This year’s Metropolis Conference, at the 2009 ICFF, focused on innovation—how designers, architects, businesses, and schools are reinventing themselves to fit 21st-century models. Now, videos from the day-long conference are available over on our Multimedia site. You can get a taste of the presentations from the one-minute trailer above. (Having trouble viewing it? Try this YouTube link.) Here’s the full program: Read more…
Even after our four-day live-blogging extravaganza, I ended up with scores of unpublished snapshots of worthy products and projects from this year’s ICFF. Herewith, one final show-and-tell from the 2009 International Contemporary Furniture Fair.
I’d been looking forward to meeting PARO, the cooing therapeutic robot seal from the Japan by Design exhibition, since we first wrote about it (her?) in the May issue. Finally, on Tuesday, I got some face time.
Cute enough to thaw even the most Javits-hardened heart. (Click here for a video of PARO in action.) Read more…
Walkers and canes may be surprising fare for ICFF, but not for Japan, a country that’s dealing with a rapidly aging population. Thanks to rising birth rates and declining death rates, nearly 32 percent of its citizens are over the age of 65 (Germany and Switzerland are the next closest contenders, with 27 percent seniors). No wonder, then, that Japan by Design, an exhibition intended to give an overview of the nation’s product culture, would include tools for the elderly. Read more…
The whispers began early on Saturday morning. “Did you hear Herman Miller isn’t doing the show this year?” Pregnant pause. “Think it’s the economy?”
Amidst the glittering booths and the plastered-on trade-show smiles, there was a subtle but palpable concern over the economy throughout the 2009 ICFF. “How will this year’s fair compare with years past?” everyone wondered. And the obvious answer seemed to be: not very well. Read more…
I gave a nod to a promotional bag a few years back, and now I feel it’s time for some more recognition. Tom Dixon’s copper lamé shoulder bags were impossible to ignore and in high demand. The only longer booth lines occured in the i Salone section when the Italians started serving up gelato, risotto, and Champagne. But there was a dark-horse contender: the Stockholm City Mission bag. If you were fortunate enough to run into Eero Koivisto, he probably handed you one of these two-sided textile versions of the classic plastic shopper. Claesson Koivisto Rune designed them pro bono for the nonprofit organization of that name, which receives 16 tons of textile donations a year. The homeless select two different fabrics, cut them to pattern, and sew them up. It’s a simple, smart, and totally worthwhile endeavor.
What recession? As usual, ICFF was full of bizarre, bank-breaking booths, from Bernhardt Design’s cheesy, trip-inducing, scuff-marked white plastic flooring (below left) to Amuneal’s aluminum-tubing bunker (below right), complete with bent iron (looking) butterflies. It apparently took only four days to build, and, no, they don’t know how much it weighs (if you build something like that, you’d better). Nearby, brandishing an axe, Shimna woodworker Timothy Aaron Huston (above) explained his booth’s accessories, which, besides the hatchet, include a double-take-inducing stuffed rabbit. “I told my boss I needed a $100 eBay budget,” he said. Huston predicts the axe will replace the antler as this year’s pointless-in-an-urban-setting design accessory. We’ll see.
2. If you can’t have the better booth, have the better business card.
Shimna had a cupboard full of wooden blocks stamped with its website (bummer about the logocoincidence though). Panelite had bubbly little clear plastic bricks of their paneling. Both are sitting on my desk now, while the rest of the cards I got are…somewhere.
Moments after filing her roundup of interesting wood furniture at this year’s fair, our senior editor spotted one last wooden collection that merits special mention.
Peter Mabeo is back at ICFF with more furnishings beautifully made by craftswomen in Gaborone, Botswana—but this year’s pieces were designed by global powerhouses Claesson Koivisto Rune and Patricia Urquiola. Mabeo met Urquiola while attending a conference in Cape Town, South Africa. They quickly decided to work together, and Urquiola accelerated the pace in order to have the pieces ready to show at a Salone del Mobile offsite event, last month, devoted to Africa. She designed a traditional-looking stool and variations on a side table, some of which feature a decorative detail embroidered in the same salvaged telephone wire that she saw local basket makers using during her trip.
Mabeo’s pairing with Mårten Claesson, Eero Koivisto, and Ola Rune came about in an even more unlikely way, at least geographically speaking. The London design store Skandium, which specializes in Scandinavian designs and is run by a Swede, a Finn, and a Dane who now live in England, carries the Maun Windsor Chair because the simple lines of Patty Johnson’s design fit well with their collection. But when Skandium creative director Chrystina Schmidt asked Mabeo for a complementary table, he told her he’d need the name of a Scandinavian designer. CKR delivered the sketches for the Kalahari table just last month, yet Mabeo’s artisans were able to produce the prototype in time for ICFF. With three legs, no frame underneath, and tonal dots on the surface, the design is deceptively complex. Made entirely of iroko, it had to be collapsible so it could be shipped from Botswana to anywhere in the world. Accordingly, the chubby legs screw directly into the tabletop, but don’t come all the way through to the surface: the three dots are simply a pleasing illusion. “It looks almost like a kid could have made it,” Koivisto said happily.
I’m a lover of obsolete technology. To give you an idea, I like the scratchy sound of 78s played on my wind-up phonograph, and I covet every megalethoscope that makes an appearance on Antiques Roadshow. So you generally won’t find me mooning over the latest injection-molded, CNC-milled, or parametric-modeled design. Michael Hurwitz’s booth, therefore, was a breath of fresh air at this year’s ICFF. Based out of a small woodworking studio in Philadelphia, he handcrafts stunning one-of-a-kind pieces but recently collaborated with a friend in Japan to produce the more affordable Marina Line using sustainable materials. My favorite is the five-legged Plum Blossom barstool made of local Pennsylvania cherry. “In Japan they’re crazy about cherry blossoms, but in a pinch, a plum blossom will substitute,” Hurwitz says, referring to the petal-shaped seat, which comes upholstered in 100% recycled Maharam textiles. You can see the rest of his work at www.michaelhurwitzfurniture.com.
I’m not sure that wood is any more prevalent at the fair this year than in the past, but overwhelmingly the pieces that have stood out for me are made of it. Take Ikea’s booth featuring its new PS Collection, which tasked designer’s with getting back to their Swedish roots. Wood was a heavily represented theme—one the press release refers to it as “a never-ending love story.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Christian Halleröd’s Karljohan, a solid birch-and-pine toadstool for Ikea, is irresistibly naive. Read more…
Blog feed
Newsletter
Twitter
BACK TO TOP