This year Gabriel turns 175. Its anniversary book, Interwoven, opens at an excavation: the old turbine house in Aalborg where the company was born.
Feature
Many design classics begin as working things. They are taken up by people who admire them, adapted by designers and kept in use for generations.
A trademark registered on a misremembered Latin place name in 1932. Everything that happened afterwards was deliberate — including eight years spent solving a problem nobody had asked for.
Europe’s most coveted wall arrived from Canton by ship, in numbered sheets, painted by hand — for a market that didn’t exist at home.
Two hundred years before digital print, a French workshop was solving the same problem — how do you put a picture on a wall and make it mean something?
Matteo Thun makes a claim about how design is judged that should worry anyone who specifies for a living. Walk into a hotel room, he says, and you know within a split second whether you like it. The verdict is instant, instinctive, almost involuntary.