Vienna @ vdw25

issue #56: Exploration: vienna @ vdw25

Vienna Design Week 2025 showcases the creative process in its purest essence: “From doubt to form.” At a historical moment when design is called upon to address complex and evolving challenges, the Viennese festival celebrates design as an open journey, made of questions rather than answers, of attempts rather than certainties. With a nomadic and distributed spirit—50 venues throughout the city and a different headquarters each year, this year hosted in a former 1950s workshop—the 2025 edition adopts responsibility as the lens for exploration: social, environmental, political. Vienna, this year’s European Capital of Democracy, confirms itself as fertile ground for reflections on the role of designers and companies: what questions guide their choices? How can design forms contribute to continuously evolving processes?

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[1/6] COOL STAYING: THE SOCIAL HUB

A stone’s throw from Vienna’s Prater Park, @thesocialhub.vienna is our exploratory base. It’s a hotel where travelers, students, and locals gather to study, stay, work, and enjoy themselves. We use The Social Hub in the most traditional way possible, as a hotel, but simultaneously, a BCorp seminar is taking place in the Arena space.

[2/6] PASSIONSWEGE #1: SWEDISH GIRLS & CUCINA ALCHIMIA

An unprecedented encounter takes shape between the Swedish duo @_swedish_girls_ – alias Mira Bergh and Josefin Zachrisson – and the Viennese collective @cucina.alchimia, formed by Sendi Gbinia, Jakob Bretterbauer, and Michael Moser. While Swedish Girls explore the boundaries between art, design, and architecture with a conceptual and ironic approach, Cucina Alchimia merges cuisine, performance, and craftsmanship into sensory and participatory experiences. The dialogue between these two worlds promises a poetic and experimental intervention, where taste, matter, and social reflection intertwine. Together, they redefine the everyday, transforming shared space into a dynamic environment where design becomes a tool for connection, awareness, and play.

[3/6] PASSIONSWEGE #2: STUDIO KAI LINKE & SCHNITZSTUBE STADLHOFER

Among the streets of @viennadesignweek 2025, a remarkable encounter unfolds between designer @studio_kai_linke e the Viennese workshop Schnitzstube Stadlhofer, guardian of an Alpine tradition that endures and renews itself. Linke, known for his conceptual and sensitive design, immerses himself in wood carving techniques—from flat engraving to relief—guided by Franz and Andrea Stadlhofer, master craftspeople working between Carinthia and Vienna. From this dialogue emerges a collection of objects where design becomes a bridge between memory and contemporaneity, technique and narrative: a series of carved houses that are boxes. It’s an exercise in mutual listening, where form comes to life through respect for the ancient and the search for new expressive languages.

[4/6] BIOFABRIQUE VIENNA: VIENNESE COLORS

Within the Urban Food & Design format, we encounter @biofabrique_vienna, once again, which this year presents a new focus dedicated to “Viennese Colors.” The installation invites us to discover how natural pigments can emerge from seemingly waste materials, such as outer leaves, stems, and invasive plant, and transform into a chromatic palette. The project, developed in collaboration with designers, universities, and industrial partners, explores the potential of plant-based color in textile production, promoting a bioregional and circular vision of materials. Nine shades, developed through the research of Antonia Maedel, tell the story of a new urban aesthetic that begins with waste and translates into sustainable beauty.

[5/6] ATELIER KARASINSKI & IKEA: THE JOY OF COOKING

@ikea presents a project that unites memory and innovation: a kitchen inspired by the historic @frankfurterneuekueche (the first prototype of a modern modular kitchen, designed in 1926 by Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky), reinterpreted by Viennese designer Laura Karasinski (@atelierkarasinski). The installation is a tribute to democratic design, where functionality, accessibility, sustainability, and quality merge into a space that reflects the evolution of inclusive thinking in domestic design. Through refined aesthetics and careful storytelling, Karasinski builds a bridge between past and present, offering a powerful reflection on the role of design in everyday spaces.

[6/6] VEREIN STADTHOLZ: RE-WOOD

@stadtholzwien transforms Vienna’s felled trees into a shared heritage. What typically ends up in compost, trunks and branches from diseased or hazardous trees, becomes raw material for a new culture of urban wood. In collaboration with local partners, the association invites festival visitors to actively participate in the collection and processing of wood, creating an ever-evolving archive of objects and materials. The objective is twofold: to preserve the value of a public resource often overlooked and to stimulate collective reflection on the ecological, artisanal, and design potential of urban wood. An initiative that unites ecology, design, and community in a concrete gesture of urban reclamation.

[7/6] CO—AG: COMMON GROUND

Five creative minds, five perspectives, one shared space: at Vienna Design Week 2025, the collective exhibition COMMON GROUND explores what happens when different design approaches meet in a context of daily cohabitation. Born from an idea by @adamgeorg, the CO—AG space is an interdisciplinary environment that unites design, applied arts, and craftsmanship—from ceramics to carpentry—becoming laboratory, workshop, and temporary stage. Here, sharing is not only physical but also conceptual: exchange, curiosity, and experimentation guide an open creative process, where design takes form through coexistence. Exhibiting: Georg Adam, Marie-Theres Genser, Federico Fiermonte, Isabelle Orsini & Rosenberg, Laura Schreiber. Guests: Filippo Andrighetto and Denis Botlo.