Meet UNNO, the New Online Gallery Championing Latin American Design

UNNO, a new online-only gallery from architect Laura Abe Vettoretti and interior designer Maria Dolores, is making the most of the situation after plans to open a physical gallery in Milan last year were put on hold. Their mission, they tell us, is to introduce the richly varied landscape of Latin American design to collectors across the globe, spurred on by the region’s fertile mix of craft tradition and yet-to-be-discovered crop of contemporary designers.
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Mexico City designer Alberto Oderiz

The Archeology of Mexican Artist-Architect Alberto Odériz

It’s no secret that here at Sight Unseen, we have a bit of an obsession with stone and its many forms. Perhaps that’s why we’re so smitten by the work of Mexican architect and sculptor Alberto Odériz. Stone is his inspiration, his material, and his passion. From small sculptures, to full room installations, to huge plazas and other inhabitable spaces, Odériz’s work is dynamic and innovative.
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Inside the Mind-Blowing Live/Work Compound of Mexican Artist Pedro Reyes

The sprawling studio compound of Mexican artist and designer Pedro Reyes is as much a laboratory as it is a factory — an environment with controlled variables and a given set of inputs working toward a desired outcome, whether that’s the downfall of Jeff Bezos’s Amazon or simply preserving outmoded technologies. Reyes is preoccupied not with objects in and of themselves, but how they’re made, why they’re made, and how they in turn shape us.
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This Up-and-Coming Spanish Artist Perfectly Mixes Organic Shapes and Geometry

Like many of our subjects, Barcelona-based sculptor Carla Cascales Alimbau has one foot in the art world and one foot in design. Alimbau, who used to work for a large design corporation before developing her independent art practice in 2015, cites influences from furniture and architecture, including Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Alvar Aalto. But her sculptures are in fact functionless beauties, often mixing organic shapes with geometry, and the imperfections of nature with the purity of polished materials.
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Maniera Gallery for the Operae design fair

Fake Wood, Real Stone, and Imagined Foam: Our Favorite Collection from the Operae Design Fair

This year's Operae show was curated by Alice Stori Lichtenstein and the fair, always notable for its mix of designers and galleries, featured Sight Unseen favorites like Campbell Rey, Carwan Gallery, and Maniera. It was the latter gallery who hosted our favorite presentation: a series of layered particle-board furniture developed by the Belgium firm aDVVT as well as a newer series called "Light Conversation Pieces," by the Italian architecture firm Piovenefabi.
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lava rock design lamps

Lava Rock — So Hot Right Now

The Guadalajara-based studio Peca made coasters out of it. Formafantasma paired it with more refined materials like brass and glass. Aleks Pollner and Adrien Rovero are obsessed with it. Now, the latest designer to be inspired by plucking basalt from the earth and fashioning it into something, well, fashionable is Laura Bilde, a furniture and interior design student from Denmark who sent us this seriously on-trend lighting series this week.
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Lola Lely, furniture designer

Lola Lely was born in Hanoi, Vietnam, but, having moved to London when she was only five, the rising design star can claim native east Londoner status — a rare feat in the area’s bustling international design scene. Her interest in making dates back nearly as far; her mother, a seamstress, was always “knitting or crocheting, making clothes or coasters.” Her Foundation tutor, ceramicist Bo Davies, guided Lely down the path to product design, to satisfy her interest in various disciplines and materials. But now that she’s there, she says, “none of my projects seem to have an end point. I like restlessness, when I don’t know where something is going. It's a little bit serendipitous.”
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