03.10.16

Excerpt: Book

Bauhaus-Inspired Sculpture From a Master of Swiss Graphic Design

Design obsessives know the late Max Bill primarily as a major figure in the Swiss graphic design scene of the 1950s and beyond. But a new exhibition catalog from a retrospective on view earlier this year at the Fundacion Juan March in Madrid reminds us that the designer was the ultimate polymath — an architect, silversmith, painter, industrial designer, and, most stunningly, sculptor of the geometric stone and metal pieces seen in the first half of this post (which sent us on a major Google Image search).

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03.09.16

Studio Visit

Inside the Brooklyn Workshop Where Misha Kahn’s Radical Ideas Come to Life

We caught up with 27-year-old designer Misha Kahn in his Brooklyn studio, just before the opening of his solo show at Friedman Benda, “Return of Saturn: Coming of Age in the 21st Century,” an exhibition that somehow looks both forward and back at the same time.

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03.07.16

Studio Visit

A New Brooklyn Talent Turning Paint, Cement, and Scraps Into Of-the-Moment Objects

Cooper Union grad Nick Parker has been working steadily since 2009 to refine a materials-driven, process-based approach to making. His vases are composed of cement that he pigments, layers, and sands until it starts to resemble some hyperactive version of linoleum. His "paintings" are made from layers of paint and paint-like materials embedded with scraps. We visited his home studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to learn more about his craft.

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03.05.16

Saturday Selects

Week of February 29, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: A David Hockney library, a Gio Ponti flatware collection, a bracelet inspired by Mario Botta, and a brand new collection by two of the founding members of Memphis.

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03.04.16

Sighted

#weseefaces In These Clever Photos of Everyday Objects

When the Swiss-born, Paris-based product designer Miriam Josi started to feel restless with the pressure to constantly create new objects, she decided to collaborate with photographer Corinne Stoll to make something new out of old ones. To assemble the playful totemic compositions featured in their "Common Faces" series, the pair scavenged everyday objects both from their own homes as well as from a neighbor's basement.

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01.17.14

Fair Report

Union of Striped Yarns by Dienke Dekker

People always ask us which design fair is on our can't-miss list, and though we've never been able to make it there ourselves, we're inclined at this point to say Dutch Design Week. The work on show there is consistently kind of epic, with future design superstars springing almost fully formed each year from the Design Academy Eindhoven (see Formafantasma, Julien Carretero, and Nacho Carbonell, to name a few). Next on that list might be Dienke Dekker, a 2012 graduate whose material explorations we're featuring today. For her project the Union of Striped Yarns, which debuted at last year's DDW, Dekker used a variety of yarns — hand-dyed, industrial-printed and even non-traditional "threads" like caution tape — to explore striped patterning in textiles. Different colored and white spaces, combined with a variety of weaving methods, created the gorgeous effects on view here.

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03.03.16

Fair Report

10 Things We’re Looking Forward to at This Year’s Salone del Mobile

When we attended our very first Salone del Mobile fair in Milan a decade ago, we were instantly swept up in the magic of an event that’s served as the epicenter of the contemporary design world since 1961, and that each year packs a 2.5 million square-foot convention center (plus an entire surrounding city) full of everything that's new and next in furniture and lighting, from future classics by mega-brands to prototypes by design-school grads. Here are the 10 things we're most looking forward to at this year's show, which begins April 12.

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03.02.16

Up and Coming

Colorful, Geometric Designs by a German Studio On the Rise

Though Julia Mülling and Niklas Jessen of the German studio Schneid consider themselves makers of all things — from textiles to furniture to the amazing, stackable dishware set above — it’s lighting that fills the majority of their portfolio. Creating a lamp, they say, “feels very free, almost like making a piece of art — where you don’t have to follow the rules like when you design a chair.” So it’s no wonder that when we ask who their influences might be, they don’t first cite Ettore Sottsass or some other member of the Memphis Group who could have inspired their colorful, totemic Junit series, but rather light artists like James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson. “When you see their art, you realize how affected you can be by the use of light and color,” Mülling says. “That’s very inspirational to us.

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03.01.16

Studio Visit

Beautiful, Textured Wall Hangings By the Los Angeles Studio All Roads Design

Janelle Pietrzak has made a name for herself as a Los Angeles-based textile artist and one half of All Roads Design, the creative studio she runs with boyfriend Robert Dougherty. It’s fair to say her thickly textured woven wall hangings helped usher in the trend; in Pietrzak's distinctive work, abstract fields of color and looping yarns meet shaggy, silky fringe in pieces that are warm and fuzzy yet elegant.

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02.29.16

Shopping

Colorful Kitchen Accessories by the Designer Behind Your Favorite Brand

If you've ever lusted after many of Hay's simple but colorful accessories — from the ultra-covetable Strike matches to the duotone Analog clock — you have Shane Schneck to thank for that. The Swedish-American designer, along with his wife Clara von Zweigbergk, has for years created products and headed up the art direction for the Danish brand from his studio in Stockholm. Now, Schneck is bringing his finely tuned eye to another Scandinavian-chic housewares brand: Ommo, a colorful kitchen accessories collection that's debuting in the U.S. this week.

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02.26.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

Sculptural Vases With Scholarly Origins

Among our 30-something friends, collaging is suddenly all the rage. (Maybe it's the new adult coloring book?) But to our minds, there's another use for old books and papers that consistently produces a far more beautiful result: paper pulp, the key ingredient in CHIAOZZA's charming Lump Nubbins, Silo Studio's PPPPP bowls, and now Ben Branagan's Monuments series, which debuted last night in a window installation at London's Darkroom concept shop. For the exhibition, Branagan, a designer and professor in visual communications, transformed the pulped remains deaccessioned library books into a series of totemic, distinctly non-functional pots and vases.

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02.24.16

Up and Coming

Erika Emerén is Doing Magical Things With Concrete

Swedish designer Erika Emerén's current practice involves dyeing and casting concrete in an experimental process that she has very little control over, then using it to make chairs, tables, and soon, lamps too. "The results always vary, especially when I'm mixing different colors," she says. "But that's what I prefer, to make something unique. The that I can't control is what makes the design interesting."

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02.23.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

Stools That Channel Our Favorite Modernist Sculptors

Isamu Noguchi, Hanna Eshel, Barbara Hepworth — these are the masters of marble who came to mind when we first saw French designer Guillaume Delvigne's beautiful new stool series for Tools Galerie in Paris. The young designer — who often does work for companies like Hermes or La Chance — just closed an exhibition there, the inaugural presentation at a brand-new Left Bank space for the gallery. The sculptural, totemic stools — which were inspired by mooring posts — are actually made from several different materials, including bronze, wood, and leather. But stone is the star here, in creamy white Carrera, flecked travertine, and a rich green called Vert Donay.

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