06.16.16

Sighted

Furniture That Nails This Year’s Coolest Shapes

Last year, it was Memphis-inspired patterns and mobile-like lamps. This year, it's ziggurats and arches. Anna Karlin — the prolific New York designer who's practically her own department store — somehow always has her finger on the pulse of whatever it is we happen to be feeling at the moment. Today we're excerpting our favorite pieces from her third collection, launched at ICFF last month.
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06.15.16

Up and Coming

Inside the Rope-Painting, Basket-Making World of Gemma Patford

After attempting to learn to crochet, Patford realized it was not for her and instead turned to artists who were working with rope like Doug Johnston, who remains one of her heroes. “I muddled my way through the Internet to find a process that worked with my abilities and with what I had at home. I had a sewing machine and paint — and the baskets were born,” she says.
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Zuza Mengham resin sculptures
06.14.16

Up and Coming

One-Of-a-Kind Resin Sculptures, Whose Fates Are Sealed in an Flash

Most artists and designers start their practices small, then scale up their work as their ambitions, finances, and studio spaces grow. London-based Zuza Mengham has done the opposite: Back in art school, she welded semi-functional steel sculptures so large and unwieldy she sometimes had to destroy them afterwards, while recently she began turning her attention towards resin experiments compact enough to perch on a bookshelf. Both endeavors come from a similar interest in working within the transitional states of materials.
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06.13.16

Q+A

IKEA’s Head of Research on the Future of Furniture

We recently sat down with Mikael Ydholm, the head of IKEA's research team, to hear some of its findings. What happens when you seal a family into an IKEA prototype house for 14 days? How do people really use a sofa when they forget they're being watched? And how do you design for a generation that eats in the bathroom? Read on to find out.
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06.11.16

Saturday Selects

Week of June 6, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: We re-discovered bygone designs like a Formafantasma runway, rekindled our love for Roberto Burle Marx, and re-examined the excitement factor of architectural glass, just made exponentially cooler by Scholten & Baijings (above).
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06.08.15

Up and Coming

Thing Industries

When designers approach their medium with such a religiosity that it pushes their work into an unattainable or off-putting place, it can make the viewer a bit uncomfortable. On the other hand, not taking your work seriously enough is a recipe for kitsch, and being relegated to that dustbin of history. Enter Bridie Picot and Matt Smith, two native New Zealanders behind the design studio Thing Industries, whose work flits back and forth between the arch and the architectural.
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06.10.16

Sighted

A New Program Turns Your Walls Into a Work of Art

The brand-new Designtex Bespoke Surfaces line taps more than 30 contemporary artists — many of whom are up-and-coming talents who live near Designtex's Portland, Maine, manufacturing headquarters — to create imagery for custom surfaces in the built environment. In other words, to turn your walls in the ultimate work of art.
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06.07.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

New Perspective-Bending Works By Eindhoven Duo OS ∆ OOS

Oskar Peet and Sophie Mensen of OS & OOS consider themselves designers, not artists, but their latest body of work — on view now in a solo exhibition at Zurich's Roehrs & Boetsch gallery — includes not only cast-concrete updates on their neon-tube Primary Fluorescents lights, but also two large sculptural works whose only purpose is to delight and tease the eye.
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Sight Unseen geometric rugs guide
06.06.16

Shopping

32 Statement-Making Geometric Rugs You Can Buy Right Now

At the end of last year, we began to notice a new trend in patterned rugs. Gone were the ubiquitous chevron stripes and hexagonal motifs, and in their place was a new kind of graphic, geometric look — elemental shapes that had been stacked, abstracted, layered, mixed, or simply juxtaposed alongside each other (in other words, a pretty healthy reflection of what's happening in furniture design right now as well). As with most trends, the second we began noticing one or two rugs in this vein, they were suddenly everywhere. So, we did what any object-obsessed, semi-helpful design blog ought to do — we gathered them all into one place, for your shopping enjoyment. Herewith, your definitive guide to Sight Unseen's favorite, statement-making geometric rugs — and where to find (and buy) them right now.
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06.06.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

We Didn’t Think Kilims Could Get Any Cooler… Until Now

Iranian artist Taher Asad Bakhtiari may be a Raf Simons–wearing, Swiss-educated jetsetter, but growing up, he was inundated with local tradition. Now he helps support and modernize the ancient crafts that were among his most formative influences by working with semi-nomadic Iranian weavers to create contemporary, geometric updates on traditional kilim and gabbeh rugs. His latest series, pictured here, is on view in The Pond House, a solo show of his textiles that just opened at Carwan Gallery in Beirut.
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06.04.16

Saturday Selects

Week of May 30, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Beige is back, so are Tevas, and yet another Wright auction is absolutely killing it (the upcoming Contemporary Glass — which introduced us to this granite and glass concoction by glass artist William Carlson — is just. so. good.)
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Jongjin Park layered ceramics
06.03.16

Up and Coming

You’ll Never Guess What These Ceramics Are Made From

When you first catch sight of the pieces in South Korean artist Jongjin Park's Artistic Stratum ceramic series, it's almost impossible to tell that they're ceramics at all; their textured, layered surfaces call to mind everything from sponges to unsanded wood. But the pieces were in fact made using a technique Park stumbled upon while researching his Master's thesis at Cardiff University in the UK: By painting clay slip onto pieces of paper towel, layering them, applying pigment and then firing them at 1280 degrees, Park creates a masslike trompe l'oeil.
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