Last year, the Japan External Trade Organization arrived at ICFF with a huge exhibition that took up an entire annex pavilion to the main Javits floor. Many curious fairgoers got their first look at products like Naoto Fukasawa’s famed Infobar cell phone, a candy-bar doppelgänger that has been (criminally) limited to Japan. JETRO was smaller this year, but there were still visual treats to be had. We’ve selected a few of the sweetest morsels.
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Hecmec

Bright and cheery, Hecmec’s fold-up plastic chairs for kids have a soft, cardboard-tube structure that protects little fingers. They come in glossy cardboard (for extra durability) or plain (for customizing with your four-year-old’s precocious scrawls). www.hecmec.jp

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The Designboom Mart often acts as ICFF’s palate cleanser. When the glossier offerings on the show floor start feeling like too slick a pitch, it can be refreshing to see a group of mostly young designers selling their own inexpensive wares in a PR-free marketplace. And if a few of their products are more cloying than clever, there’s usually something better at the next table. But this year’s roster of 40-odd designers, from half as many countries, seem particularly inventive, and the addition of the Mart to the show proper (as opposed to just outside the entrance) helped integrate it into the fair. Here are a few favorites. Read more…

If you needed proof that the rudiments of punning are a crucial part of any design student’s curriculum, look no further than the booth for Parsons’s School of Constructed Environments, where the theme is Flow. On one table, there’s Currentcy, a glove by Kim White that employs radio-frequency identification (the same technology used to track cattle herds) to allow, say, joggers to buy a bottle of VitaminWater with the swipe of a finger instead of a credit card. Next to it is Chelsea Briganti’s Mademoicell, a kit that allows women to collect and store stem cells from their menstrual blood. (One passerby visibly blanched upon hearing what the petal-like silicone forms, one of which contained a dark-red liquid, were meant to hold.) And then there’s the Nücs, didactic bathroom toys by Rob Spalding that teach three- to six-year-olds about the flexibility of family structure and straightforwardly demonstrate that the sexes pees differently. Read more…

ArtFuture’s booth brought a bit of St. Petersburg to the Javits with designs that played off of the traditional Russian nesting doll, or matryoshka. The shapely silhouette (actually imported from Japan in the late-19th century) was used to great effect in Olga Prozorova’s Button-Table, which is supported by four massive wooden dolls; their white heads poke through the acrylic tabletop, making the shape of a button. Following a similar idea, Anna Pushkareva’s Roundabout table turns nine thin doll shapes, woven together with red cord, into a base for a glass table. The busy, overlapping forms (which would have frustrated Saarinen’s slum-clearing tendencies) are designed to replicate the look of a carousel in motion. Elvira Ziyangirova set the matryoshka on its side, filling a pear-shaped sack with foam and (shades of the Campana brothers) covering it with a layer of felt apples. It is an irresistible form, and passersby constantly stopped to squeeze the felt fruit, as though they were in a farmer’s market sampling the produce. Read more…

The Yale School of Architecture isn’t exactly known for producing industrial designers. (It’s the Yale School of  Architecture, after all.) But Joshua Rowley, who cotaught the elective seminar “Chair as Crucible,” which had students design and build a one-off seat in a semester, thinks the unfamiliarity of the form might have been a good thing. “They feel a little more like there’s nothing to lose,” he says. “We’re trying to get back to the original idea of the architect who designs everything.” The students were asked to take forms they were already working with in their building projects and explore them on a smaller scale. Andrea Vittadini, for instance, created Seated Chair (it appears to be kneeling) with thin, tubular legs that match the vertical strands of a facade he designed. Jacquelyn Hawkin’s CNC-milled Arm Chair (below)—narrow, black, and dour—wouldn’t look out of place in Sauron’s den or in her own building designs, which are full of jutting corners and unforgiving curves. Rowley says it’s “something that seems a bit dangerous but turns out to be comfortable.” Read more…

I was a little worried when I saw the title of Pratt’s exhibition (a collaboration with the furniture giant Herman Miller): Empathy for Culture. Like oatmeal, it sounded a little bland and a little mushy, and I had the strong suspicion that it was going to try to be good for me. Students were asked to research a particular culture—the Hmong tribes of Vietnam, for instance, or New York DIY punk kids—and design an object that communicated something about it. Fortunately, the 14 projects from the Brooklyn school are often sharp and thoughtful, displaying the specificity that comes from careful study and consideration. Sahar Ghaheri created cardboard boxes that double as modular shelving and are screen-printed with details from Chinese lace umbrellas, Mexican doily flags, and a Lebanese mosque. Reenacting the immigrant experience, the boxes can be used both to move and, when unpacked, to display prized possessions, keeping the old world and the new (whether Bahrain or Bushwick) in plain sight. “It’s a reembracing of what you left behind,” Ghaheri says.

