Sarah Ellison Gives Bauhaus a Feminine Spin With Her Tubular Chromeo Chair

Are tubular metal chairs back? Almost a century since Marcel Breuer started churning out seating designs formed from sculptural lines of curved stainless steel, like the B5, Wassily, and Cesca models, Australian designer Sarah Ellison has paid homage to these Bauhaus icons with the launch of her Chromeo lounge chair. A more contemporary and feminine spin on the intentionally simple style, with its curvy silhouette and bolstered cushioning, the design offers a fresh approach to the movement’s ethos of combining art, craftsmanship, and mass production.
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Anastasia Komar’s New Leather Goods Nod to Everything from Karl Springer to Superstudio

The wavy line is everywhere. It's in the puddle-shaped mirrors that have become ubiquitous on Instagram; it's in the amoeba-shaped tables that have popped up in millennial interiors. Remember the scalloped trim on that Collectible booth last spring? (Related: Remember fairs?) And yet we're still seeing novel applications of a trope that of course dates way beyond even midcentury touchstones like Jean Royère and Karl Springer. The latest is on a series of crossbody bags, totes, and clutches by the Moscow-born, New York–based multi-disciplinarian Anastasia Komar, who designs under the studio name Forms.
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Own a Piece of Design History: The 2019 Sight Unseen Gift Guide, Part IV

The architect Philip Johnson spent 46 years building the 14 structures that comprise the Glass House, and 58 years personally living there. It's an incredibly important snapshot of design history, spanning the years 1949 to 2007, and our final gift guide this week has similar aims: We've rounded up 27 of our favorite important design objects that are available for sale in the Glass House Store, from iconic 1920s lamps and 1950s Aubock paperweights to more recent pieces that are on their way to becoming icons in the future.
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Croissant Lamps and Bauhaus Blankets: The 2019 Sight Unseen Gift Guide, Part III

For today's gift guide, we turned the tables, asking some of our favorite designers and influencers to share their best gifts for giving and receiving. The results were kiiiinda great — who wouldn't want a croissant-shaped lamp (that's Ellen Van Dusen's pick), a portable jacuzzi (chef Angela Dimayuga), or a shiny pink purse adorned with fruit salad (interior designer Sally Breer)? Plus, over on Instagram, you’ll have the chance to win four of the coolest items from this guide.
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Week of November 4, 2019

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Hay's ultra-chic, French-inspired bedding, Matisse-esque ceramics on view in Italy, and a series of new textiles and wallcoverings using designs by Bauhaus masters and SU icons Gunta Stölzl and Anni Albers.
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Week of January 28, 2019

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: A primer on Bauhaus, an under-the-radar American midcentury talent, a holographic furniture collection, and plenty of sculptural travertine.
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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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Week of June 2, 2014

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Bauhaus auction fever, turquoise table mania, and a 1:1 drawing of the biggest pinecone you've ever seen.
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Carwan Gallery Launch: My Bauhaus is Better Than Yours

Through April 15, Sight Unseen will be showcasing the work of half a dozen designers and design firms exhibiting together at the Milan Furniture Fair under the umbrella of the soon-to-launch Carwan Gallery in Beirut. Next up are designs from My Bauhaus is Better Than Yours, a loose collective of young German studios — most of whom studied at the Bauhaus University in Weimar — that banded together two years ago as a way to mount exhibitions in design hotspots like Milan and DMY Berlin. The group has since evolved into a full-fledged design label with the ability to manufacture and distribute the designs of its members, and it has plans to launch a webshop later this week. We spoke with Daniel Klapsing, one half of the Berlin-based duo 45 Kilo and de facto leader of the newly formed label, and put together a preview of designs from several of the group’s other members as well.
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Dokter and Misses, Furniture and Fashion Designers

There’s a lot that’s hard for Westerners to understand about Adriaan Hugo and Katy Taplin, the husband and wife who make up the South African furniture and fashion duo Dokter and Misses. First, there’s the fact that they hail from Johannesburg, a city whose art scene has held sway in the international market for years but whose few industrial designers are hardly household names. Then there are their references, which remain resolutely sub-equatorial: In our interview, we talked about game reserves, braais (the South African term for barbecue), a Nigerian dancehall/reggae musician named Dr. Alban, and an artist who uses the techniques of the Ndebele tribe, from the Mpumalanga region of the country. Perhaps most confounding is their name, which mixes English and Dutch honorifics and calls to mind everything from sci-fi movies to secretaries — and which the two refuse to explain. It’s lucky, then, that their work is so instantly likable and wonderfully easy to grasp.
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Daniel Emma, Product Designers

Australian wine capital Adelaide has a population of 1.3 million, putting it on par with Dallas or San Diego. But as native Daniel To sees it, it’s a big city with a small-town mentality — one that nearly consigned him and his wife Emma Aiston to a life designing laundry lines. “We met at the University of South Australia, where our design program was heavily engineering based and suited to what’s required for the city's industry,” explains To. “Adelaide has three main manufacturing companies: one making garden sheds, one light switches, and a third clothes-drying lines.” Rather than learning about mid-century modern, Memphis, or the Bauhaus — all of which would later inform their work as the independent studio Daniel Emma — the pair were taught to perfect their technical-drawing skills and gear up to become cogs in the local wheel. Just as they were starting their final projects in 2006, though, they had a kind of mutual awakening.
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