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Recently graduated and improvements on the house. While full of curiosity, our author expressive cable routing on the outside Conny Kestel started prevents any show-case photographs (7). her Round The World You just accept it in the typically generous ArchitecTour in the Thai manner. At the second construction site we visited, autumn of 2013. Her studies of interior design at the Academy of Arts and after safety precautions are likewise casual. that of architecture at TU München are Hardly any barriers or handrails, the only ideal prerequisites. Traineeships and helmet is kept in the office container. internships with renowned architects like Directly adjacent to it are the makeshift Baumschlager & Eberle Architects, accommodations of the workers, both Plasma Studio London, Yes Architecture male and female. They sleep, cook and or SAS Architekten help open doors. work here in extremely modest quarters The young woman from Munich has a until they return to their families and talent for languages and an appetite for fields when the season begins. crossing borders. With her architectural In addition to traditional buildings like world tour, Conny Kestel maps the world Wat Prakaew or Wat Arun (8), which from her very personal perspective. you simply must see, there is one contemporary object the search of which is worth the while for everybody who is interested in both architecture English translation from page 74 and art – the MOCA. The “Museum of Contemporary Art”, designed by Design archaeology landscape architects P Landscape (PLA) md correspondent Jamy Yang reports houses contemporary Asian art – from from Shanghai pure Western style to flamboyant Thai. A sculpture by Nonthivathn Chandhanaphailin, inspired by jasmine, resides in a water basin in the garden (9). It’s fascinating how the voluptuous, floral aesthetics contrasts with the building’s unadorned structure and is in harmony with the façade’s pattern through which light is poetically guided “There is no future without knowledge into white rooms inside (10). Only about history and the present time”, recently IF paid a collective visit to the thinks Jamy Yang. “That is my philosophic MOCA, and apart from that they spend and aesthetic working basis.“ The quite a lot of leisure time together. I successful Chinese product designer become fully integrated in the office’s and md correspondent is preparing a bonding programme, which comprises book on the history of Chinese design sports, cultural events, going out and of under the title of 'Design Exploration'. course daily lunch in a large group. Excerpts are exclusively published by md. At my small, almost ceremonial farewell Part 1: On the disappearance of Chinese party I present my research work, design history my RTWArchtitecTour project and IF feedback. A home-made dessert for Collecting is my passion. I detected most IF rounds it off – a framed miniature of my findings at flea markets all around certificate with personal dedications the globe – in Los Angeles, Malaysia, for me. Text: Conny Kestel Taipeh or Shanghai. My lucky finds www.integratedfield.com mainly date back to the time after the www.plandscape.com industrial revolution, and I am planning Next stop is Tokyo to establish with them a museum for industrial design some day. By the way, talking about flea markets, I refer to trading with used industrial products, not with handcrafted ones. That is why I wouldn’t call the Panjiayuan
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market in Beijing a flea market, although there definitely are some in China. However, it's rather a European or American phenomenon, where they are more widespread and look back on a long tradition. One reason for this may be that at Western flea markets industrial products from various epochs turn up, many of them from the 19th century. Chinese flea markets, on the other hand, offer relatively young products from the years between 1970 and 1980 or even later than that. This is due to the fact that in China modern industrial production almost came to a standstill in the time before the industrial revolution took place in England until the Chinese reform and opening policy. Over and above that there are only few products that were completely developed by the Chinese themselves. This, too, makes it difficult to find old Chinese pieces at our flea markets. When flea markets mirror industrial development, this seems not to have taken place in China. It has not always been like this. The last design heyday dates back to the Ming dynasty. At that time craftsmen were very adept at handling materials, and consequently Ming furniture made of wood gained an excellent reputation worldwide as far as their aesthetic value and practical functionality are concerned. After the industrial revolution, a step-bystep transition to machined production took place on a worldwide basis. It first took hold of Europe, then of the U.S.A., and finally of China. It was the birth of modern product design, a revolutionary process, which in the subsequent 200 years was mostly determined by the Western countries. At the end of the 19th century, the Arts-and-Crafts movement dominated by William Morris evolved in Great Britain, a bit later the Bauhaus originated in Germany, and then came Memphis in Italy in the 1970s, while the U.S.A. took over the leading role in industrial design after World War II. As new materials and manufacturing techniques emerged, product aesthetics, too, changed time and again. China did not take part in this development. The Chinese industry as a whole passed through long periods of weakness from the Qing dynasty up to