Love the colour palette and shapes of Alessi's Tonale tableware collection by David Chipperfield. Chipperfield drew his inspiration for the line from the simple shapes found in ancient Korean stoneware and the muted palette found in Italian painter Giorgio Morandi's work. Find it in stores now.
We lost beloved designer Pierre Paulin last June; gratefully Artifort continues to manufacture many of the French master's iconic pieces including the instantly recognizable Tulip, & Little Tulip, Orange Slice and Ribbon Chairs.
Are you familiar with his gorgeous ABCD Sofa? In 2007 Artifort celebrated 2 big milestones by rereleasing the ABCD: Paulin's 80th birthday & his 50th year designing for the company. I wrote about it at my day job in '07- check out my clever one-liner: Sometime in your future you will have better-looking friends and swankier parties. When you do, you'll want the ABCD sitting there, ready to go. A silly line for a gorgeous work of art.
If you love Finn Juhl's Poeten, but don't know what on earth would sit alongside it and flatter it in the way it needs to be flattered, bid welcome to The Baker Sofa. Heavenly proportioned with legs of teak or walnut, the Baker was designed by Juhl in 1951 for Baker Furniture in the US and has now been relaunched by One Collection in Denmark.
How did it go by so fast? You've a mere 4 days left to get to NY to check out the magnificent-looking Bauhaus exhibition at the MoMA, which ends on Monday, January 25th. You may have heard a lot about the Bauhaus recently as the institution celebrated 90 years since its inception this past Fall. Somehow unfamiliar? The Bauhaus was the precursor to Art & Design Schools as we know them today, developing the idea of the foundation year. The famous school/design movement also featured an all star cast: Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, just to name a few:
Bauhaus players, from top to bottom:
Josef Albers; post-Bauhaus Hommage to the Square, 1965
Marcel Breuer; Club Chair, later called the Wassily Chair, 1925
Marianne Brandt, the only student featured here amongst the profs; Ashtray, 1924. Now being produced by Alessi.
Wassily Kandinsky: On White II, 1924.
Paul Klee, Twittering Machine, 1921-31
Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe; Barcelona Chair, 1929. Available through Knoll.
If you can't make it to NY, the MoMA site is rich with Bauhaus content and definitely worth a look. I'm sick with upset that I missed this one. Hope that you got to see it in person!
Brilliant design collective Nendo contributed to the Tokyo stop of Moleskine's Detour exhibition, a show that invited fifty designers to interpret the iconic Moleskine sketchbook. Nendo's take on the challenge was to design a three-dimentional landscape, showing how sketching skips between the two and three-dimensional, and turning the sketchbook itself into a place.
Moleskine's Detour has had 6 international stops, all highlighting different interpretations of their famous notebook by creatives such as Toyo Ito, Lou Reed, Cynthia Rowley, Tord Boontje, Spike Jonze, and many more. Take a tour of the works here. All designs feature a short video af hands flipping through sketched or sometimes chiseled pages. You may want to turn the sound off though. Just a heads-up.
*Nendo's design can be found under the name Oki Sato, the Canadian/Japanese founder and head designer of Nendo.
Leonard Cohen is haunting me. It started late last week when an old friend arrived in town unexpectedly and we had the chance to hang out for a few days. He's a big fan of Leonard Cohen and his visit to Montreal had me getting dragged to Leonard's house for a visit. The topic of Cohen came up several times; for instance, a late-day visit to the Old Port had me witness firsthand "and the sun pours down like honey on our lady of the harbour". On Friday he collapsed onstage in Spain, but is said to be doing okay now, thank heavens. And on Monday it was his birthday! Happy 75th dear Leonard!
Today, I visited Aesop's website and Leonard Cohen's Famous Blue Raincoat started playing. I thought- how wonderful! It was the very first and only time I've been happy to have music confront me when a website loads. It was beautiful. But that wasn't it at all! Turns out I turned on my iTunes accidentally, somehow, and there he was. Magically? In any case, I'll take the hint and post today about the wonderful Leonard Cohen. If you're lucky enough to live in the US, you're not too late to see him live and I'm super-jealous having missed him in Montreal. He's back in North America on October 17th.
There are few artists today, young, old, that can evoke mood and emotion the way he can. The music and the lyrics hold such beauty; for many of us the voice does too.
