This week, Dutch architect Haiko Cornelissen introduces picNYC, a clever grass-topped dining table designed to bring the experience of picnicking into the urban home. The lightweight aluminum tabletop and legs form a solid framework for grass, soil, and stones, and owners can transform their dining spaces as they wish through variations in flowers, herbs, or even vegetables, not to mention usage, sunlight, and season. As the firm says: “Suddenly spilling water becomes a necessity instead of a problem, and wine glasses need coasters not to prevent ring stains but to avoid tumbling.”

Photographs by Iwan Baan and Alan Tansey, courtesy of Haiko Cornelissen Architecten.

Studio DRIFT‘s latest commission is the stunning FLYLIGHT, an interactive light installation inspired by the seemingly random patterns of a flock of birds. Spanning two floors of a private residence in Moscow, the graceful, whimsical FLYLIGHT consists of over 200 glass tubes which light up and respond to the viewer. It was designed by Studio DRIFT designers Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta, and produced in coordination with Philosophy of Design.

Check out a FLYLIGHT image gallery below, and the enchanting FLYLIGHT in action here:

All images courtesy of Studio DRIFT. For more information, visit www.designdrift.nl

Belgian artist Arne Quinze‘s latest project, “My Safe Secret Garden,” takes residence at South Beach Miami’s Setai hotel this week during the Art Basel Miami Beach festivities. Quinze is known for confronting his audiences with dramatic, large-scale installations and both large and small sculptures–often from various types of wood painted in electric, fluorescent colors–that explore themes of social interaction, communication, and urbanism.

Quinze’s newest installation symbolizes the artist’s mind and thoughts through a “safe garden,” which securely fences him off from his surroundings. The enclosed area represents the parts of himself that cannot be touched by strangers; by sharing his personal domain with others, however, he ends that separation. Quinze hopes the piece will stimulate reflection on the concept of boundaries and encourage personal insight.

“My Safe Garden” is part of Quinze’s ongoing series, “My Home My House My Stilthouse,” which consists of imposingly tall wooden structures that stand atop small, fragile legs, appearing as though they might collapse at any moment–inspired by man’s own equilibrium. According to Quinze, “I regard my work as a study about how I experience life and how people in general experience their lives.”

“My Safe Secret Garden” follows Quinze’s innovative July-October 2011 “Rock Strangers” project at New York’s Statue of Liberty: a 200-foot tall digital sculpture that rested on Lady Liberty’s flame, visible through a custom-built augmented reality app for your smartphone. Adding an alien element to the city, Quinze sought to redefine the social space and questioned man’s reaction to unusual objects in one’s daily space.

The “My Safe Secret Garden” exhibition is presented by Reiner Opoku, Wolfgang Roth and Guy Pieters. For more information, visit arnequinze.tv, and feel free to check out my 2009 interview with the artist for Clear Magazine here.

*Images courtesy of Arne Quinze.

After the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster in northeastern Japan on March 11, power supplies, land lines, mobile phone networks and Internet access went down, making it incredibly difficult to contact family and friends. The Japanese postal service, however, was up and running again quickly. In many cases, in fact, the first news that loved ones were safe was shared by postcard.

Inspired by role of postcards–and the idea that art and culture are vital in celebrating life and nurturing determination to move forward–the Japan Society presents Postcards From Japan, a miniature exhibition of original postcard-size works of art created by 22 artists from Japan in response to the devastation. The results (see slideshow below) are poignant works that give insight into the power and resilience of the human spirit.

The show’s curators, husband and wife Hironori Katagiri and Kate Thomson, were working in their sculpture studio in Iwate when the earthquake hit. While they anxiously awaited news of loved ones on the coast, Takuya Okada, another artist who shares their studio, received a postcard from his parents saying they were alive and well. Inspired by the uplifting effect of this postcard on the whole household, they’ve since volunteered on a series of exhibitions and special projects to support recovery in Tohoku through the arts. As the couple explains, “Many arts and cultural projects in Tohoku have been canceled or cut back as funds are diverted to the relief effort. We feel that the arts and culture are in fact vital to the recovery, helping to boost morale and stimulate hope for the future and enthusiasm to rebuild.”

The traveling exhibit is on view now through November 27th at the Japan Society Gallery in New York.

Postcards from Japan
The Japan Society Gallery
333 East 47th Street between First and Second Avenues
New York, NY
www.japansociety.org

Now Showing Antibodies (Anticorpos): Fernando & Humberto Campana, 1989 – 2009.

