09.21.12

Fair Report

At The London Design Festival, Part III

When you visit the show Image for a Title, curated by Study O Portable as part of the Brompton Design District, you can just about conjure the illusion that you’re in a world-class design-art gallery in some chic back alley of Paris, rather than a sunlight-starved basement at a hard-to-find address that happened to be printed incorrectly in this year’s Icon Design Trail guide. The show looks — and reads — so impressively that you start to believe what you want to believe rather than the reality, which is that many of the LDF’s visitors are likely to inadvertently miss out on seeing it, and that when it's over many of the pieces will, shrugs co-curator Bernadette Deddens, probably just wind up in storage. Welcome to the placebo effect, or at least our crude metaphorical approximation of it: the ability of humans to bestow a pill, an object, or in this case an exhibition with the qualities they expect or desire it to have. Deddens and her partner in crime, Tetsuo Mukai, invited a handful of designers to join them in exploring the possibilities of placebo thinking, producing an installation so well resolved that we’re going to go right on insisting it’s one of the top gallery shows on offer this week. Although, being more realists than dreamers, we’ve decided to help actualize our version of events by publicizing the show here on Sight Unseen. Check out each of its five projects below, and if you still have time to go see them before it closes at the end of the weekend, make sure to map your way to 8 Edgerton Gardens Mews.

09.19.12

Fair Report

At the London Design Festival, Part II

Just as everyone else is arriving in London, our time here is winding down — we have one last day today to take in the sights and sounds before flying home tomorrow, and we'll be spending most of it at one of the more newsworthy events of the week, Designjunction. There's going to be quite a few new releases happening at the Central London hub, but if you want to know the truth, we're most excited about seeing the building, a 250,000-sqft. industrial complex that should make a sublime backdrop for our humble photography efforts. Meanwhile, we've documented the last two days' worth of events and shows here, from a trip to the Mint gallery where we spied the marbled stools above to a plop onto the motley mix of benches arrayed around the V&A courtyard, all made by various design superstars. There's no way we'll make it to everything by tomorrow, but we've got a lot more to share, so keep coming back to visit us please!

09.17.12

Fair Report

At the London Design Festival, Part I

The first time we attended the London Design Festival, five years ago now, it became something of a benchmark for us — the design event against which we not only measured other design events, but would come to measure our own, the Noho Design District. That's because when you attend the LDF, you feel like you couldn't be anywhere else but in London; the spotlight is resolutely on emerging homegrown talents (thanks in part to the RCA) and there are always brand new projects and product launches to see (thanks in part to the fact that, unlike ICFF, the festival takes place halfway between Milan fairs). LDF has such a good reputation, in fact, that even the coalition behind New York City's official efforts to organize an as-yet-unnamed New York design week are looking to it for inspiration — can you imagine Tom Dixon giving away 500 free lamps in the middle of Times Square? It may happen sooner than you think. In the meantime, three years after our last trip to our favorite fair, we've returned, and we'll be making the rounds all week reporting on who and what we see here. After arriving on Friday morning, we had a bit of a slow start, poking around Shoreditch and hanging out with the incredibly gifted duo behind Silo Studio, whom we'll introduce in depth in the coming weeks. Check out the images here, and stay tuned for many more.

09.07.12

Up and Coming

The Fundamental Group, Architects and Furniture Designers

The Fundamental Group's designs may be inspired by geometric principles, but the burgeoning Berlin studio owes its existence, at least in an abstract sense, to another realm entirely: physics, ie, the field in which opposites attract. As architecture students at Berlin's University of the Arts back in 2003, Gunnar Rönsch and Stephen Molloy worked as assistants to rival department chairs, which in the world of academia, meant that they were automatically rivals, too. "If you sign up with one, you hate the other," Rönsch explains. "Mine was building construction and detail design, while Stephen's was based on a programmatic approach to structure — my chair basically had to solve all the problems created by his." In time, however, the pair realized the inevitable -- that by joining forces, they'd be stronger. First they became roommates, noticing how smoothly their collaboration on the apartment went, and then they began working together professionally, on projects like a friend's house remodel. Their only other major conflict came when it was time, in 2010, to choose a name for their new company: Rönsch & Molloy, or Molloy & Rönsch? "A mathematician friend of ours was sitting in our kitchen talking about the fundamental group — a term from algebraic topology that describes very complicated 3-D surfaces," says Molloy. "It was the perfect compromise."

09.03.12

Sighted

Kyouei’s Dish of Light and Random Musical Box

When the latest projects from the Japanese design company Kyouei came across the transom this weekend, we felt a bit like grandmothers. Which is odd, because we're not old enough to be anyone's grandmother, much less a Japanese product designer and sound producer who's nine years our elder. But there was still a burst of "my how you've grown" pride bubbling up, considering we discovered Kouichi Okamoto's firm back in our early I.D. magazine days, when he was still doing clever little Droog-ish housewares like light bulb–shaped paper lanterns and bowls that imitated crater lakes — before the vast majority of our fellow Americans even knew Kyouei existed. And look at Okamoto now! Making sophisticated sound machines, musical tables, and these amazing iron lamps that evoke modernist sculpture.

08.30.12

Up and Coming

Ian McDonald, Artist and Ceramicist

To understand what it was like for Ian McDonald growing up in California’s Laguna Beach, it helps to refer back to one of the greatest television dramas of all time. Not, mind you, MTV’s reality show of the same name, but the heart-wrenching high-school football epic Friday Night Lights — McDonald’s hometown being pretty much the diametrical opposite of Dillon, Texas. “Laguna was founded as an artists’ colony,” he says. “Our school mascot, The Artist, ran around with a brush and palette and a beret. Even the football stars took art classes.” In fact, one of McDonald’s earliest run-ins with the medium that would eventually become his life’s work happened when his own sports-star brothers brought their ceramics projects home from school, where their art teacher was a local studio potter.

