These Mysterious Glass Assemblages, On View at Marta, Were Inspired By Modernist Buildings and Corporate Architecture

Over the years, Jonah Takagi has worked with all kinds of materials, but it's glass that has preoccupied him throughout five summer residencies in the south of France, at the International Glass and Visual Arts Research Center, or CIRVA, in Marseilles. For Takagi, the experience yielded not only an unexpected love for Marseilles but also an ever-evolving series of mesmerizing angular vessels that reference, in their shape and in their texture, the Brutalist architecture of Kenzo Tange or Le Corbusier. His latest selection, a series of dusky, painterly assemblages, is on view through April 22 at Marta gallery in Los Angeles in a solo show called "Brut Vessels."
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Chunky Cups and Oyster Placemats: The 2022 Gift Guide, Part II

If you asked us what our absolute top gift recommendation would be for 2022, you probably already know by now what we'd answer: our new book, How to Live With Objects. But in case you need a few other ideas, don't worry, we've also compiled 100 best-gift-of-2022 runners-up: Today, it's Jill's 50 picks, including brutish bar carts and vases, chunky cutting boards and cups, and her favorite CBD gummies — which just happen to look great, too — for dealing with publishing-a-book–related insomnia.
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Jonah Takagi glass brut vessels

In a New Collection, Jonah Takagi Reimagines French Brutalism in Shimmering, Colored Glass

Jonah Takagi has always been inspired by architecture. His first foray into the design world, nearly a decade ago, included furniture inspired by Tinkertoys, and an early series of tables for Matter employed architectural elements in miniature, like I-beams, columns, and trusses. “My dad’s an architect, and it was something I considered pursuing,” Takagi says. “Now I make things that go inside buildings.” It makes sense, then, that Takagi’s latest collection — a series of stepped, angular glass vessels in deeply saturated or disco iridescent hues — would be inspired by one of architecture’s most recognizable structures: Le Corbusier’s Brutalist 1952 Unité d’Habitation housing complex in Marseilles, France.
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This is Today Chamber Gallery

Colored Sand, Kool-Aid, and the Potential of Materials

Group exhibitions, which ask a cohort of designers to all respond to the same brief, are far too rare in the American design scene, which often favors solo presentations. That's perhaps why Chamber Gallery's exhibition model, in which an outside curator puts together a few different installments over the course of a year, feels so refreshing. Now on view at Chamber is This Is Today, Matylda Krzykowski's second installment built around the theme of collage.
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These Norwegian and American Designers Spent Six Months Collaborating on Skype

For the Norway x New York booth at Sight Unseen OFFSITE, we set up a cross-cultural exchange pairing 5 entrepreneurial American studios (Ladies & Gentlemen, Bower, Farrah Sit, Jonah Takagi, Assembly) and 5 up-and-coming Norwegian ones (Vera and Kyte, Bjørn van den Berg, Silje Nesdal, Hallgeir Homstvedt, Morten and Jonas), who spent the past six months working together via Skype and emails on a long-distance collaboration, with the aim to develop an object or series of objects that utilized an American workshop for fabrication.
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Roll & Hill Jonah Takagi Silk Road

An Exclusive First Look at Roll & Hill’s 2012 Collection

Three ICFFs ago, when we launched the Noho Design District, our biggest exhibition was the debut of Jason Miller's highly anticipated new lighting company Roll & Hill, which took over the top floor of our beloved former lumber building (RIP) and cozily lit its dilapidated interior with a string of gorgeously modern chandeliers. It's hard to believe how far both of us have come since then. With the imminent redevelopment of the NDD's former hub at 45 Great Jones, we went hunting for a new home, and instead found two. And Roll & Hill — in addition to showing its new collection at the Javits Center — will join up with us once again in Noho, this time spreading out over 3,500 square feet on the ground floor of 2 Cooper Square, where a monthlong showroom will showcase the brand's full collection in addition to its new products for 2012.
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Jonah Takagi, furniture designer

Jonah Takagi claims he has ADD, and he may be right. Since graduating from RISD in 2002, the Japanese-born, New England–bred, Washington D.C.–based designer has worked as a cabinetmaker, a full-time musician, a set builder for National Geographic docudramas, and a producer for an indie-rock kids’ show called Pancake Mountain. In the weeks leading up to this story, we talked about skinned cats, prosthetic kidneys, and smoking pot out of an art-school professor’s peg leg. But Takagi’s work is anything but schizophrenic.
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