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ARCH_BldgTakagi
01.27.12
Inspired By
Architecture

Does it seem strange to think of furniture, which has such an intimate relationship with the human body, as architecture in miniature? Not, at least, if you count the number of legendary architects who employed their craft in the making of chairs and tables — Eames, van der Rohe, Gray, Corbu, Saarinen, Sottsass — plus all the contemporary ones, like David Adjaye, who aspire to work fluidly across all scales. Way before there was design-art, there was no more permeable disciplinary boundary than the one between buildings and the objects that occupied them. Which, of course, has made the overlap a longtime topic of interest among Sight Unseen’s editors. But what’s really piqued our curiosity lately is how the relationship works in the other direction, when designers trained to make furniture and objects try to harness larger architectural ideas and shrink them down to a more familiar level — one on which they can be lived with, rather than in. Sometimes you end up with baby skyscrapers or re-appropriated I-beams, other times it’s a single detail used to evoke a disproportionate sense of the monumental. We decided to put together a small roundup of recent furniture by designers who take inspiration from various aspects of a profession that Philip Johnson once called “the art of wasting space.”

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2
01.25.12
At Home With
Oscar Tuazon, artist, and Dorothée Perret, editor

Like most good photographers, Daniel Trese is a chronic wanderer. Troll the internet for instances of his work for magazines like Pin-Up and Butt, and you’ll find visual essays — often accompanied by musings he wrote himself — that seem like off-the-cuff missives from the road. “Oh hi, I was just traveling from Paris to the Italian countryside and I managed to shoot these beautiful images for you,” is what a typical contribution from the Los Angeles–based photog seems to say. So we were pleased earlier this winter when Trese wrote to us with pictures he’d taken during a recent visit to the new Paris home of his friends, the art-world power couple Dorothée Perret — formerly of Purple and current editor of Paris, LA — and Oscar Tuazon, a onetime Seattleite who makes sculptural art in raw concrete and wood, and who’s about to become known as one of the stars of this year’s upcoming Whitney Biennial. The couple and their two girls had recently relocated after a fire burned down their Montmartre duplex, and Tuazon had built bits of the new house from pieces of the old. Trese, who was in Paris during Fashion Week shooting bloggers Tavi Gevinson and Diane Pernet for a Dutch magazine called Girls Like Us, shot both houses and sent us notes he’d jotted down from his day with the family.

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_tableware2
01.18.12
Inventory
Sam Baron, designer and art director

As a child growing up in the Jura mountains on a small farm on the border between France and Switzerland, the first thing designer Sam Baron remembers collecting were the stickers you scrape from the skins of fruits, heralding their arrival from someplace exotic — tomatoes from Mexico, say, or bananas from Guadeloupe. “For me, it was like a small souvenir from a trip I had never taken, an invitation to think about someplace else and another way of life,” Baron told me from his studio in Lisbon earlier this fall. Of course these days, the designer needn’t only imagine what life is like in faraway places: As head of the design department at Fabrica and a designer for outfits like Ligne Roset, Secondome Gallery, and Bosa Ceramics, Baron’s work has him constantly jetting from Paris to Milan to Treviso, where Fabrica is based; to Venice, where his glassworks are blown; and back to Lisbon, where he recently opened an office with Fabrica alums Gonçalo Campos and Catarina Carreiras, and where he lives with his wife.

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ROLU_Main1
01.12.12
Shop
New Necklaces by ROLU and Tanya Aguiñiga

Yesterday we introduced you to the up-and-coming Minneapolis-based design studio ROLU, whose plywood and OSB chairs inspired by conceptual art and modernist sculpture have garnered them the design-world equivalent of a cult following as of late. Today, we’re excited to announce that the multi-talented trio have designed their very first jewelry project, exclusively for the Sight Unseen shop. Called Shapes After Guy (and Lost At Sea), the felt-backed plywood necklaces — which can be worn individually or in a group — make for some serious statement pieces, and yet they’re only $100 each. We’ve also got a brand new handmade dyed-rope necklace design by the rising California talent Tanya Aguiñiga, which is even chunkier than our other Tanya creations and yet rings in at just $125.

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01 PRIMARILY-PRIMARY after CAROL BOVE SCOTT BURTON and SOL LE WITT
01.11.12
Up and Coming
ROLU, Designers

Before Matt Olson and Mike Brady of the Minneapolis studio ROLU began making boxy plywood furniture in 2010 — earning them serious contemporary design cred and a reputation for channeling Donald Judd — they spent seven years designing landscapes, minimalist geometric compositions in steel, wood, concrete, and grass. It was those projects, says Olson, that have helped define the group’s work since, from their love for earthy materials to their awareness of design’s larger experiential qualities. “A landscape is a dynamic thing,” Olson explains. “It has smells, it grows and dies and changes. That taught me to pay attention to what’s really happening with an object; the chair as a visual and functional thing is only the start.” In ROLU’s case, chairs can also interact with users, reference sculptures and performance art and drawings, or become performances themselves, often by way of little more than a few planes of OSB.

