About the site and the project

functionalfate.org is a little weblog I started in 2004 after I found it intriguing that virtually nothing had ever been published on this humble chair we love to sneer at but that seems to follow us whatever plane we may board however. It´s by now just entertaining glimpses from my forthcoming book and museum exhibition.

functionalfate met a near tabula rasa/terra incognita (chose one) environment, when I started my very first inquiries into the plastic chair five years ago; no one knew anything, hardly any designer or artist had taken on the chair, no flickr-groups, the public opinion unequivocally negative, to put it mildly. Five years later this has changed a lot and I guess, this little weblog may take some credit for that fact. I also guess, that is an acceptable reason to carry on.

Some Vita

Born in East Germany in 1970, I without my family left the country at the age of 19 before the Wall came down. After graduate studies in Business and Economics in Germany, London and Kazan/Russia, I set up one of the very first German coffee bars concepts in mid-1990ies Berlin – and failed. Since 1999 I have been working as a freelance management consultant for various emerging technology companies in Berlin, was instrumental in founding a leading comparison shopping site, built the Berlin branch of global internet entrepreneurship network First Tuesday, and freelanced for major strategy consulting firms. I thus accidentally became lead subject of some book, an early German B-blogger elsewhere, and got tired of all that eventually.

Functionalfate and my monobloc research had taken a good two years off, after in 2006, together with Berlin based writer and artist Ingo Niermann, I designed and launched The Great Pyramid – A Monument for All of Us, as a proposal for a new 21st century burial and memorial culture. In this project – originally funded by Germany´s Federal Cultural Foundation and later selected for the German pavilion at the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale – we collaborated with Rem Koolhaas, Miuccia Prada, Ai Weiwei, et al. Names, but also lots of inspiration. After it became obvious, that some former protagonists were utilizing The Great Pyramid either as some rather irrelevant conceptual art project or/and a vanity machine for themselves, I decided to continue within a more productive setting. A feature-length documentary will premier in cinemas later 2009.
This project I set up and steered from 2006 through 2008 made however rather big headlines worldwide from the BBC to Gizmodo. It is now on hiatus, but will be re-launched in autumn 2009. There´s a little book I concpted and then co-edited with Ingo Niermann, – written up to “book of the year 2008″ by Tom McCarthy in Artforum for not exactly the right reasons I´d say but still. This bit perplexing work is available from Amazon: .de, .co.uk , .com).

I currently live in Erfurt, Berlin, and travel. Below is how I look when I am being bored in Bulgaria and take unfavorable photos of myself, which – any two of these – fortunately wouldn´t happen too often.

Blue over-dyed tracksuit jacket by Comme de Garcons, formerly black T-Shirt by Vivienne Westwood, glasses by Starck for Mikli. Wooden hut, end of season closed, white plastic chairs in farthest background and rain: not model´s own.

I happen to have email: jens.thiel /*that symbol+/ gmail.com.