Great, now what? Block construction.

Just finished your studies – or in the final stages – and really. no. Plan. what to do next? We’ve all been at this point. Used to always having a goal in mind, there’s now a big question mark. Goodbye university, hello fears for the future. We have the antidote: young offices and employees who are going their own way. We asked them about their biggest fears, inspirations and successes. Today: Blockbau from Karlsruhe.

Johann Kuhn and Kevin Rack know each other from their architecture studies at KIT Karlsruhe. The idea of designing furniture under the name Blockbau arose from the idea of dealing with design beyond architecture. The name came about in the 4th semester in the urban design studio – but there it referred to Kuhn and Rack’s design group. They kept the name without further ado, as it conveys their design principles: Joining principles, ingenious constructions and a clear material aesthetic.

What influenced you during your studies?
At the KIT Faculty of Architecture, all students work in large design studios with 40-80 people. This is where your entire (private) life takes place during your studies. The close cooperation between the students that inevitably arises as a result is naturally formative. You can also switch between different professors every semester. The mixture of different approaches – from traditional to material-related to pictorial – has had a very strong impact on our work.

Architecture or product design?
Both – the symbiosis is what appeals to us.

Is product design architecture on a smaller scale?
Above all, we enjoy freely changing scales and scaling concepts accordingly. Of course, there is a lot of overlap between product and architectural design. We are particularly interested in the boundaries between these disciplines: For example, when does furniture become architecture and vice versa?

Which piece of furniture recently left you speechless?
In 2013, the Dutch architecture firm OMA developed a series of furniture together with Knoll under the title Tools for Life, which was then used as part of the set design for the Prada Fashion Show FW 2013.

What breaks your heart?
When people buy a “living room”…

What are you afraid of?
That you get so bogged down in the day-to-day small tasks and the production of furniture that the creative process falls by the wayside.

What’s next?
As a studio, we would like to link architecture and product design even more closely and would also like to initiate projects in collaboration with other companies.

The Baumeister Academy is an internship project of the architecture magazine Baumeister and is supported by GRAPHISOFT and BAU 2019.