Hermann Weizenegger – FH Potsdam

Hermann August Weizenegger is an institution in the Berlin design scene. He is one of the founding members of Design-Mai (later DMY) and has also been teaching as a professor of design at the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences since 2004.

The FHP with Hermann Weizenegger and team has developed the appearance: in the field of exhibition design and graphics.

Hermann August Weizenegger is one of the founding members of Design-Mai (later DMY) and has also taught as a professor of design at the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences since 2004. He became known with his label Vogt+Weizenegger, which he founded in 1992 together with Oliver Vogt, whom he met during his studies at the HdK (UDK) Berlin. Concept design was taught there at the end of the 1980s, which broke with bourgeois aesthetics and wanted to make design accessible to everyone. The designers applied this principle, for example, to the Blaupause project (1993), in which they distributed construction plans instead of a finished product. One of their greatest successes was the retrospective exhibition DESIGN_MATRIX (2006) at Museum Marta Herford, which showed their most famous projects, such as the Imaginary Manufactory and the Sinterchair Factory of the Future.

Since 2009 Hermann August Weizenegger has been running his label HAW, which is composed of the initials of his name. In his ensembles, which he calls “design works”, the focus is not on the product to be designed.

Rather, the formal and functional distinctiveness of the objects is brought out only by the fact that they function as an integral part of an autonomous design cosmos, as in the projects “Digital Couture” (2009) or “Hotel Dresden” (2010), in which the designer worked together with manufactories on the fictitious reconstruction of an art nouveau inventory, which was shown in the rooms of the Berlin Haubrok Foundation.

His staged flower fairy tale “Die Falsche Blume”(2016), which was staged and exhibited in the Dresden Museum of Decorative Arts, Pillnitz Castle, attracted a great deal of attention. The exhibition was a composition of stage design, music composition and dance performance, which was equipped with almost 60 products, which were produced by 16 manufacturers. Well-known manufactories, such as Meissen, Curt Bauer and the Sebnitz artificial flower, among others, participated in the total work of art.

Besides the extensive exhibition projects, the studio also works for manufacturers such as Porcelaingres, MAWA and Pulpo.

Hermann August Weizenegger was nominated “Best of German Interior Design” by the German Design Council in 2017.