bavarikon4UDescription
The designs by the Swiss couple Trix (born 1933) and Robert (born 1931) Haussmann can be assigned to the Radical Design movement, which has become prominent in Europe since the end of the 1960s. The starting point for this was a critical examination of modernism. The Haussmanns tried to counter the increasing commercialisation and flattening of the new building standards developed by Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) and Le Corbusier (1887-1965), among others, with irony and a return to craftsmanship finesse. Their "column stump" reverses the modernism dictate "form follows function". "The function's disturbance of the form" is the principle attached to the object, because it consists of wood and not stone and does not have a supporting but rather a concealing function: the replica of a Doric column, made out of olive ash veneer in an elaborate hand crafted process, is divided into eleven flat cylinders that act as containers and can be swivelled around a laterally displaced axis. The designs by the two Zurich-based designers, who have been active under the name "Allgemeine Entwurfsanstalt" since 1981, follow a conceptual design approach. Their "Lehrstücke", which include the "column stump", are marked by the critical Mannerism they proclaimed, with which they undertook an intelligent survey of modern design in a return to the namely style of art in the transition period from the Renaissance to the Baroque. The objects not only have an entertaining but also a manifesto-like function in the sense of post-modernism.