LDF Preview: The Online Design Gallery Redefining “Nordic”

For Now Nordic, Adorno invited curators from Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki, Reykjavik and Oslo to assemble a collection from 5-7 designers working at the intersection of art, design, and craft. The point of the exhibition was to explore whether the label "Nordic" — or what the organizers call "design-world shorthand" for clean lines, natural materials, simplicity and functionality — can meaningfully describe an aesthetic or if lumping designs from different countries together actually does each of them a disservice.
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Week of September 10, 2018

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Your weekly pink interior from Melbourne, enigmatic lighting inspired by the Wiener Werkstätte (casual!), and an expansive exhibition that confronts the limits of materiality.
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Dontworrybaby, a Used Bookstore in Austin, is the Ad Hoc Interior We Need Right Now

These days, we spend so much time looking at interiors that boast the perfect Hay sofa, or the just-right Vitsoe shelves, that it can be easy to forget how wonderful anonymous furniture can be. Lucky for us, Austin-based stylist Margaret Williamson Bechtold remembered this when she was sourcing display pieces for her used bookstore Dontworrybaby, which opened in an abandoned cement factory on Austin's East Side earlier this summer.
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14 Up-and-Coming American Designers, In a Show Curated By One of Their Own

As people whose job it is to track emerging designers — particularly those on the American scene — it's rare that we walk into a show to find incredible work by a roster of relative unknowns. And yet that's exactly what happened when I rolled up to Fernando Mastrangelo's studio in deep (deep) Brooklyn last Friday night for the opening party of In Good Company: Material Culture. It's the second exhibition Mastrangelo has curated in his space — this time alongside Architectural Digest's senior design writer Hannah Martin.
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Chicago architect Ania Jaworska

This Chicago Architect Wants Furniture To Boss You Around

Since receiving a second degree from the storied Cranbrook Academy of Art — alumni of which include Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia, and Florence Knoll — Ania Jaworska has been living in Chicago, working as a professor and developing a practice and a body of work that spans art, design, and architecture, more often than not finding her surest footing at the point where all three intersect.
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LDF 2018 Preview: A Spotlight on Uruguayan Designers

It's nestled directly between Brazil and Buenos Aires, but you don't hear a whole lot about Uruguay in this part of the world. A new exhibition launching during the London Design Festival next week, though, is set to change that: Hilos Invisibles at Aram Gallery will give seven Montevideo studios a platform to present themselves on the global design scene, and the London-based but Uruguayan-born designer Matteo Fogale has helped groom them for their debut.
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Week of September 3, 2018

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a beige neoclassical fantasy interior, a new iridescent mirror by Fort Standard, and a series of vessels that are helping us make the case that stained glass is back and better than ever.
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Furniture Made With Everything From Chipboard to Concrete

For last month's Malmöfestivalen, a creative arts weekend in Sweden, design collective Malmö Upcycling Service created an installation and furniture collection using waste from local industries — from textile boat covers to chipboard, rusty metals to polyester foam.
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Suprematist-Inspired Vases and Lights by An Emerging Ukrainian Design Studio

Over the past few years, we've had many designers cite the Russian Suprematist Kazimir Malevich as an influence — but never before did those designers actually hail from Malevich's hometown of Kiev, Ukraine. "When you live and work in the city where Malevich was born, studied art, and taught at the Art Academy, and when you even have a workshop on the street that bears his name, it’s only a matter of time until his presence starts to inspire your creation," say Arkady Vartanov and Kateryna Sokolova of NOOM, a new, Kiev-based studio launching its first collection of Malevich-inspired vases and lighting at this weekend's Maison & Objet.
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Week of August 27, 2018

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a new view on Guillermo Santoma's now-iconic interior, a more affordable Cold Picnic rug, and a trio of American and Norwegian designers getting their due at a major American retailer.
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The Mesmerizing Color-Field Paintings — Both Digital and Canvas — of Artist Ana Montiel

Questions about the nature of perception ­— the what, why, and how of consciousness ­— have been driving the work of Mexico-based artist Ana Montiel lately. And while any definitive answers to such age-old puzzles remain elusive, Montiel's work provides a kind of aesthetic response, making those mysteries both visual and material. There’s a mesmeric, meditative quality to her canvas and digitally-created color field paintings, reminiscent of the Light & Space art of the '60s and '70s.
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