Gifts for architects and designers

This shop was started by two architects. Gunnar Rönsch and Steve Molloy met studying architecture in Berlin, worked at David Chipperfield Architects and J. MAYER H., and then began making small objects governed by the same rules as large ones. So the honest answer to what do you buy an architect is: something drawn before it was made, by someone who can explain the drawing.

The three that land every time

The Nolli map, as a bookmark

Roma – Bookmark. Giambattista Nolli surveyed Rome in 1736 and drew it inside out: churches, courtyards and public interiors rendered as open space, private buildings filled in solid. Every architecture student meets that drawing. This is a fragment of it, centred on the Vatican, milled into brass. It is the cheapest thing in the shop and it is the one architects pick up first.

A pattern that never repeats

Penrose – 2 Coasters and the Penrose – Pen Tray. Roger Penrose showed that two tile shapes can cover a plane forever without the pattern ever repeating. It looks ordered and it is, but you cannot find the loop. Good for anyone who has ever argued about grids.

Central Park from the air

Manhattan – Bookmark, with the Paris and Penrose versions beside it. City plans reduced to the one line that makes each city legible. They are flat, brass, and they cost less than a decent pen.

For the desk

• Cloud – Desk Tidy — solid brass, two overlapping dot grids that produce a moiré as you move past. Ships flat, folds into shape in twenty seconds. The folding is half the pleasure.
• Gravity – Pen Holder — a steel grid warped as though something heavy had been set down in the middle of it.
• Push – Jewelry Bowl — a flat steel disc that the owner presses into a bowl with their thumbs. A finished object that arrives unfinished.

For the ones who have a shelf for this sort of thing

• Drops – Bookends — crystal spheres set into solid crystal blocks.
• Gravity – Centerpiece — the large warped grid. The Centre Pompidou commissioned its own colourway.

A note on gifts for designers

Designers are a harder audience than architects, because they will have opinions about the object and the packaging. The safest picks are the ones where the rule is visible on the surface: Penrose, Nolli, the Push bowl that the recipient forms themselves. Avoid anything decorative. They will know.

More: design gifts by price · gifts made in Berlin · the whole desk collection. Or come to the shop on Ackerstraße and ask us.