Vases Loaded

Very quickly I wanted to link to a nice blog post written about my Art & Architecture Tour of Lincoln Center. I can't really pat myself on the back over it: Sims works for LC. He can't very well say anything too negative about the tour. Of course my tour is awesome, so I'm sure it wasn't difficult to find good things to say about it. Anyway, it was interesting to see what he remembered most.


That's not what I wanted to talk about, though. I wanted to show some things from Moser Glass that I spotted at the ICFF. Ludwig Moser founded the company in 1857, and they hail from Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic, which is sort of smack in the middle of the triangle formed by Prague, Dresden, and Richard Wagner's headquarters, Bayreuth.

Unfortunately I need to say that this was the website I found quite a bit less than inspiring, although perfectly nice to look at. For my purposes, I found it very awkward to get around. Every movement I made seemed to require a reload of a web page and constant backpedaling. The photos of their products are so small that they're hardly worth browsing. To be fair, this extremely high-quality cut glass is certainly better seen in person, anyway, where one can fully appreciate its weight, clarity, and the way it catches light. Their contact person was also very nice, very helpful, and quicker to respond than most. Having experienced the whole range of possible responses to email queries, I can sincerely say I place a lot of value on that.

Having been around for well over a century, they not unexpectedly have some very nice traditional work that's been treasured by royalty and heads-of-state all over Europe. In fact, they're quite proud of their clients and list on their website the kings and princesses who have owned the various collections over the years.

While I liked tracing their evolution into the modern age, from about the 1910s to the late-1920s, it was in 1934 that I noticed something that really grabbed me. It's a collection called simply "Bar" from 1934, designed by Rudolf Eschler:


The four wide facets of the base and the gentle curve of the vessel make this so serene and sophisticated. More than that, although it's seventy-five years old, I think no one would be at all shocked to see this in a store today. There's something wonderfully timeless about the design.

Leaping quite a bit forward to 1998, here's a vase called "Ikebana," designed by Lukáš Jabůrek, who I believe is their most promising designer:

[On a side note, I'm about the least linguistically xenophobic person you'll ever meet, but I have no idea how the Czechs can get anything typed at all, with all those diaereses, circumflexes, carons, and tildes over every other letter.] This is also offered in a version with vertical facets that curve up from the bottom to the top. There's something beautifully chemistry laboratory about it. Things like this always strike me as being somehow naturalistic in a very subtle, even subconscious sort of way. But it's also taking great advantage of the medium of cut glass. It uses the materials to create an intense optical experience and manipulate the quality of light hitting it.

Two years later they unveiled "Gema" by Kateřina Doušová:

This is equally fascinating for the way it exploits the qualities of the glass, but adds color to the mix. The various different color combinations are also dramatic and very well chosen: icy blues, deep rich purples, firey yellows. Each of them is gorgeous in its own way, while being very different in character at the same time.

In 2002 they did something a bit more fun and clever. This is "Tipsy" by Jiří Rydlo:


I had seen these before, not at a trade show, but in some design store somewhere. At the time, I didn't take much of a closer look to note that they were by Moser. The more your guests drink, the more likely I can imagine that you're going to have liquor all over the table, but I still adore this concept. They're perfectly counterbalanced with the weight of a heavy glass base, of course, but can rock back and forth. Even just visually, they're uncommon and interesting. I would also think that the movement of them, as a group of people pick up their glasses and set them back down, would be delightfully festive. They're also available in a clear version, but I think the lens at the bottom of a matte glass would help emphasize its movement even better.

Getting back to Lukáš Jabůrek, most of the newer items Moser has out that impressed me were his designs. The rest of these are all his and all from 2009. First, the vases, here's "Balada":

This was where I started to see Moser as an adept competitor in the present design market, in addition to doing high-quality work. This is a great piece. It's a very simple relationship, but so well done. At the top, it's vertical, rigorous, formal, geometric, and restrained. The horizontal pattern at the bottom is in sharp contrast free, loose, casual, and almost organic.

The next three make up Jabůrek's "Comfort" collection, lens cut:

Very nice, although this one could probably have appeared just as easily in the 1950s or '60s.

