Home Authors
06.16.16

Sighted

Furniture That Nails This Year’s Coolest Shapes

Last year, it was Memphis-inspired patterns and mobile-like lamps. This year, it's ziggurats and arches. Anna Karlin — the prolific New York designer who's practically her own department store — somehow always has her finger on the pulse of whatever it is we happen to be feeling at the moment. Today we're excerpting our favorite pieces from her third collection, launched at ICFF last month.
More
Zuza Mengham resin sculptures
06.14.16

Up and Coming

One-Of-a-Kind Resin Sculptures, Whose Fates Are Sealed in an Flash

Most artists and designers start their practices small, then scale up their work as their ambitions, finances, and studio spaces grow. London-based Zuza Mengham has done the opposite: Back in art school, she welded semi-functional steel sculptures so large and unwieldy she sometimes had to destroy them afterwards, while recently she began turning her attention towards resin experiments compact enough to perch on a bookshelf. Both endeavors come from a similar interest in working within the transitional states of materials.
More
06.13.16

Q+A

IKEA’s Head of Research on the Future of Furniture

We recently sat down with Mikael Ydholm, the head of IKEA's research team, to hear some of its findings. What happens when you seal a family into an IKEA prototype house for 14 days? How do people really use a sofa when they forget they're being watched? And how do you design for a generation that eats in the bathroom? Read on to find out.
More
06.11.16

Saturday Selects

Week of June 6, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: We re-discovered bygone designs like a Formafantasma runway, rekindled our love for Roberto Burle Marx, and re-examined the excitement factor of architectural glass, just made exponentially cooler by Scholten & Baijings (above).
More
06.07.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

New Perspective-Bending Works By Eindhoven Duo OS ∆ OOS

Oskar Peet and Sophie Mensen of OS & OOS consider themselves designers, not artists, but their latest body of work — on view now in a solo exhibition at Zurich's Roehrs & Boetsch gallery — includes not only cast-concrete updates on their neon-tube Primary Fluorescents lights, but also two large sculptural works whose only purpose is to delight and tease the eye.
More
06.06.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

We Didn’t Think Kilims Could Get Any Cooler… Until Now

Iranian artist Taher Asad Bakhtiari may be a Raf Simons–wearing, Swiss-educated jetsetter, but growing up, he was inundated with local tradition. Now he helps support and modernize the ancient crafts that were among his most formative influences by working with semi-nomadic Iranian weavers to create contemporary, geometric updates on traditional kilim and gabbeh rugs. His latest series, pictured here, is on view in The Pond House, a solo show of his textiles that just opened at Carwan Gallery in Beirut.
More
05.28.16

Saturday Selects

Week of May 23, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a resurrection of old Castiglioni furniture, the most anticipated art exhibition of the summer opens at the Guggenheim, and four (more) of our favorite releases from New York design week, including the tables by Yield above.
More
05.26.16

Sighted

Kathleen Whitaker Just Took Her Simple, Geometric Jewelry Up a Notch

Nearly a year ago, we profiled the Los Angeles jewelry designer Kathleen Whitaker, known for starting the whole staple and dot stud earring trend that went viral a couple years back, and previewed the limited-edition project she was starting in parallel to her base collection — one that would elevate those designs into more rarefied territory by adding semiprecious stones to their simple, minimalist geometries. Earlier this spring, she officially debuted the results in the form of the Stone Collection, and we are coveting every. single. piece.
More
05.23.16

Fair Report

The Best of New York Design Week 2016

New York Design Week may come hot on the heels each year of the all-consuming behemoth that is the Milan furniture fair, but to pay it any less attention would be a mistake — between Sight Unseen OFFSITE, ICFF, Colony, Wanted, and the goings-on at outposts like the Future Perfect and Matter, the days when America's most important contemporary design event was simply a watered-down rehash of Europe's are indisputably over. Here's a roundup our favorite finds from this year's show.
More
05.16.16

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

These Norwegian and American Designers Spent Six Months Collaborating on Skype

For the Norway x New York booth at Sight Unseen OFFSITE, we set up a cross-cultural exchange pairing 5 entrepreneurial American studios (Ladies & Gentlemen, Bower, Farrah Sit, Jonah Takagi, Assembly) and 5 up-and-coming Norwegian ones (Vera and Kyte, Bjørn van den Berg, Silje Nesdal, Hallgeir Homstvedt, Morten and Jonas), who spent the past six months working together via Skype and emails on a long-distance collaboration, with the aim to develop an object or series of objects that utilized an American workshop for fabrication.
More