05.22.18

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

The Principals’ Epic, Prismatic Plant Installation at Saturdays NYC

In the backyard of the Soho surf shop Saturdays NYC, Brooklyn design studio The Principals are exploring the border between the physical and sacred worlds. For an installation called Golden Arch, they’ve installed an 8-foot-tall triangular wave structure made from the studio’s modular, stackable Prism Planters. Spanning the garden from north to south, it symbolizes the emergence of the sun, moon, and stars from what Australian aboriginal cultures call “dreamtime” — the period during which the universe was created — into the physical world.

More

04.24.18

Fair Report

The Best of Milan Design Week 2018, Part I

This year marked our tenth anniversary of attending the Salone del Mobile in Milan, and this year's fair felt a bit... different. The showrooms were more crowded (sometimes uncomfortably so), the brands were more lavish (Hermes's installation employing 150,000 Moroccan tiles rivaled only Flos's poured concrete last year in terms of sheer material costs), and the trends felt less obvious (we're living in such maximalist times that it can feel like all colors are suddenly trending at once). Here’s the first of our posts chronicling all the wonderful things we found.

More

04.23.18

Fair Report

The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today, Day 5

Created by the Berlin-based Studio Greiling for Kinnasand's Toyo Ito–designed Milan showroom, the STRUCTURES series uses powder-coated, architectural steel tubes to lift the Swedish textiles company's knotted or woven wool rugs to a new height, elevating the formerly flat surfaces into a new dimension: furniture.

More

Exhibit Columbus Washington Street Installations

09.01.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

See How 5 Design Galleries Are Transforming This Tiny Midwestern City

The seed for Exhibit Columbus began back in 2014, when designer Jonathan Nesci created an installation of reflecting tables, called 100 Variations, in the sunken courtyard of Columbus's First Christian Church, built by Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen in 1942. "It was essentially to show proof of concept that a designer could make an installation in dialogue with the city," says Nesci. Three years later, the resulting design festival, which runs through November, boasts 18 separate installations.

More

09.28.16

Sighted

Kick Off Your Shoes — Literally — At Everlane’s New Pop-Up

As the once-narrow concept of the retail experience has exploded in recent years, there's been a spate of stores that purport to be something else entirely. We've seen the shop as art gallery, the shop as chicly curated apartment, and even the shop as restaurant. Everlane, the minimalist online fashion purveyor which has no stores to speak of, has launched two immersive pop-ups in New York this year that continue the trend.

More

12.31.15

Sight Unseen Presents

7 Design Insiders On Their 2015 Faves … And What’s Coming Up Next

We come here every day to tell you about our favorite things — so for our last round-up of 2015, it seemed only fair that we spread the love! We asked seven of our favorite design insiders to reflect on their best design moments of the past year — an experience they had, an exhibition they saw, a discovery they made, an interior they fell in love with — as well as offer the one thing they're most looking forward to in 2016. Enjoy, and see you back here next Monday!

More

12.11.15

Up and Coming

Kim Thomé, A Norwegian Designer By Way of London

Think of the London-based, Norwegian designer Kim Thomé’s playful approach to design as a Venn diagram of sorts: On the one side is a fondness for color and geometric pattern play, and on the other is an affinity for reflection and creating optical scenarios that can change at the viewer’s discretion. Where the two overlap is a creative region in which the designer thrives.

More

10.14.14

Q+A

Jonathan Nesci in Conversation With Matt Olson of RO/LU

When it comes to design, it's easy to forget about Indiana. Easy, but unfair — just ask anyone familiar with the legacy of Columbus natives Irwin and Xenia Miller, whose Eero Saarinen house is one of many architectural landmarks the pair commissioned in and around their hometown. Or ask the editors of Sight Unseen, who included not one but two Indiana-based talents in our American Design Hot List last week. One of them, Jonathan Nesci, debuted a project over the weekend that underscored both arguments: Invited by curator Christopher West to create a site-specific installation on the grounds of Eliel Saarinen's First Christian Church — also a Miller commission — Nesci conceived the stunning project 100 Variations, consisting of 100 unique, mirror-polished tables aligned in a grid in the church's courtyard. He developed the tables using the Golden Ratio, an ongoing preoccupation in his work that similarly informed Saarinen's. We snagged the first photos of the installation, which was on view for only three days, then invited Matt Olson of the Minneapolis studio RO/LU to discuss the project — and its oft-overlooked setting — with Nesci. Read their conversation after the jump.

More

09.25.14

Fair Report

London Design Festival 2014

As summer turns to fall, so we turn the design diary to September and one of our favorite events: London's annual Design Festival. Now in its 12th year, LDF has evolved to include not only the city’s flourishing design community, but a national and increasingly international mix, competing against the behemoth that is Milan’s Salone del Mobile in April. But in addition to furniture debuts and high-profile launches, LDF also acts as an occasion for those lesser design-mad folks to enjoy events and workshops around the city, as well as the oh-so-tempting retail destinations offering the latest coordinating stationery necessities (yes, HAY, we’re looking at you). With the launch of our pop-up keeping us New York–bound, we sent our London correspondent Rae Blunstone out onto the circuit, LDF guide in hand and sturdy sneakers at the ready, to pick up her favorites from the week's events.

More

04.16.13

Studio Visit

Heather Levine, Ceramic Artist

If designers are especially complicit in adding things to the world — and for stoking our desire for more and more stuff — they also get first dibs on the act of destruction. “I smash my own pieces all the time,” says Los Angeles-based ceramic artist Heather Levine. “You have to make quite a bit to get what you like, and I don’t keep all the tests. I’ll destroy them or try to make them into something else. I don’t want to see things in the world that I’m not happy about.”

More

11.19.10

8 Things

William Hundley, Artist

The artist William Hundley — known for photographing plumes of fabric hovering enigmatically in mid-air and strange objects balancing atop cheeseburgers — recently began experimenting with self-portraits. Which wouldn't be out of the ordinary, except that Hundley happens to hate letting people know what he looks like, so he obscures the photos of his face with collages of weird body parts and other incongruous images. He’s also been playing with masks, shooting the results of elaborate tribal-inspired face-painting sessions with his fiancée. “There’s this perception that I’m this badass artist who doesn’t give a fuck, this imagined character,” says Hundley, a boyish Texas native who lives deep in the suburbs of Austin. “But I work at a hospital in IT. So that’s why I don’t like putting images of myself or a biography out there — I mean look at me, I’m all-American white-boy looking. It would ruin the illusion.”

More