Material lab at PBSA.
From the 15th to the 22nd October 2023, the first-year master’s students of the Department of Interior Architecture of EKA were in the Ruhr region of Germany to participate in a joint workshop with students of the Peter Behrens School of Arts Exhibition Design department.
The MA curriculum in interior architecture includes the subject Spatial Art, within which students explore the boundaries of (interior) architecture and contemporary art. Each year, the focus of the course has changed somewhat depending on the supervisor’s profile. In the fall of 2023, the course is supervised by Berlin-based Japanese designer Masayo Ave who has previously worked as the professor in the product design department at EKA.
Ave, who was this fall asked to coordinate an exhibition of metal craftsmen from the Tsubame-Sanjo region of Japan at the Red Dot Design Museum in Essen, decided to include the exhibition design students of Peter Behrens School of Art (PBSA) in Düsseldorf as well as interior architecture students of EKA in this process.
From the 17th to the 20th October students were in Essen to help Masayo Ave and Japanese masters install the exhibition “The KOUBA principle: The fundamentals of Japanese design in the Tsubame-Sanjo region”. During these days, the students got to know in depth the objects exhibited at the exhibition, traditional Japanese craft skills, as well as the collection of the Red Dot Design Museum and the award exhibition of Red Dot product design.
Cooperation between the two universities will continue from the 13th to the 17th of October in Tallinn, where EKA and PBSA students will start working on an exhibition introducing Japan’s material culture to be opened at the Japanese Cultural Institute in Cologne in the spring of 2024. The theme of the exhibition is happiness and how it is expressed in Japan’s specific material culture. The exhibition consists of about thirty items selected by dozens of Japanese and European creatives with a passion for Japanese design, spatial culture and philosophy. The curator of the exhibition is Philipp Teufel, head of the PBSA Institute of Exhibition Design. After Cologne, the exhibition travels to the Japan Cultural Institute in Paris, then to Tallinn and finally to Japan.
Have a look at the photos of the week in Ruhr on our Facebook page.