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The Great Indoors Awards:
The Great Indoors 2007
Award, conference and workshops on the growing attention for interior design.
The Great Indoors is a new, biennial, international interior design award. Interior design – currently the most vital field of the design profession – combines the disciplines of fashion, architecture, and product design. By signalling the best interior design world-wide, The Great Indoors AWARD wishes to celebrate the best-realised projects biennially, thus raising the quality of interior design. The Great Indoors CONFERENCE aims to contribute to the international discourse on and the growing importance of interior design. In addition, The Great Indoors WORKSHOPS intend to give a positive impulse to design education and to the positions of both designers and clients within interior design.
The interior seems to be the only place in which people still dream of a better future; it’s the ultimate sanctuary of utopian thinking. Catering to the desire for an intense experience, the interiors of hotels, shops and restaurants have evolved into the new epicentres of human imagination. Then, too, we see the language of fashion and the image increasingly gaining the upper hand. Every interior has to make an immediate impact, reflecting the identity of the organization it represents. In doing so, interiors are having a stronger and stronger influence on discussions involving public space. Seen in this light, interior architecture is assuming an increasingly dominant position within the realm of design.
The conference
The Great Indoors Conference explores this growing influence of interior design on the private and public domain. It offers a platform to make developments visible, to get a discussion going and to lift the discipline to a higher plane. The theme of The Great Indoors Conference, held for the first time this year, is Branded by Space. What kinds of tools does the interior designer use to communicate? What role is played by surfaces, by the skin of an object or an architectural element? What is the media’s approach to interiors and their designers? These and other issues will be addressed by an international team of key speakers and nominees of The Great Indoors Award.
Key note speakers and programme
New Zealand-born architect and author Mark Wigley, also Dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in New York, will give an introduction on the theme of Branded by Space. What’s the secret behind the current power of this amalgam of fashion, design and architecture? And how does interior design influence the private and public domain?
Milan-based Fabio Novembre, architect and designer, but also author, poet and provocateur, will get into the subject of Ego-Tecture. Whereas to an ever-increasing degree the interior acts as an organisation’s calling card, itp;rsquo;s the designer’s job to interpret and realize that story in a memorable way. But how well does this task coincide with a designer’s unique signature?
The German architect Jürgen Mayer H. works at the intersection of architecture, communication and new technology. In his presentation he will question if you get another kind of architecture when you design a building from the inside out. What can architects learn from interior designers?
Dutch designer Hella Jongerius, will examine the way images prevail in today’s society. How they capture attention, transmit messages and how this relates to interiors. Can the skin of objects and the finishes of spaces tell their own stories?
World-renowned trend forecaster Li Edelkoort, also curator of exhibitions and director of Design Academy Eindhoven, will give a trend forecast on which textures and materials will be en vogue for the coming years and what are the steering mechanisms behind these interior trends.
Initiators of The Great Indoors are Frame magazine, Marres, Centre for Contemporary Culture (Maastricht, NL), and the Netherlands Architecture Institute Maastricht (Maastricht, NL). The province of Limburg and the city of Maastricht are providing generous support for award, conference, and workshops.