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OSOOS_Main
01.09.12
Self Portrait
OS ∆ OOS, Syzygy Lamps

Credit where credit is due: The idea for Sight Unseen’s newest column, Self Portrait, came from a chat we had recently with Pin-Up editor Felix Burrichter, over lunch in Soho. “Why don’t you feature more products?” he asked us, to which we replied that our site is really about process — not products. Felix suggested we ask designers to pose with their latest works, something more personal than just reporting the news. The notion rattled around in our brains for a few months until it evolved into something even more exciting, at least we think so: A series inviting designers and artists to visually present their creations to us in a unique way, photographing them firsthand in a setting or setup that somehow illuminates the ideas behind the object. Our first submission comes from Oskar Peet, who with his partner Sophie Mensen founded the Eindhoven-based firm OS ∆ OOS this fall, launching with a trio of lamps so beautiful and intriguing that we actually feel grateful to Burrichter for inspiring the perfect platform with which to share them. Check out Peet and Mensen’s submission above, then read below about how — and why — they got the shot.

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AUG_Main
01.06.12
The Making Of
Skin Rugs by Agustina Woodgate, Artist

Agustina Woodgate is one of those artists whose work is defined by its very resistance to definition: Wooden doormats, inspirational poems secretly sewn to thrift store tags, fairy tale–themed performance pieces — it can be hard to see the thread. That is, until you notice her obsession with bizarre materials. Woodgate once made a chandelier out of 36 yards of defective fishing line, while her Tower series comprises 4.5-foot turrets whose miniature bricks — nearly 3,000 of them — were woven from human hair she collected while offering random pedestrians free haircuts on the streets of Miami. And then there are her Skin Rugs, which she patches together from the hides of used stuffed animals, a kind of distant cousin to the Campana brothers’ Banquete chair. It’s hardly a surprise when Woodgate says she finds inspiration in everything: “I’m just a very curious person,” she says.

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184209
12.23.11
Happy Holidays
See you next year!

Indeed, everything is going to be just fine, at least in the world of Sight Unseen, and hopefully yours as well. We’re closing up shop here for the next two weeks as we take off for parts near and far, but when we return on January 6, we’ll begin furiously preparing to bring you, our dear readers, the following new year’s goodies: 1) First and foremost, the Sight Unseen book — a limited-edition collectible item, which will be designed by the marvelously talented Studio Lin and packed full of wonderful and (almost all!) new stories. You’re going to want to buy this. 2) New designs and new designers in our online jewelry shop, which we should remind you remains open and ready for orders even as the editorial site goes on a short holiday hiatus. 3) Pop-up shops in New York and beyond. 4) Collaborations and exhibitions with some of your favorite up-and-coming designers. And, as always, 5) loads of new content peeking at the homes, studios, and working methods of creatives around the world. In the interim, we leave you with the five most-viewed stories on Sight Unseen this year. If you haven’t read them yet, what are you waiting for? See you next year!

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OKORehbergerShelves
12.21.11
Sighted
Okolo Visits Tobias Rehberger’s Studio

For the team behind the Czech curatorial studio and blog Okolo — Adam Štěch, Jakub Štěch, and Matěj Činčera — their work is informed as much by the fact that they’re based in Prague, with a front-seat view of all things fascinating in Eastern European design, as it is by the fact that they love to travel. Adam Štěch has toured the region documenting amazing modernist homes, one of which he covered for Wallpaper this fall and more of which you’ll see on Sight Unseen in 2012, and the trio recently produced a print magazine devoted entirely to the city of Vienna. They also traveled to Frankfurt in November, visiting a succession of designers’ studios and photographing them for the Okolo website, slotting them in between posts about new work by Tomáš Král and the deconstruction of a Phillips auction catalog. One of our favorites was the studio of artist Tobias Rehberger, known for his striking graphical sensibility and his affinity for design and architecture, recently witnessed in the award-winning series of spaces he created in partnership with Artek; we’ve reposted it here with additional images and text that Adam prepared exclusively for Sight Unseen. Meanwhile, look out for a more extensive collaboration we’re preparing with Okolo for later this winter.

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SIMG_1333
12.19.11
Excerpt: Magazine
The Bouroullec Brothers in Disegno #1

Designers around the world owe Johanna Agerman Ross a drink, or perhaps even a hug: Her new project, the biannual magazine Disegno, is devoted to letting their work breathe. “I always found it frustrating working for a monthly, because I couldn’t give a subject enough time or space to make it worthwhile,” says the former Icon editor. “For a project that took 10 or 15 years to make, it felt bizarre to represent it in one image, or four pages.” Founded by her and produced with the help of creative director Daren Ellis, Disegno takes some of the visual tropes of fashion magazines — long pictorial features, single-photo spreads, conceptual photography — and marries them with the format of a textbook* and the investigative-reporting ambitions of The New Yorker. The story about Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec which we’ve excerpted here, for example, fills 22 pages of the new issue and runs to nearly 3,000 words; it’s accompanied by images captured over two full days the photographer spent with the brothers, one in their studio and one at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, where they were installing their latest retrospective, “Bivouac.” And articles on Martin Szekely, Azzedine Alaïa, and Issey Miyake’s Yoshiyuki Miyamae are set either over lunch, or in the subject’s living room. The focus, says Agerman Ross, is on proper storytelling. “The people behind the project, the process of making something, even the process of the writer finding out about the story — that’s all part of it,” she says. “It’s the new journalism.” Obviously, we couldn’t agree more.

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