Jordan Kushins is a freelance writer and former associate editor at Dwell. She's happiest when crafting but also enjoys drinking tea, swimming in outdoor pools, and Singin' in the Rain, and once baked a very large cake that was shaped like a hamburger.
“I’m not particularly interested in ‘design,’” says David Carlson, a man who has spent much of his career focused on the subject. “I see it as more of a cultural thing.” After opening David Design, a furnishings boutique in Sweden, he created the David Report, a semiannual forecast about issues affecting the industry, and founded Designboost, a forum for sharing knowledge on the field’s future.
It’s quite a feat to transform the interior of a convention hall—vast and fluorescently lit—into a feel-good lounge-y space that truly brings the outside in. The Dwell on Design booths were bustling, but the Outdoor area was a popular spot to sit and feel the (artificial) grass beneath your feet and admire the vertical gardens. Here are a few shots of the greenest show floor you ever did see.
On Sunday afternoon at Dwell on Design we dimmed the lights on the Sustainability Stage for a special screening from SMIBE—The Society for Moving Images About the Built Environment. Founding member Bill Ferehawk, who is a former architect and current director and principal at Radiant Features, presented the winners and finalists from SMIBE's Personal Infrastructures short film competition. The contest, which garnered 208 entries from around the world, called for moviemakers—student and professional—to create three-minute shorts that demonstrated the foundations that make up our lives: personal, and public and everything in between. There was a huge range of styles, each focusing on a very different way of seeing our world, and the results are impressive. Check out the clips below!
There's an epic amount to be browsed through on the Dwell on Design show floor this year, and we're all having a blast checking out the booths at the LA Convention Center. One of the first things I saw—and loved—was at Touch. This little Open Stool is a multi-national collaboration between Studio Verrisimo, who designed it in Portugal, and the fantastic local Los Angeles gallery Touch, who developed it for manufacture in southern California from FSC-certified pine. It's a little seat, sure, but the smart slot cut out in the center means that it also acts as a door-stop (!) or a short desk-addendum. Very cool stuff.
"I can never understand why people employ decorators," posits Sir Terence Conran, a man whose surname is synonymous with design. "One of the great joys in life is collecting things to put in a home," he adds, and it's apt that outfitting a house is more than just part of the job for Conran; he has been helping others discover that same satisfaction since opening his first furnishings store, Habitat, in London in 1964. In 1987 he launched the Conran Shop, and his reach now includes architecture, books, and restaurants. The sun, it seems, never sets on this British empire.
Climate-controlled high-rises make sense when the changing seasons bring extreme temperature shifts, but in Bangkok, year-round hot and humid days blend into similarly sultry nights. Enter the Met, an award-winning residential skyscraper by multidisciplinary design firm WOHA. Located in the heart of Thailand’s capital, the tower gives the western model an eastern makeover and welcomes the elements into its infrastructure.
Few forms of reading leave a physical reminder of the act itself, but to page through the two volumes of collected newsprints from Storefront for Art and Architecture is to truly feel and see the ink on your fingertips.
As cofounder of the iconic Dutch collective Droog, industrial designer Gijs Bakker further defined the design identity of his homeland, the Netherlands, as simple and playful, conceptual but clearly realized. He has also brought contemporary jewelry design to the fore, focusing on the principles behind the pieces as opposed to their "handmade virtuosity," Bakker recently acted as artistic director for Yii, a Taiwanese collaborative uniting traditional craft and modern design. Recently he sat down with us to answer a few questions.
Picture this: You’re standing on the subway. The train begins to fill, begins to move, it lurches forward and the man standing next to you grabs the bar, right above your hand. Touching your hand. It’s awkward, it’s intimate, it can be off-putting and germy (who knows where those palms have been?). It’s situations like these that are cleverly tackled at Uncomfortable Conversations, a show in the Meatpacking District curated by Liz Kinnmark and Kegan Fisher, the talented duo behind Design Glut.
It's definitely springtime in the Big Apple, and New York is buzzing. Though ICFF veterans notice the fair feels still a bit smaller than years past, there seems to be a sense of optimism running through the booths at the Javits Center, which hosts the exhibition, and across the design events that dot the city. Most of the designers are there with their work, and are more than happy to talk you through their pieces. Their inspiration begets enthusiasm and, in a tight economic time, innovation, to make the most of what they're producing in concept and in practice. In this slideshow, I share a few things that caught my eye.
