NEW YORK — The 500-plus designers gathering in Midtown at the Javits Center this weekend for the International Contemporary Furniture Fair will be vying for the attention of potential producers, buyers, and retailers of their work. On the last day of the four-day affair, they let the masses in to ogle the latest high-design and luxury goods, but what are us regular folk to do during the rest of New York Design Week? We suggest heading south to a more accessible, more interactive destination called the NoHo Design District.
The annual takeover of the area stretching between Bowery and Broadway was launched in 2010 by Monica Khemsurov and Jill Singer, the former editors of I.D. magazine who currently run the design and culture blog Sight Unseen. "We wanted that extra element of independent designers," Khemsurov told ARTINFO. "We had a specific point of view that we wanted to express that we felt was missing. It's supposed to be the young, fun, edgy, multi-disciplinary place for art." This is the third year the pair have stormed the neighborhood and filled it with four days of interactive exhibitions and events, from storefront installations at Areaware and the Future Perfect, to a Bowery Hotel bash decorated with vignettes by lighting whiz Lindsey Adelman.
This morning, ARTINFO took a tour of one of NDD’s central hubs, the Standard Hotel East Village, whose first two floors have been taken over by an international set of designers, craftsmen, and general visionaries. The first thing visitors will see while approaching the hotel entrance is Irish woodworker James Carroll, along with the freshly cut trunks of ash trees, old-fashioned woodworkers' tools, and mountains of wood shavings. He's the central attraction of "Making 01," a show of Irish handmade crafts presented by homegoods brand Makers & Brothers (comprised of brothers Jonathan and Mark Legge, and makers like Carroll). Carroll will be there in person constructing three-legged stools for about ten hours every day, nestled next to shelves full of the crafts of his homeland, like plush mice crafted from tweed, an Irish textile mainstay; hand-finished linen; and handwoven baskets.
Inside the hotel, "Scale" presents the architect as designer, showcasing the works of hybrid building- and furniture-making acts like Snarkitecture and Studio Dror. It's an exploration of objects as manifestations of the architects' aesthetics, just adaptively resized for practical use in the living room. Equal parts whimsy, brilliance, and absolute uselessness, Patrick Gavin's "Disc & Sculpture" pieces are strewn about the floor like tiny monuments, built for no other purpose than to be in the way. Hernan Diaz-Alonso, an architect of swiftly sloping lines in the tradition of Zaha Hadid, echoes the style of his structures in "Le Chaise Grotesque #2," a sinister loveseat that brings to mind a drop of ink suspended in water. Our personal favorite: Jonah Takagi’s "Range Life," a coffee table throwback to the modernist age. Its mixed use of glass, metal, concrete, wood, and poignant accents of color would make the Eames's Case Study house proud.
The aptly-named and appropriately-situated "Hotel California" offers as a tour of young West Coast designers on the sunny second-floor deck, where Taidgh O'Neill's 101 Chandelier evokes a linear pencil sketch made with wood beams. Matt Gagnon's Knit Fort — an expandable, tulip-shaped structure of interlocking wood — sits in the corner looking at home near the hedges, as it clearly belongs in a backyard. "It's an object but also a space, with no real practical use," Gagnon modestly told us, although he proposed a few great impractical ones — living room cabana or outdoor shower, just to name a few.
Back downstairs, "Sonos Listening Library" looks at sound in a novel, conceptual manner: as an integral component in the design of a room. A Soundelier, the collaborative effort of Lindsey Adelman's light fixture-crafting prowess and Kiel Mead's quirk, hangs a handful of Sonos Play 3 speakers from the ceiling. Also in the library is the Panther, a sofa much less intimidating then its name suggests, crafted from plywood and soundproof foam. Each purposefully emits or absorbs sound to round out the overall construction of the space.
As thought-provoking and conceptual as all the exhibitions appear, watching various hotel guests perusing the objects while their children played in the wooden detritus of Carroll's stool-making made the designs feel so welcoming, so inclusive. It’s the kind of event that stimulates an interest in the general populace for contemporary design, while simultaneously raising the bar for groundbreaking invention. The current concentration of innovative objects within a few-block radius just north of Houston Street fosters a spirit of optimism that we hope, in coming years, will spread throughout the city's Design Week offerings, rather than remain contained in one tiny little district.
To see furnishings from the NoHo Design District's hub at the Standard Hotel East Village, click the slide show.