Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photo: Clockwise from top left: Read McKendree, Adrian Levander, Juho Huttunen, Maria Pergay
The season’s turning and the leaves are falling, but in design, it’s time for a classics revival. Some are perfect for fall dinner parties: Sweden’s legacy design store celebrates “the art of the table,” reissuing four 20th-century designs including a table, a chair and a chandelier from its 100-year archive, and a squiggle-armed chair by Finland’s “punk grandfather” of design returns after a three-decade production hiatus. Then we wind into the last of the outdoor exhibitions: A Frida Escobedo-designed residential building in Boerum Hill is the backdrop for an indoor-outdoor exhibit, one last hurrah for living outdoors.
A Josef Frank chandelier and T51 chair, and a dining table by Jan Ruhtenberg.
Photo: Adrian Levander
From its century-old archive, Svenskt Tenn, Stockholm’s legacy interior design store, will rerelease four works from two 20th-century design greats, Josef Frank and Jan Ruhtenberg. Two brass chandeliers by Frank, decadent fountains of many arms and exposed bulbs, appear indebted (in structure and spirit) to the champagne tower. The Austrian-designer’s more subtle rattan-wood ‘Chair T21’, a dining chair with a back that calls to mind Japanese sliding wood door frames, is also being reissued. Jan Ruhtenberg’s minimalist dining table from 1932 prioritizes function, a round elm wood body with a rotating steel tray in the center (a removable Lazy Susan). It may not surprise you to know that Ruhtenberg was a past pupil of architect Mies van der Rohe. Available at Svenskt Tenn.
After a thirty-year production hiatus, Yrjö Kukkapuro’s ‘Experiment Chair’ will be reissued in all its postmodernist glory by Hem. The chair, designed by the 91-year-old “punk grandfather” of Finnish design, has only been tweaked in the name of durability, but its original chrome finish and bright, wavy arms remain. Four renditions of the ‘80s design, each distinct in armrest style and color, will be released. Its pop colors are inspired by the elements: fire, foliage and water. Like the designer’s most recognized Karuselli chair (nominated “the world’s most comfortable chair” in 1974 by the New York Times), Kukkapuro proves a comfortable chair always remains in style.The Experiment Chair will be available to order on October 16.
From left: Photo: Thierry DepagnePhoto: Max Burkhalter
From top: Photo: Thierry DepagnePhoto: Max Burkhalter
Maria Pergay, the legendary French designer beloved by Pierre Cardin, Salvador Dalí, and Christian Dior, largely fell out of favor in the ‘80s, until the gallerists at Demisch Danant tracked her down in Morocco and mounted a 2006 exhibition. She passed away last year at age 93, and the gallery is retracing her legacy with a big retrospective that’s opening at the end of October. The gallery will show over 30 rare and recognizable works from the past 70 years as a series of set interior vignettes, including her steel Ring Chair (a design Pergay conceived of while peeling an orange) and a steel-framed daybed. Pergay, whose family emigrated to Paris from Moldova after her father was exposed a Russian spy, began working as a window dresser, which then led her to commissions making luxury items for Dior, Givenchy and other fashion designers. She expanded out into furniture design, creating a vocabulary that married stainless steel with the unexpected (mother of pearl, precious woods, lacquer) and formed into inventive motifs. Opens October 24.
Photo: Jonathan Hokklo
From left: Photo: Jonathan HokkloPhoto: Jonathan Hokklo
From top: Photo: Jonathan HokkloPhoto: Jonathan Hokklo
In Boerum Hill, The Bergen, a new residential development designed by Mexican architect Frida Escobedo, makes use of its in-house gallery and landscaped garden for a big group show of indoor-outdoor works, appropriately titled “Inside~Out.” The curator-founders of Brooklyn-based design studio Kin & Company, Joseph Vidich and Kira de Paola, wanted to highlight outdoor furniture, a category of design that’s sometimes overlooked. The works range from the small and decorative to the functional, but there’s very little that feels overly familiar. There’s a raw earth planter, made from a mixture of sand and clay, by organic-material-master J McDonald, which looks “sculpted by air,”and a concrete armchair that looks like it’s made out of turquoise, hand-mixed and painted by Concrete Cat, a married Montreal-based duo. A blackened wood armchair by Two Tree Studios, complete with a red pigmented underbelly and limbs, resembles a sports car in motion. Inside Out closes October 14. Viewing is by appointment only: email info@bergenbrooklyn.com
Photo: Read McKendree/
A new Hell’s Kitchen’s piano bar, So & So’s, carved its cozy space out of former back-of-house spaces in a Morris Lapidus hotel. Riffing off New York’s lost neighborhood bars and glamorous clubs, the navy and red-drenched design by Good, Rich studio makes the space feel like a deprivation tank without any sense of time and place. Red upholstered walls with embedded metal arches curve over the piano stage, each one framed with custom-designed lights like a dressing-room vanity. You can find it behind a freshly cut but otherwise nondescript blue door with a hand painted sign on West Fifty Second Street.
