“It’s not like it’s a science,” says Brooklyn designer Chen Chen as he’s mixing up a batch of cement in the Brooklyn studio he shares with collaborator Kai Tsien Williams, attempting to explain why he can’t offer an exact set of measurements for replicating his concrete bookends. They’re fitting words to have chosen, though, coming from him: The Shanghai-born, Wyoming-raised designer had two chemists for parents, and yet it seems like his entire practice has revolved around losing control during the design process rather than maintaining it. Since he joined forces earlier this year with Williams — a fellow Pratt grad who also runs the design fabrication business Three Phase Studio — the pair have spent most of their time together choosing offbeat materials like expanding foam and studio scraps and experimenting for weeks to see what kinds of unexpected effects they can elicit from them.
Their breakout project this past May, designed for Sight Unseen’s Noho Design District pop-up shop, was a set of drink coasters made by wrapping bits of neon resin–soaked rope, animal bones, and offcuts around a wooden core, then slicing the whole mess open to see what might lay inside, with the results being different every single time. Granted the pair now profess to be working on an extremely functional storage system that, while modular and customizable, otherwise has the exact opposite ethos, but so far, it’s their work’s freewheeling and slightly bizarre quality that has so captivated the New York design scene. While the Metamorphic Rock Bookends you see here are technically a design of Chen’s, from just before he teamed up with Williams, we still thought they were a great example of the typical Chen Chen & Kai Williams methodology, so we asked for a lesson in how to make them, and Chen kindly obliged.
Chen’s Metamorphic Rock bookends, currently for sale through Phillips de Pury, are made from fine-grain concrete and stone-yard reject scraps. Their complete and utter randomness is part of their appeal — each one is entirely one of a kind, and even Chen himself doesn’t really follow a set recipe when he’s fabricating them.
The ingredients are always the same, however: stones, Rockite cement mix (don’t use anything else), cement sealer, and a three-sided mold. Chen constructs his molds from wood lined with aluminum flashing — which gives the bookends a smooth surface texture — then seals the seams with Plasticine to keep them watertight. “You could probably use a plastic bin that had relatively sharp corners,” he says. “That would probably work too, and you might not even need the flashing.”
Chen’s made bookends peppered with bricks and bits of chain, but the main ingredient is always stone — hence there are boxes filled with chunks of the stuff all over he and Williams’s studio. They find them at a nearby stone yard, where they’re basically considered garbage. “It’s all stuff no one could use,” Chen says. “If you even just walk around a stone yard, you’ll normally find little chunks like these on the street.”
Depending on the size and shape of the stones he selects, “I’ll sometimes drill a few holes into the surface so there’s something extra for the cement to grab onto,” Chen notes. “It really helps. You just want to be careful if it’s a thinner piece, because a drill might shatter it.”
Today Chen decided to keep his design simple, and opted for three pieces of stone in contrasting shapes and colors — one for each visible surface of the bookend. For the back two walls of the box, it’s best to select stones with a flat side, which you should place completely flush against the aluminum so there’s no gap for the concrete to seep into. The bottom surface of the box will be the bottom of the bookend, and doesn’t need to be as considered, while the top will have the marble hunk in the foreground emerging from it.
When it comes to mixing up the Rockite, “there’s no real measurement to it,” Chen says. He used 1.5 spray-paint caps–full of cement and added water very slowly and carefully until the mixture had the consistency of cake batter, or yogurt. “You want to keep it thick just to keep it from getting between the stone and the mold,” he says. One important note: While working with the cement, keep a bucket of water nearby for washing any mixing cups or stirring sticks. After you finish, you can dump the sediment from the bucket into the garbage. “It’s not harmful, you just don’t want it clogging up your sink,” Chen says.
This is what the mold looks like once the mixture has been poured in, and the shape of the bookend is now visible. Any cement that splashes up onto the stones can be wiped off later, once the piece has set; it’s so thin and easily re-hydrated that even after it dries, a wet cloth will suffice to remove it.
Chen likes to keep extra pieces of wood or stone handy while he’s making the bookends to shim up the mold, in case he wants to alter the angle of the cement (and thus the shape of the final object) immediately after it’s poured in. In this case, he lifted the back legs up a bit to make the bookend a little wider at the base. It takes 15-20 minutes for everything to dry, and at that point the bookend should slide right out of the mold.
Voila — our finished bookend. “Afterwards I file down the edges a bit with sandpaper to give them a little bit of a radius, so they don’t chip,” Chen says. He also coats the concrete surfaces with a cement sealer to protect them from water damage. If you try this at home, be sure to post photos of the finished results on our Facebook page!
At the London Design Festival in 2009, Apartamento magazine collaborated with local furniture wunderkind Max Lamb on a show called “The Everyday Life Collector.” The title referred to Lamb’s father, Richard, who had spent more than 15 years surrounding himself with British studio pottery, of which 400 examples were on view. But while age might have given him a leg up in the volume department, it turned out that the elder Lamb wasn’t the only one with the collecting bug: Max, too, admitted to joining his dad at flea markets from time to time and almost never coming home empty-handed. So when we had the idea to start a new column called Inventory — for which we’d ask subjects to photograph a group of objects they found meaningful — we turned to Max first, and he didn’t disappoint. He sent us 10 images of the collections on display in his live-work studio in London, then gave us a personal tour.
When we — and the rest of the design world — were first introduced to her at the 2009 London Design Festival, Faye Toogood already seemed like Superwoman: Having just left her post as a stylist at the UK shelter magazine World of Interiors and cast out on her own, she'd engineered a coming-out party for herself that included a collaborative installation with Gallery Fumi featuring designs made from corn, a Memphis-inspired playroom with an Arabeschi di Latte egg bar, and a temporary shop for Tom Dixon that showcased how she'd begun to transform his brand image. Just seeing her do it was enough to make us feel stressed, and that was before we knew that she was about to reinvent herself again, this time as a furniture designer. Her first collection, Assemblage 1, was inspired by modernist sculpture, British craftsmanship, and her childhood growing up in the English countryside; it gave way to Assemblage 2 in Milan earlier this year, which took a darker, edgier turn. Finally, with Phillips de Pury last week, Toogood unveiled the third chapter in the series, and the most ambitious to date — it's based around her fascination with iridescence, and it took a motorcycle fabricator, a gun maker, and a studio full of assistants in gas masks to complete. I was asked by Phillips to conduct an in-depth interview with Toogood to appear in the show's catalog, and so Sight Unseen received special permission to reprint that interview here. It's lengthy, but it offers a good deal of insight into the mind of one of the most intriguing and ambitious personalities working in design right now.
If you travel all the way from New York to Arnhem just to attend the fashion biennial in this relatively obscure Dutch city, half the size of Pittsburgh, you can expect people to notice. Your waiter will witness your accent — and the fact that you’re not drinking a huge glass of milk with lunch like everyone else — and ask if you came just for the show, and well, did you like it? Your jolly white-haired cab driver will crack a few embarrassing jokes about the Big Apple before waxing poetic about how lovely it is when the festival’s on. And despite Vogue calling the $2.5-million production the “Greatest Fashion Event You’ve Never Heard Of,” it will seem, when you’re there, like Arnhem's gravitational pull has shifted in some small but significant way.