Spool cut, which is interesting for a lot of the same reasons "Balada" is, though I think just slightly less successful:

Here the serious formality is set against something much more fun and playful, but I think just aesthetically I don't find it as satisfying.

And my definite favorite of the three, olive cut:

It's like he took the lens cut version above, got drunk, and started carving away at it. But it's more than that. The lines that swirl around the middle of it have completely distorted the whole vase as if you were seeing it in a fun-house mirror. There's something almost irreverent about this which appeals to me in the same way as Jaime Hayon's work for Baccarat. At the same time, it's utterly sculptural, dynamic, even futuristic.

Jabůrek also designed a couple sets of drinking glasses for Moser. Here's "Zero," which is extremely edgy and modern:


And "Galileo" which is some of the most suave and elegant glassware I've seen in a long time:

I'd like to point out that Moser specifically recommends against putting any of their pieces into a dishwasher. I don't have a dishwasher, anyway, much to my chagrin and ongoing annoyance (I very literally dream about having a dishwasher on a somewhat regular basis). The pin-point bottom of the champagne flute would be exquisite with the pale champagne color filling it up. However, if for some reason it were allowed to stand over night with the beverage still in it, it would be practically impossible to get clean the next morning. I'd never descend to living in squalor, but strict housekeeping is not one of my most reliable habits, so I have to consider these things. Regardless, they are visually stunning, and the soft, graceful curves of their stems would feel so perfect in one's hand.

©2010, Ryan Witte

New Directions

I've discussed Palo Samko before, and as always, I continue to be fascinated with the evolution of his work. He displayed at two of the trade shows this year.

What immediately caught my eye was his "Compass Table." Unfortunately, this is a one-of-a-kind piece and it's already been sold. But I really liked it, and it shows Samko's cleverness:

On the table there you can see his "Dali's Clock." The arms drip down over the bulbous cylinder inside the glass case.

These were the only photos they took of it. You can click those, but what may not be obvious is that there's a working compass embedded in the center of the table, and at the outside edge, at the four compass points, are letters inlaid into the wood: N, E, S, W, each one about two-inches or so tall. I do happen to own a compass. I'm not sure exactly why, to be honest. Probably I was working on some architectural project. But I'm going to assume most people don't own one, unless they're avid hikers. So how would you orient this table, unless it had a compass built into it? Problem solved.

Once you've got it positioned exactly right by the compass points--and no one at dinner even needs to ask if it is, all they have to do is look at the compass needle--the table begins its dialogue with the dining room. I imagine all but very few rooms in very, very few houses are oriented on a perfect north-south axis. One's attention is then drawn to how the presumably right-angled room is canted off that axis in a way I'd imagine would seem mostly arbitrary in most cases.

Then it calls attention to the house or building as a whole, considering that most structures are designed with their various rooms all aligned to the same axis. Next, its dialogue extends at least to the street the building faces, and if in a city like mine, where there's a street grid, to the surrounding neighborhood, as well, if not the whole city. Beyond that, the table refers to the magnetic field of our entire planet, and to the angle of the sun as it streams in through our windows. From a simple dining room table to...the solar system.

Over the years, Samko's booths have been a lot of fun because there are surprises in the booths as well as in the furniture. You open a drawer, and there's a bunch of tiny cows inside. Open another, and there's a tiny man riding a bicycle. Or the man riding the bicycle on the table is pulling a blimp floating above the table like a chandelier. It's all so delightful. Well, I was happy to discover that he's been pursuing his whimsical sculptures with even more enthusiasm. In fact, he's begun selling them, as well.

This is called "Ark/ Whatever I Could Steal from My Kids," and "what he could steal" obviously included the blimp:

Click that.
I think the sculptures are very fun, but the Ark is also quite beautiful in its own way. When you see the sculptures displayed along with his furniture, they make so much sense, visually. I'm going to assume that he waits until his kids are done with those things before he takes them.

This is "Time Machine":

Looking at it more closely now, I think it may be missing a flux capacitor.

©2010, Ryan Witte

Use/ Re-Use

I recently came across another designer doing some extremely fascinating work, Jo Meesters from the Netherlands.

