At the New Permanent Eames Archive in California, You Can Deep-Dive Into the Design Process of Charles and Ray Through 40,000 Artifacts

From the moment that Charles Eames, formerly an architect and teacher, and Ray Eames, formerly a fine artist, began a shared design practice in 1941, they cultivated an unusually meticulous creative process: in lieu of drawings and schematics, they worked out ideas and solved problems in real-time by creating endless physical models and prototypes. It's no wonder, then, that until the Eames Office closed after Ray's death in 1988, they were able to rack up more than 40,000 artifacts of their design process — and also no wonder that it took the family nearly 25 years to catalog them and finally make them available for public viewing all in one place, at the newly opened Eames Archive in Richmond, California.
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An Exhibition of 100 Hooks Has Us Totally Rethinking Our Wall-Mounting Game

The humble coat hook might be the most simple and effective design humans ever invented. It solves the problem so well that it’s often taken for granted (as most genius inventions are) and little attention is paid to its ingenuity, because it just works. Well, humble no more — the hook is celebrated in all its weird and wonderful variations in an exhibition called 100 Hooks presented by the estate of American sculptor JB Blunk. A hundred versions — by names like Jasper Morrison and Ilse Crawford as well as young artists and designers from across the US, UK, Europe, Mexico, and Japan — are all designed, at least nominally, for hanging clothing, towels, bags, hats, art, or whatever else needs storing or displaying. 
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Meet the NYC Art Collective Who Brought Their Explorations of “Vaguely Asian” Identities to Milan

Comprising four New York City–based artists, the collective CFGNY employs an unruly creative output to assert their own lived experience of being what they call “vaguely Asian” in America. The group recently staged an exhibition called Emporium during last month’s Milan furniture fair — presented by Italian leather brand Marséll and curated by PIN-UP magazine’s Felix Burrichter — that employs cardboard, porcelain, and leather to further complicate this idea of a blurry Asian-ness. The sculptures created with Marséll especially for the show, like leather-wrapped replicas of architectural details from Milan’s Chinatown, elucidate contact points between cultures and identity groups.
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The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today: Campo Base

This week we're featuring our favorite quick-hits from this year's Milan Design Week. Our pick for today's post is a powerhouse collective of six Italian studios that have teamed up to self-produce a series of six rooms that act as a "manifesto on contemporary interior design."
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The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today: Norwegian Presence

This week we're featuring our favorite quick hits from this year's Milan Design Week. First up is the ninth annual edition of Norwegian Presence, a group exhibition of work by some of the Nordic country's best talents, curated by Design and Architecture Norway (DOGA) and, this year, styled by Kråkvik & D’Orazio and Bjørn van den Berg.
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Week of August 1, 2022

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a new French studio founded by Fabrizio Casiraghi and Pierre Yovanovitch alums, works in stone and wood on view at Radford Gallery in London, and a new vanity set meant to encourage the commercial liberation of independent designers.
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Week of July 18, 2022

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the first furniture collection from interior designer Robert McKinley, colorful glass candlesticks by Lex Pott, and a Wright auction full of postmodern treasures.
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New York Design Week, We Missed You — Here Are 25 Favorites From the Festival That Was

Well, after two years of fallow Mays due to COVID delays (and a November iteration of NYCxDesign that barely registered), New York Design Week returned with a vengeance this month. Its de facto kick-off was the incredible MASA exhibition, curated by Su Wu, which opened in a former post office in Rockefeller Center and remains a high-water mark for the month. The festivities finally ended last week with a rager of a party at Matter Projects for a dual exhibition with furniture designer Minjae Kim and his mother, the painter Myoungae Lee, which we'll cover more in-depth on the site this week. Here are our favorite projects from the past few weeks.
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In His First Gallery Show, Ryan Preciado Combines His Love of Wood, the 80s, and High-Gloss Finishes

L.A. designer Ryan Preciado traffics heavily in nostalgia, particularly for his own Cali upbringing: "When I was a kid, my grandpa would give me five bucks to buff and polish his cars; I bet that’s why I’m attracted to the glossy finish," he told us back in 2019. He also cited his grandmother's garden chairs, and his uncle's car-show habit, as formative design influences. All of those influences were on display in his first gallery show, A Cliff to Climb, at Canada gallery in New York earlier this month — including via a new, ultra-polished green cabinet that he created at his friend’s autobody shop. 
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Nathalie du Pasquier is So Much More Than the Poster Girl for Memphis Design

When a return to Memphis became the defining design trend back in 2014, a few of the movement's original members flew to the forefront of discourse once again, among them Peter Shire, Ettore Sottsass, and Nathalie du Pasquier, whose exuberant patterning became a kind of shorthand for cool around that time. (If you came home from Milan in 2014 without an NDP Wrong for Hay tote bag, were you even there?) But while Du Pasquier became pigeon-holed for that kind of blocky, frazzled look (remember when she designed for American Apparel?!), she's always been so much more than that, and the full fruits of her output as an artist are on view this month at an exhibition called "Speed Limit" at Anton Kern Gallery in New York.
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Week of February 28, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Virginia Sin releases the bathroom accessories of our dreams, Linde Freya Tangelder designs a $15,000 bathtub, and Hauvette & Madani complete a very modern renovation of a landmark 1926 apartment in Paris (pictured).
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Week of December 13, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a reconstructed 1960s apartment by Ettore Sottsass opens in Milan, six London designers exhibit works in glass and metal, and Sweden's David Taylor unveils his latest collection of bent-aluminum furniture and lighting.
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