08.23.12

Excerpt: Magazine

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.

08.20.12

Sighted

Study O Portable’s Neon Alphabet

Whereas most of us may never fully grasp the meaning behind the testicular descension metaphors and self-referential glyphs woven throughout Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle, the message behind his Drawing Restraint series — which has seen the artist challenge his creation process with obstacle courses and 270-pound dumbbells — couldn't be more relatable: creativity flourishes in any struggle with limitations. Many designers, for example, profess to do their best work under the pressure of client briefs; then there are those, like the London duo Bernadette Deddens and Tetsuo Mukai of Study O Portable, who in the absence of such briefs will invent their own rules to work around. Since they started their studio in 2009, the couple have been using the alphabet as a testing ground for aesthetic and material experiments, producing letter sets in various combinations of wood, leather, and plastic that must conform to strict, self-imposed standards of size and legibility. "It's really satisfying to work on the puzzle an ABC poses depending on one's materials and techniques," says Deddens. Their most recent is the Neon Alphabet, "a cross between signage, jewelry, and a font" that debuted at Design Miami/Basel this June with Belgian gallerist Caroline van Hoek.

07.31.12

The Making of

Office by Studio Swine

Things are winding down here at Sight Unseen HQ, where as of tomorrow we'll be on a much-needed summer holiday for two weeks. So today, we bring you an appropriately tiny story about a very tiny project: an office by Studio Swine in London's Soho neighborhood where three people share a 100 square-foot space. We first learned about the duo — RCA product-design grads Azusa Murakami and Alexander Groves — during this year's Noho Design District, where they showed a series of golden geometric button covers in the Once Removed show at our 22 Bond space. We were further intrigued by works like their recycled-plastic Sea Chair. But if you read our story yesterday on Kent Fonn Skåre, you already know why we find this simple office scheme particularly endearing — not only does it take advantage of pegboard to maximize wall space, but it's also inspired by "New York Art Deco meets Memphis," say the designers, and it uses a freewheeling mix of contrasting materials like marble, colored steel, linoleum, and reclaimed wood. After reading a bit more below from Murakami and Groves about how they constructed the various elements of the office, stay tuned for your chance to purchase their geometric marmoleum wall pouches, coming soon to the Sight Unseen shop!

07.30.12

Up and Coming

Kent Fonn Skåre, Artist and Graphic Designer

Being that he's still a student at Konstfack in Stockholm, you've probably never heard of Norwegian artist and graphic designer Kent Fonn Skåre. But his work, even at first glance, is ridiculously easy to love: It's got a heavy focus on materials, lots of marble, and a whiff of Memphis — yes, the three "M"s, the golden trifecta of the current avant-garde, or at least the little corner of it that we're obsessed with, which also includes folks like Clemence Seilles and Jens Praet. We discovered Fonn Skåre via a fleeting image on Pinterest, but found surprisingly little information on him and the ideas behind his work, so we did what we do best, harassing the poor man until we were able to tease out a bit of insight into his practice. Check out the interview and accompanying photos here, then bookmark Fonn Skåre's Flickr feed to browse more of his graphic design work and follow his future projects.

07.24.12

Sighted

The 2012 Parsons Thesis Site

As curatorial hunter-gatherers, we're always on the lookout for new and unseen talents, and there's no better place to spot them than at school thesis shows. But as workaholics who seldom have time to leave our home offices, much less attend these shows, they all too often remain off-limits to us. It's a rare yet celebrated occasion any time we're either sent a clear, comprehensive accounting of projects by graduating students, or become aware of a website that successfully catalogs them. Last week, we received an email from Parsons with just such a treat — the new multi-disciplinary Parsons thesis site, part of the two-year old Parsons Festival which flings open the doors of the school to the public each May for three weeks of exhibitions, workshops, and fashion shows. Grateful to have access to the event's couch-potato version, we sifted through all the projects on the site and found the six we liked best: humorously cloying photographs of weird dollar-store finds by Antonia Basler, a series of poured-concrete side tables made in fabric molds by Isaac Friedman-Heiman, dresses that pay homage to Muybridge and Noguchi by Kaoru Oshima, photos by Charlie Rubin that blur the line between the real and the artificial, and minimalist versus maximalist origami garments by Yingshi June Lin and Si Lu. Have a look at the slideshow here, which is annotated with selections from the students' thesis statements, then clear your calendar for next May so you'll have no excuse not to join us at next year's festival.

07.18.12

8 Things

Roanne Adams, Founder and Creative Director at RoAndCo

If you've been to one of her fashion presentations or received one of her elaborate invitations in the mail, you might be surprised to hear graphic designer and art director Roanne Adams describe her business as "not the edgiest design firm." This, after all, is a woman who's so well known for her career-launching work for emerging fashion stars like Abigail Lorick and Timo Weiland that brands often come crawling to her for infusions of downtown cool. Yet if she's managed to turn RoAndCo into one of the most up-and-coming boutique firms in New York at the moment, it's because her little-known clients like Rachael Ray and Zappos have just as much respect for her work as folks like TenOverSix do, which has a lot to do with Adams's instinctive approach to design: Rather than competing to be the most avant-garde kid on the block, she prefers putting new twists on familiar ideas from the past, researching a brand's history or creating narratives around those who don't have one. Her inspirations, as enumerated in the pages of our book Paper View and elaborated on here, run to the likes of Guy Bourdin and '70s advertising icons. "I''ve always been more into Paul Rand and Herb Lubalin than contemporary designers," Adams says.