Furniture Designer Spotlight: La Chance
An enterprising duo mines their respective creative and business backgrounds to create a furniture collection with French roots and universal appeal.
Istanbul, Turkey
Dwell traveled to Turkey’s most cosmopolitan city for the first annual Istanbul Design Biennial, discovering a modern heart beating within ancient walls.
Stoa Design
A philosophical designer based in Beyoğlu relies on handicraft, woodworking, and the universal meaning of nature.
Byzantium Boom
The former Constantinople isn’t all Ottoman-era carpets and ruins: A cutting-edge art, dining, and travel scene overlays its rich past.
Veliero Shelving by Cassina
In 1940, architect Franco Albini made a single model of his ship’s rigging-like Veliero bookcase for his Milan home—where it eventually collapsed. Sixty-six years later, Cassina fabricated the shelves in a re-creation of Albini’s study for the Renzo Piano-curated Zero Gravity exhibition. Again: poor stability. But Cassina, which has committed to keeping alive the work of select master architects in the form of its I Maestri collection, did not give up. Instead, it embarked on an epic five-year R&D effort that would lead to the product’s launch in April 2012.
Studio Gorm
John Arndt and Wonhee Jeong Arndt named their studio after the made-up word “gorm,” an invented antonym to the real word “gormless” (meaning stupid or dull). The Eugene-based duo creates products that are sustainable, pared down, and pragmatic: easy to carry, repair, recycle, compost, or collapse.
Ventura Lambrate Trumps in Milan
For the second year running, Milan’s Zona Tortona feels more like Zona Tortura, a nightclub dotted with big brand showrooms, than the former creative epicenter of the Salone furniture fair that it has been for years. Dance music pulses out of black-curtained buildings past the large men (bouncers?) dressed in black suits that guard them while costumed kids handed out free drink tickets. For those seeking a slower-tempo compliment to the commercial fair center at Tortona, the best relief is Ventura Lambrate, where the warehouses surrounding the polytechnic university—themselves beautiful objects of architectural design—are filled with student work, some fresh takes on old products and materials, and design that borders on art. Check out our slideshow of what to see at Ventura Lambrate.
Cole & Son Factory Tour
Cole & Son, a London-based wallpaper manufacturer established in 1875, recently launched its collection of autumn wallpapers, including a particularly striking harlequin pattern of overlain colors called "Circus" that proves the 136-year-old company can do modern with as much depth as the historical. These papers are manufactured—"manu," by hand, being the operative root—barely north of central London in Haringey, where the tiny Cole & Son factory rolls out a quarter of a million meters of high-end wallcoverings per year. On the ground floor of the two-floor warehouse, a 130-year old machine sits beside a shinier digital printer of a mere 30 years. Though they don’t look old enough, some workers have been there for decades and have children working there too. “It’s like anything you do,” says a screen printer named Jason who has been mastering his craft for 25 years. “You just get used to it and then it’s easy.”
London Design Festival Recap
As with most trade fairs, it was difficult to find dense clumps of strong design at the London Design Festival; instead gems were dispersed throughout. When an object did stand out, the work was clever, as exemplified by a flat-pack boat made by two recent RCA grads; gracefully technical as in Jake Dyson’s handsome and super-long-lasting (will-it-to-your-grandchildren) task lamp; or adorned with traces of the maker’s hands as was Johannes Nagel’s pottery. Creativity was found, and hailed from, everywhere: The Australians made a fine showing at Designjunction while the streets of London, itself, provided wall space for those who didn’t want to hire an exhibition booth at Earls Court.
Geenen + Hoon at Aram Gallery
Curated by Héloise Park at the Aram Gallery, the Geenen & Hoon exhibition brings together two young furniture makers who approach design through structure—but from opposite ends of the nature-nurture spectrum. It is a good-looking show filled with the artifacts capable of depicting the design process succinctly: sketches, models, maquettes, prototypes and even machine-like molds.
“I’m not just making up shapes. I’m letting the shapes be defined by natural forces,” explains Bram Geenen, a graduate of Utrecht’s HKU who is now based in Amsterdam. Geenen often works in collaboration with tech companies and begins by repurposing their cutting-edge production techniques or materials, but winds up with organic forms derived from physics and the properties of his materials and “better, stronger, lighter, more sustainable products,” he says. “Today any shape you can imagine, you can build. It forces me to be very careful and honest in choosing my forms.”
