At first, seeing exhibitions incorporating home furnishings worried me, thinking they turn galleries into shops for luxury goods. But this concern is misguided.
furniture
Posted inArt
The Rich History of Women in Design, From 1900 to Now
Here We Are! is an expansive exhibition exploring the role of women in furniture design, fashion design, industrial design, and interior design.
Posted inNews
This Pricey Burger Chair Doesn’t Come With Fries, But It Is Inspired by Art
Relish Italian luxury retailer Seletti’s “Burger Chair” — which looks uncannily like Claes Oldenburg’s “Floor Burger.”
Posted inArt
A Young Designer’s Pulpy and Surprisingly Personal Furniture
Thomas Barger, whose material of choice is colorful paper pulp, is part of a generation of adventurous furniture designers reshaping their field in the US.
Posted inArt
The Gift of Simplicity in America’s Love Affair with the Shakers
The Metropolitan Museum of Art examines the emergence of 19th-century Shaker minimalism, and its influence on American Modernism.
Posted inBooks
The Chairs that Architects Have Designed
Before he designed the soaring 1962 TWA Flight Center at JFK Airport, Eero Saarinen experimented with gravity-defying design through his one-legged white and red Tulip chair.
Posted inBooks
The Origins of Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal in a One-Legged Chair
When the TWA Flight Center opened in 1962 at New York’s JFK Airport, its swooping form seemed to embody flight itself, with its two white wings rising from the tarmac.
Posted inArt
A Designer Experiments with Digital Design, After 60 Years of Handcrafted Furniture
Designer Wendell Castle has made a career out of challenging the boundaries that define art and furniture.
Posted inArt
Lincoln’s Loveseat: Help Restore the ‘Courting Couch’ Where Abe Wooed His Babe
There are plenty of artifacts of Abraham Lincoln, from his fine pocket watch acquired while he was a successful Illinois lawyer to the presidential top hat he’s believed to have worn for that infamous 1865 evening at Ford’s Theater.
Posted inArt
Breeding the Perfect Chair
Good or bad, every experiment starts with a hypothesis. For Dutch-born designer Jan Habraken with New York-based design studio FormNation, it was the question: “What if we apply the science of genetic engineering to an inanimate object?”
Posted inOpinion
Color-Changing Furniture Controlled by Electrical Pulses
Part of choosing to buy an aesthetic object, whether that’s a piece of art, a decorative sculpture, or a provocative furniture item, is committing to living with it. Sure, your Zaha Hadid desk looks amazing, but would you really want to do work on it every day? Into that conundrum comes British designer Ron Arad whose new series “No Bad Colors” is a series of pieces that can change in response to any environment.
Posted inOpinion
Will the UK’s New Design Copyright Law Kill Innovation?
Patrick Cariou’s lawsuit against artist Richard Prince for wrongfully appropriating his photographs of Rastafarians into new artworks provided a benchmark for the role of copyright in contemporary art, though the case is still being debated in appeals. But how do those same issues impact the world of design, where knockoffs of iconic designs are omnipresent and it’s even more difficult to tell when inspiration becomes appropriation, and appropriation becomes infringement? Later this year, the British government plans on extending the copyright term for design, stretching the protected period from 25 years from when the creation was first marketed to 70 years after the death of the object’s creator. Could that policy impact the creative dynamism of design in the U.K.?