Core77

From Broadway to Rockaway, Pelham to Freshkills, 8.2 million people call New York City home. On the occasion of New York Design Week 2012, Core77 takes a moment to survey the landscape of all five boroughs with an open call to designers to represent their hometown.

Since its very beginnings, the city has been a trading grounds—a venue at the crossroads of ideas, commerce, materials and innovation. The 35 designers representing nearly as many neighborhoods in the ALL CITY ALL STARS continue to explore that space, negotiating technologies, materials, histories and futures in the crucible of a dynamic city. Interpretations may vary, but the voice of New York City is as bold, inquisitive and imaginative as ever.

Core77 OPEN: All City All Stars
350 Bowery at Great Jones Street
Friday, May 18-Tuesday, May 22
11AM - 6PM Daily
**Special Guest Nail Artist Ami V on Saturday and Sunday! Book your appointment at management [at] elsalonsito.com**

Opening Reception
Saturday, May 19, 7-10PM
rsvp [at] core77.com
Spread the word via Facebook!
Admission is based on capacity so please arrive early!

Bronx
» Michael Ferris Jr.
» Michelle Frick
» Sean Paul Gallegos
» Talitha James
» Ryan Thistle

Brooklyn
» Chris Adamick
» Chen Chen and Kai Williams
» Evan Clabots (Nonlinear Studio)
» Sebastián Errázuriz
» Kiel Mead
» Elizabeth New
» Ruta Reifen
» Uhuru Design
» Seldon Yuan
» Karl Zahn

Manhattan
» Harry Allen
» Brad Ascalon & Frederick McSwain for Neal Feay Studio
» Ben Light
» Rich Brilliant Willing
» Jeremyville

Queens
» Piet Houtenbos
» Daniel Michalik
» Alta Price & Jonah Koppel for Artware Editions
» Richard Saja
» Patrick Townsend

Staten Island
» Rama Chorpash
» Victoria Munro
» Tattfoo Tan
» Scott Van Campen & Mark Zappasodi

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Photography for Core77 by Nicole Lenzen

For its New York debut, the Frieze Art Fair was held on Randall's Island Park, in an expansive 225,000 sf. tented structure custom-designed by Brooklyn architecture firm Solid Objectives — Idenburg Liu (SO — IL). Many Manhattanites were skeptical at first of the location choice, but access to the fair was made easy by regular ferry trips, shuttles from the subway, or quick cab rides from Manhattan. Attendees seemed to enjoy the adventure associated with going to a dedicated self-sufficient location, where they were greeted with outdoor sculptures and installations upon arriving on the island.

The fair hosted 180 international contemporary galleries, representing over 1,000 of today's most important artists. Critics argued that the fair did not bring enough newness and lacked risk-taking on the part of the galleries, but that did not seem to hinder the business of art, with many galleries reporting significant sales on the first day. Overall, the event was well produced, and the high quality of the galleries represented were positive factors that would most likely encourage the fair's subsequent return to New York. In addition, the tasty food vendors nourishing Frieze visitors certainly trumped most trade fair food options.

Repeating themes throughout the fair involved conveying and challenging notions of time and space, as with Darren Almond's piece Perfect Time. The use of color provided splashes of energy, such as Paul McCarthy's blue silicone sculpture portraying the dwarf Sleepy from the classic, Snow White. Many artists created works from found objects, like used clothing tacked compositionally to wood in Tom Burr's These Patterns of Public Display. Other mediums ranged from traditional to unconventional, such as acrylic paint, paper, canvas, wood, textiles, plastic, mirrors, glass, metal, resin, and not to be neglected, Damien Hirst's formaldehyde-preserved dead animals. Physical floor or wall installations and sculptures seemed to dominate the show over paintings, drawings, and video. Design and art overlapped on occasion, with some works serving to both aesthetic and function, such as Andrea Zittel's Aggregated Stacks and Richard Artschwager's impressive red oak and cowhide chairs.

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It's not surprising that the most refined and spare presentation I've seen at NY Design Week so far took place at the Jil Sander store in Soho, where Kvadrat celebrated one of its best-selling fabrics, Hallingdal 65, by inviting over thirty young designers to use it in new works. Since Hallingdal was designed by Nanna Ditzel in 1965 , it's become famous for its durability and rich color palette. It's been used in homes, hospitals and schools, but it's never been used for more artful purposes until this show for NY Design Week, at least not on this public scale.

