01.18.18

Up and Coming

This Swiss Designer Blends the Rational With the Emotional to Create Some of the Most Beautiful Objects We’ve Seen

"When I started at ECAL at age 18, I actually didn’t know much about design," admits Dimitri Bähler. "As a kid, I was more interested in music, fashion, and illustration, along with biology and chemistry. In fact, I've always combined those two poles of interests: the rational and the emotional." That seems as good a way as any to describe Bähler, a young Swiss designer whose work has always seemed the result of both meticulous planning and wild experimentation. In many of his pieces, a relatively strict basic form is married to a more complex and renegade surface treatment.

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01.17.18

Sighted

This Up-and-Coming Spanish Artist Perfectly Mixes Organic Shapes and Geometry

Like many of our subjects, Barcelona-based sculptor Carla Cascales Alimbau has one foot in the art world and one foot in design. Alimbau, who used to work for a large design corporation before developing her independent art practice in 2015, cites influences from furniture and architecture, including Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Alvar Aalto. But her sculptures are in fact functionless beauties, often mixing organic shapes with geometry, and the imperfections of nature with the purity of polished materials.

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01.16.18

Sight Unseen Presents

The Design Trends We’re Predicting Will Be Big in 2018

Where do trends come from, and how do forecasters like ourselves know which ones will rise to the top? Why does a movement like Memphis come into vogue only to be replaced by something like Art Deco? Why is rust trending? These are the questions we ask ourselves every day, whether we're walking the halls of a design fair, scrolling through endless runway presentations, or simply trying to make sense of what's coming through our inboxes. Here, we've compiled six of the design trends we predict will most influence interior design and objects in the coming year.

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01.11.18

Sighted

If You Like Design and Books, You’re Going to Love [Reads]

We're living in a world where the algorithm pretty much rules all: The algorithm decides which high school friends are worth keeping up with, whether you might enjoy the new album by Gucci Mane, and if you're the type of person who would buy Loeffler Randall shoes from an Instagram ad. So it's refreshing — and kind of quaint — that the new book subscription and delivery service [reads] is curated by actual humans.

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01.09.18

Excerpt: Book

A New Book Documents the Architectural Mash-Ups of One of Earth’s Most Mystical Locales

Pretty much everyone is a travel photographer on Instagram these days, and there's nothing we like better than when one of our favorite photographers heads somewhere far-flung. But for Brian Ferry's latest project — a book called The Deepest Lake, which documents Ferry's 2014 trip to Kashmir — Instagram didn't seem like the proper vehicle on which to be seen. "When I post photos online, it can feel insignificant," Ferry says. "People scroll past it once and then move on. I want people to have the time and the space to really look at a photo, and so I had the idea to make a book."

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01.05.18

Up and Coming

This Swedish Illustrator’s Soft-Edged Work Might Be the Calming Influence We All Need Right Now

If you're a relatively highly attuned design person — and chances are, if you're here, you are — you might recognize the work of Swedish-born, Barcelona-based designer and illustrator Klas Ernflo (and not just because it often reminds us of another perennial SU fave, Geoff McFetridge). Ernflo's done work for Apartamento, Domus, Frame, IKEA, Mother London, Oyyo, and more, in addition to keeping up his own studio with drawings, paintings, and sculpture. But it's his latest project that we find the most fascinating.

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12.28.17

Sight Unseen Presents

7 Insiders on the Best Design Moments of 2017

We asked seven of our favorite designers, art directors, gallerists, curators and more to reflect on their top 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 the one thing they’re most looking forward to in the new year.

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12.27.17

Sight Unseen Presents

Our 10 Most Popular Instagrams of 2017

Today we're turning our lens to our favorite social media platform — and the place that many of our fans probably only know us from (!) — Instagram. Here are the 10 images you loved best, in all their geometric, millennial-pink glory.

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12.21.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

In a New Show, 3D Printed Objects So Real They Look Fake

Called "Transitional Speculation," the show blurs the line between the digital and physical worlds even more than Wang Söderstrom's work normally does: While their 3D illustrations often have a whiff of handicraft, here, they've made tangible objects — primarily printed in 3D — that seem to take on the blobby, hyper-real aesthetic a rendering would typically have.

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12.19.17

Excerpt: Book

This 90-Year-Old Company’s New Book is Anything But Old-Fashioned

Cassina's 90th-anniversary monograph, This Will Be the Place, is, quite frankly, a remarkably cool book for such a furniture company to produce. Rather than proselytizing about all of the great pieces their workshop has produced over the years, Cassina looks both outward and towards the future, asking others to weigh in on what exactly the concept of "the future" means at this point and what the domestic landscape will look like when we reach it.

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12.16.17

Saturday Selects

Week of December 11, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: (even more) awesome new work by Os & Oos, a cerebral show by Formafantasma, and two simultaneous Brent Wadden exhibitions that are next level in terms of composition and color.

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12.12.17

Sighted

These Women Are Teaming Up for a Powerhouse Ceramics Collab

It seems inevitable that some of the women included in Egg Collective's powerhouse Designing Women exhibition last spring would end up making their working relationship long-term, but we couldn't be happier about the first pairing: From their Soho showroom, throughout the next year, Egg Collective will be commissioning and selling capsule collections of ceramic work by Natalie Herrera, whose graphic, geometry-inspired pieces feel very much of a kind with Egg Collective's aesthetic.

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