As anyone who’s ever made an album knows, sophomore efforts are by far the toughest to pull off. And so, even though we here at Sight Unseen have been putting together a major New York Design Week showcase in some way or another since 2010, this year marked only our second outing as Sight Unseen OFFSITE, which debuted last year to enormous fanfare and praise. The stakes were incredibly high.
Part of the appeal of last year’s show — aside from the insanely high caliber of talent on display — came from our location: a beautiful, 20,000-square-foot brick-lined former factory in the middle of Soho. This year, that location was under construction, but we happened upon an even more brilliant concept: Why not set up shop just a block from the Javits, so that anyone going to ICFF could simply pop over, eat a bite in our delicious cafe rather than suffering the Javits’ underground cafeteria, and view the work in a pretty, light-filled, white-walled space? The plan worked like a charm. Hudson Mercantile proved a perfect backdrop for our showcase, which this year featured the work of more than 100 designers, who hailed from places as varied as Los Angeles, Vancouver, Indianapolis, St. Augustine, FL, Detroit, Seattle, Montreal, and, of course, Brooklyn. If you happened to miss it — or if you just want to relive the glory — check out our slideshow at right, which features our exhibitors from OFFSITE and its Collective Design satellite, and stay tuned for even more coverage later today!
Thanks so much to everyone who attended, thanks to the exhibitors who helped make this week’s show such a beautiful success, thanks to the Collective Design team for their tremendous support, thanks to our graphic designers Kokoro & Moi and our PR team at Camron, and many thanks to our partners — Cain Cain Studios, Dazian, Space Productions, and Welkin Vines. And a huge round of applause to our title sponsor Ford, without whom none of this would have been possible in the first place!
Our location changed this year — Hudson Mercantile was conveniently situated just a stone’s throw from the Javits Center — but many elements of last year’s show remained intact, like our playful branding by Finnish design studio Kokoro & Moi. These totes were a highly coveted souvenir!
At our Sight Unseen OFFSITE presentation at Collective, Chicago-based designer Steven Haulenbeek debuted the results of his experiments in bronze ice-casting, which we wrote about a while back.
The series included mirrors, side tables, vessels patinated in black, and even a table lamp.
LA-based Matthew Sullivan of AQQ Design sees his furniture as engaged in a dialogue with designers of the past, such as Alessandro Mendini, Ettore Sottsass, Gaetano Pesce and Robert Venturi.
With her husband, LA’s Mimi Jung creates furniture and objects as Brook & Lyn. Under her own name, she fabricates these ethereal mohair weavings, mounted on powder-coated steel frames.
Jung also responded to our brief for an eye-catching piece for entrance to our show with these framed weavings made from colorful lanyard string.
LA’s Brian Thoreen presented the efforts of two years of work, including a show-stopping marble and brass coffee table, a credenza fronted in flexible black rubber, and a missile-like pendant light lined with beautiful blown-glass orbs.
Brooklyn’s Egg Collective created a 15-foot long dining table for the occasion, and surrounded it with new colors of their Wu stool, as well as a credenza and bookcase.
The table was topped by an Instagrammable installation of ultramarine paper flowers by Daniel Sean Murphy.
Doug Johnston, who’s perhaps best known for his braided rope backpacks and baskets, showed wall hangings and multi-humped sculptures in a stunning presentation.
Over in the main show, at Hudson Mercantile, visitors were greeted with this colorful installation by Brooklyn’s CHIAOZZA.
For the second year running, Brooklyn’s Bower created one of our favorite booths, with inventive, ’70s-inspired meditations on the materials palette du jour (marble, colored glass) as well as new takes on seemingly tired typologies, like nesting tables.
Earlier this week, we introduced you to our brand-new collaboration with Print All Over Me, a housewares line whose objects and illustrators are exclusively curated by Sight Unseen. At the show, PAOM had the brilliant idea to create an all-over-print living room, swapping in new patterns each day. This black-and-white print came courtesy of Brooklyn artist Pia Howell.
Ladies & Gentlemen, John Hogan and Calico Wallpaper created a collaborative booth where each contribution dealt with the theme of optical illusion. Calico’s zig-zag lenticular wallpaper was a standout.
Mobiles by Hogan and L&G.
Greg Papove of Vancouver’s Studio Medium riffed on the Miami color palette of his coffee table and incense burners with plenty of tropical plant leaves.
One of the more subtly beautiful booths at OFFSITE was by quilter Meg Callahan, and also featured a whitewashed bench created in collaboration with designer Andrew Mau.