São Paulo’s Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil welcomes Antibodies, an expansive retrospective exhibit of work by the famed design duo, Fernando and Humberto Campana. The brothers have been designing together for almost three decades, and have collaborated on everything from furniture, fashion and jewelry, to products and interiors. The pair may be best known for their playful design aesthetic and projects developed from common but often unexpected materials – including waste products like cardboard, stuffed animals, rope, fabric and wood scraps, plastic tubes, aluminum wire. As curator Mathias Schwartz-Clauss says, “Together, the brothers ignore all the conventions of the traditional design, play with the notion of functionality, and form their poetic objects from contradictory realities.”

Antibodies was first displayed at the Vitra Museum in 2009, and texts, films, photos, and hundreds of designs (furniture, domestic objects, art, architecture models, installation pieces, etc.) by the Campana Brothers. The exhibit reveals both the diversity of the pair’s work as well as their design process and sources of inspiration.

Antibodies is on display through January 15, 2012.

Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil
Rua Álvares Penteado, 112 – Centro – São Paulo
Information: (11) 3113-3651 / 3113-3652

The fifth annual Vienna Design Week, a celebration of product design, industrial design, and furniture design, finishes up this coming Sunday. As always, one of the highlights of this year’s festival is the “Passionswege,” a design trail through Vienna featuring experimental, site-specific collaborations between designers and established Viennese businesses. This year’s “Passionswege” exhibits included works by Canadian designer Philippe Malouin for renowned glass manufacturer J. & L. Lobmeyr; Austrian designer Patrycja Domanska‘s collaboration with ‘dirndl’ [ladies’ folk costume] experts from Tostmann Trachten; and Tomas Kral, a product designer and instructor at the University of Art and Design Lausanne (ECAL) for fashion-forward milliner Mühlbauer, among others.

One of the most beautiful collaborations, “Brass & Crafts,” came from Udine-based design firm LucidiPevere, which joined forces with WOKA Lamps Vienna. The result was a series of four beautiful metal sculptures, which WOKA’s creative director Christiane Büssgen describes this way: “like over-sized jewelry or. . . Japanese fashion in brass, an homage to our craftsmanship.” See below for a slideshow of this gorgeous project’s process and final results.

For more information, on Vienna Design Week, visit www.viennadesignweek.at.

*Images courtesy of WOKA Lamp Design and Vienna Design Week.

We’re loving Italian designer Luigi Billiani’s playful Numbers Collection. This solid beech wood or lacquered seating collection sports open back frames counting from zero to nine. Each Billiani numbers chair is available in more than 180 colors, and pieces are available in the U.S. through Eurotrend Furniture LLC located in New York, or its website www.eurotrendusa.com (retail price is $585.00).

Olivier Dollé's "Branch" bookshelf

Thirty-year-old Olivier Dollé finds inspiration for his craftsman pieces in the shapes he encounters in nature and geometry. “Structure,” he says, “is the base for everything. I am convinced that nature is well made.” Preferring the term “artisan designer,” Dollé sees himself at the junction of craft and design, blending traditional cabinetry and carpentry skills for beautifully modern wooden designs.

Brought up in the Alps and trained at the Ecole Boulle in Paris, Dollé won the “Atelier de France” prize for young talent in 2009. An admirer of Jean-Michel Frank and pure, minimalistic lines, every piece is driven, at its heart, by functionality. “A chair loses all its meaning and therefore its quality when it no longer fulfills its primary function, that is its capacity to support the weight of an individual.”

At the same time, Dollé’s pieces are undeniably poetic. The “Branch” bookcase, for example, encourages one’s books to perch like birds. “When I create a piece of furniture, I draw my inspiration from the shapes I come across in nature, architecture or buildings. Something will strike me in the physiognomy of an object. I then appropriate the object, make it mine and give it the existence I wish, one that will move me.”

See more of Dollé’s pieces in the gallery below. To learn more about the rising design star, visit Studio Olivier Dollé’s website.

*All images courtesy of the designer.

Here at ArtSlope, we truly love lighting. And each year – especially right around ICFF – there are more and more options to choose from. Some designs are beautiful, others daring, and some are downright playful. We’ve put together a gallery of some of the latest and greatest lighting solutions, from big names like Blu Dot, Normann Copenhagen, and Foscarini, as well as a few head-turning designers you may not have heard of yet.

As you’ll see, the field is diverse this year, offering a variety of lighting solutions – the timelessly simple, the sportively complex, and the truly new.

LUNAR‘s Ember light, for example, designed by Junggi Sung, allows the user to change ambient lighting according to his or her mood. A set of acrylic stems ascend and brighten from their wooden chamber, or descend for a softer glow. And Normann Copenhagen’s unexpected, sculptural BAU lamp – designed by Vibeke Fonnesberg Schmidt – combines color and geometric shapes for “a hanging lamp with attitude.”