Jonah Takagi's vintage camping gear-inspired Basecamp (above) that got such a positive response when it was shown in Milan was placed front and center. Around the corner was Stephen Burks' Play, a set of wooden room dividers covered in bright shades of Hallingdal 65. The dividers are joined by a zipper, allowing you to attach as many panels as you want to suit your space.

On the other side of Burks' dividers was the largest piece, Jonathan Olivares' Chaise for Hallingdal 65, which asks "What if a piece of fabric wanted to relax?" Surely, if any fabric deserves a break from all its hard work over the past 45 years it's Hallingdal 65. "Since fabric is normally used to upholster furniture designed for humans, Olivares thought it would be a fitting gesture to instead make a piece of furniture designed only to hold a piece of fabric." By setting up a roll of yellow Hallingdal 65 on aluminum castings and letting it roll out and drape naturally, Olivares invites the fabric to "stretch out, and maybe...relax."

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Furniture designer Tamara Petrovic is one half of 0 TO 1—a studio that she and architect Garner Oh founded in 2009—but she presides over their showing for NY Design Week at Con Artist NYC. Called Industrial + Industrial, the exhibition is the result of a project to create design objects from the remnants of industrial manufacturing.

Petrovic came up with many clever design solutions by making simple alterations to materials like felt, cork and cardboard. Fruit Play is a fruit plate made from a thick slab of cork with holes cut out in different sizes. Bright fruit not only looks great in contrast with the natural brown cork, but the softness of the material and the size of the holes ensure that the fruit makes minimal contact with the container, "extending fruit shelf life and staging each piece openly."

Snowflakes is a series of trivets and coasters made by stringing felt balls together in a circle. Flowers also repurposes wool felt, this time into a set of hairpins, but the real standouts are Cylinder 14 and Cylinder 16, two chairs made from recycled cardboard cores that were once used as rolls to wrap fabric or packaging materials. The challenge here was to "reuse the material and reveal its intrinsic beauty."

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The Northern Oddities showing at Ivana Helsinki Concept Store features "eight curious Finnish design brands on their crusade to New York City." This is the first time any of these designers have sent their work "beyond the borders of the Old Continent," and their colorful, graphic patterns and fun, approachable products are a safe bet for a warm reception during NY Design Week.

If you make your way past Ivana Helsinki's dresses and blouses you'll see a table set with Northern Oddities' wares: kitchen accessories, lamps, toys and paper goods, like the plywood notebooks by Private Case. The notebooks come in two sizes and are made from birch wood, a material indigenous to Finland, where they use it for everything from "hand tools and furnishing to bridges and churches." The wood is thin enough not to be bulky and hard enough to provide a sturdy surface to write on. There's even a handy little pencil holder on the side.

Sanna Pelliccioni made the boldest statement with Bombo, her line of colorful kitchen accessories (above) with bright blue and yellow graphics of families printed on hand towels, serving trays and plates.

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Years ago a Frank Lloyd Wright sketch of what appears to be a globe stand (above) surfaced at the Foundation in his name, which holds archives for more than 20,000 of his drawings. A Chicago-based company named Replogle Globe, the world's largest manufacturer of globes, approached the Foundation seeking permission to realize it. Permission granted, they produced the Wright Globe, a walnut pedestal supporting an antique-hued globe and standing at 39 inches.

The drawing is an unidentified concept for one of the Prairie Homes that Mr. Wright designed in the early 1900s. The only marking on the drawing is in his handwriting and says, "Something like this." The proportions, and interpriation, of the drawing were calculated based on the scale of other drawings from this time period.

They apparently met with some success, as they then produced an entire line of Foundation-authorized Frank-Lloyd-Wright-branded globes, the others not drawn from sketches but rather cobbled together from a combination of Wright's design signatures.

I have mixed feelings about this. But I think it would be awesome if a missing next page in the sketchbook surfaced, and it turns out that the scale was all wrong, and that Mr. Wright actually intended to venture into outer space to encase the Earth in a really big walnut pedestal space station.

In my wildest dreams, it comes to light that the sketch had been doctored to remove the following annotation:

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Lead Interaction Designer - Touch Interfaces & Applications
Bresslergroup
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Bresslergroup is seeking an experienced (5+ years), full-time interaction designer to join our team of UI designers, researchers and industrial designers. The designer will work on an interesting variety of projects including interfaces within consumer products, medical devices and industrial equipment as well as stand-alone applications.

