These Are the Best Things We Saw at the Miami Design Fairs This Year
Throughout the year, we dispatch Dwell’s editors to different design events around the world, including Salone del Mobile in Milan, NYCxDesign in New York, and the brand new, confusingly named Design Miami Paris (in Paris) to find the best new furniture, lighting, and design ideas out there. This week, photographer James Jackman and I headed to Design Miami (in Miami) for its annual hometown fair. The show has run alongside the venerable Art Basel Miami Beach since its inception 19 years ago, with a roster of galleries representing the most vaunted designers in the world.
Of course, Miami Basel week notoriously attracts satellite events courting well-heeled collectors in town as well as thousands of other art-inclined people. This year, they ranged from genteel talks at the fairs to a costumed wrestling match (seriously) underneath a freeway overpass, where the prize was a championship belt improbably designed by the eminent Marc Newson. (I’ve informed my friends that we’re doing this instead of karaoke on our birthdays from now on.)
One of the latest additions to the Basel–adjacent calendar is the emerging designer-focused Alcova, an exhibition that runs alongside Salone del Mobile in Milan every spring, debuting its first U.S. edition with some 35 designers selected by founders Valentina Ciuffi and Joseph Grima.
Canvassing it all, this is some of the best design work James and I saw.
The installation with the most, um, valences was by Marijke Jorritsma who works for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, designers Daniel Perlin and John Vieweg, and technologist KamranV. Here Perlin, a prolific experience designer, explains what’s going on in their room wrapped in space shuttle-ready gold foil.
I’m going to get this wrong, but my best summary is that the piece is a vinyl record studded with space rocks. It contains work by 20 musicians meant to be played through four speakers simultaneously. The limited-edition record arrives flat-packed in panels printed with images of invented galaxies. The packaging can be assembled into a chair on which you’re meant to sit while listening to the record. My description may or may not be totally accurate, but I do know that proceeds from sales of the work will go to the independent nonprofit radio station, Dublab.
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