At the Reform Design Biennale, Helping to Push Design in a More Radical Direction

Last summer, we received an invitation from Danish designer Maria Bruun to participate in the Reform Design Biennale, an open-call, juried design exhibition she co-founded in 2014 with her friends and colleagues, Louise Hagemenn, Rasmus Fox, and Jens Dan Johansen. The brief for designers? To create an experimental piece that might challenge their typical practice or usual methods of production — i.e., what the curators describe as doing "the illogical in order to create something logical." The results are on view starting tomorrow at Munkeruphus, just outside of Copenhagen.
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Week of May 28, 2018

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: great moments in color-blocking, an Instagram-induced existential crisis, and an iridescent shower that lifts a humdrum apartment renovation into the design stratosphere.
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28 Designers to Know From This Year’s Sight Unseen OFFSITE

In this year’s edition of OFFSITE Selects, the works on view were international in scope and wildly varying in scale, from a chubby-legged, rusty velvet chaise by newcomer Jessica Herrera of Oôd Studio to six tiny marble vessels by Chile’s Rodrigo Bravo (both got quickly scooped up by gallerists or other in-the-know design people).
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Inspired by Crop Circles, Grain’s Lands Rug is Early American Settler Chic

To create their textile pieces, the Seattle-based studio Grain used to travel all the way to Guatemala, working with artisans in the country where founders James and Chelsea Minola first met and fell in love. But over the past few years, the designers have begun sourcing producers a bit closer to home: Their Lands Rug, a custom version of which debuted at The Primary Essentials in Manhattan last week, is woven by a 30-year-old textile mill near their alma mater, RISD.
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SAIC x Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Five Talents to Watch from SAIC’s Ceramics Exhibition at Sight Unseen OFFSITE

This year, two recently famous American designers themselves — Pete Oyler of Assembly Design and Jonah Takagi of Atelier Takagi — launched an intensive studio class in the SAIC Designed Objects program, aimed at taking students on a holistic journey from concept to exhibition, with the ultimate goal being a showcase of ceramic drinkware; the results were on view at this weekend’s Sight Unseen OFFSITE.
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Minimalist, Shaker-Inspired Cleaning Tools That’ll Make You Want To Do Chores

When the exhibition Furnishing Utopia debuted at Sight Unseen OFFSITE two years ago, it followed a relatively strict set of parameters: 11 international designers would spend a week at two Shaker sites in New York and Massachusetts, engaging in an intensive workshop yielding new furniture and objects directly inspired by artifacts from those sites. But this year's exhibition examines the impact of the Shakers on contemporary design in a much more conceptual way: Called Hands to Work, it features objects by more than 25 studios, each meditating on contemporary attitudes towards everyday chores.
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The New, Architecturally-Inspired Wallpaper You Need For Your Home

Today marks the launch of Ratio, Twyla’s first-ever, limited-edition line of luxury wallpaper, with the first four patterns curated by Sight Unseen. Aiming to highlight Twyla’s ability to capture minute texture and detail, we asked four of our favorite architectural photographers to lend us a single image, and then invited four artists to create paintings loosely inspired by their use of shadow, color, line, or shape.
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Week of April 30, 2018

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: It may be Frieze week but some of the coolest works can be found in smaller galleries around town. Plus, how to refresh your house for spring, the coolest color-coded museum in Copenhagen, and the $10,000 table that's currently at the top of our wishlist.
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Ross Hansen Volume Gallery

Resin is Having a Moment — Here’s One of Our Favorite Uses of the Material Yet

Los Angeles designer Ross Hansen has a degree in landscape architecture — as well as a current landscape practice — so it makes sense that his first solo furniture exhibition, on view now at Chicago's Volume Gallery, would hinge on man's perception of nature. Called Super Natural, the pieces in his new series explore color, form, and industrial processes through objects made from epoxy resin — a grand, flocked, deep green armoire with a protruding, block-like grid; a bumpy, brick-red chair; and a series of bowls, tables, shelves, and chairs, whose mottled, pigment-dyed patterns almost resemble florals.
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The Best of Milan Design Week 2018 — Part IV

In case you couldn't tell, we thought this year's Milan fair was a pretty great one, as evidenced by the fact that it's the fourth and final day of our coverage, and we're still featuring some of our favorite things we saw all week — Dimore Studio's enormous, flower-filled vitrine, Hay's takeover of Atelier Clerici with WeWork and Sonos, the outstanding Lina Bo Bardi show at Nilufar Depot, and Nov Gallery's iridescent barbells (above), among others.
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