New York, trueing.co
Trueing, the eye-catching practice of Josh Metersky and Aiden Bowen, is our favorite kind of ADHL winner: The young, burgeoning design studio with a strong first collection whose second, even-better collection — which includes the two lamps shown just above — comes along *just* in time for us to break the news as we’re announcing their award. (Lamp photos: Lauren Coleman)

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

It embodies both good and bad all at once, a reflection of the country at large. Without slipping too far into cliché, it can read as patchwork of borrowed references, vernacular iterations, and ingenious new ideas packed into an aesthetic that would be impossible to sum up in brief, which is in turn what makes it so exciting. With no alliance to one national style, and with inspiration from every culture on earth, the opportunities for designers are kind of endless. We’re free to mix, play, and create as we please – knowing that somewhere in this large, complicated country we’ll find a sympathetic audience who sees some truth in our version of ‘Americana.’

What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year?

We’re launching a big new lighting collection, our first full line that’s been in the works for over a year. We’ve also just moved to a lovely, sunny studio space which is giving us the opportunity to experiment with some larger-scale pieces. Otherwise, we have another collection planned for May that pushes the capabilities of our favorite material of the moment: colored glass.

What inspires or informs your work in general?

Our work is really a product of our relationship. We mix art-historical, architectural, and (sometimes obtuse) cultural references with an engineer’s eye for mechanical connections and systems thinking; the pieces are reflections of our lifelong idiosyncrasies and passions. In the end it creates a synthesis of pragmatic mechanics and superfluous detail — a body of work that’s informed by the past but firmly rooted in contemporary culture, designed with precision and perfection in mind.