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10.27.17

Sighted

This Dutch Designer is Giving Concrete a Serious Makeover

At this point, we've seen pretty much every formerly humdrum thing in the universe get a design-forward makeover, from watering cans to luggage. But Dutch designer Iwan Pol wasn't happy to simply renovate a product category — he wanted to recast an entire architectural material. "Concrete can take any shape or form, so why not aim for a softer look and feel?" he says.
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Dutch Design Week 2017 - Hardcore Exhibition
10.25.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

At Dutch Design Week, 17 Designers Turning Everyday Materials into Sculptural Furniture

It’s Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, and we'll be publishing a round-up of our favorites first thing next week. But for the second year in a row, one of the best exhibitions on view came from the young trend-forecasting and design firm Core Studio, who last year curated the colorful exhibition Popcore. This year, the theme was HARDCORE, and the curators asked participating designers to create works exploring "a counter-digital movement."
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10.02.17

At Home With

Inside the Home and Studio of LA’s Newest Emerging Design Star

Leah Ring's works represent striking and deeply thoughtful iterations on familiar forms, but there’s something brighter and more buoyant that binds them. “There's a sort of playful geometry that's present in all of my work, and I definitely hope that all of it communicates a sense of joy,” Ring says. She recently invited us into her Atwater home and studio to reflect on her space, her process, and the importance of play.
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09.05.17

Up and Coming

A Debut Collection Influenced By Poetry, Philosophy, and “Total Garbage”

We've always been curious about solo designers who choose to use a studio name, but we got as good a reason as any recently by Brecht Gander, the designer behind a brand-new, Queens-based studio called Birnam Wood, whose first collection we're debuting here today. A philosophy major and the son of two poets, Gander's studio name is a reference to Macbeth. But its lack of specificity also acknowledges the people who work alongside Gander in his shop — as he says, "I write the songs, but it takes a group to play the music."
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08.16.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

This Norwegian Auction Just Made Us Excited for the Fall Design Season

Today we got word of a new auction launching in Oslo next month, which we hope will be the first of many: Called Unika, the event — held at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts from September 9-10 and online from September 1-10 — is a collaboration between the biennial event Designer’s Saturday, Oslo's oldest auction house Blomqvist, and Klubben, the Norwegian designers organization.
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08.09.17

Up and Coming

8 Amazing Finds From the Parisian Design Dealers Known as Kolkhoze

This month we discovered the Parisian entity Kolkhoze, whose program we must confess we don't entirely understand — founders Thibaut Van den bergh and Thomas Erber seem to be interfacing not just between designers and clients, but between other galleries and clients, as well, offering both existing editions and custom commissions. Whatever they're doing over there, they're doing it well — we did a deep-dive into their site this week and discovered not only amazing works we'd never seen before, but designers we'd never even heard of.
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07.02.17

Saturday Selects

Week of June 26, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: furniture inspired by Judd and Noguchi, a peek into Portland's seriously impressive retail scene, and a new collaboration between a Dutch textile designer and a happy housewares store, above.
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06.29.17

Up and Coming

Six Talents to Watch from RCA’s 2017 Graduate Show

Despite continued uncertainty about the effect Brexit might have on applications from students abroad, this year’s Royal College of Art graduate show was a celebration of global design talent, showcasing some of the best emerging talents from the EU and beyond. Here are six of our favorites.
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Ornsbergsauktionen at Stockholm Design Week
02.07.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

An Auction of Work By Emerging Talents is the Best Thing at Stockholm Design Week

For Örnsbergsauktionen’s sixth anniversary, the Swedish exhibition, produced annually by Fredrik Paulsen, Kristoffer Sundin, and Simon Klenell, is moving into swankier digs and partnering with Artek. But though the location is new, the event is still one of the best things about Stockholm Design Week, where the variety of experimental objects on view is a direct result of the designers’ extreme specializations and visions — no mass production necessary.
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02.02.17

Up and Coming

Look Inside the Practice of Four Up-And-Coming Ceramicists

What we found at RCA's annual Work in Progress exhibition, in the Ceramics & Glass program, was a study in experimentation: clay that had been manipulated into terrazzo-like slabs, perforated bricks, stringy lumps, punched-in blobs, donut-like lamps, and meticulous geometrics, and almost nothing that looked like it had been turned on a traditional potter's wheel.
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01.30.17

Up and Coming

In This Dutch Designer’s Hands, Even a Door Handle Becomes a Piece of Sculpture

So pretty. So minimal. That, in a nutshell, is the work of Dutch product designer Jeroen van de Gruiter. A recent graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven, van de Gruiter’s work plays with the tension between what a thing appears to be and how we choose to let it function in the world. His objects are as much about themselves as anything else: the way they take up space, shifting and fluctuating, contrasting and offsetting — other objects as well as their surroundings. They are concept made manifest; latent potential given concrete form.
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