New York, musing-selles.com
The charm of the work of Müsing-Sellés, the shared studio of Spanish architect Álvaro Gómez-Sellés and Canadian architect Marisa Müsing, is in its strange yet beautiful forms. Their first collection combined super-fat legs and a hidden cabinet with a mesmerizing metallic ombre finish, their second featured a bizarre yet exciting double-sided chair, and their latest turned slug-like glass vessels, meant to evoke plump body parts, into a covetable object.

What is American design to you, and what excites you about it?

The opportunities that arise for emerging designers are really unique to American design — it’s a dynamic and exciting field to be working in, and the approaches really push for more experimentation over practicality. The boundary between art and design is very blurred in this case too; the new work we see and the people we speak to are constantly pushing the limits of what design can be and fulfill.

What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year?

This year we want to slow down and focus on more experimental work. Both having backgrounds in architecture, our projects are usually digitally designed and rendered to begin with, but we plan to play more with understanding tactile materials and building design concepts from a physical perspective, in order to understand how materials can change and behave in different scales. Around this goal, we plan to experiment with a couple of upcoming projects, ranging from small-scale sets of objects to bigger-scale sets of rooms and spaces, exploring the boundaries between design and architecture.

What inspires or informs your work in general?

We take inspiration mainly from an architectural process to start, thinking of the spatiality of the thing we’re interested in making. We’ve always designed through sets, so the pieces behave more like figures in a room rather than standalone objects. The objects act like little characters; we give them names and specific traits. Some are robust ‘towers,’ others have small legs that hold up much larger volumes. It adds a fun playfulness to the design. Our inspirations are driven by the way we set each scene — we usually come up with a narrative for the room or environment that the pieces work within. The first set we envisioned in a small cocktail party environment, for example.

Recently we’ve been interested in more human elements, like the folds and irregularities we find beautiful in the body. Our most recent project, curated by Chamber Gallery for Nomad Circle, played with this language of bodies and with embracing the deformations of material language. Inspiration can come from anywhere, though: An ongoing inspiration has been mochi ice cream. It’s usually an excitement in the overall form and weird details that we enjoy.

SHOP WORK BY MUSING-SELLES IN OUR 1STDIBS STOREFRONT!