Who says a bar cart has to be a boring little trolley parked in the corner waiting for cocktail hour? This wonderfully unconventional design by French designer Étienne Fermigier looks ready to serve drinks, store bottles, and steal the show all at once.
Designed in 1970, the cart is a delightful exercise in geometric design. Its boxy form is broken up by contrasting white and coral-pink panels, with open compartments that reveal the layered edges of the plywood construction. The circular cutouts in the shelves add a playful polka-dot effect while providing dedicated spots for bottles. Mounted on wheels, the entire unit can be moved wherever the party happens to be. Continue reading Eye On Design: Étienne Fermigier’s 1970 Bar Cart→
Forget traditional table lamps: this is lighting design for anyone whose decorating tastes lean a little closer to The Addams Familythan Martha Stewart Living. This unusual candelabra looks like something rescued from a haunted mansion. Its worn black base and curving arms support three baby-dollheads, each with its own unsettling personality. One has a single, upturned blue eye, another sports a network of cracks across its face, and the third appears to be weeping black tears. Their vacant eyes and rosy little cheeks make the whole thing even creepier. You know you need own it.
Furniture is sometimes at its best design-wise when it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Case in point: Alan Siegel’s irreverent Tongue Chair, designed in 1981. With its seat transformed into a wide-open mouth and a bright pink tongue playfully poking out, the chair turns an everyday piece of furniture into a a little piece of surrealist theater. The chair’s ‘face illusion’ is completed by a back support that forms a human nose, while two eyes can be seen along the curved upper back and armrest that continues to form the chairs front legs. Continue reading Eye On Design: Alan Siegel’s Tongue Chair→
Stan Winston Studio created this complex animatronic for Steven Spielberg‘s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (USA, 2001), a haunting story of a robotic child longing to be a real boy. Teddy, a loyal sidekick to David (played by Hayley Joel Osment) and likewise a robot has fifty points of motion and required at least five people to operate. In comparison, Winston Studios enormous T-Rex animatronic for the 1993 Jurassic Park has 10 fewer points of motion than this tiny bear. Computer graphics and Jack Angel‘s voice acting enhanced Teddy‘s convincing performance. The toy’s unending devotion starkly contrast with the actions of the humans in the film, who all abandon David.
Most fashion is meant to be worn, but Thierry Mugler’s designs often look like they were engineered as stand-alone pieces of art. I photographed this spectacular look when I visited Thierry Mugler: Couturissime at the Brooklyn Museum in 2022, but it took me this long to take a deep dive into what this design is all about. Dressed entirely in black, this figure has an impossibly sculpted silhouette: exaggerated shoulders, a dramatically cinched waist, sharply defined hips, glossy pointed heels and a fantastical headpiece that makes the wearer look less like a woman getting dressed and more like a character from a futuristic graphic novel. This is all very much Mugler’s territory. Continue reading Eye On Design: Thierry Mugler, When Fashion Becomes Architecture→
