Looking ahead, designers find inspiration in the remix
The 25th International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York showed that design is all over the map, its contours muddled and its direction uncertain
The 25th International Contemporary Furniture Fair at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York, which ended last week, offered many surprises. There were dollhouse-size candelabra inserted into hanging glass bulbs like ships in a bottle and a coffee table whose base was sheathed in python.
There was even wallpaper inspired by a 1909 New York Times article about a monkey in a bathhouse.
But nothing caught the eye like the colossal head of William Shakespeare emerging from an African carpet.
Shakespeare in Africa, part of a rug collection by Milton Glaser for the Spanish company Nanimarquina, reflects the 83-year-old graphic designer’s efforts to yoke together disparate subjects in a way that avoids scrambling the brain.
‘‘I wanted to take two things that have no relationship with each other,’’ Glaser said, ‘‘and do what art does: to unify the apparently unrelated.’’
He wasn’t alone in his shoehorning. Two booths away, Spanish company Lladro presented several of its porcelain figurines, including a classic macaw, wrapped in World War I-era camouflage. A news release for the collection, which is called Dazzle, explained the concept as ‘‘the art of disguise, of the unrecognisable and the imperceptible’’.
Add to that the art of the remix. In design, as in any creative endeavour, mashups paradoxically represent inexhaustible possibilities, as well as the plateau of invention.
You can cover a macaw in any number of patterns, but the real challenge lies in moving beyond the bird. Given Spain’s economic trials, Lladro may be forgiven for making cosmetic adjustments to existing pieces rather than hiring designers to produce a new collection and investing in new moulds.
But Dazzle wasn’t just a mash-up; it was also a mascot. The furniture fair — along with a host of exhibitions and openings taking place over the rebranded 12-day festival called NYCxDesign — showed that design is all over the map, its contours muddled and its direction uncertain.
To be sure, when more than 500 exhibitors from around the world put on a show, as they did at ICFF, you can expect diversity. But you should also be able to pick out coherent strains of form, material or style.
Apart from a mysterious eruption of bronze and copper objects, and Swarovski’s ongoing search for another household product in which to embed its crystals, those strains weren’t clear. Several years of recession have taken their toll on innovation. And while there were many goods to admire, few had the uplifting effect of groundbreaking design.
‘‘I’m not seeing a lot of new ideas,’’ said Noel Wiggins, the founder of the New York design company Areaware, which is known for producing whimsical objects by local designers and this year showed a new version of a radio dock by Jonas Damon with an app for tuning in only public radio stations.
‘‘The design languages of the last five years are still with us.’’
And yet there were nascent signs of what may be next. With each ICFF, more emissaries show up from the frontiers of technology to demonstrate how computer-controlled tools will transform the look, price and environmental impact of objects.
For example, the British designer Tom Dixon, who previously showed teams assembling lighting fixtures to demonstrate how easy it is to produce one’s own designs, this year appeared with a digital laser cutter and other tools to create what was, in effect, a portable pollution-free factory making lacy metal pendant lamps.
And Dirk Vander Kooij, a young Dutch designer, showed the Chubby chair, made with a robotic arm that extrudes brightly coloured recycled plastic in a continuous line. Each chair takes about a half-hour to produce, Vander Kooij said, and sells for around $400 (12,000 baht). He also showed Chubby coat hangers, created from the variegated material the robot spits out when Vander Kooij changes the colour of the plastic. The hangers are about $130 for a set of eight.
Chubby may not look like a revolution, but it is approaching one. Compared with the five-figure prices attached to 3D-printed furniture a decade ago — pieces that took hours, if not days, to produce — Vander Kooij’s work is snappy and affordable. And it doesn’t have the brittle, ethereal quality of early 3D printing. He drives home this point on his website, where he describes Chubby as ‘‘precise as toothpaste. Heavy like oak.’’
In another wing of the Javits show, Massan Dembele, a master weaver from Burkina Faso, sat at a loom constructed from logs bound with twine and wove handspun cotton cloth decorated with West African totems, part of a programme organised by the non-profit British European Design Group to assist artisans in making goods for export.
Dembele operated the loom with his bare feet and wove his crocodiles and fish from patterns embedded in his brain.
Craft and small-batch production are ripe to produce something new, as well. Though artisanship is often touted as an antidote to digital culture, Vander Kooij and Dembele are more alike than different. Both men control the fabrication process, and that’s no small thing. With the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh renewing concerns about remote factory conditions, there is added value to the idea of designers producing locally and autonomously. The furniture fair and the coterie of New York design week events offer a stage for such efforts. This year, for example, Wanted Design in Chelsea presented ‘‘The Carrot Concept’’, a show of furniture produced in El Salvador by local designers, architects and entrepreneurs, working with Jerry Helling, the president and creative director of the American furniture company Bernhardt.
And though conceptual depth was rare, this design week did offer some of it, as when students of the Products of Design MFA programme at the School of Visual Arts appeared at Wanted Design with tools that helped visitors think more deeply about objects. A digital microscope, for instance, magnified surfaces 170 times to expose an alien world of beauty and order within everyday materials. In a related project, a series of brief recorded messages purported to express the viewpoints of the items on display.
Startling design innovation often follows material innovation. Nothing extraordinary happened on this front, either, but it is always enjoyable to watch designers at play.
At the Javits, John Eric Byers, a furniture maker, displayed gouged hardwood pieces that he painted and lacquered the colour of sable and accented with 24-carat gold. At Wanted Design, Sinje Ollen, a knitter whose needles never left her hands while she chatted, showed an Egg chair by Arne Jacobsen sheathed in bumpy emerald green wool and a modular rug made of zipped strips of knitted fabric. At ‘‘NoHo Next’’, a show of young designers’ work curated by the organisers of the three-year-old NoHo Design District, Souda from Brooklyn displayed textured, irregularly shaped porcelain vessels cast from leather moulds. At Collective .1, a new design show on a Hudson pier, Kyle DeWoody’s Grey Area gallery included work by Scott Campbell, a tattoo artist: fragrant wood panels burned with ornate patterns. And at BKLYN Designs, which returned to Brooklyn after a hiatus, John Randall of Bien Hecho in the Navy Yard offered a water cooler shingled with wood from a New York City water tower.
All these events were staged under the new moniker NYCxDesign (pronounced ‘‘NYC by Design’’). An initiative of City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn, this 12-day assortment of some 200 activities covered all five boroughs and touched various design disciplines, from graphics to jewellery to architecture. The mission, Quinn has said, is to create jobs in these industries while attracting visitors to New York, much as they flock to the city for Fashion Week.
In its first year, NYCxDesign was mainly a marketing campaign, providing street banners, a website with listings, a scheduling app and a presence on digital billboards in Times Square. Designers should be grateful for that much. Design doesn’t get out and strut around like fashion, and it needs more visibility. Milan comes alive when design is celebrated, but New York design week gets lost in the urban shuffle.
As long as people can get past the confounding abbreviation, NYCxDesign is poised to help both design and the economy. Now that the festival is over, Quinn said, the Economic Development Corp. is studying its economic success and growth potential. She added that she is confident the initiative will continue and hopes she will be around to lead it, something that depends on the success of her mayoral candidacy.
‘‘Whoever the next mayor is, they’ll have NYCxDesign,’’ she added. ‘‘There’s no question in my mind.’’