All Photos By Gail
Ettore Sottsass’ late furniture for Gallery Mourmans liberated the artist from the ordinary constraints of the market and quantity. The collaboration gave him license to pursue the vast poetic and sculptural potential of perhaps his favorite of all design archetypes, the Cabinet.
Continue reading Eye On Design: Ettore Sottsass, Cabinet No. 56
Photos By Gail
What a treat it is to experience the Pierre Cardin exhibit Future Fashion, currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum. I admit to being unaware that Cardin also made furniture until I saw a selection of his amazing woodwork staged amongst his retro-space-age fashions. This cabinet, which emulates a sunset above ocean waves, is from 2018.
Continue reading Eye On Design: Lacquered Wood ‘Sunset’ Cabinet By Pierre Cardin
All Photos By Gail
Like the side chair designed by Hector Guimard, seen just to the left of this cabinet in the bottom photo of this post, Louis-Desiré-Eugène Gaillard’s Display Cabinet (1900) incorporates bold, animated, plant-like forms in its decoration. Gaillard exhibited similar furniture at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, also known as the Exposition Universalle, which helped popularize architecture and domestic objects with fluid lines and whiplash curves.
Cabinet Design Detail
This cabinet was part of a larger set of dining room furniture that would have been marketed to both middle and upper-middle class consumers. A key idea of design reform at the turn of the 19th century was that well-designed objects should not be reserved only for the wealthy.
Photographed in the Art Institute, Chicago.
All Photos By Gail
Seemingly random bits of e-waste make up the Ore Streams collection of office furniture, designed by Italian duo Formafantasma.
Cabinet (2017) is a clear glass-encased filling cabinet created from up-cycled aluminum computer cases embellished with a digital print of the surface of Mars, a reference to the extra-terrestrial origins of gold, which is widely thought to have arrived on earth via a meteorite shower.
Continue reading Eye On Design: Ore Streams Filing Cabinet By Formafantasma
All Photos By Gail
This spectacular bureau cabinet reflects the European fascination with Japanese and Chinese luxury goods in the early eighteenth century. The bright red surfaced imitated Asian lacquer, which was made from materials not available in Europe.
Continue reading Eye On Design: “Japanned” Bureau Cabinet Circa 1720