Sara McBeen’s low Aata tables (top), which borrow their forms and colors from the Middle East’s vivid marketplaces and geometric design, replicate the region’s hospitality and convivial meals. They’re meant to be linked together, with the mustard-yellow and turquoise surfaces providing a place to share food. And Stevenson Aung’s light and colorful aluminum stools (below) take the Hmong’s dispersed community and translate it into structural lines that come together and draw apart. Read more…

Konstfack’s booth is notable for showing the work of just three students, Bengt Brümmer (middle), John Astbury, and Karin Wallenbäck, who met at the Swedish school last year and together make up What’s What Collective. Their designs—a trio of lamps called Push, Pull, and Pop—have a high sense of polish, as do the designers themselves, who might have stepped out of an ad for the downtown fashion company Opening Ceremony. (Theirs was also the only booth in the student area to be blaring music, giving it a bit of the feeling of a runway show.) Pop is a small table lamp with a top that bends forward to cover the heavy concrete base like a shy snail. A black cord that runs in and out of a cutaway in Pull’s slim ash body is used to maneuver the lampshade up and down. And Push is made from pleated, fabric-covered plastic that can be cinched up in the middle—a lamp with a belt!—to change the direction and quality of illumination. “We really wanted to make it look like an Italian suit,” Brümmer says. Read more…

In the ICFF student yearbook, the Maryland Institute College of Art, or MICA, would be the crunchy freshman in Birkenstocks, brandishing a Lonely Planet guide to Cambodia. The school’s low-tech exhibition, also called MICA (for Material Inspired Concepts & Artifacts), uses simple materials simply. Jute, cork, felt, and banana leaf are the basis for projects that wear their lack of elaboration as a (reclaimed-from-the-scrap-heap) badge of honor: a canopy for outdoor living, a transparent hemp body pillow with a striking geometric structure, bamboo digging tools to get tykes connected to the dirt, and a braided hemp-and-jute sandal with a removable banana-leaf insole. (Hemp is a perfectly fine material on its own, though I started getting other ideas when I was handed a business card made from a Trader Joe’s cereal box; it had just one word of the original packaging on it: “HIGH.” A coincidence?) Read more…

The architecture world’s eyes are trained this morning on Beijing, where a hotel tower in Rem Koolhaas’s massive Central China Television (CCTV) complex went up in flames, the New York Times reports. The 40-story Mandarin Oriental Hotel, scheduled for completion this year, might have caught fire during the citywide fireworks displays celebrating the lunar new year. Videos from bystanders are already being posted on YouTube (like the one shown here), but there’s no word yet on injuries or the full extent of the damage. Early reports suggest that the main building, China Central Television’s monumental headquarters, unveiled last summer as an Olympics showpiece, is so far unscathed.

When a decadelong worldwide architecture party comes to a sudden crashing halt—lights on, stop your cranes, everyone out—what comes next? A sheepish walk homeward? A hangover? If MOS—this year’s winner of the Museum of Modern Art and P.S. 1’s Young Architects Program to remake P.S. 1’s Long Island City courtyard—has its way, there’s more celebration yet to come.

Still, the firm’s design, afterparty, is less cheery than those of recent years, with a gray Bedouin-inspired conical city that will poke up well above the museum’s walls. MoMA’s chief curator of architecture and design, Barry Bergdoll, calls it “a return to basics.” Partygoers at the summerlong Warm Up dance parties will be able to escape the heat in MOS’s lightweight recyclable aluminum-frame structures, which employ au courant passive-cooling techniques. It’s a little less postapocalyptic than what I might have come up with, but you probably can’t win these types of competitions with a scheme for repurposed junkyards and packs of feral dogs.

MOS’s winning design, plus entries by the finalists—!ndie architecture, Bade Stageberg Cox, L.E.FT architects, and PARA-project—will be on display at MoMA over the summer. More pictures after the jump. Read more…