Constantin Boym at UrbanGlass

For anyone like us who "grew up," professionally speaking, in the New York design world in the last few decades, it was always with a sense of awareness of and deference to the scene's elder statesmen. Constantin and Laurene Boym, for example, set up Boym Partners back in 1986, and by the time we started circulating in 2005, they still felt markedly omnipresent, both critically and physically speaking. We suppose that's why it felt so surprising when these New York stalwarts up and left town in 2010, after Constantin accepted a two-year tenure as director of graduate design studies at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar. They disappeared from New York design events, parties, exhibitions, and talks, only occasionally sending dispatches to their mailing list about life on the other side of the globe. They returned to New York a year ago, but we hadn't really heard from them until now — with the launch of Constantin's new exhibition at Brooklyn's UrbanGlass, "Learning From the East," which opens this Saturday.

04.17.12

The Making of

Philippe Malouin’s Intarsia Bowl for Carwan Gallery

On Friday we introduced you to Oeuffice's Ziggurat Towers for the Beirut-based Carwan Gallery, and today it's the gallery's contribution from London designer Philippe Malouin, who's also showing with Plus Design and Kvadrat in Milan this week. Malouin was one of nine designers — along with Karen Chekerdjian, Khalid Shafar, Lindsey Adelman, Studio mischer’traxler, Nada Debs, Oeuffice, Paul Loebach, and Tamer Nakisci — who traveled to the Middle East late last year for a grand tour of artisan’s studios, each pairing up with a different craftsperson to produce a new twist on an old archetype or technique. What caught Malouin's eye was the wood-inlay method called intarsia, in which pieces of various types of wood are cut and assembled into a jigsaw-puzzle like image or pattern that often has the illusion of depth. Rather than using the method in a conventional way, however — as a decorative add-on — he tried something a little bit different; here, he explains how he arrived at the final design for his Intarsia Bowl.