You want to know what going to to the International Contemporary Furniture Fair is like? It’s like squatting down, taking a picture of a piece of furniture that’s more beautiful than it is comfortable and realizing that what you’re really doing is taking a picture of a fabulous person taking a picture of the same beautiful piece of furniture. And that the lighting is inexplicably bad.
Have you ever been to a trade show? Before Monday, I never had. So to be honest, reporting on the ICFF (that’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair, an annual extravaganza that takes place each spring here in New York) is going to be a quixotic pursuit for me; I have nothing to compare it to. So I’ll try to record the reactions of a bright-eyed first-timer with no special allegiances to the design world—and in fact, a certain quotient of density about how that world actually works.
I headed over to the Javits Convention Center around 3pm on Monday afternoon. The Fair had been going on there since Friday; 550 exhibitors filled most of a hangar-sized space on the first level of the Center. Booths as far as the eyes could see, some representing individual companies, some more like pavilions featuring work with a theme: Italian design, German design, seating from Norway. To the right, a large wing of Japanese design. In the back, booths affiliated with schools, including Cranbrook, MICA and Pratt. The initial impression was overwhelming but exciting, more Shiny Things than anyone could hope to see in the two hours I had before the daily closing time. You want to run off in every direction at once.
And yet, you don’t quite know what you’re supposed to be looking for. If you were a wallpaper designer or a maker of custom lighting, that would be one thing. But you’re not. You’re a roving reporter and you’re trying to seize on something that might structure and give meaning to your experience, something beyond the mental noting of what you like and don’t like, though that’s of course going on too.
Being that you’re a roving reporter for ReadyMade, and that you’re a little skeptical of glitz in general, you start looking at how the booths themselves are put together. You notice that the wares on display are polished but that the displays themselves, having been put up quickly as responses to a clearly-defined design problem (how to make, say, a twelve-foot by twelve-foot patch into the most striking possible showcase for one’s collection of furniture), show the evidence of abundant creativity and a witty use of simple materials that feels very, well, familiar to a ReadyMade type in the otherwise sexy but unfamiliar environment of a high-wattage international trade fair.
And so I’d like to offer ReadyMade’s take on the ICFF: sort of a Pimp My Booth edition, with a few instances of things we just loved thrown in for good measure.
Ideas we want to steal from ICFF booth displays, volume 1: at Columbia Forest Products, triangular shelving units made from two sheets of lacquered plywood, tilted towards each other and fitted with green shelves of graduated widths inside. They looked professional, but doable.
At the large Ikea booth (I couldn’t tell if it was more weird or more not-weird for Ikea to have a booth at this), regular packing pallets in full effect as shelving. Painting them black makes them look sort of elegant, no? Like a stage set for really serious existentialist theater.
It’s a trend! Brown-painted pallets as platforms from Fora Form, a Norwegian maker of chairs and tables, in the Aksel area.
At Kikkerland’s booth, hundreds of cans of Campbell’s tomato soup make functional, modular pop-art shelving. Neat effect, though perhaps not that inexpensive to pull off in the end (at $1.29 a can, your wall nine cans tall and 50 cans wide will cost you $580.50, and that’s just a single layer! At least be sure you really like tomato soup, I guess).
We noticed a few instances of shipping crates being integrated into displays (though it was unclear whether they were real shipping containers, or faux ones used for the ‘we’re not really that high-end, seriously, the recession impacts us too’ effect). This one, at Dutch design group van Esch, was an especially nice example: a container opened out on hinges, with seating installed in the neatly painted inside. A front panel from one of the crates is used as a platform, towards the right of the picture. The huge clock in the foreground is called the Oclock. Spying me taking many pictures of their crate and none of their products, the van Esch people regarded me with quizzical suspicion, but they politely gave me a press kit anyway.
White ‘trees’ at Aksel. I’m not sure what the bases are; they are made of white metal and look a little bit like the laundry drying racks that people have in their backyards. The ‘leaves’ are made of white strips of fabric, tied in simple knots. It looks nice.
The proprietors of the Non Fiction Collective padded the floor of their booth with rubber anti-fatigue mats. Then they spruced it up by spray painting a laser-cut stencil leaf pattern onto them. After two hours trudging Javits’ hard floor, the anti-fatigue matting felt incredible. The pattern had already started to wear in high-traffic areas, but the choice of a more durable paint might prevent that.
