Prolific midcentury designer Harry Bertoia experimented with jewelry throughout his career. "He did more detailed things with his jewelry, because it is smaller scale and more easily manipulated," his daughter Celia says. "Also, his jewelry is quite playful in a way that neither the chairs nor the sculpture is."

A pin by Harry Bertoia.

Reproductions of Bertoia's jewelry, like this ring design, can be purchased at harrybertoia.org.

Bertoia did much of his experimentation with jewelry while he attended Cranbrook in the 1940s. "I think the jewelry was really his foundation and his learning process, to get the understanding of metal that he needed," Celia says. Some of the pieces appear to be precursors to his later work. "There were some brooches that were wire, like wire cages with pebbles inside, or gems. And in some ways those remind me of the chairs, because of the wire construction," Celia says.

"Some of his brooches look little creatures," Celia says. "He did all kind of sculptures like that, too, that suggested something organic or something alive. You couldn’t quite tell what it was, but looked very natural. I would say that the jewelry and the sculptures both have that."

"Metal was in his blood," Celia says of her father's natural aptitude with the material. "He had a real affinity toward metal and knew the qualities of each type of metal and alloy and as he learned how to create jewelry, he learned more about the qualities of metal."

Harry Bertoia, sitting in one of his famous chair designs for

After his successful chair designs for Knoll, Harry Bertoia dedicated his time to artistic pursuits. One of his ongoing projects was a series of kinetic sculptures consisting of metal rods, which he began in the 1960s. When the rods strike one another, they produce an ethereal, mesmerizing, and sometimes haunting sound. The thickness, height, and placement of the rods alters the resonance and Bertoia experimented with different configurations to produce varying effects. He defined Sonambient as the sound environment created by these tonal sculptures. (Watch this video to hear them in action.)

Bertoia housed many Sonambient sculptures in a barn near his home. His daughter Celia fondly recalls exploring the space. "Harry always told people he saved the best ones for the barn," she says. "When I was in high school, my girlfriends and I would sneak into the barn. We’d go running around in there and bang on all the different sculptures and just have a cacophony of sound in there—oh, it was fabulous! The whole concept is to have a sculpture that is not only visually pleasing but it’s auditory and tactile. If you were standing on the floor and all these pieces were toning you could even feel the vibration in the floor. It got in your whole body." "In the barn, because there were so many of them there, it created this amazing aura and mood, almost spiritual," Celia says. "It would affect people differently: A jet pilot comes in there and he thinks it sounds like roaring planes. A group of nuns came in the barn and they said it sounded like church bells chiming. Each person interprets it in his or her own way."

“A series of stepped concrete site walls lead you gradually up to a covered exterior entry, which opens onto a compressed entry foyer,” Hutchison says. A Bertoia bench by Knoll sits in an entryway covered by Mosa’s Greys Collection tiles.

In 1974, Bertoia began work on a commission for the Standard Oil Building in Chicago. To complement Edward Durell Stone's modernist masterwork, Bertoia envisioned a collection of eleven sound sculptures stationed in a 4,000-square-foot reflecting pool at the skyscraper's foot.

The Standard Oil Sonambient sculptures are composed of rods ranging from four to 16 feet tall. At a June 2013 auction at Wright, fragments and maquettes of the sculpture sold for $12,500 to $374,500. "No other works in Bertoia's extensive oeuvre match the impressive scale of the Sonambients for the Standard Oil Commission," stated the catalog.

It took 8,000 pounds of beryllium copper and 5,000 pounds of naval brass to produce the sculpture. Responding to the environment, the sculpture is activated by Chicago's notorious winds. The plaza was redesigned in 1994 and the sculpture was reconfigured and some portions removed.

You would be hard pressed to find an issue of Dwell without a Bertoia barstool or chair in it. Launched in 1952, the industrial-strength steel seat is a modern classic without drawing too much attention to itself. $747

In the outdoor dining room, wire chairs by Harry Bertoia for Knoll surround a mango wood table made by a local carpenter, Diego Madrazo.

"The big pieces are a result of metal knowledge and physical forces; they can be any size, on up and up...They too are a part of me, of course; however I am following certain laws of metal and its reaction to bending, falling, cutting, etc. Thus when these objects are played on by the wind and sun they will move, change shape, but always obey the law by which they were created."—Harry Bertoia, as quoted in Wright's "The Standard Oil Commission" catalog.

Barbara Hill's re-envisioning of her Houston condo involved a different sort of minimalism: rather than yearning for sleek, expensive surfaces, she wanted a home that included all the blemishes that remain when you strip these features away.

Wright will auction Sonambient sculptures that are part of the Dr. Martyna Miskinis Collection on September 23, 2014.

The kitchen features a wide Corian countertop and Bertoia stools. The polished ceramic flooring is from Céramique Décor in Québec.

The wool carpet is from Iberia. A Bird Chair by Harry Bertoia for Knoll and a Grasshopper Lamp by Greta Grossman round out the room.

The fluted cherry front door, designed by Scarpa, launches a rippling motif that reappears in furniture and on walls. The Harry Bertoia Bird chair is from Knoll.

There used to be walls; now Barbara Hill's bed offers views not just of Houston, but also a French farm table surrounded by a sextet of black and white Harry Bertoia chairs for Knoll.

The Dwell Store Pop-Up, the first-ever physical manifestation of the Dwell Store, will offer Dwell-favorite designs, including an exclusive jewelry stand by Zoë Mowat (pictured). Meanwhile, select exhibitors will have products for sale through the Cash & Carry program. The Dwell Bookstore by Skylight Books will be stocked with architecture, design, and sustainability titles, and feature book signings all weekend.

Cool bottle openers and jewelry from Iacoli & McAllister.

This "local prefab" home on the Isle of Skye is made mostly from materials sourced in northern Scotland. The timber-framed model, meant to evoke the simple agrarian barns of the area, can be constructed on-site in as little as a day and is designed for affordability.

In Roanoke Park, a neighborhood in Kansas City, Missouri, architect Matthew Hufft designed a home for his family that drew on the surrounding traditional homes. In the kitchen, Bertoia barstools are tucked under a custom honed-granite two-level kitchen island by a local company, Carthage Stoneworks. Hufft’s team designed and built the larch cabinets. The appliances are by Thermador.