I cannot help but silently humming Franz Ferdinand´s “The Dark of the Matinee” since I received that teaser image above. No Terry Wogan in this case, but I will introduce the Monobloc in the BBC2´s new five part series “The Genius of Design”, that will give a tour d´horizon across the story of design in the 20th century. We shot last May in Weil am Rhein, the team around director Chris Rodley and producer Hattie Bowering just came from filming Dieter Rams and prepared for Marianne Panton and Rolf Fehlbaum the next day. So expect a must-see excellent programme, virtually everybody important and influential in the design world will be in there..

Commissioned by the Museo Reina Sofia, French artist Pierre Huyghe in March 2010 installed “La saison des fêtes” at the Palacio de Cristal, a Madrid-cousin of Crystal Palace. In the center of the luminous pavilion he set up a visionary landscape comprising of plants associated with festivals and celebrations familiar across the world – red roses for Valentine’s day, pumpkins for Halloween, cherry blossom marking the arrival of spring.

Huyghe further strengthens this one-world motif by providing visitors with plain monobloc plastic chairs in different sizes and colours, as he hopes ..

Sorry, there won´t be a big, fat Rolex-logo on a plastic chair in this post. The story behind the photo isn´t bad though at all, some Rolex involved.

Bryan the other week pointed out an infommercial by Grosfillex on DesigningSpaces.TV . Unless, you are a true mono afficionado, I cannot recommend watching the clip. It´s just blasting cheesy suburbia home improvement, but I wanted to file it on the blog for a simple, least to me interesting fact:

After a few too long years of occasional shuttling between Erfurt and Berlin, I have moved back to Europe´s most exciting city again and probably for good. The Erfurt studio loft is history, instead over the next weeks ..

Some more reflections/remakes of the monobloc stool from the world of design and visual arts.. Click.