Ignant Design

“Is the equation between destruction and growth also a formula for art?” writes American postmodern novelist Kathy Acker in Against Ordinary Language: The Language of the Body, her seminal 1993 meditation on how weightlifting exposes the shortfall of words in capturing embodied experience. The question hovers at the edges of a visit to Slovak sculptor Veronika Janovec’s apartment in Kreuzberg, Berlin—part private home, part ongoing testing ground for the effect of her works within space. Its spa

Tadashi Kawamata has been creating temporal installations from salvaged materials since the late 1970s — wooden accretions that appear to have grown organically from the architecture they inhabit. These symbiotic structures have been exhibited everywhere from the Venice Biennale to Documenta, the Centre Pompidou and MoMA PS1. This year, a new set of works will appear at Maison Ruinart in Reims, where Kawamata is the artist in residence for the annual curatorial program Conversations with Nature.

In the heart of Berlin, a quiet courtyard sits framed by historic properties that once thrummed with the energy of industry. Here, on the ground floor of a 19th-century building, you’ll find Strom—a café where reverie meets play, conceptualised by Berlin-based architectural multihyphenate Celeste Asfour. Read moreThe post Strom by Celeste Asfour: A Seasonal Café Where Reverie Meets Play appeared first on IGNANT.

Sanghyeok Lee’s work is nothing if not balanced. It is restrained and minimal. Playful and intellectually rigorous. Read moreThe post Sanghyeok Lee on ARC, Emptiness, and the Spaces Between appeared first on IGNANT.

Berlin’s vibrant Torstraße in Mitte isn’t exactly a street you’d associate with the words “calm” or “retreat”. Yet, from the moment you step into the sports studio Hagius, housed in the historic former post office building, the noise of the city immediately fades away. There’s a sensitive and balanced feel to the space, which was founded in 2020 by brothers Nicolas and Timothy Hagius, who wanted it to be a little more than just a “gym.” Read moreThe post Hagius: Architecture as a Medium for Wel

For over fifty years, ORFÈVRE has been a home for jewelry that values meaning as much as beauty. Among the artists it champions, the German sculptor and goldsmith Walter Wittek stands out for a radical clarity of design that unites minimalism, conceptual depth and technical mastery. Read moreThe post Essential Forms in Modern Jewelry: ORFÈVRE Presents Walter Wittek appeared first on IGNANT.

On Berlin’s monumental Karl-Marx-Allee, one of the former GDR’s emblematic sites of Socialist Classicism has taken on a renewed role as the working home of one of the city’s leading design exports. Read moreThe post Aeyde Haus by Gonzalez Haase AAS Marks a New Era for an East Berlin Landmark appeared first on IGNANT.

Hamburg’s growing TRADER constellation stems from founder Vincent von Thien’s wish to offer his city more than another café. TRADER Gallery in the Schanze set the first tone, uniting specialty coffee with art and design. Read moreThe post TRADER HiFi Tunes Hamburg’s Coffee Culture to a New Frequency appeared first on IGNANT.

At Berlin’s Futurium museum for futures thinking, the exhibition Ocean Futures (on through 31 August 2026) navigates the planet’s vast expanses of water as infrastructure, archive and neighbour. At its centre stands Filipino artist Leeroy New’s installation Balangay Spacecraft—a colony of interlinked spheres forged from bamboo and recycled plastic—part mangrove, part artificial island, a future habitat taking root on shifting ground. Read moreThe post Worlds Between Water and Waste: Leeroy New

In Berlin’s diplomatic center, not far from Unter den Linden and the Brandenburg Gate, a new interior offers an unexpected lens onto domestic life in a district defined by ministries and embassies. Read moreThe post House Zafari: Studio Penzlien and Maj van der Linden Reframe Berlin Living appeared first on IGNANT.

In stone, time turns tactile—a record of sediment, heat, and movement pressed into matter. At Marbledworks, that long geological story continues in contemporary form. Read moreThe post Marbledworks: The Nature of Making appeared first on IGNANT.

The craft of KARST reveals itself first in a feeling. An ambience of warmth, polish and clarity. A closer look at—and feel of—the Berlin carpentry studio’s interior joinery and custom furniture reveals the details that build toward this impression. Read moreThe post KARST: The New Craft of Space appeared first on IGNANT.

High on a ridge above Portugal’s Atlantic coast, Casa Plaj appears almost imagined: a red geometry in a green expanse, elemental yet precise. Designed by Lisbon-based extrastudio for a young family, the holiday house is both retreat and experiment – built slowly, iteratively, in high attunement to wind, light and time. Its creation captures a portrait of architecture as process: formed through exchange, grounded in the textures of place, and open to evolution. Read moreThe post Time Softens at e

When Berlin-based design duo Yellow Nose Studio first removed the K from ‘kindergarten’ to name their evolving collection of objects, they opened more than a typographic space. Read moreThe post Child’s Play: With INDERGARTEN, Yellow Nose Studio Returns to First Principles appeared first on IGNANT.

For architect Seamus Kowarzik, the shift between a building and a bench is hardly a shift at all. The same questions persist – how materials meet, how light moves across a surface, how space feels when pared back to its essentials. Read moreThe post Architect Seamus Kowarzik: In the Details, a Dialogue appeared first on IGNANT.

Contrasts verge on the extreme along Egypt’s eastern coastline, where the warm azure waters of the Red Sea are backdropped by husky mountain ranges. Their craggy peaks shift from fiery hues at dawn to purple shadows as the sun sets behind their jagged silhouettes. Beyond these elemental forces lies the parched expanse of the Eastern Desert, arid and vast. Amid the starkness of this landscape, Casa Cook El Gouna punctuates the horizon. Read moreThe post Between Mountains and Sea, Casa Cook El Gou

On a small rise in Berlin-Mitte, a storefront with tall glass panes looks out onto the street. Blink, and you might miss it, but a second glance rewards the curious. Step inside, and the atmosphere reveals itself. Light moves across the room throughout the day, drawing out nuances of the objects it holds. The eponymous gallery of Berlin-based interior designer and curator MAJ VAN DER LINDEN reflects an ongoing engagement with contemporary craft and material culture. Connections build gradually,

Zuzanna Czebatul is interested in the way monuments shape and perform power. Through her sculpture-based practice, she distorts architectural forms and cultural relics—columns, obelisks, busts—to reveal and complicate the narratives they once held. In the bucolic calm of her Brandenburg studio, and later among shrouded objects and scaffolding in Berlin’s long-closed Pergamon Museum, Czebatul spoke with Ignant about one of Europe’s most symbolically charged monuments—the Pergamon Altar. Her fragm