GOOD DESIGN Award to the Kassak Museum
10 May 2013
The Kassak Museum, the museum of the avant-garde and modernism in Budapest, Hungary, is proud to announce that it is among this year’s winners of the prestigious GOOD DESIGN Award. Lajos Kassak was Hungary’s greatest avant-garde artist, journal editor and designer. Key words in the lifework of Kassak are ‘internationality’, ‘cooperation’, ‘intellectual workshop’ and ‘critical approach’. There are references to all of these in the museum’s corporate visual identity.
GOOD DESIGN ™ is the world’s most prestigious, recognized, and oldest Design Awards program organized annually by The Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design in cooperation with the European Centre for Architecture, Art, Design and Urban Studies. The trademarked awards were created in Chicago in 1950 by three architects: Eero Saarinen, Charles and Ray Eames and Edgar Kaufmann, Jr..
High design standards are central to the concept of the Budapest Kassak Museum. The Museum has produced an up-to-date design that evokes the Kassak spirit but is more than a formal copy. The new design elements are an integral part of the Museum’s efforts, through its exhibitions, events and activities, to convey to Hungary and the world the message of Kassak’s work for today.
The exclamation mark in the logo, often used by Kassak himself, represents the watchfulness of man highly attuned to his surroundings. The arrow, the other component of the ‘K’, points to the validity of the Kassakian message. In a series of postcards featuring variants of the logo, the clash between the exclamation mark and the construction rules of the logo is an expression of the tension between revolutionary ideas and personal fate.
The Kassak Museum, operating as part of the Petofi Literary Museum, has a permanent exhibition which presents the wide-ranging activity of Lajos Kassak (1887-1967). In its museum publications, temporary exhibitions, conferences and other programs it attempts to place Kassak’s art in the Hungarian and international context of the historical avant garde and modernism. Not least, it gives space to phenomena in contemporary art that reflect on Kassak’s art from today’s perspective. This involves selections from international art, and the Museum also presents Kassak’s art and his world in other countries.
Winning design elements at:
http://europeanarch.eu/2012awards/graphics/GRAPHICS%20IDENTITY%20PACKAGING%20WEB%20PAGES2%2050.pdf
On The Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design:
http://www.chi-athenaeum.org/
On the award:
http://europeanarch.eu/gooddesign/2013 GOOD DESIGN PRESS INFO.pdf
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