Balanced by Mischer’traxler at Wait and See
In recent years designers have not just been presenting their work, but using the Salone exhibitions to showcase their process alongside their finished products.
Mischer’traxler created a new piece from the tools and inspirations used to develop their old ones.
For Balanced, an installation at the Milanese concept shop Wait and See — the machine-obsessed couple dug up artifacts from the creation of four of their most popular projects and envisioned them laid out perfectly on either side of four gigantic homemade scales.
“With Balanced, we wanted to show that for us, research and all kinds of input for a project are really important. The exhibition consists of four installations which give insight into our way of working, and which explain the projects in a different way by showing various parts of our process. The presented projects are: Reversed Volumes, the Idea of a Tree, Growing Necklace from the project Scientific Nature of Jewellery, and Collective Works.
“Of course, not all of our materials could fit in the installations, since we had certain restrictions of weight and space on the scales. Selecting and arranging single pieces from our project archives was really fun.”
“Balancing everything perfectly, on the other hand, was quite boring, since we spent quite a lot of time moving the pieces a few millimeters one way or the other.”
Each project got a different type of scale according to what we thought would fit the project the best: Reversed Volumes is presented on one that refers to old scales on the market, while the Idea of a Tree installation uses a counterbalance principle similar to the one we used for the machine in the original project.”
About Studio Mischer‘Traxler
Formed 2004 – ongoing
Katharina Mischer (1982) and Thomas Traxler (1981) form Studio Mischer’traxler
Based in Vienna they develop and design products, furniture, installations and more, with a focus on experiments, context and conceptual thinking.
Balancing between hand craft and technology, they envision whole systems, processes and new production methods that deal with contemporary themes and indicate sustainability and the relevance of nature.
Their Results make use of unexpected materials and are often characterized by external inputs, for example the condition of the weather, human interaction or the usage of the existing.
After graduating from the IM-masters department at the Design Academy Eindhoven and several years of collaboration, Katharina and Thomas found Studio mischer‘traxler in 2009.
Their work won the Austrian Experimental Design Award 2009, the DMY Award 2009 and was shortlisted for the Brit Insurance Designs of the year 2010 Award.
Exhibitions on contemporary Design displayed their projects in Museums including the Boijmans van Boiningen, the Design Museum London and the Triennale Milano, as well as on International Festivals.
Projects are in the permanent collections of the Art institute Chicago and the MAK Vienna.
They have been invited to lecture and give workshops in various institutes and Universities in Austria and Europe.
In 2011 studio Mischer’traxler was honoured with the ‘W-hotels designer of the future award’ by Design Miami/Basel and W-hotels