First some furniture, this is "Reshaping Wood":

He used water jets to cut the wood in a pattern inspired by traditional woodwork.  It has a strange relationship with its use, and certainly it would be perfectly easy to cover this with a glass tabletop.  But I think that misses the point.  What I find really interesting about this is how the form of the table guides and dictates the way it will be used.  There's no reason this can't be a showcase for floral arrangements or a place to put your mail.  But where and how it can be used like a normal table is decidedly uncommon.

He's also doing some interesting things with reclaimed materials.  This is "Odds & Ends, Bits & Pieces," the stool:

All of the pieces are made from reclaimed wood and overstocked blankets, cut into strips and rewoven.  The discarded blankets are beautiful reinterpreted as upholstery, but where it becomes really interesting is in a piece like the shelves:

So it's an item with one traditional use, a blanket, reinvented to become something else, upholstery, but applied to a piece of furniture that one wouldn't normally expect to be upholstered.  Very interesting.

Similarly, "My Secret Garden" is made from discarded wool blankets and also incorporates needlepoint work:

The floral patterns would also come off as being particularly traditional, but at the same time, it's a very unusual design.  He calls it a "carpet," but it appears to have almost more negative space than positive.  It's a complete reinvention of the idea of a carpet, and it becomes more a sort of adornment, accessory for the floor, rather than a floor covering.

There's even more reinvention in "My Home is My Wardrobe."  Here shirts become curtains:

And the rug becomes a robe:

I'm especially reminded of some of Martin Margiela's revolutionary Deconstructivism from the 1980s (Margiela's website is freaking brilliant, by the way).

Onto some housewares, here are a few vases that use rapid prototyping technologies, which I've discussed before.  Here's "Botanical Ceramics":

And "Redefining Genetics":

I was really impressed by "Ornamental Inheritance," though:

They look like more or less traditional vases with some kind of ornamental pattern in blue glaze.  But if you look more closely, the designs are actually executed with very modern imagery, airplanes, architecture, and so on:

That's extremely smart, and they're quite beautiful, on top of it.

©2008, Ryan Witte

Fine Fabrics

A couple of quick items:

First, one of my favorite textile designers from Brooklyn, Aviva Stanoff, unveiled some new pieces.  This happened a while ago, but they still deserve to be seen.  Stanoff creates textures and amazing color effects in the velvet with real live plants and flowers, which impressed me so much when I first discovered her work and interviewed her for the story.  She also has one of the most impeccable eyes for color that I've ever seen.

I was also made aware of some new products from Chilewich.  Their table linens are all very earth-toned and neutral, from what I can tell.  I definitely need some super glossy, shocking bright orange vases arranged on this first table.  But the settings are still wonderfully textural:

This one I thought had a vaguely Asian sort of sensibility to it, very minimal and classy:

This Dot table runner looks like fine linen, but it's actually a new interpretation of an outdated pressed vinyl manufacturing process:

©2008, Ryan Witte

Master at Play

And now, for the Grande Finale. 

Sitting over on my table here was one of the last things I had to go through.  It was an envelope saying "A Century of Chairs" and very simply "barcelona design" at the top.  I had no idea what it was.  Finally I popped the CD in and took a look.  At first, I was kind of like "eh, this is okay, but it's a little...weird."

But then I kept looking...and looking...and sinking deeper and deeper into this universe, and it suddenly dawned on me that I was looking at some of the most brilliant work I'd ever seen.  Not for a very, very long time have I been so overwhelmed with respect for a single designer.  I'm agog.  His name is Jaime Hayon.

What.  Shut up, he's dressed for dinner at Björk and Matthew Barney's house.

I should warn you, I tried to narrow this post down as much as I could, but it will still be a big one.  There's just too much to see and making matters worse, his publicity photographs are absolutely gorgeous, in and of themselves.

This will be another one of my goofy analogies, but it's almost like an alien from another planet with a bad memory was sent to study earth, but accidentally arrived in the 1930s, and then was asked when he got home to try and remember what earth people's houses looked like inside to recreate them for the Alien Planet Museum of Art.  And coming from me, that is a very high compliment.

