Week of March 4, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the spring weather in New York goes hand in hand with a slew of new exhibition openings, including an archival Max Lamb show, a Bushwick gallery meditating on consumer iconography, and the new Latin American "Crafting Modernity" design exhibition at MoMA.
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A New Exhibition Featuring Florals in Every Form — And Our New Favorite Table

India Mahdavi's Project Room is where the Iranian-born interior designer puts on freeform exhibitions four times a year, and it occupies just a single storefront below Mahdavi's studio in Paris's 7th arrondissement. Yet the space, now on its 12th curatorial outing, tends to occupy an outsized, Zeitgeist-driven share of the collective design consciousness due to the quality of its exhibitions: so far, one themed "reds and tartans" (both on the upswing, trendwise), one curated by AGO Projects (Mexico City–based gallery, pretty much universally loved), and the most recent, "Foreign Flowers," which is being presented as part of the programming for Matter and Shape, a new, compact fair in the Jardin des Tuileries, designed by Willo Perron. Foreign Flowers is curated by Matter and Shape's artistic director Dan Thawley, and it investigates the unexpected dovetailing of flowers and plants with the disciplines of furniture-making, fine art, craft, and collectible design.
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A Deft Mix of Materials Earned This Swedish Studio Sight Unseen’s Best in Show Award at Greenhouse, the Exhibition for Emerging Design at Stockholm’s Furniture Fair

Adrian Bursell and Siri Svedborg were students at Konstfack back in 2018 when they made the tables that would become the initial studies for their Burn & Turn collection, which debuted at the Stockholm Furniture Fair earlier this month, and which earned them Sight Unseen's Best in Show award at Greenhouse, the fair's up-and-coming designer showcase. At the time, they were studying the Arts & Crafts movement in a degree program for Interior Architecture and Furniture Design, and they agreed to explore a table that might reflect the movement's values — one that could be functional yet decorative, using a kind of stripped-down ornamentalism inspired by the Swedish folk tradition.
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18 New Talents We Scouted at Greenhouse, Stockholm’s Showcase for Emerging Design

As an editor, each time I attend a design fair, I'm making snap judgements in my head: Does this designer's collection stand together as a whole? Is there a compelling narrative behind it? Does it use materials in a profound or creative way? Is it formally inventive? Is it pretty? If I had another suitcase, would I want to take a piece home with me? But before last week, I had never in my life had to choose my number one, absolute, hands-down favorite. And yet, at the Stockholm Furniture Fair's Greenhouse exhibition of emerging design, I did just that: For Sight Unseen's inaugural Best in Show award, I chose the Swedish duo Bursell/Svedborg — whose wonderful series of mixed-material pedestals we'll be diving into more in-depth next week — from a pool of 30 international design studios, who had been juried into the fair by a committee of six Stockholm-based designers. Today, though, I'm highlighting *all* of my favorite up-and-coming designers from the week.
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30 Projects We Loved at the 2024 Stockholm Furniture Fair

Perhaps no design fair makes me philosophize about the future of trade shows more than Stockholm. A small fair that has become even more compact over the past few years, as Danish brands have increasingly shifted their calendar to coincide with Copenhagen's 3 Days of Design, Stockholm tends to particularly shine in two areas that make a fair worth having in the first place: its curation — not only in booths but also in talks that one might actually care to attend — and the idea that sustainability ought to be baked in at every turn, or else what's the point of making new things?
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Week of January 29, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: paintings made by a giant squeegee, a perfectly preserved Art Deco hunting lodge outside of Paris, and a Barcelona apartment inspired by the 1992 Olympics.
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The Malin Opens a Moody, Textured, Pine-Accented Location in Nashville

Having been a member of the design-forward co-working space The Malin for nearly a year now, we could tell you a lot about their New York locations: how there's often a snack plate on offer (banana bread in the mornings, cookies in the afternoon); how there's always a row of lights running above the shared desks that were designed by two of Sight Unseen's longest-running collaborators; or which location has the best view (Williamsburg FTW). But Nashville, where the Malin recently opened its fourth and largest location — and first outside of New York — is something of an unknown quantity to us, having never before visited. We can't tell you which restaurants nearby have the best take-out, or what the artsy neighborhood it's in — called Wedgewood-Houston, or WeHo for short, because of course it is — is like. But part of what we love about The Malin is how they keep so many aesthetic elements the same, while switching things up just enough to make each outpost feel simultaneously familiar and fun.
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The 2023 American Design Hot List, Part IV

This week we announced our 11th annual American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen’s editorial award for the names to know now in American design. We’re devoting an entire week to interviews with this year’s honorees — get to know the second group of Hot List designers here (including Frances Merrill of Reath Design, whose midcentury Altadena project is pictured above).
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The 2023 American Design Hot List, Part II

This week we announced our 11th annual American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen’s editorial award for the names to know now in American design. We’re devoting an entire week to interviews with this year’s honorees — get to know the second group of Hot List designers here (including Little Wing Lee, whose graphic rug for the most recent Black Folks in Design exhibition is pictured above).
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In His Latest Solo Exhibition, Magnus Pettersen’s Glass Orbs Evoke a Sense of Metaphysical Disturbance

In Norwegian designer Magnus Pettersen’s latest solo exhibition, which was on view at QB Gallery in Oslo last month, a new series of sculptures was presented, which purport, per the press materials, to transgress the boundary between artworks and functional objects. But that isn't remotely the most interesting thing about the pieces; pretty much everything published on this site at this point achieves that with equal aplomb. For us, the most interesting thing is the addition of wood, yes, especially in brilliantly tinted hues like emergency orange. But more important is the inclusion of tiny glass orbs, perched on the arms or backs or smack dab in the middle of several of the seats, which sometimes prevent the pieces from being functional objects at all. Why are they there? What is their meaning? Has Pettersen recently discovered astrology?
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