07.10.24

Excerpt: Book

A Brutalist Cemetery, a Center for Spiritual Exploration, a Compendium of Product Design: What We’re Reading, Summer 2024 Edition

This week, the New York Times is counting down the 100 best books of the 20th century. So while you could be reading one of those this summer — or, perhaps, the book everyone I know is talking about, which does tangentially relate to this site in the form of a motel-room renovation — we've recently had a few more hefty design tomes come across our desk. What better time, then, to inaugurate a new column, where we tell you all the great things we're reading, browsing, or simply returning to again and again for inspiration. 
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05.30.24

Fair Report

Inspired by Italian Modernism, the Opulence of Paris, or a Brutalist Viennese Church, These Three Up-and-Coming Design Studios Wowed in Milan

Before we leave the spring design fair season entirely, we'd be remiss if we didn't call out three of our favorite up-and-coming studios from Milan. Milan Design Week this year was, as usual, awash with global brands whose impressive, big-budget presentations took up the majority of space around the city — not to mention air time on Instagram. But that doesn’t mean that the emerging and independent designers weren’t represented as well — they just required a bit more searching among the noise.
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03.01.22

Up and Coming

A Young, Milan-Based Designer Inspired by the Brutalist Architecture of Eastern Europe

There are two distinct threads that run through the work of Milan-based, Macedonia-born designer Daniel Nikolovski. The first is a penchant for storytelling. His objects and furniture all seem to point to an obscure reference or emerge from a well-thought-out backstory; the forms that make up his EYE Lamps, for example, were inspired by Yugoslavian monuments, like the Brutalist buildings Kenzo Tange constructed in Nikolovski’s hometown of Skopje following an earthquake that decimated the city in 1963. The other major tenet of his work is craftsmanship, which is actually the reason he ended up in Italy at all.
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02.04.21

Sighted

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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11.05.19

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Jose Dávila Exhibition in A Stunning Brutalist Church

If you've ever visited König Galerie in Berlin, which is housed in a renovated 1967 Brutalist church with a skylit concrete nave, you'll know that there are only a few places in the world to experience contemporary art in such a breathtaking setting. There are also only a few artists whose work would be quite so at home in that nave as Jose Dávila, the Mexican sculptor who trained as an architect and is known for his focus on space, balance, and proportion.
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08.15.19

Up and Coming

Brutalist Ceramics Inspired By the Pacific Northwest’s Most Famous Volcanic Explosion

LGS Studio, a ceramics brand founded by Thomas Renaud and Noel Hennessy, is currently based out of Los Angeles. But the company actually got its start a few years back in a garage in Portland, Oregon, where the founders were living at the time. Which is what makes their latest collection all the more personal — called Tephra, it's inspired by growing up in the Pacific Northwest in the aftermath of the 1980 Mount St. Helens volcanic eruption.
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Brutalist-inspire ikebana vases by Studio Testo
06.19.18

Shopping

These Brutalist-Inspired Vases Will Up Your Ikebana Game

Last time we featured Studio Testo, we noted Giulia Dolci and Giulia Fauro Alessi’s uncanny ability to make pieces that are on-trend and effortlessly cool. So it comes as no surprise that their latest collection of sculptural vases has a similarly refreshing vibe, taking cues from Brutalist architecture and adding in some ikebana by Irene Cuzzaniti and fresh textiles by AH/OK.
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Bauhaus-inspired housewares by Orphan Work
11.08.17

Up and Coming

Brutalist- and Bauhaus-Inspired Housewares and Lighting From the Duo Behind Material Lust

Christian Swafford and Lauren Larson, the creative couple behind Material Lust, introduced their sister brand Orphan Work humbly enough, with a soft launch last year that had us wondering what, exactly, the brand even was. But since its debut, the label has evolved beyond its origins as “an exploration of orphaned material” and developed into a full-fledged brand: lighting, accessories, and what they call “monuments for your tabletop,” inspired at turns by Bauhaus and Brutalism, but mainly by the Vienna Secession.
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09.14.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

A Breathtaking Furniture Installation Staged Inside a Famed Brutalist House

When we named Jonathan Muecke to our American Design Hot list in 2014, the enigmatic Minnesota architect summed up his motivations with a 1963 George Brecht quote about seeking precision in objects — the same kind of precision, presumably, that he saw in the starkly angular 1974 Van Wassenhove House by Belgian architect Juliaan Lampens, where he recently spent a week making a new body of work for Maniera gallery.
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05.30.25

Fair Report

13 Group Shows We Loved at New York Design Week 2025

At this year's New York design week/month, opportunities were everywhere for showing new work, from an incredibly solid debut for the new trade fair Shelter, to the Hello Human–curated showcase at Public Records, to yes, the OG mothership that is now ICFF/Wanted. We found excellent work by ex-RISD kids in a Chinatown basement, design pieces mingling with fashion at boutiques like Colbo and Knickerbocker, and, a true sign of the times, quite of bit of great work in extremely expensive new residential developments. Yesterday we featured our favorite independent designers; today, we're focusing on our favorite group exhibitions from the week-turned-month that was.
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01.10.25

American Design Hot List

The 2024 American Design Hot List, Part V

This week we announced our 12th annual American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen’s editorial award for the names to know now in American design. We’re devoting an entire week to interviews with this year’s honorees — get to know the fifth group of Hot List designers here (including Wretched Flowers, whose chainmail floral floor lamp is the slightly goth hit of decor we didn't know we needed.) 
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01.08.25

American Design Hot List

The 2024 American Design Hot List, Part III

This week we announced our 12th annual American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen’s editorial award for the names to know now in American design. We’re devoting an entire week to interviews with this year’s honorees — get to know the third group of Hot List designers here (including recent RISD grad Michelle Jiaxin Huang, whose futuristic works in steel are pictured above).
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