Hort

I discovered Hort (Eike König and Martin Lorenz Frankfurt) by their work on the Project Fox for the Hotel Fox in Denmark. It was one of my favorite rooms to begin with, but it was only after reading their idea behind their room design that I really started to respect them as artists. Their reasoning behind the rooms was: "Someone is going to live in this room for a while, they are going to breathe the atmosphere more intensely than someone just visiting like at an exhibition. The idea was to create modern mythical creatures that function like fables or tales that give a polemic viewpoint to everyday lives. Each illustration tells its own story to the viewer. It is the visitor that brings the different fragments together and builds his own story from them.”

After reading this, I looked back at the room and they were clearly right on track. I, myself, liked their idea of breathing the atmosphere (of a hilly pasture, in this case) even though it's only four walls with paint. Just looking at the room, I could almost smell the green grass and fields stretching as far as the eye could see and I could feel the dirtiness and excitement from the monster truck in the dirt. I just loved how they took photography (at least that is how they appeared to me in the photo) and mixed it with hard edged graphics that seemingly had nothing to do with the photos but still flowed nicely together.


I researched Hort after viewing all their rooms in the Hotel Fox and was surprised at the turn their work took when it went from walls of paint to print in magazines. Not unpleasently surprised but surprised nonetheless. I expected to see clean, modern and an eclectic sort of mix of ideas put into one. They did this to some degree but more in the way that everyone else is doing it instead of solely their own like their room more represented I think. I do like this kind of work and I find it amazing sometimes when I take long looks at work such as this and wonder how they decided to put each element with each element...but then I think also, that if you really try to do this sort of thing, it's one of those kinds of designs that isn't nearly as hard as it looks and besides that, it's really been overdone...even though it fascinates me still...I just wasn't impressed with them to have done the same sort of style.


It did excite me to see some different layouts in magazines though and I absolutely adored this one and how they incorporated soo many pictures into one layout and yet it doesn't look cluttered or hard to read in any sense. It's hard to find different layouts such as this one in a world that follows in one another's footsteps all the time. And sometimes, it's hard to see that there are a bajillion ways to do one thing until you see an idea so unlike everyone else's and that still works to the ninth that it wakes you up and you say "ah ha!...well duh."

http://www.hort.org.uk/