Dutch Design Week 2019

30 Projects We Loved from Dutch Design Week 2019

A feeling of urgency pervaded this year's Dutch Design Week. It was clear from many of the works on show that the focus of the designer is shifting; no longer is good aesthetic judgment and a well-designed clever product the aspiration. Ego and vision are going out of style, to be replaced by attempts to understand the inter-connected systems in which design sits.
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Week of October 21, 2019

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an explosion of color in our current must-see art exhibitions, an affordable new housewares series by Philippe Malouin, and four very different takes on wooden furniture, including the table above.
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The Soft Serve Aesthetic of Anton Alvarez’s Extruded Ceramic Sculptures

The Flavour Is So Strong — Anton Alvarez’s second solo exhibition at the Stockholm gallery Larsen Warner — opened last week, situating Alvarez’s hyper-colorful, texturally striking sculptures within a peaceful white setting at the gallery’s new space in Ostermalm. Alvarez has always been interested in formal instability, and these new objects — a continuation of his work with a kind of automated ceramic extrusion — challenge our perception of weight as well as gravity, while embracing the imperfections inherent to the process of transforming wet clay inside a kiln.
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RIP Design Legend Ingo Maurer, Who Was More Relevant Than Ever

In a strange twist of fate, we had a story on the recent resurgence of legendary lighting designer Ingo Maurer on our calendar for today, even before we'd heard of his passing at the age of 87. We had of course followed Maurer's work over the course of our 15 years in the design world, but we had never gone in for Maurer's more purposefully kitschy designs. But to focus solely on those works is ignore Maurer's sheer breadth of output, and to dismiss a collection of his lights that has recently begun to feel more contemporary and relevant than ever.
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Week of October 14, 2019

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a kitchen in Barcelona that has us green with envy, a modern-day ode to Atelier Brancusi, sculptures that defy gravity, and more.
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Trip With Us Inside This Neon Fantasy Duplex in Madrid

"Is this even a house?" we wondered to ourselves when we first saw images of this renovation in Madrid, undertaken by the Spanish architects Lucas y Hernández Gil. Called CASA A12, the duplex home — once a deep and extremely dark space — has been turned into a kind of futuristic fantasy wonderland.
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At a Paris Gallery, Furniture and Art in Colorful Conversation

We've always been fans of exhibitions that put furniture in conversation with art, but often those exhibitions are a solo affair. On view currently at Galerie Derouillon in Paris, though, is an exhibition in which an artist and a furniture designer instead riff on one another's work: Called Conversation, the exhibition features furniture made by the French designer Frédéric Pellenq and paintings and objects by artist Alexandre Benjamin Navet.
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Week of October 7, 2019

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, and more from the past seven days. This week: a new entrant into the vintage velvet couch Hall of Fame, a designer killing it with kids' room decor, and an exhibition featuring a who's who of Canadian designers.
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A Spanish Architect’s Wildly Colorful Renovation, Inspired By Disco and Nightclubs

Mario Montesinos Marco is just one year out of architecture school, but this marks already the second time we've featured his interiors, and this one's a doozy: For the renovation of a friend's apartment in Valencia's Ruzafa neighborhood, the Spanish architect designed most of the furniture and lighting according to the same principle that drove his art school thesis — "disco space."
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