New York-based Jamie Harris‘s custom, glass pendant lighting and chandeliers marry the designer’s sense of color and fluid, organic forms into sophisticated, lyrical pieces. LZF’s lamps are straight-up joyful, their natural wood finishes embracing the material’s flexibility, with lovely lights that calling to mind fanning leaves, paper-maché, and even pixelation.

And then there’s a twist on a classic: Vienna-based WOKA‘s reinterpretation of Adolf Loos’s Goldman chandelier, on the occasion of its 100 year anniversary. While the brass chandelier, designed by Christiane Büssgen, looks modern as ever – frankly, one can imagine its raw simplicity coming right out of a Brooklyn design firm – WOKA’s 100 year jubilee interpretation, called Adolf Loos goes Hula Hoop, celebrates the true basics of lighting, dipping the original version in color.

And that’s just the beginning. Hope you enjoy!

In May of last year, the New York arts community was shocked and saddened by the death of thirty-five-year-old designer Tobias Wong. Blurring the lines between conceptual art and design, Wong’s work questioned the value system of objects and pretensions of designers with humor and wit. Now, in honor of his life and work, nine NYC-based designers have come together to create Brokenoff Brokenoff, an exhibition of new works that reconsider and reinterpret Mr. Wong’s design legacy, emphasizing the importance of self-reflection and humor. (Gallery slideshow below.)

Wong was a talented designer and provocateur, as well as a master of clever expropriation (take, for example, This Is Not A Lamp, his Phillipe Starck Bubble-Club-chair-turned-lamp, or his gold-plated McDonald’s coffee stirrers). He was also a dear friend to the nine Brokenoff Brokenoff participating designers, who include Todd Bracher, Dror Benshetrit, Brad Ascalon, Stephen Burks, Joe Doucet, Josee Lepage, Frederick McSwain, Marc Thorpe, and David Weeks.

Reflecting on his friendship with Wong, Todd Bracher says, “My relationship with Tobi was very subtle and unspoken. I’d known him for many years through his work and personally only for about a year before his death. In that year, I felt as though my exchanges with him were sort of out of body-from mind to mind, without sounding odd-meaning we just simply ‘got’ each other. He was a sincere person whose wit and spirit cut through everything, and if you were a like person the bind became instant and strong. He has been and will continue to be greatly missed.”

Bracher’s exhibition piece, called Secondhand Romance, was inspired by Wong’s glass candlestick and smoking mitten. “The concept is a revisited candlestick where instead the hero is the cigarette,” Bracher says. “It is about taking pleasure and finding intimacy in something some see as disgusting and others see as wonderful. The idea is as Tobi had defined in his work, crossing boundaries. Saying that cigarettes too are wonderful, beautiful and sexy. They are not to be seen as wholly negative, and in some ways, even worshiped, indulging in its odor and pattern of waffling smoke.”

Describing his piece, Dror Benshetrit says: “I met Tobi while I was working on one of my first products, the Vase of Phases. The project appealed to Tobi and he approached me about including it in the Terminal 5 show at JFK. I was excited about the opportunity, especially because I appreciated his work and his vision. I admired him as a designer, artist, and thinker. In this tribute to Tobi, the vase is a symbol for our first encounter, and plays homage to Tobi’s life as a phase.”

Various Projects and Bondtoo, a new creative space in Manhattan, were close collaborators and friends of Wong’s as well, and realized his The Times of New York Candle with a limited-edition run of 1000. Describing the history behind the piece, Josee Lepage says that Wong “thought of himself, more than anything, as an observer. One of his last concepts was The Times of New York Candle. Wong saw the candle as both a tribute to the iconic newspaper and as a nostalgic commentary on printed media. To capture the olfactory essence of black ink on newsprint, a candle scent has been developed that would include guaiacwood, cedar, musk, spice and floral hints, with a powdery note and velvet nuance.”

Other pieces include Frederick McSwain’s Die, a portrait of his friend made of 13,138 die (one for every day of Wong’s life), which references Wong’s early installation work and the concepts of uncertainty and risk taking so integral to his work, and Marc Thorpe’s Call Me or Copy Me, a version of Wong’s personal business card, which Thorpe transformed from plastic to gold. According to Thorpe: “I was introduced to Tobias Wong in 2001. He handed me his plastic stencil business card and said, ‘Call me or copy me.’ The business card was the essence of his design intention: to subvert the value of objects, challenge the definition of status and question originality.”

BrokenOff BrokenOff runs through tomorrow at:

Gallery R’Pure
3 East 19th Street
New York City

For more information, visit brokenoffbrokenoff.com.

Images courtesy of Gallery R’Pure, Todd Bracher, and Dror Benshetrit.