A New Exhibition Celebrates the Ambiguity of Objects

For a new show at New York's Chamber Gallery, curated by Matylda Krzykowski, contributions from American Nick Van Woert, Swiss designers Robert and Trix Haussmann, Polish talent Oskar Zieta, and Vienna-based design studio mischer’traxler, among others, each pay homage to Richard Hamilton’s 1956 collage, “Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?” — the inspiration behind the show and its moniker (“Just What Is It”).
More

Beautiful Objects Built to Last, By a Tech Refugee Turned Furniture Designer

Not every designer considers UI when approaching a furniture collection, but then Zürich-based Isabell Gatzen isn’t every designer: A brief stint in Silicon Valley a few years back left her disillusioned with the short product lifecycle that seems to be a hallmark of so much tech industry innovation and eager to apply strategic thinking to a more traditional craft.
More

A Breathtaking Furniture Installation Staged Inside a Famed Brutalist House

When we named Jonathan Muecke to our American Design Hot list in 2014, the enigmatic Minnesota architect summed up his motivations with a 1963 George Brecht quote about seeking precision in objects — the same kind of precision, presumably, that he saw in the starkly angular 1974 Van Wassenhove House by Belgian architect Juliaan Lampens, where he recently spent a week making a new body of work for Maniera gallery.
More
Slash Objects furniture collection

This Brooklyn Designer is Doing Amazing Things With Industrial Rubber

In a previous life, Arielle Assouline-Lichten studied architecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, created graphics for Bjarke Ingels's Copenhagen office, built models for Snøhetta, and interned for Kengo Kuma. But she landed on our radar this spring after she began working for someone a little less famous: herself. This spring saw the launch of Slash Objects — a glamorous, assured debut furniture and object collection that mixes brass, marble, concrete, ceramic, and industrial rubber in endless combinations and at various scales.
More
Sight Unseen at Collective Design

Fountains, Pink Daybeds, and Foam: A Tour of Our Booth at Collective

For the second year in a row, Sight Unseen is proud to be presenting at Collective Design, which opened to the public yesterday and runs through Sunday afternoon. We're smack in the middle of the fair this year, spotlighting new work by five American design studios on the rise: Bower x Studio Proba, Chris Wolston, Only Love Is Real, and Fort Makers. At the VIP opening on Tuesday night, we heard comments like "It's like Sight Unseen come to life!" "It's amazing how every booth is so different but everything goes together perfectly!" and, straight from Julianne Moore's mouth, "This is gorgeous." We couldn't agree more.
More
Leong Leong's TOPO installation for Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Get Ready to Experience Leong Leong’s Epic Infinite Sound Bath for Ford

Christopher and Dominic Leong, brothers and founding partners in the New York–based architectural office Leong Leong, have since 2009 developed a practice shaped by an understanding of architecture as a discipline in constant dialogue with other disciplines, such as art, film, and music. Their installation for this year’s edition of Sight Unseen OFFSITE is no exception: TOPO is an immersive and experiential landscape — created in partnership with ARUP and inspired by the design thinking behind the Ford Edge — that turns a flowing field of more than a thousand foam rollers into a kind of musical instrument, using acoustic actuators to pick up ambient sounds and translate them into a sonic soundscape.
More

Visit Us at Collective Design This May!

From May 4 – 8 at Skylight Clarkson Sq, we are thrilled to be showing at Collective again, spotlighting ambitious new work by independent American design studios on the rise. For our 2016 showcase, Bower x Studio Proba, Chris Wolston, Fort Makers, and Only Love Is Real will debut a collection of furniture and lighting set against a backdrop of custom wallpaper developed with our amazing sponsor Designtex especially for the show.
More
Dutch design studio Os ∆ Oos

Dutch Design Studio Os ∆ Oos Makes Work That’s Brainy But Beautiful

Four years ago, Sight Unseen featured the first product by what was then a brand-new studio on the scene: The Syzygy series by Dutch duo Os ∆ Oos consisted of three lamps whose intensity depended on the subtle rotation of three light-filtering discs placed in front of the bulb; it was inspired by the astronomical phenomenon of three celestial bodies aligning in space. As a design product, it was both conceptually driven and artistically minded, but it was, at the end of the day, a lamp. “We’re definitely not artists; we’re designers,” clarifies Oskar Peet, who with Sophie Mensen makes up the Eindhoven-based studio. “We like to make functional projects.”
More

Cody Hoyt

New York, codyhoyt.tumblr.com A Brooklyn-based artist, represented by Patrick Parrish Gallery, whose striped and mottled ceramics have put him at the vanguard of the design-art scene. What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? I wasn’t sure what excited me about American design, so I read through everyone’s responses on the 2014 Hot List before realizing how awesome it really is. My personal take on what makes it exciting, as opposed to just special, is a trend of emphasizing quality, like aesthetics and materiality. It’s good to be obsessive about form and detail, and I think that’s fun. Part of the reason that’s possible is the fecund American economy. The plentitude of wealth means more work for young designers and more freedom for those designers to be singularly focused on their projects. What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year? I’m showing some new work in Miami during Art Basel this year. And I’ll have a solo show at Patrick Parrish Gallery in mid-February. I’m working on some ceramic vessels that have jumped up to an enormous scale, with more ambitious surface inlays. There will be some functional pieces in the show too, like tables and tiles which evolved out of the patterned slab process I use for the vessels. I’m also making some drawings and non-ceramic sculptures. What inspires your work in general? I think it boils down to elements of wonder and idealism. I’ve always drawn inspiration from sci-fi and fantasy artists like Phillipe Druillet, Roger Dean, and Moebius. Music and album art has been the most important thing in my life at various times. I was excited to discover that architecture can offer the same sense of reality-shifting escapism, but on an accessible scale. Finding a way to channel the influences into something tangible and cohesive is the ultimate challenge.
More

2015, Part III

This week we announced the 2015 American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen’s unapologetically subjective annual editorial award for the 20 names to know now in American design, presented in partnership with Herman Miller. We’re devoting an entire week to interviews with this year’s honorees — get to know the third group of Hot List designers here.
More

At the 2015 London Design Festival

In terms of sheer distance traversed, if not content, LDF now stands nearly on par with the Milan fair. But these days it’s also becoming equally vital as a destination for open design debate, with a strong manufacturing voice represented and a buffet of ambitious installations on offer. Guide in hand, we hit the mean – but thankfully sunny – streets of London to choose our favorites from this year’s show.
More

James Hyde’s Varieties of Useful Experience at Volume Gallery

He just opened a sprawling solo show at the Chicago design gallery Volume, but if you're not familiar with the work of James Hyde — or at least not to the degree of other Volume alums like Jonathan Nesci, Tanya Aguiñiga, or Stephen Burks — you're not alone. And in fact, that's kind of the point: Hyde, who began his career in New York in the '70s, is a painter, and even when his works take the form of sofas or lamps, they remain squarely in the realm of art.
More