London-based Il Hoon Roh, trained at the Architectural Association and as a product designer at the Royal College of Art, works from the point-of-view of nature and ends up with extraordinary machines that produce elastically oozing forms. His table on show has aesthetic qualities but its form actually illustrates how forces flow from the table top to the ground, he says. “The forms of nature are not accidental at all. The organic beauty is there for a reason.”
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Ventura Lambrate Trumps in Milan
For the second year running, Milan’s Zona Tortona feels more like Zona Tortura, a nightclub dotted with big brand showrooms, than the former creative epicenter of the Salone furniture fair that it has been for years. Dance music pulses out of black-curtained buildings past the large men (bouncers?) dressed in black suits that guard them while costumed kids handed out free drink tickets. For those seeking a slower-tempo compliment to the commercial fair center at Tortona, the best relief is Ventura Lambrate, where the warehouses surrounding the polytechnic university—themselves beautiful objects of architectural design—are filled with student work, some fresh takes on old products and materials, and design that borders on art. Check out our slideshow of what to see at Ventura Lambrate.
Cole & Son Factory Tour
Cole & Son, a London-based wallpaper manufacturer established in 1875, recently launched its collection of autumn wallpapers, including a particularly striking harlequin pattern of overlain colors called "Circus" that proves the 136-year-old company can do modern with as much depth as the historical. These papers are manufactured—"manu," by hand, being the operative root—barely north of central London in Haringey, where the tiny Cole & Son factory rolls out a quarter of a million meters of high-end wallcoverings per year. On the ground floor of the two-floor warehouse, a 130-year old machine sits beside a shinier digital printer of a mere 30 years. Though they don’t look old enough, some workers have been there for decades and have children working there too. “It’s like anything you do,” says a screen printer named Jason who has been mastering his craft for 25 years. “You just get used to it and then it’s easy.”
London Design Festival Recap
As with most trade fairs, it was difficult to find dense clumps of strong design at the London Design Festival; instead gems were dispersed throughout. When an object did stand out, the work was clever, as exemplified by a flat-pack boat made by two recent RCA grads; gracefully technical as in Jake Dyson’s handsome and super-long-lasting (will-it-to-your-grandchildren) task lamp; or adorned with traces of the maker’s hands as was Johannes Nagel’s pottery. Creativity was found, and hailed from, everywhere: The Australians made a fine showing at Designjunction while the streets of London, itself, provided wall space for those who didn’t want to hire an exhibition booth at Earls Court.
Geenen + Hoon at Aram Gallery
Curated by Héloise Park at the Aram Gallery, the Geenen & Hoon exhibition brings together two young furniture makers who approach design through structure—but from opposite ends of the nature-nurture spectrum. It is a good-looking show filled with the artifacts capable of depicting the design process succinctly: sketches, models, maquettes, prototypes and even machine-like molds.
“I’m not just making up shapes. I’m letting the shapes be defined by natural forces,” explains Bram Geenen, a graduate of Utrecht’s HKU who is now based in Amsterdam. Geenen often works in collaboration with tech companies and begins by repurposing their cutting-edge production techniques or materials, but winds up with organic forms derived from physics and the properties of his materials and “better, stronger, lighter, more sustainable products,” he says. “Today any shape you can imagine, you can build. It forces me to be very careful and honest in choosing my forms.”
London-based Il Hoon Roh, trained at the Architectural Association and as a product designer at the Royal College of Art, works from the point-of-view of nature and ends up with extraordinary machines that produce elastically oozing forms. His table on show has aesthetic qualities but its form actually illustrates how forces flow from the table top to the ground, he says. “The forms of nature are not accidental at all. The organic beauty is there for a reason.”
London's 100% Design
Albeit with more drizzle and more crowded aisles, 100% Design in Earls Court, London, resembles New York’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair in that it is small and easily digested. 100% Design has its share of big-booth brands and practical tools, materials and production processes for the foot soldiers of the interior design industry but this year, it also featured interesting international contingents from Chile, Norway, Korea and the UK, and a couple of strong examples of booth design, one by Dutchman Ben van Berkel’s UN Studio and the other by Paris-born, New York-based designer and musician Sebastien Agneessens for, of all things, a Turkish real estate developer-cum-design lab called Nef.
