This chair is included in the exhibition Joris Laarman Lab: Design in the Digital Age, on view at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum through January 15, 2018. This Pixel chair (prototype) is part of a series of twelve unique Makerchairs designed by Joris Laarman and fabricated by Joris Laarman Lab. To make the bending grid...
For more than a decade, Dutch designer Joris Laarman and his team at Joris Laarman Lab have been looking to nature for information and inspiration. As he writes in the newly published book Joris Laarman Lab, “our digital age makes it possible to not just use nature as a stylistic reference, but to actually use the...
Elegant contrast is the defining characterstic of Korean sculptor, artist, and furniture designer Byung Hoon Choi’s body of work. This delicate black ink and gray wash drawing is no exception. The opposing forms, textures, and colors of the two geometries in this preparatory sketch for a bench produce a meditative composition echoed in Choi’s final...
Two breakthrough Finnish designers from Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial discuss their explorations of design, memory, and making with Triennial curator Andrea Lipps. Tuomas Markunpoika made his piece Engineering Temporality to honor his grandmother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. He welded steel rings over a traditional wooden cabinet and then burned away the wood, leaving behind...
Recorded live on February 4, 2016 at Cooper Hewitt. David Adjaye OBE is an architect and designer known for combining the aesthetics of his African heritage with classic, modernist design. His studio, Adjaye Associates, has established projects on four continents, including the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, scheduled to open...
Hans and Florence Knoll founded their company in 1938 on the belief that good design enriches our lives. That belief thrives today at Knoll through their pioneering analysis of work patterns, reimagining furniture for the ever-changing workplace, and setting standards for sustainable design. Throughout its history, Knoll has fostered the most innovative designers of our...
First stop: Moorhead & Moorhead’s Design Miami/ tent exterior. The Cooper-Hewitt group was greeted by brothers, Robert (industrial designer) and Granger (architect), to talk about the dynamic canopied entrance to the design show – a bris soleil of hand cut, twisted vinyl strips that perform a dance of shadows on the ground. Taking a...
The Vermelha chair is an iconic piece, originally conceived and prototyped in 1993 for a gallery show in São Paulo along with several other pieces. The construction of the chair is very time-intensive, as it is handmade from a huge length of rope wrapped and woven to create the chair’s structure. Though the piece is...
Fernando and Humberto explain their TransPlastic series as a fictional story wherein, in a world made of plastic, synthetic matter eventually becomes fertile ground for transgenic creations in which nature grows from and eventually overpowers plastic. The Trans… chair, the final piece in the Campanas’ TransPlastic collection, was designed especially for Cooper-Hewitt and is featured...
