Color Palette, From PIN–UP #17

When PIN–UP editor Felix Burrichter asked me to put together a product-driven color story for the magazine's new fall issue, which just came out last week, I said yes without hesitation — then secretly panicked later. It turns out that defining yourself by a single hue can be strangely intimidating. After thinking about it for ages, I resolved not to think at all, resorting to an idea that's been kicking around Sight Unseen's Pinterest feed for months now: electric blue, reimagined for the magazine as the more whimsical-sounding "peacock." I rounded up 14 of our favorite examples, which PIN–UP contributor Fausto Fantinuoli turned into the gorgeous illustration pictured above, along with the selections of Ambra Medda (dolphin), Tauba Auerbach (vermillion), and Paloma Powers (blush). Burrichter was kind enough to let us share the full story, which you can view after the jump.
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Oeuffice Milanes collection Piero Portaluppi

Oeuffice’s Milanes Collection, from PIN-UP No. 16

Now that Seattle Week on Sight Unseen is over, we're turning our attention to another northwestern capital — Milan, Italy, home of the Salone del Mobile, where Jill and I are on serious scouting duty this week. Before we begin posting our annual eyewitness dispatches from the fair, though, we wanted to start our coverage with a small paean to our temporary digs: an article I contributed to the forthcoming Milan-themed spring/summer issue of PIN–UP magazine, which features the work of one of our favorite local design firms (Oeuffice) photographed inside the foundation of one of our favorite local architects (Piero Portoluppi). Click through to learn more about Oeuffice's Milanes collection of tabletop items and the impetus behind these gorgeous images, plus how you can snag the PIN–UP No. 16 when it goes on sale next month.
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Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Lost Interview with Ettore Sottsass, From Surface Magazine

It's no secret that we're devotees of the work of the late Italian design legend Ettore Sottsass, but to the extent that everyone we know has been caught up lately in the more superficial elements of his influence — the post-modernist colors, patterns, and geometries — we jumped at the chance to share with you this reminder of his intellectual legacy: one of several previously unpublished interviews with Sottsass conducted by Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2001. It was given to us as a little holiday present by Surface magazine's new editor Spencer Bailey, who oversaw its inclusion in the Dec/Jan Art Issue, which was co-edited by ForYourArt founder Bettina Korek and is the fourth since Surface was redesigned and reimagined this past July. Says Bailey: "Last fall, I was talking with Serpentine Gallery co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist over dinner in London about his unpublished interviews with artists and designers. He mentioned that he has several with Ettore Sottsass, so I asked him to send them to me. This one in particular blew me away. Hans Ulrich is a master interviewer, and Sottsass is, well, Sottsass. When I was putting together Surface's first annual Art Issue, I just knew I had to publish it." Sight Unseen is the only place on the web you can read the entire edited interview as it ran in the magazine — check it out after the jump, including images added by us, and don't forget to subscribe to Surface when you're done!
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Week of November 18, 2013

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, and events from the past seven or so days. This week: a cement-truck mural, a furniture collection about shark-hunting, a pretty way to empty your pockets, and more.
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The Belger Collection in Outpost Journal #3

So many of the designers we've featured here on Sight Unseen grew up somewhere small, but left their hometowns behind for someplace big. Kiel Mead grew up in Buffalo but moved to Brooklyn. Max Lamb started out on the beach in Cornwall but headed inland to London. Sam Baron spent his childhood in the mountains of France, but is now so worldly he splits time between Paris and Lisbon. But what of the people who stay behind? Who are the artists and designers who make up the cultural fabric of, say, a Tucson or a Des Moines? That's what the three-year-old annual nonprofit magazine Outpost Journal purports to find out.
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PIN-UP Interviews

It's quite nice to write, as we do here at Sight Unseen, for ourselves, but it's equally — if not sometimes more — fun to write for PIN-UP. When you're a writer assigned to conduct a Q+A in the "magazine for architectural entertainment," as I was earlier this year, you take one look at past examples and breathe a huge sigh of relief. Because PIN-UP has always encouraged both writer and subject to be absolutely themselves, and its founder and editor-in-chief Felix Burrichter has always allowed transcripts into the magazine complete with exclamation points, interjected giggles, and tangents about things like Beyonce's hair, Philippe Malouin's "lustrous beard" or what kind of stationery is Shigeru Ban's favorite — in other words, all of the fun, non-jargony things that often make an interview entertaining to conduct but that usually get edited out. This week, PIN-UP Interviews — a book filled with seven years' worth of those conversations — was published by PowerHouse Books.
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Joel Evey, Graphic Designer

Joel Evey owes his career to Pixar, believe it or not. He made a name for himself as part of the team that was bringing edgy, high-brow graphics to Urban Outfitters back in 2010 — with a style some like to call the “new ugly” — but at age 15, it was Toy Story that changed his life. “I saw it for the first time and was like, wow, that’s crazy! You can do that with a computer?” recalls Evey, who at the time was already about to head off to college early to study computer science. Instead of hard coding, he decided to pursue animation and 3-D graphics instead. “But animations took so long to render that I started to think, ‘Well, what happens when I take this image and just render one of them?’ Then, ‘What if I put type on it? What would that look like?’” The rest, as they say, is history.
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Zrcadlo: The Mirror by Okolo

