We see nearly shivering lines on paper, lenses on the designer’s drawing table, papers with a red stamp, sealed with the letter G, rays of light coming through the windows in the showroom, calmness, a former water castle in South of Netherlands, blocks of wood in the parque, waiting to be dry enough to get transformed into another status of being. From the outside to the inside, from Nature to Design. From Materia to Thought.

Accompanying through the process of unfolding the character, the strength and the timelessness of its heritage and personality asking the principle questions after all the decades of creation.

Designing means creating order. That is, designers are engaged in giving matter meaningful structure, and so move, whether they see it this way or not, in virtually ontic dimensions. Even inanimate matter is structured. The incomprehensible vastness of the solar systems and galaxies enthrals us, as does the microcosm of atoms – all the more so when we recognize the astonishing similarities between them. The more advanced the development of a life form, the more complex its structure. Understanding ourselves as a part of these systems perhaps doesn’t lead directly to practical solutions, but it makes us aware that we’re integrated in a greater whole and heightens our sensitivity to parallelisms. – Peter Ghyczy

Like in architecture, the design objects work on two sides, they are materialized thoughts, materialized ideas. But with their design and form language meubles for practical use. Form follows function you have in mind experiencing Peter Ghyczy’s pioneering casting and clamping technique which he developed in the 80s.

During one of our studio visits, where I had the honour to receive a wonderful espresso, made by the designer himself, like a well experienced barista, one sentence about visual language and photography of his collections will be always actual and is frozen in time: A collector, a human being has to understand each design in a millisecond, in a blink of an eye, the same for a photography of the design object. If the beholder could not, the image or the object has failed.

I’ve been a designer since the 1960s, a time when design was a new term in Germany and had about it something of the rebellious spirit of the era. Having originated in the Italian disegno and journeyed, via the French dessin, into English and beyond, the word has meanwhile firmly embedded itself in our globalized language. But this shouldn’t keep us from reflecting on the well-worn term, which is strug- gling under the weight of the history it carries within it. This hull of a word embraces striking extremes of meaning. Many of our contemporaries think of the designer as a kind of charlatan, a pyrotechnician who recasts everyday objects in dazzling new forms and colours. The polar opposite of this image is per- haps that of the earnest idealist bent on improving the world through his creative works – le createur, as expressed in French, which would seem to equate the designer with God himself. Conversely, in dis- cussion of evolution, God is often referred to as the intelligent designer. While it certainly does me good to be able to fiddle with creation, perhaps even optimizing some small screw or other, the truth lies, as always, somewhere in between the extremes. The recent trend has been to hype designers by heaping on them titles like star designer, top designer and designer of the year. But wouldn’t it be nice if someone somewhere were to confer the title intelligent designer? – Peter Ghyczy.

Throughout my architectural studies no one ever mentioned aesthetics, beauty or harmony. These things were taboo, at least in seminar rooms and lecture halls. European culture of the twentieth and twenty- first centuries, which believes itself to be so enlightened, has incredible difficulty with the definition of beauty, so it simply avoids this domain. The notion of good taste, which, while problematic, always had a central function in society, is difficult to nail down and so is set outside the opinion-makers’ discourse. That surely also has historical reasons. The world of the bourgeoisie failed during the First (and Second) World War. As a result, its aesthetic was discredited as well. Dissonance was embraced, in music and especially in painting. Since then, harmony has largely been branded as reactionary. Beauty in art is still viewed with suspicion; it’s considered to be untrue. Terms such as beautiful and decorative have been shifted in the direction of kitsch. But is this not just a new dictatorship of taste – of the kind that modernism actually wanted to overcome? I can’t accept the defamation of the beautiful and the decora- tive, qualities that today only seem to be allowed when cloaked in postmodern irony. The Viennese Josef Frank was a non-dogmatic pioneer of modernism, a fighter against narrow-mindedness right from the beginning. He didn’t merely propagate openness in dealing with the diverse sources of our aesthetic heritage – he practiced it. Frank, an architect, designer and emigrant like myself, is close to me in this regard. – Peter Ghyczy