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10.27.17

Sighted

This Dutch Designer is Giving Concrete a Serious Makeover

At this point, we've seen pretty much every formerly humdrum thing in the universe get a design-forward makeover, from watering cans to luggage. But Dutch designer Iwan Pol wasn't happy to simply renovate a product category — he wanted to recast an entire architectural material. "Concrete can take any shape or form, so why not aim for a softer look and feel?" he says.
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10.24.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

Amazing 80s Interiors, and the Furniture That Was Made for Them, Now On View at Volume

Anyone paying attention probably gets that for us, the Memphis train left the station awhile ago — we were heralding the return of Sottsass in 2007, and our interests have long since shifted. But that doesn't mean we're opposed to every attempt to bring back the '80s, not in the least. Case in point: We highly recommend seeing the current show on view at Volume Gallery in Chicago, which celebrates the '80s interiors of the Chicago architecture firm Krueck + Sexton with the launch of limited-edition reissues of three of their most iconic chair designs from that time.
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10.19.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

Inside Berlin’s Most Instagrammable Installation

Like some kind of latter-day Helio Oiticica, the French artist Jean-Pascal Flavien has constructed a life-sized house, surrounded by sand, within the exhibition space at Esther Schipper gallery in Berlin. But while Oiticica's work was dependent upon interaction, it's unclear how immersive Flavien's installation is really supposed to be.
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Chicago architect Ania Jaworska
06.06.17

Up and Coming

This Chicago Architect Wants Furniture To Boss You Around

Since receiving a second degree from the storied Cranbrook Academy of Art — alumni of which include Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia, and Florence Knoll — Ania Jaworska has been living in Chicago, working as a professor and developing a practice and a body of work that spans art, design, and architecture, more often than not finding her surest footing at the point where all three intersect.
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Entryways of Milan
04.21.17

Excerpt: Book

A New Book Celebrating the Secret Beauty of Milan

Having just gotten back from Milan, where the foyer of our Airbnb apartment building looked like this, the subject of a new book from Taschen hits awfully close to home: Called Entryways of Milan, the book takes readers inside the heavy wooden doors that often conceal the city's most beautiful thresholds, or ingressi.
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03.10.17

The Making of

A Turner Prize–Winning Architecture Collective Sets Up Shop in Brooklyn

U.K. architecture collective Assemble has created an installation — dubbed “A Factory As It Might Be” — in the courtyard of A/D/O, the brand-new, forward-looking design space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The temporary factory features an industrial clay extruder, which Assemble — and their Liverpool-based social enterprise the Granby Workshop, along with fellow collaborators — used to make the factory’s cladding as well as a host of products from dinnerware to planters. The effort is the debut US project for the team, who famously became the first architects to win the Turner Prize in 2015.
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01.20.17

Up and Coming

This Moscow-Based Studio is the Only Place Not Under Russian Influence

When you think of Moscow and its corresponding decor schemes, Scandinavian minimalism isn't the first thing that comes to mind. But take a look at the interiors in this post — with their exposed-bulb lamps, gridded pillowcases, herringbone floors, moody palettes, and splashes of pink, they'd be right at home in a Stockholm flat. In fact, they're the work of Crosby Studios, the Moscow- and New York–based furniture and interiors studio that debuted its first collection with us at last year's Sight Unseen OFFSITE.
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12.13.16

Sighted

An Under-the-Radar Postmodern Architect Finally Gets His Due

In the age of Instagram, does the most colorful architect win? We've seen a massive uptick lately in people posting — and designers citing as influences — architects such as Luis Barragan, Ricardo Bofill, and Ricardo Legorreta. Sometimes forgotten in all this, however, is the Maltese architect Richard England, who studied under Gio Ponti and designed much of the colorful, Postmodern architecture that dots the Mediterranean archipelago.
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09.14.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

A Breathtaking Furniture Installation Staged Inside a Famed Brutalist House

When we named Jonathan Muecke to our American Design Hot list in 2014, the enigmatic Minnesota architect summed up his motivations with a 1963 George Brecht quote about seeking precision in objects — the same kind of precision, presumably, that he saw in the starkly angular 1974 Van Wassenhove House by Belgian architect Juliaan Lampens, where he recently spent a week making a new body of work for Maniera gallery.
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Repossi Paris flagship OMA Sabine Marcelis
07.18.16

Sighted

In Paris, the Anti-French Jewelry Boutique

Here's something we never thought we'd be covering on this site: A French jewelry boutique. The very idea seems too fussy for our forward-thinking aesthetic, calling to mind things like porcelain reliefs, gilded displays, and grand spiral staircases. But the new Repossi flagship in Paris's Place Vendôme, designed by Dutch architects OMA, contains precisely none of those things.
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