MoMA Fall Preview
Last week I was invited to preview the MoMA Store’s fall/ winter collection. Like their current spring/ summer collection, the products they showed were smart, playful, and only vaguely articulated the season. The buyers seemed to be particularly into monochromatic colors, geometric patterns, and use of materials that pushes the boundary of manufacturing, in a few cases subverting accepted material applications.
This Stone Chrystal stool/ table by Marcel Wanders encapsulated the feeling of the collection more than any other single piece. Essentially a large glass vase turned upside-down, the stool’s structural strength seemed to come from the triangles embossed on its surface, which also bent light and translated anything viewed through the stool into an impromptu pattern. While it’s a stretch to call the piece seasonal, the glass could have been carved from a block of ice, and it could be compelling (or horrible) if stuffed with a tangle of Christmas lights.
For her Lotus Lamp, Jane Kyttanen also puts a familiar material – nylon in this case – to an unexpected use. Her lamp depends on the plastic’s soft translucency to create the impression of a lotus blossom with a glowing core, and is “printed” directly from a 3D computer file by way of a rapid-prototyping process.
Naoto Fuksawa’s restrained chair uses bare aluminum and washed-out wood to channel a snowy day at the beach.
While I don’t usually write about jewelry, these vegetal silk and silicone pieces by Tzuri Gueta were impossible to ignore. The designer pushed molten silicone through woven silk tubes, where it cooled into those wonderful growths. I loved how the necklace’s complexity was unforced, and resulted from such a simple action.
Unbeknownst to me, Paola Antonelli, director of MoMA’s design department and a wonderful design thinker, reviews every product that’s carried by the design store. As one of the buyers told me, the MoMA store isn’t really a museum shop; products are design to be sold, so carrying them as a retailer is often more true to their narrative than displaying them in a gallery.
2 Comments
August 15th, 2007 at 7:10 pm
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October 22nd, 2008 at 2:05 am
I am looking for a buyer who have any idea on such stone such as cystal stone with rainbow colour. I have a sample with me which I am looking for interested cleints. In my land I have about 2 kilometres of this glass stone.