While on Lockdown at the Barbican, This Duo Made Brutalist Furniture Out of Moving Boxes and Other Scraps

A Space's new Barbican collection is a series of mirrors, lights, and tables whose name references the famed London housing estate where the studio's founders spent the past year living and making it. Having moved in last May, they conceived the series as an homage to their new surroundings, then sculpted it out of the materials available to them during lockdown, including moving boxes, food containers, and plaster of Paris ordered online.
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By Innovating Local Materials and Manufacturing, This Bangkok Studio Is Redefining Thai Design

Decha Archjananun and Ploypan Theerachai, the couple behind the Bangkok-based product and furniture-design studio Thinkk, named their practice after their core professional pursuit: to think past the obvious and propose a new narrative for what it means to be “made in Thailand.” It’s a theme they’ve explored not only in their own work, but through exhibitions and projects they’ve organized since graduating from European design schools (ECAL and Konstfack) and returning to Thailand to found their studio in 2011.
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Tired of Hearing About Masks? Not Once You See this Antwerp Duo’s Incredible Creations

Clouds blowing swirls of wind, gentlemen with fin-de-siècle mustaches, finely dressed generals with elaborate headpieces — such are the lost-in-time characters depicted in "An Entrance to Mention: the Park Pardon Principles," a 52-page book about a fictional park and its inhabitants that Dutch illustrators Bloeme van Bon and Geran Knol created together in 2014. Last year Knol and van Bon began turning the characters into one-of-a-kind papier-mâché masks, and today they've launched the latest edition in the ongoing (and consistently sold-out) series.
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Lex Pott’s Pandemic Pastime: A New Series of Hand-Woven Checker Chairs

Just when we'd almost begun thinking of him as "the candle guy," his pillars and tapers seemingly having colonized every store in New York, Dutch designer Lex Pott posted a photo on his Instagram late last month of a single eye-catching chair wrapped entirely in hand-woven nylon straps. We did a mini interview with Pott to find out more about the project.
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Melbourne design store Guild of Objects

A Must-Visit Design Store in Melbourne

Guild of Objects fills an interesting gap in Melbourne — a store that isn’t quite a gallery, but is far from a gift shop. Each object — handmade by an Australian maker and often one-of-a-kind — has a story behind it. Quality materials and an emphasis on craftsmanship are central to each piece — otherwise they wouldn’t be here.
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Tureens, Totems, & Tables: What’s Next for Workaday Handmade

When we think of ceramicists at work, we often conjure romantic visions of noble artisans wearing clay-streaked aprons and strenuously channeling their artistic magic behind a potter’s wheel. Which is mostly true, to a point, and yet — what happens once that noble artisan also has to figure out how to run a thriving, growing business? To find out, we visited the Brooklyn studio of the hugely successful Forrest Lewinger (aka Workaday Handmade) with photographer Paul Barbera.
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Our 2015 Holiday Gift Guide — Monica’s Picks

Welcome to Sight Unseen’s annual holiday gift guide! This week, we're sharing our best, most covetable, seriously-buy-me-now finds from around the web. We've narrowed it down to 25 items from each editor — a seriously herculean task when it's basically your job to source cool things all year round. Next up is Monica, whose wish list this year runs the gamut from hairy pillows to hiking boots.
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An Oiva Toikka Bird Inspired by Sight Unseen’s New York

Earlier this year, Iittala invited us to be a part of its Bird and the City series, in which we — along with four other bloggers around the world — were tasked with helping glass artist Oiva Toikka to create a bird dedicated to each of our respective hometowns: New York, Tokyo, Helsinki, Shanghai, and Paris. The blue and white swirled critter above represents not just New York, but our New York.
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Portuguese Designer Célia Esteves of GUR Rugs

While Portugal is probably best known, these days, for manufacturing clothing and shoes for big brands like COS, Zara, and Camper — or if you're a product designer, for supplying 50% of the world's cork — Porto-based designer and printmaker Célia Esteves homed in on its longtime flat-weave rug-making tradition when she founded GUR two years ago. After meeting a weaver in her hometown of Viana de Castelo, who for 15 years had been handcrafting the style of rug that she'd seen on "every Portuguese kitchen floor" since she was a child, Esteves decided to hire the weaver to use the same technique to produce colorful limited-edition designs commissioned from illustrators she knew and admired, like Atelier Bingo and Ferreol Babin. We recently interviewed Esteves about the project, which has collabs with Après Ski and Reality Studio on the way; scroll down to read more about how she transformed a local craft into a contemporary design brand.
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Mathieu Julien and Jin Angdoo of Amateurs

For all its perks — freedom, travel, never having to take off your pajamas — the freelance life has one perpetual drawback: the panic that starts to creep in whenever you're between jobs. Add that to the sense of creative fulfillment that every designer and artist craves, and it's no wonder so many of them start their own projects on the side. For the Paris-based couple Mathieu Julien and Jin Angdoo, whenever they don't have work as a freelance illustrator (Julien) and a film and animation director (Angdoo), they dream up new projects to release under the extra-wide umbrella of their shared endeavor, Amateurs; launched in June, the website comprises projects that are experimental, hand-crafted, and fall somewhere between art and design, like painted tea towels and flags, embroidered sweaters and blankets, plus actual paintings as well. We checked in with the duo to find out more about the collaboration.
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Visit Us This Weekend at Tinseltown, With Refinery29

Last week we shared with you our official Sight Unseen holiday gift guides, which were full of links to our most-coveted design and fashion items this year. But for those of you who prefer to browse in person — and will be in New York this weekend — we're taking our wish lists IRL at Tinseltown, Refinery 29's annual holiday shopping event, which we're co-hosting this year. Sight Unseen has invited seven amazing vendors to offer their wares for sale: Alex Proba, Best Made Company, Bower, CHIAOZZA, Dusen Dusen, Fredericks & Mae, and MAKE Cosmetics. Refinery29 are hosting RillRill and Print All Over Me, plus a cat-themed boutique and a hairstyling bar. Best of all, CHIAOZZA's Terri Chiao and Adam Frezza will be on hand all weekend offering personalized papier-mâché plants, so you can choose custom colors and patterns and get them painted for you on the spot! It's all happening at OpenHouse in Nolita, 201 Mulberry Street, on December 13 and 14, from 12PM to 8PM each day.
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Father Magnus Wenninger, Mathematician

The folks who rank as internet celebrities in Sight Unseen’s world — usually those with a killer eye and a massive following on Tumblr or Instagram — would no doubt seem obscure to most. But even our regular readers might be surprised by today's unconventional yet equally influential story subject. A few years ago, after stumbling across some articles about mathematician Father Magnus Wenninger on the web, we added him to our “Minnesota” file, whose sole other occupant at the time was RO/LU; earlier this summer, we finally had an occasion to open said file when SU contributor Debbie Carlos asked if she could shoot anything for us there. Carlos was game enough to track down the nonagenarian priest — who became a cult figure in the mathematics world (and later in the online world) for his elaborate paper-polyhedron models — in his home at St. John’s Abbey outside Minneapolis. Not only did she photograph Wenninger and his works, she got him to open up about his history and his methodology as well.
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