12.08.16

Rafael de Cardenas

New York, architectureatlarge.com We hesitated from including de Cardenas on this list for years because we thought he might be too well-known, having designed hip-yet-haute interiors for the likes of Nike, Cartier, and Jessica Stam. Then he nabbed the AD100 and Maison et Objet’s Designer of the Year, and we stopped overthinking it. Better late than never. What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? I think America’s greatest export is a certain kind of optimism. I’m excited by the problem of how to fold American optimism into American design. What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year? I can’t get too specific yet, but there are a number of upcoming projects I’m excited about. In general we seem to be working on a larger scale, coming up, which is great. But I also always love the smaller-scale project that allows us to work with a finer grain of detail. The line of eyewear we just designed with Gentle Monster, for example. Also, 2016 marks the 10th anniversary of the studio. We’re currently preparing a monograph to be published in celebration of the occasion. That will be coming out next fall. What inspires/informs your work in general? Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie, David Lynch, Madonna. Bruce Springsteen, right now. I have a roster of about ten movies that serve as an endless source, for me — a source of more than I could hope to say. I keep coming back to them.
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11.09.11

Rafael de Cardenas

After an architecture education at UCLA and a stint designing menswear for Calvin Klein, Rafael de Cardenas founded the interiors studio Architecture at Large in 2006. Since then, the Cuban-born, Manhattan-raised designer’s neon fingerprints have been everywhere, from the Op Art–inspired alternative art spaces he designed in New York, Miami, Athens and beyond for OHWOW gallery, to interiors for the likes of Parker Posey and Jen Brill. In the spring of 2011, de Cardenas released with New York’s Johnson Trading Gallery his first collection of furniture — geometric armoires, benches, and consoles, all built around the rotation, mirroring, and multiplication of shapes. The necklace he’s made in collaboration with Architecture at Large’s lead designer Robert Passov is the first piece of jewelry ever created by the studio.
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12.09.10

At Home With

Rafael de Cardenas, Interior Designer

If style is a sore subject for the up-and-coming interior designer Rafael de Cardenas, who bristles at the suggestion that he might have one, a therapist would likely lay the blame on his mother. A Polish-Swiss former fashion PR agent — who with his Cuban father moved the family to New York City when de Cardenas was six — she was constantly redecorating, stripping the house bare every time her tastes changed. “She’s into one thing carried throughout, she can’t mix and match,” says de Cardenas. “So once it’s something new, everything’s gotta go. There was an Armani Casa phase, and now it’s all Native American, with blankets and sand-covered vases from Taos. It scared me away from design to a degree.” After spending most of his childhood wanting to be a doctor, he eventually went to RISD to study fashion and painting, and ended up heading the menswear department at Calvin Klein for three years. But although he admits that interiors were something he never put any thought into back then, design began exerting its slow pull.
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12.12.23

American Design Hot List

The 2023 American Design Hot List, Part II

This week we announced our 11th 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 second group of Hot List designers here (including Little Wing Lee, whose graphic rug for the most recent Black Folks in Design exhibition is pictured above).
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11.22.22

Current Obsession

Body Parts Are Trending in Design, and Our New Book Proves It

In the last five years — somewhere between the giant nose vase German duo BNAG produced for Felix Burrichter's dollhouse exhibition at Friedman Benda and the butt bookends Marco Braunschweiler made for Marta's In Support of Books — body parts in design became a full-fledged thing. That's why we weren't a bit surprised when we noticed, visiting the 16 homes we photographed for How to Live With Objects, that body parts were popping up seemingly everywhere — from the Nicola L eye lamp in Yoram Heller and Eleanor Wells's living room, to the giant hand sitting at the base of Jonathan Pessin's object-filled bookshelves, to the nose relief on display in the London home of Sadie Perry.
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12.07.21

American Design Hot List

The 2021 American Design Hot List, Part II

This week we announced our 9th 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 second group of Hot List designers here: Ellen Pong, Husband Wife, and Michael Cihlar.
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08.16.20

VIDEO

NYC designer Rafael de Cardenas of Architecture at Large does a show-and-tell from his Brooklyn home.
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07.27.18

The Essentials

What Makes An Ideal Hotel Room? We Asked 9 Design Insiders

Looking back on my travels, I see that hotels are often the thing I get most wrong, either from pure laziness or a less-than-ideal budget. But what if I could consult with a panel of experts to make sure I never stayed at a dud again? As part of our recent partnership with Hotel Tonight — the app that offers booking deals on some of the world’s best design and boutique properties — we turned to some of our favorite design-world insiders to get the scoop on where to stay, what's trending in the world of travel, and how exactly those details can make or break your stay.
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05.20.18

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

We Asked 13 Designers and 13 High-Profile Creatives to Collaborate for Charity, and the Results Will Surprise You

Since we started Sight Unseen nine years ago, we’ve found ourselves writing again and again about the fertile ground between creative fields. So it wasn’t much of a leap from there to Field Studies, for which we paired 13 furniture and interior designers with 13 creatives in food, fashion, film, art, and music and invited them to create a collaborative object together — all 13 of which are now available to purchase on 1stdibs, with proceeds going to a charity of each pair's choosing.
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03.21.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

Design and Art Are More Connected Than Ever at New York’s Newest Gallery

Whither Johnson Trading Gallery? The New York design gallery — which in its heyday introduced an American audience to the work of contemporary designers like Max Lamb, Kwangho Lee, Katie Stout, Aranda/Lasch, and more (not to mention Rafael de Cárdenas's epic first furniture collection) — had been relatively quiet of late. Now we know why: Earlier this month, it was announced that while JTG will continue selling vintage work, the contemporary artists in their stable will be absorbed into a new program at one of our favorite art galleries, Salon 94.
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12.02.16

Gift Guides

The Best Gifts for Design Lovers, $250 and up

For our last holiday gift guide, we're letting loose. On our most extravagant list? A leather-topped turntable, an ombré wall mirror, and an epic pink armchair — among others — that will make you want to blow your rent check and never look back.
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09.01.15

Invitation

Views by Designer Tom Hancocks

In his new Views series created exclusively for Sight Unseen, New York designer Tom Hancocks used the 3-D graphics software Blender to conjure six different rooms inhabited by various types of chairs, whose forms and relationships to their immediate surroundings were intended to convey certain moods and emotions.
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