If you go strictly by the numbers, nearly any product typology could be said to be having a moment at the Milan Furniture Fair each year. Sofas? There are always hundreds. Cabinets? Wall clocks? Yup, those too. But scan the recent fairs not just for mirrors but for amazing mirrors, and you might be inclined to agree with Adam Štěch and Klára Šumová, curators of a show at this week's Prague's Designblok festival that reflects on the genre's recent creative uptick. (These three hand mirrors alone totally slay us.) "The exhibition not only brings together our friends from the design world but also tries to define the typology of a mirror based on quite varied styles and design approaches," says Štěch, one of three co-founders behind the creative agency and online magazine OKOLO. He and Šumová comissioned 30 designers — 15 of them international and 15 Czech — to design a new mirror for the installation, from Maxim Velčovský's wall mirror bordered by cheap plastic store-bought varieties to Marco Dessí's mirror that doubles as the top for a jewelry box.
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mono.kultur #32: Martino Gamper, All Channels Personal

It took me 16 issues (Miranda July) to discover the Berlin-based magazine mono.kultur, after seeing its pull-out poster on my friend's wall a few years back. "Dear life," it read, "do you want to hang out tonight? I should warn you that I will not be wearing any make-up and my hair is dirty. If you can handle that, call me. Yours, Miranda July." Five issues later (Tilda Swinton), I was obsessed: Here was a publication that, with each issue dedicated to a single long-form interview, was less about collecting personalities for front-cover bragging rights and more about truly, painstakingly, and intimately getting to know them. Which is all any of us dream about when it comes to our cultural idols, even those of us who, from time to time, have the honor of crossing their paths ourselves. So even though we've profiled Martino Gamper on Sight Unseen before — our lovely London contributor Claire Walsh having toured his home garden and secured us his favorite pasta recipe — we still jumped at the chance to excerpt mono.kultur's new sit-down with the Italian RCA grad, who talked to its editors about his latest public design projects, his feelings about Ikea, and the use of humor in his work. The interview runs to 10,000 words and — in print — comprises three booklets hand-assembled into one exhaustive artifact that stretches far beyond the small sample presented here. After reading it, scroll down to learn how to get your own copy before it — like most of the issues this cult favorite has produced — sells out forever.
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A 20th Century Palate in The Gourmand Issue 00

In the summer before starting Sight Unseen, one of us had a very brief flirtation with the idea of attending culinary school. Along with design, food is our great love, so we were pleased this week — and maybe even a little bit jealous — to stumble upon a new magazine out of London that unites the two disciplines in the most fantastic of ways. Called The Gourmand, the first issue tackles subjects ranging from David Shrigley's new cookery-themed opera to Jeff Koons's recipe for apple dumplings. But our favorite feature — plucked from the site's website, which has a sprinkling of teasers for the print edition as well as practical food recommendations from artists, contributors and London's culinary cognescenti — has to be this collaboration between art director Jamie Brown and photographer Luke Kirwan, which depicts 20th century art and design movements in foodstuffs like American cheese and pink wafer cookies.
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Clemence Seilles in PIN-UP #12

Berlin's many charms are hardly lost on your editors. After a sunny, weeklong trip five summers ago, we both fell in love with the German capital — the wide open spaces, the well-situated swimming pools, the way clubbing unfolds as an actually enjoyable activity. But while my partner in crime has returned to the German capital each consecutive summer, I've never been able to find the time to go back. This summer, then, I was lucky enough to visit by proxy through the eyes of Felix Burrichter and his staff of Berlinophiles over at PIN-UP Magazine, which devoted its entire Spring/Summer issue to the changing metropolis. "For very long, Berlin was this one thing: You went when you had no money," says Burrichter, who serves as both editor and creative director of the architecture biannual. "But there’s a cultural elite — a moneyed elite — that has developed there over the past 10 years. Mostly people from out of town or in the art world. So there's an interesting friction right now. When that moneyed elite takes over, the city will lose a lot of its charm. But right now it still feels very raw and budding." The issue was in some ways a homecoming — Burrichter grew up in Düsseldorf — but in the end, the Berlin depicted in the magazine's pages bears more of a resemblance to Burrichter's adopted home in New York. "What fascinates me about Berlin right now is that it's very international," he says; hence the features run to a British architect who recently remade the city's Neues Museum (David Chipperfield), a West African transplant (Francis Kéré), and Clémence Seilles, a Frenchwoman who arrived in Berlin with a singular goal — to assist in the studio of designer Jerszy Seymour — and who never left. We've been fans of Seilles' work for some time now, and her conversation in the magazine with fellow Sight Unseen friend Matylda Krzykowski was too good to confine to print. Burrichter has graciously allowed us to excerpt it today on Sight Unseen.
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Nicolas Trembley’s Fat Lava vases in Apartamento 07

If I hadn't taken as long as I did to read issue number 07 of Apartamento, which came out around this time last year, I would never have gone stumbling around the web only to realize that Nicolas Trembley's wonderful Sgrafo vs Fat Lava exhibition — which started in Geneva last year, making stops along the way at Galerie Kreo in Paris and Gisela Capitain in Cologne — will end its world tour this June in my own backyard, at the Zachary Currie gallery in New York. In this excerpt from Apartamento, the Parisian art critic and curator explains how his collection of more than 150 instances of the bizarre German ceramics came to be.
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