Finally, at the back of the Center, we encountered Pratt’s ‘Design For a Dollar’ booth. The school challenged current students and grad students to design something that cost less than a buck to produce. Needless to say, the work presented quite a contrast from the things on display everywhere else at the Fair. I wish I could say they got me jazzed about the possibility of design merging with sustainability, but to tell the truth, I found some of them depressing.
I don’t hold this against the Pratt students, but rather think it’s a statement about how little a dollar is and how difficult it is to make something that’s truly low-impact, rather than infuse the same old stuff with the rhetoric of sustainability. Austen Doten’s Bottle Cap Bowls, “made by melting discarded bottle caps together,” made me feel deflated about the prospect of living in a future where we’re forced to confront and actually re-work the mounds of plastic crap we’ve made over the last eighty or ninety years—an eventuality that must sooner or later be on its way. (And I guess this makes Doten’s work, in a weird sense, some of the most affecting I saw at the whole Fair).
Pratt student David Steinvurzel’s Orange Votive Candles, also from ‘Design for a Dollar,’ brightened my mood a little. Made of orange peels (dried on a light bulb, for shape), the star-shaped soy wax candles use the orange pith as a natural wick. I didn’t see one burning, but they probably even smell nice.
On to a few random loves: Tanya Aguiñiga’s felted soft seating at the Furniture Society of America booth. Aguiñiga describes her work as “organic modernist;” her practice is informed by the complex relationships between the cities of Tijuana and San Diego, where she has spent considerable amounts of time, though she now lives in Los Angeles. She designs and hand makes all of her own work. We like her, and we like her approach. ReadyMade editor Andrew Wagner said this piece looked like a big piece of dark chocolate with a delicious marshmallow ottoman. I think it’s as statement-making as any big-ticket modernist chaise, but not cold or machined-feeling.
Also at the FSA booth, Jennifer Anderson’s classic Eames lounge chairs, made out of steel…and mud. I’d love to know (a) whether they’re durable enough to be sat on, and (b) what the artist would say about her decision to re-create a 20th century furniture icon out of dirt. Is it supposed to be some of design-world shot across the bow, or just wow-cool? (Jennifer, if you’re listening, do tell!)
Dug Jason Miller’s grandpa-like brown armchair with the faux duct tape appliqué. Next to it, a table topped with tinted custom auto glass.
Lindsey Adelman Studio’s delicate lighting mixes old-fashioned globes and Edison bulbs (starting to look tired out there in the world, but working for me here) with irregular, biological shapes that feel of the moment.
Less rarefied but still way cool: cardboard pendant lamps at Gray Pants Studio.
File under: Cardboard, is there anything it can’t do? (Cross-file under, I don’t know what it is but I love it.) Molo Design’s cardboard…shapes.
Let’s face it, I will never be in a position to consume most of the things I saw at the ICFF. The Designboom Mart, a yearly occurrence, is there to soothe the consumerist itch of people like me and give young designers a shot to show their chops. It’s a souvenir shop, or maybe it’s a clever ruse to keep the plebs from storming the high-design Bastille. At any rate, it’s a place where around 40 designers from around the world show and sell their wares, priced from $10 to $100 U.S. dollars. Much of it is cool, and predictably there are a lot of jewelry items/wallets/tote bag type things in the mix.
One Designboom vendor that really stood out for me was studiomake. The husband-and-wife team of David and Im Schafer collaborate on several categories of product, including these vases molded from commonplace objects spliced together. In clean white ceramic, they look cohesive but also a little monstrous, as if they’d been put together by a mad surgeon of everyday things.
The Frankenstein feeling continued with studiomake’s “Domestic Clamps,” almost medical-looking black and white steel and aluminum fasteners (patent pending!) designed to be able to hold materials together in a variety of configurations (Flat to Flat, Flat to Round/Square, Round/Square to Round/Square, you get the idea), for the creation of furniture, structures, whatever the imagination can dream up. They seem infinitely useful and a little bit punk and they look like something from Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange.”
Both lines are just in the prototype stages, but I’ll have my eyes out for them when I return, wiser and/or more jaded, to next year’s show.