I'll go into the individual pieces, but to understand why I say that, you really need to see all of them together.  Individually, each piece is remarkably distinctive, a little bit Baroque, vaguely familiar but a little bit...off somehow, and profoundly interesting.  But together, they just create the most bizarre universe, and this, ladies and germs, is the Future of Furniture Design.  Click these:

The line is called "Showtime" and Hayon was actually inspired by films from the 1930s.  So a lot of the cues are coming from that period.  But he's got every decade from the '40s though to the '80s in there as well--there's even a little Eames--so seamlessly fused together into one crazy new aesthetic.

Here are some closer shots of the sideboard and table in blue:

And by the way?  That deep, rich cobalt blue could make sweet love to my eyeballs all day and all night.

Here's the armchair with a canopy, which I'm fairly certain can be attached and detached at will:

And the loveseat:

I have to show you the glamour shot, too, because the photography is amazing:

And a close-up studio shot of the vases:

When you see a grouping like that it becomes obvious this guy has the most impeccable sense of color.  None of the colors are all that unusual, but the combination of them is extraordinarily suave.

But you see what he's doing here--he's so adeptly walking all these extremely fine lines like a tightrope.  It's just campy enough to be fun, but without ever being gimmicky.  It's so very rich in cues from the history of design, but without ever being clichéed.  And there are all these elements that seem strangely familiar, but he's combined them together in a way that becomes almost Surreal.  It's completely blowing my mind.

And there's more!

He did a small number of pieces for Bisazza, who I've written about before, truly at the very top of their game in the art of mosaics.  Here's the mirror, table, and vases--click this:

Moving on.  Here's Hayon's bath line, "Artquitect," click this:

I think some of this gets a little bit too delicate for my taste, but there's still some incredible things happening.  Namely the sink:

Don't ask me why the shocking yellow isn't bothering me; it just...works.  He also did this in shiny metallic gold, which is so rich and beautiful.  But what's really getting me is the integrated mirror, which is like this isolated Art Nouveau sort of detail, and evidently it can also be a lamp.  Here it is in black:

The legs have a vaguely Art Nouveau sensibility to them, also, but it's so subtle and anything but derivative.

Speaking of lamps, here's "Josephine" in silver:

That gun-metally grey is delicious.  It also comes in gold, which you can see here in the sconce version:

It's sort of like Sears Catalogue circa 1973 on crack.  Out of control.

And here's "Bubbles" in white:

I actually think that'd be great in a bathroom, like a bubble bath.  In copper it's just completely from another world:

And here's a glass candle holder shaped like an old oil lamp:

I'm fairly certain I don't have to tell you how unbelievably clever I think that is--especially since it's in the shape of an object that's supposed to give off light, but then it's black, which is the polar opposite of lightness?  No, didn't think so.

Here's the horse vase you may have noticed in the bathroom up above, in black:

And platinum:

Okay, so it's a vase...but it's a vase that hangs on the wall, which is already a little unusual.  And then it looks like something taxidermied, but it's a horse...people don't hunt horses and put them on their wall like a trophy, do they?  I think that would be weird.  And then the flowers come out of the center of the horse's head, like a unicorn's horn?  It's just fascinating and beautiful, anyway.

But that's nothing compared to this.  Hayon is also art director for Lladró.  Remember I posted about them?  I should have known they had some insane genius at the helm.  Here's his "Conversation Vase 1B" for Lladró, click this:

Uh...

Did I just have an acid flashback?

On the vase part, it's maybe a clown with hearts on his face? wearing some kind of strange cartoon bunny costume.  Then on the top of the vase is a jester holding a staff with a heart at the top, wearing a Michelin Man shirt and a bunny helmet with a huge arrow through it and a bird on one of the ears.

Who comes up with something like this?  "Conversation" is right.  Your house-guests could probably spend the majority of the evening just trying to figure out what this is supposed to be.  And I have a sneaking suspicion that was the whole point.

Hayon Studio

info@hayonstudio.com

And I'm still not done.  I've asked if Jaime would be willing to do an interview with me, also.  His representative said it wouldn't be possible until after August, but stay tuned.  I definitely need to get into this guy's head if he consents to answering some questions for me.

©2008, Ryan Witte