The grand designers of the year are Terezie Lexová and Štěpán Smetana for seating furniture

Prague - The absolute winner of the Czech Grand Design Awards 2022 today became the duo Terezie Lexová and Štěpán Smetana, winning the title of Grand Designer of the Year. The Czech Design Academy was impressed by their collection of seating furniture. For the third time in a row, the main prize was awarded to a creative duo. The Hall of Fame of Czech Design welcomed, in memoriam, industrial designer Otakar Diblík (1929 to 1999), who significantly influenced the appearance of transport vehicles in Czechoslovakia.

The organizers also awarded prizes in eight categories, and the winners received "historically" the loudest trophies in the form of aluminum rattles from last year's Grand Designers, the studio Vrtiška & Žák. The recording of the awards ceremony held at the Centre for Architecture and Urban Planning in Prague will be broadcast by Czech Television on Monday, March 27. The finalists of this year are introduced in a photography exhibition at the Czech Savings Bank Gallery, running until April 2.

The winning duo also took home the award in the Designer of the Year category. The Czech Design Academy was captivated by the original processing of the seating furniture collection Hide and Seek for the Hradec Králové company Polstrin. The win is associated with the organization of an exhibition at the Museum of Applied Arts in Brno.

"As children, we built hideouts from cushions and blankets in the middle of the living room, creating our own little world. In our playful world, we also found ourselves while designing a new collection for Polstrin, where we layered and freely shaped the individual cushions together, resulting in the Hide and Seek collection," described their work, the winners stated. The duo met while studying product design at the AAAD (Higher School of Applied Arts) and has been creating under a joint brand since 2018. According to David Kalista, a representative of the relevant jury, the Hide and Seek collection represents a breath of playful, unadulterated creativity that reflects a pleasantly emotional interpretation of purely functional forms.

The Fashion Designer category has a winner in the figure of experienced designer and educator Liběna Rochová with her collection Inside 23. The author, who entered the Hall of Fame of Czech Design last year, was inspired by a meeting with the work of Brno painter Petr Kvíčala during her creation. In the category of Jewelry Designer of the Year, the brand Dick Wolf succeeded with the Marina collection, which combines fluid forms of metal and irregular river pearls.

In the field of graphic design, the project Readable Prague succeeded. The graphic studio Side2, in collaboration with the A69 architects and the Superior Type type foundry, created a comprehensive navigation system for pedestrians and public transport in the city of Prague, which will begin to appear in the public space of the city this year.

The Photographer of the Year 2022 became young, Prague-based photographer of Belarusian origin Iryna Drahunová, the Manufacturer of the Year is the company Amplla for its revolutionary design of the Hussechuck and Shield fire extinguisher. After 150 years of existence of fire extinguishers designed in the shape of industrial bottles, the brand transformed this object into a circular shape, which, according to the creators, is also more user-friendly.

The Czech Design Academy selected designer Alena Konečná as the Discovery of the Year 2022. Her diploma project at the AAAD, titled Finding Light, serves as a phototherapeutic lamp, helping to prevent issues from lack of daylight, while also functioning as a standard table with light.