Eric Trine and Ellen Van Dusen first paired up at last year’s OFFSITE to create a chair frame and cushions for Print All Over Me. This year the two joined forces on a truly collaborative booth, with Van Dusen’s colorfully patterned home line juxtaposed with Trine’s endlessly creative metal-framed furniture.
Husband-and-wife team Mimi Jung and Brian Hurewitz of Brook & Lyn debuted planters both large and small, made from spun steel and finished in different hues of hammertone. The two sourced their succulent selections back in Los Angeles; the varietal in the blue planter, for example, is called Peruvian Old Man.
Matthew Sullivan of AQQ here presented the most sophisticated flat-pack furniture you’ve ever seen: Each of the fluted column legs screws out for easy shipping.
Brooklyn’s Visibility presented an overview of recent projects, including this paintbrush and can opener for the SHOP at Cooper-Hewitt, mini pocket mirrors for Good Thing, and the Life Measured pitcher for MOLD.
Katie Stout teamed up with the braided rug–makers at Colonial Mills to create soft, geometric building blocks that could be arranged any which way. Visitors could crawl inside the hollow cylinder at left, which proved especially popular with the under-four-year-old set.
Alex P White’s moody, black-and-white installation included a zebrawood bench, strewn roses, hand-painted velvet chairs, and a video performance by SKOTE.
Julie Thévenot presented beautiful wall hangings made from neon and metallic threads, as well as a series of necklaces.
Colorful solar-powered watches by Q&Q — for sale on site! — were a major hit for the second year running.
The American Design Club and Roll & Hill teamed up to curate a juried exhibition of candleholders. The centerpiece was this incredible table — made by AmDC founder Kiel Mead and covered in wax by Joya Studio — but we’ll have up close pictures of some of the entries next week!
Last but not least, our Dynamic Sanctuary installation — created by The Principals in response to a brief by our sponsor, Ford — was the sleeper hit of the show. Approaching the glowing blue structure, visitors — who had to don booties before entering — weren’t entirely sure what to expect inside.
The interior had a soothing infinity effect, thanks to a mirrored floor and ceiling, and a sensor that translated visitors’ heartbeats into pulsing blue light. The experience was meant to evoke a sense a calm in an otherwise relatively hectic environment. (See our recent article on the New Escapism in design!)
The installation was inspired by the interior of the Ford Edge, which was also on display for the duration of the show. Many thanks again to Ford for making our whole show possible and for supporting American design as a whole! Stay tuned tomorrow for the second half of our OFFSITE coverage!
When we founded the Noho Design District back in 2009, it was meant to provide a much-needed, well-curated platform for independent designers, whose numbers — particularly in America — had begun to surge. But it was also meant to add an extra dose of dimension and excitement to New York Design Week (or NYCxDesign, as it has since come to be known), which at the time was considered preeeeeetty lackluster, to say the least. By that measure alone, the first edition of Sight Unseen OFFSITE, our successor to the Noho Design District, was a massive success; word on the street was that this NYDW was the best anyone could remember, and we're proud to have played a significant role.
Though your Sight Unseen editors have been in major curation mode for the past two weeks, we've also had day to day work to do as, you know, journalists. So for five days during our Sight Unseen OFFSITE event last week, Monica and I set up camp on the Astroturf-covered bleachers of the MOLD Future Food Café, where we caught up on emails and posted stories to this very site. It was the perfect vantage point from which to view our own event: We could see friends and VIPs on their way in, and we could overhear people heading to the elevator, on their way up to the second floor. The most common refrain we heard? "Oh my God, there's more upstairs?"
Comprising four days, 12,000 square feet, and 50-something exhibitors, Sight Unseen OFFSITE is a major undertaking — a Herculean one, in fact, if you consider that there are only two of us leading the entire operation. So when we announced in April that we were doing an additional show this year, at the Collective Design fair, people quite understandably looked at us like we'd lost our minds. And yet we persisted on the sheer force of our belief that Steven Learner and his team at Collective are doing great things for design, things we wanted to be a part of — not just providing a platform for some of the world's most important design galleries to sell to clients, but attempting to widen the dialogue with special projects like (this year) on-site design performances by The American Design Club, a Nap Lab by Various Projects and Print All Over Me, installations by OS & OOS and Jonathan Nesci, and of course, an offer to let us curate a corollary to Sight Unseen OFFSITE that featured six up-and-coming American designers making gallery-level work. If you didn't get the chance to see last week's Collective Design fair, which welcomed more than 10,000 visitors, here's our best of show — and stay tuned for images from our own presentation at Collective, which we'll be posting tomorrow.
