One of Our Milan Week Favorites? An Adult Playground Made From Industrial Flooring

We're now deep in the age of the Instagram-friendly immersive installation, which was especially evident at this year's Milan furniture fair, where we couldn't help but laugh at how many brands were touting some sort of earnestly dramatic light-based experience. And yet, for materials brands, there really is no better way to inspire visitors — and no one did that better last month than Tarkett, who with Note Design Studio installed a towering forest of playful geometric columns inside one of Milan's most beautiful buildings, the 150-year-old Circolo Filologico Milanese.
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Studiopepe Went Full Mystic For Milan Design Week

A few weeks ago, while other brands and design studios were barraging our inboxes with press releases and preview images pre-Salone, Studiopepe — the Milan-based interiors duo of Arianna Lelli Mami and Chiara Di Pinto — kept relatively mum, announcing only that they would be investigating "the interconnection between matter and the archetypal power of symbols" in a former gold factory in Porta Venezia. In other words: design week catnip.
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In LA, A Weekend-Long Show Cheekily Called “Object Permanence”

Two weekends ago, a group of Los Angeles–based designers came together to interpret the candlestick in the first iteration of "Object Permanence," a new, quarterly event co-curated by designer Leah Ring of Another Human and Emma Holland Denvir, head of Hem's U.S. business development. Hosted at Hem’s Los Angeles showroom, the selection of designers and their objects follows a recent trend of reimagining near-relics like the ashtray, the bookend, and the paperweight, in which each object represents a tiny distillation of its designer's aesthetic.
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Think Women Are Underrepresented in the Creative Arts? This Exhibition Does Too

The design world hasn't yet grappled with the chronic underrepresentation of women by brands — the Instagram @showmealist was a good idea that seems to have sadly fizzled out — but female designers and curators are doing just fine supporting each other, thankyouverymuch. The latest is an exhibition at Ox Poblenou in Barcelona, inaugurated on International Women's Day and curated by Sanna Völker, a Swedish furniture designer and curator living in Spain.
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In Brussels, New Designs at the Place Where Art, Architecture, and Industry Meet

When we first heard that Belgian architects Kersten Geers and David Van Severen were collaborating with the Kortrijk-born, Turin-based painter Pieter Vermeersch for an exhibition at Maniera Gallery, we became, we'll admit, somewhat unreasonably excited. Our love for Vermeersch's signature gradients is well-documented on this site, and, if you'll recall, Office KGDVS's angular furniture collection was what set off our love for the Brussels-based Maniera all the way back in 2014.
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A Showcase for Experimental Craft — And Iridescence — On View in London

Like Salon in New York, the Collect fair in London has recently evolved to become a platform for enabling more risk-taking work, showcasing the latest possibilities, processes, and technologies at play in the field of making. The peripatetic London gallery Seeds, a longtime SU favorite, returned to the fair this year with newly commissioned works from nine contemporary designers.
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In a New Show, a 3D Artist Tries His Hand At Something New — Making Furniture

This week, in a bit of a twist, 3D artist Andrés Reisinger brought one of his metaphysical spaces to life: For one of Chamber Projects' bi-monthly Quick Tiny Shows, curated by Juan García Mosqueda and held in the courtyard of RIES's studio, Reisinger created three design objects — a lamp, a curtain, and a snakelike silver seating unit meant for group lounging, John Chamberlain-style.
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A Brand New Design Gallery in Mexico City Just Launched With an All-Star Lineup

MASA was inevitable, and MASA was what we'd been waiting for — a stake planted for high-end design within the cultural renaissance happening in Mexico City right now. Everyone talks about the city's epic food scene, and its influential art galleries, and the Zona Maco fair, and the budding starchitects building fancy museums. There's even a Design Week Mexico and a couple of good design galleries working with local talents. But before MASA debuted this past week, with an exhibition of furniture and lighting by 15 of the city's top artists and designers, there wasn't really a definitive platform for contemporary experimental design, at least not one as ambitious as this.
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