The design industry takes over New York for NYCxDESIGN, a multifaceted platform for designers, showrooms, firms, students, and cultural institutions to share their latest projects, installations, and exhibitions. Here are a few highlights that you won’t want to miss from WantedDesign, Sight Unseen OFFSITE, ICFF, BROOKLYN DESIGNS, and independent studios.
The Fraction Collection
Gentner
This collection of furniture, lighting, and decorative art objects is associated not with a particular genre but rather with a stylized aesthetic vocabulary that Christopher Gentner took a year to hash out in his Chicago studio. The collection— the culmination of sculptural abstractions, a metal material palette, negative space, kinetic components, and subtle pops of color—will be on view at ICFF.
Bough
Kalon
L.A.-based Kalon Studios designed a simple collection that accentuates the inherent beauty of wood. The series—comprising a table, bench, and stool—is manufactured in a Pennsylvania workshop that specializes in woodwork.
EXCAVATED VESSELS
Jeff Martin Joinery
The Canada-based studio conjured otherworldly shaped glass containers by molding and casting glass around cork molds. The collection of vessels, goblets, basins, decanters, jugs, and pitchers will debut at Collective Concept, the capsule exhibition of the Collective Design fair at ICFF.
Alabaster Totem
Allied Maker
For Collective Concept at ICFF, Allied Maker designed six totems of light, each articulating a single material. The studio collaborated with six local artisans, each of whom specializes in either wood, metal, glass, stone, ceramic, or fabric. All of the luminaries stand over seven-and-and-a-half feet tall, creating a heightened presence informed by material and shape.
Guadalajara, Mexico–based design studio Mexa teamed up with the New York City–based gallery kinder MODERN to craft a collection of outdoor furniture for children. The colorful handmade series includes a collapsible play tent, rocking planters in multiple sizes, a sculptural outdoor double-seat chaise, and individual open-frame rockers.
Neotenic Lounge
JUMBO
Design duo Justin Donnelly and Monling Lee conceived a cast-steel chair with a “clumsy pipe” framework, finished in auto body paint and saddled with a dyed fur seat. The playful form was inspired by Konrad Lorenz’s 1949 study of “baby schema,” which the zoologist and Nobel laureate believed would trigger “innate releasing mechanisms” to elicit sympathy in the beholder.
Rye Sofa
TRE
In the international wing at Wanted Design, visitors are encouraged to configure and reconfigure partitions to make one solid mass. Articulated by vibrant and contrasting colors, three modules of varying sizes form myriad seating combinations.
