JUNG UNIQUE
BackProject type
Product Design
Status
Completed
Time
2023–2024
Available via
Client
Albrecht JUNG GmbH & Co. KG
Photos
Henrik Schipper/JUNG
"Used and new, ugly and beautiful, ironic and serious – we wanted to explore the ambiguity of aesthetic perception and what is perceived as beautiful. We were attracted by the aesthetics of the everyday, of those things that we might experience in passing, without seeing their potential."
GRAFT was inspired by Berlin for the individually designed collection of switches in the JUNG UNIQUE series. The city in which the office has had its headquarters since 2001 and to which the architects feel closely connected.
The JUNG UNIQUE platform allows designers to individualize the control elements in their buildings and to use them as an additional level of communication – not only within the framework of predefined design parameters, but also freely in terms of color, font, design and content. JUNG UNIQUE is a tool for project-related one-off production.
In recent decades, urban art, originally understood as a form of protest, has become socially acceptable. Graffiti and street art have developed into a valued and friendly way of appropriating public space not only in international metropolises. Urban spaces want to be "used". They must offer people the opportunity to appropriate them and to fill the spaces with life. Graffiti and street art, posters and messages, and traces and imprints are all signs of identification and colorful urban life.
The JUNG UNIQUE by GRAFT switch collection works just as well in the office in Cologne or the apartment in Stuttgart. Because the intention is independent of the location and refers to the bold and subversive power of urban street art. When GRAFT realized the Urban Nation Museum in Berlin, the first German museum for this art form, we focused intensively on the question of how it can be exhibited without being museumized and how it can continue to enter into new symbioses with architecture.
The switch collection for JUNG goes one step further: The traces on it are unambiguous facsimiles, artificial replicas of the original. Is it an ironic comment or a serious appreciation? The answer lies somewhere between the WW2 graffiti preserved behind glass in the Reichstag and the freshly written tags in the subway.
Originally designed for the new GRAFT headquarters, the individual switches with the design surfaces of the JUNG UNIQUE collection are now part of the JUNG catalog and can also be purchased for other daring interior design projects.
More information can be found here: jung-group.com
PROJECT PARTNERS
Sven Fuchs, Lars Krückeberg, Wolfram Putz, Georg Schmidthals, Thomas Willemeit
DESIGN LEAD
Besher Alyoussef
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