In addition to your work as interior designers, you are also active in teaching. Which universities are you currently working at?
Susanne Brandherm: I originally started my teaching career at the university in Trier. Since the winter semester 2019/2020, I have been teaching exhibition architecture at the Peter Behrens School of Arts in Düsseldorf. The teaching position has just been expanded to include design.
Sabine Krumrey: Since 2015, I have been working as a lecturer in the Spatial Concept and Design (B.A.) course at the Fresenius University of Applied Sciences, Department of Design | AMD in Hamburg. Parallel to the lecturer’s work, this semester I accompanied no less than six students in their bachelor’s thesis.
What appeals to you most about teaching?
Susanne Brandherm: When I teach, I choose topics that I would also like to work on myself as a planning task. I have a tremendous amount of fun working with the students. It’s simply exciting to see the different approaches and creative thought processes of the up-and-coming designers.
Sabine Krumrey: The motivation for this is very simple: it is fun to work with students, to accompany them in their development and to teach them the values and contents of our profession. The reward for this is the younger generation’s eye for new things – which often results in something surprising.
What projects are you currently working on with the students?
Sabine Krumrey: In joint project work with Prof. Stephan Exsternbrink. Professorship for Design Processes, I accompanied two semester classes of the Interior Design program (B.A.) in the winter semester 2020/2021. One of the assignments we gave the 3rd semester students was to develop a large-scale exhibition under the heading “Pandemic Spaces.”
Susanne Brandherm: Last year, the semester project was a film premiere at the Düsseldorf cinema “Cinema”. This year we are creating a “Salon on the Water” on the boat “Black Pearl” in Düsseldorf’s Medienhafen. Both projects take place in real spaces.
What exactly are these projects about?
Sabine Krumrey: Looking back from 2024, the project “Pandemic Spaces” aims to highlight a selection of key moments of societal, medical, logistical or psychological challenges facing global society in 2020 and 2021. The focus is on an exhibition design with space as a carrier of meaning. The starting point is the own experiences of the pandemic period with special attention to all moments of spatial nature of closeness and distance. This can include experiencing in all spaces of human and social life. The location of the exhibition is the former Art Kite Museum in Detmold, today Kulturfabrik Hangar 21 (architects von Gerkan, Marg and Partners).
Susanne Brandherm: The idea behind the semester project is to give a print medium a spatial and mobile presence that makes it more visible and accessible. The title “Salon on the Water – a magazine invites” reflects this. Students were allowed to choose a print magazine for which the storyboard for the event was developed. This then also served as the basis for the elaboration. The boat in Düsseldorf’s Medienhafen has been redefined in terms of its spatial structure and atmosphere – corporate identity was the most important parameter here. Impressive designs have emerged that would certainly “make waves” in real-life implementation.
