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04.16.22

Saturday Selects

Week of April 16, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a Vienna Secession–inspired editorial, a futuristic department store in Seoul, and a new Italian furniture featuring a who's who of international designers. 
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04.11.22

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Show Highlights the Appealingly Messy Side of Contemporary Ceramics

Closing in Barcelona this week is an exhibition that celebrates some of the bigger trends in contemporary ceramics these days — namely bright, drippy glazes; lumpy, organic forms; and raw, tactile, fissured surfaces. Presented by Side Gallery, “Exposed Material” is an overview of work by four artists who span several generations and hail from places ranging from America to Auckland, New Zealand.
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03.30.22

Excerpt: Exhibition

Nathalie du Pasquier is So Much More Than the Poster Girl for Memphis Design

When a return to Memphis became the defining design trend back in 2014, a few of the movement's original members flew to the forefront of discourse once again, among them Peter Shire, Ettore Sottsass, and Nathalie du Pasquier, whose exuberant patterning became a kind of shorthand for cool around that time. (If you came home from Milan in 2014 without an NDP Wrong for Hay tote bag, were you even there?) But while Du Pasquier became pigeon-holed for that kind of blocky, frazzled look (remember when she designed for American Apparel?!), she's always been so much more than that, and the full fruits of her output as an artist are on view this month at an exhibition called "Speed Limit" at Anton Kern Gallery in New York.
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03.28.22

Excerpt: Exhibition

These Fashion Designers Made Their Name Reinventing the Uniform. Now They’ve Turned Their Eye to Furniture

One of the more poignant collections to come out of lockdown was on view earlier this month at Nilufar Depot in Milan. Called "Scarpette and Carolino," the exhibition — conceived by the Danish-Italian duo OLDER, aka Letizia Caramia and Morten Thuesen — featured two pieces of design dreamed up during a period of pandemic isolation spent at Caramia’s father’s studio in Pietrasanta, on the seaside edge of Tuscany. “As lockdown isolation is a lonely affair, our idea was to create a small series of friends to bring us company and warmth," say the founders.
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03.21.22

Excerpt: Book

“Why Design Matters” is Only the Tip of the Iceberg in This Expansive Book of Interviews by Debbie Millman

If you've ever thought about starting a podcast — a design podcast, sure, but really one on any topic at all — you probably have Debbie Millman to thank for that. Millman, who started the phenomenally popular Design Matters way back in 2005, was one of the first people working in the medium — and, as I was reminded when flipping through her new book Why Design Matters, which brings together more than 50 conversations from the show's past, remains one of the best. We're excerpting one of our favorite interviews from the book, with the filmmaker, graphic designer and artist Mike Mills, here today. 
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Isern Serra Six N. Five interior
03.08.22

Interiors

Barcelona’s Go-To Interior Designer for Turning Your Office Into an Oasis

This is the story that answers the question: What if you had to go back to the office, but your office looked just like a house? While that wouldn't solve most of the problems that bedevil workplace culture and WFH advocates, maybe it would help? The offices we're featuring today were both designed by the up-and-coming Barcelona-based interior designer Isern Serra — one for the creative studio Six N. Five, and the other the headquarters for ad agency Fuego Camina Conmigo.
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Daniel O'Toole Modern Times
03.07.22

Sighted

Daniel O’Toole’s New Gradient Works Provoke a Distortion of the Senses

"Can an image feel as though it has a sound frequency embedded in it?" That is the question animating Australian artist Daniel O'Toole's latest exhibition at Modern Times, which closed this week in Melbourne. Called Cascade Rumble, and inspired by O'Toole's own experience with synesthesia, the exhibition features works that are intended to fully engulf the viewer and to "hum a frequency of sound that resonates in the mind."
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02.27.22

Saturday Selects

Week of February 21, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a Nathalie du Pasquier subway art installation in Italy, a color-blocked collection of rugs by Ethan Cook for Hay, and a new PR headquarters in London that's both deaf-friendly and vegan.
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02.17.22

Sighted

The Experimental Mexico City Design Shop That’s On Our Must-Visit List

We've experienced such a shrink in the retail industry over the past two years that it honestly feels incredibly heartening to see a brick-and-mortar design store of all things opening in Mexico City this week. Called ORIGINARIO and led by Andrés Gutierrez — whose work we featured early last summer — the store is a destination where design folks can shop for furniture, objects, and art by homegrown talents, including Comité de Proyectos, CHUCH, Bestia, Raúl de la Cerda, Flama, A-G studio, and more.
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cristina celestino interior
02.16.22

Interiors

In a Renovated Apartment in Udine, Cristina Celestino Shows the Softer Side of Brutalism

What's the first thing you notice when you scroll through images of this renovated 1970s-era apartment in Udine, Italy? Is it the pink-on-pink walls, a kind of blush and bashful situation? Is it the delicate, fan-shaped Afra and Tobia Scarpa floor lamp (which, we're predicting, is about to blow up in a big way)? Is it the conversation-pit–like living room, covered in wall-to-wall travertine tiles? The genius of Milan-based designer Cristina Celestino is that her interiors give you the space to notice each of these things, but no one element knocks the others out of balance.
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02.12.22

Saturday Selects

Week of February 7, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: two African artists — one living, one dead — in dialogue in London, two color enthusiasts making magical pillows together, and one giant carved peanut, just because.
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