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The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

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Artist: lunchbreath
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The British are coming! Tom Dixon continues his global takeover with the launch of London Underground, an independent satellite event staged during NY Design Week/ICFF. Held in the basement of the Bleeker Street Theater, the show will debut the Luminosity lighting collection in the United States as well as host a special off-line Fab.com x Tom Dixon pop-up store. In addition, visitors can grab a cup of Stumptown Coffee or check out Surface Magazine's retro-'60s inspired broadcasting station.

Core77 had an opportunity to chat with the trailblazing designer about being a Brit in New York during Design Week, the future of manufacturing and his opinions on light, love and rock 'n' roll.

London Underground
Bleeker Street Theater Basement
45 Bleeker Street and Lafayette
Through May 22nd

Core77: We're counting down tonight's kickoff of 2012's New York Design Week. A lot of European designers skip over New York after the madness of Milan. As a designer who has had a consistent presence at ICFF and New York Design Week, why is it important for you to be here every year?

Tom Dixon: Well, we've always thought it was an interesting market and we like hanging out in New York anyway. We decided several years ago to invest in the United States properly. We've been taking baby steps to get the infrastructure in place—having a little office there, a partnership with the warehouse and taking it seriously. A lot of people just think that because I speak English they can just go to New York and sell things and people will understand. For anybody who's ever been in, I dunno, rock and roll—you've got to tour. You've got to be there. You've got to invest and spend time.

You've got to be consistent in your presence, otherwise, America just doesn't happen. So, we made a decision and we're pleased we did because people seem to like what we're doing. It feels just like a beginning of something a bit bigger. We also think that the United States has been quite conservative for a long time. We thought it was time to breathe a bit of fresh air.

We're definitely seeing more and more of your work here in the United States. In fact, this week you launched a pop-up store with Fab.com both online and in a physical pop-up at the London Underground exhibition.

America is so good at defining new business models. I think it's the same thing with the furniture industry worldwide—it has been very acting very conventionally. It's only really Ikea that does things in a really different manner. It is really interesting to see how fast and how quickly Fab.com is gaining traction and how it really challenges the way you distribute things. Things just went online this week so we don't know what the results are yet, but it's kind of fascinating to see that there are a million people over there that are interested in design in a slightly different way.

That brings us to your current collection, Luminosity. One of the things that I really enjoyed was the way that you're really playing with transparency and the process of actually creating these pieces. What were some of the design considerations you were thinking about when crafting this new collection?

We tend to think more about the sculpture of the object rather than what it's really doing. It was time to think a bit more about the effects and the functionalities—the effects that these lights were giving and whether we could think a bit more about how you build a character and the lighting in space rather than just thinking about the surface and the shape of the object itself.

It's still a really fantastic field in lighting at the moment because it's something which really is evolving and changing rapidly—through government legislation, technical development and more efficient ways of lighting things. People feel slightly nervous about using these new lighting technologies. I mean, everybody is much more comfortable with the incandescent bulb—you know what 100 watts does and you know that you're going to like the light quality.

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Audi is known for their four-wheel drive prowess, with the Quattro mentality embodied in their very logo. But at yesterday's Worthersee AutoNews 2012 show in Austria, they pulled the sheets off of a two-wheeled creation: Their lithium-ion-battery-powered E-bike Worthersee concept.

We've seen automakers design bicycles to tuck in the trunk before, but this one isn't intended as a crunchy green adjunct to driving; instead it's meant to be an unabashed display of Audi's design and technology prowess. They make no bones about the fact that the bike is intended for "sport, fun and tricks," which explains why the thing produces more torque than my VW Golf did and has a top speed of 50 freaking miles per hour.

The Audi e-bike Worthersee combines the Audi brand's principal competences - design, ultra, connect and e-tron—and explores the limits of what is technically feasible in terms of design, lightweight construction, networking and electric mobility. [The] ultra-light carbon-fiber frame weighs only 1,600 grams (3.53 lb). It makes use of bionic principles derived from nature. Material reinforcements are needed only at the points where loads actually occur. The swinging arm for the rear wheel is also made of CFRP. All in all, the Audi e-bike Worthersee represents the full extent of the brand's expertise in ultra-lightweight design.

The bike has three levels of power: You can either provide all of the juice by pedaling, provide some of the juice with the electric motor taking up the slack, or have the electric motor do all the work. Beyond that are two somewhat bizarre-sounding "Wheelie" modes, where you're meant to tip the bike back on its rear wheel and ride it like a Segway, with the motor taking care of the balance and braking or accelerating when you lean forwards or backwards.

Click here to read more details.

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