The Lectori Salutem Desk by Jeroen Verhoeven

The Lectori Salutem Desk is imbued with a symbolic value as it conveys the intimacies of Verhoeven’s own personal life. While ostensibly a desk, produced through a combination of highly-skilled craftsmanship and carefully-programmed technical processes, the personal mark of the maker is strongly evident within the work as two silhouette portraits of the artist’s design collaborators, Joep Verhoeven and Judith de Graauw, are subtly shaped into its undulating surfaces. Thus, the piece combines design functionality with an artistic rhetoric that subliminally communicates the importance of Verhoeven’s immediate creative circle. Constructed using highly-polished steel, the traditional industrialism of this material is inverted to produce an elegant and seemingly lightweight object. Through a delicate distribution of weight, the piece combines streamline curves and flowing contours to create a physical equilibrium and an illusionistic sense of movement and speed.

LS Desk, by Jeroen Verhoeven, Demakersvan
Exhibition: The Curious Image, at Blain Southern Gallery, London, May 12 – July 16

The Cube by Electrolux: Belgium

Combining ground breaking design, fantastic cuisine and stunning locations, The Cube by Electrolux is taking fine dining to a new level. Travelling across Belgium, Italy, Russia, Switzerland and Sweden, two spectacularly designed restaurants will be popping up at some of Europe’s most famous landmarks, inspiring guests with wonderful meals, events and once-in-a-lifetime views.

The Cube is fully transparent and consisting of glass encased in a white, laser-cut aluminium layer. Everything apart from the floor is pure white.

The interior is white Corian in combination with matt and glossily varnished wood. The wooden floor and carpet under the tables give it extra warmth and atmosphere, while the terrace outside provides an exclusive view across the Jubelpark, the centre of Brussels, the Atomium, etc.

The Cube is sited on top of the triumphal arch at a height of 45 metres. The entire structure has a surface area of 150 m2 and weighs 60 tonnes. The guests are taken to the top of the arch by lift.

The Cube, by Electrolux, Photography by Carol Kohen

Sound Sculptures & Installations by Zimoun

138 prepared dc-motors, cotton balls, cardboard boxes 40 x 40 x 40 cm. Zimoun.

200 prepared dc-motors, 2000 cardboard elements 70 x 70 cm. Zimoun in collabortation with Architect Hannes Zweifel.

“Zimoun is best compared to a watchmaker of a self-reproducing time constructing his own gauging station.”
- Radjo Monk

Sound Sculptures & Installations, by Zimoun

Exhibition: Charlotte Perriand 1903-1999

In this fresh look at the work of Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999), the Petit Palais reveals for the first time the part played by photography in her creative process, both as a source of inspiration and sometimes as an actual component of her pieces. When she joined the Le Corbusier/Pierre Jeanneret studio as furniture design associate in 1928, she at once began using photography for her preliminary studies, then as a means for observing the “laws of nature” — in the mountains, especially — and the urban context. This provided her with inspiration for her experiments with forms, materials and spatial arrangements. The exhibition also particularly emphasises her passion for objects found in the course of her walks; in their distancing of the rationalist spirit of the 1920s, these brought greater flexibility and formal freedom to her work.

Charlotte Perriand 1903-1999: From photography to interior design
April 7 – September 18, Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris

Exhibition: Stephen Burks: Man Made

Prototypes & Material Compositions (Pile Up) Including Basket Lamps and Basket Low Tables, 2010

Material Composition 1 (Totem), Polystyrene, Paper, Senegalese Sweetgrass and Polyethylene Basket, Birch Plywood, Acrylic Paint and Oak

The Studio Museum in Harlem is pleased to present Stephen Burks: Man Made, a unique project that furthers industrial designer Stephen Burks’s ongoing exploration of the global economy of artisanal craft. Inspired by Burks’s collaboration with Senegalese basket weavers based in New York and Dakar, as well as projects with artisans in South Africa, Peru and India, Man Made starts with the traditional basket-weaving process as its core concept. During the exhibition, the Museum’s galleries will be transformed into a workshop where New York-based weavers and artisans will create a series of functional and experimental objects and installations conceived by Burks.

Stephen Burks: Man Made, March 31 – June 26, at Studio Museum New York
Photography by Daniel Håkansson for Readymade Projects

Polish Design 1955-1968: We Want to Be Modern

This pioneering exhibition of approximately 180 objects from the collection of the National Museum in Warsaw, featuring the most important examples of Polish design, rarely seen in the west, explores the significance of the objects of everyday use in shaping modernity and the modern Polish identity emerging during the post-thaw period.

The collection of post-1945 design in the National Museum in Warsaw is the most comprehensive in Poland, and the exhibition benefits from it, showing a whole range of applied arts of the period, including ceramics, glass, textiles, furniture, and other household objects, periodicals, photographs, and films.

Polish Design 1955-1968: We Want to Be Modern, at The National Museum in Warsaw, February 4th – April 17th
via: designboom

In Between by Sebastien Verdon

In Between, Installation, Skizze, Socle, Frame, Red Thread, Magnets, Plattform10 ewz-selnau Zürich, by Sebastien Verdon

Wearable Architecture by SUUM

Designed for modern mind and ritual, SUUM SUMS are wearable architecture that requires the human form to build, support, and embody. More than metal. SUUM SUMS are the experience of acquired function and multi-faceted beauty when beings and design concept work together. Each SUUM SUM is a collection of precision, interrelated stainless-steel components. Original compositions are chosen and may evolve over time with additional sculpture- and material-altering components, known in SUUM terminology as EVOLVERS.

Wearable Architecture: Rings, by Nava Wiegert, Brianna Kenyon SUUM

Wunderboxes by PostlerFerguson for V&A

Wunderboxes is a temporary installation designed for the V&A Friday late programme “Archive Live” in the grand entrance hall of the V&A museum in London. PostlerFerguson was commissioned to visualize parts of their research and the design team responded with an installation of differently formatted cardboard boxes each one housing a bright orange light box displaying a variety of three dimensional models to create an abstract but strangely familiar collection of “things”. Spectators were encouraged to come closer and examine the partly hidden and camouflaged objects being drawn in by the warm and hypnotising orange glow of the boxes. From a tiger attack helicopter to Han Solo in Carbonite – from a Lobster to the iconic “Nike Swoosh” the objects represent the designers divers interests and fields of research from science to popular culture.

Wunderboxes, by Postlerferguson, for Victoria and Albert Museum

9 Mirrors by Ron Gilad

At the Milan Furniture Fair Dilmos presents a series of mirrors that contain historical references combining the present with the past and that, like the nine lives of a cat, represents the possibility of inner lives. In the series 9 mirrors Ron Gilad suggests that the mirrored image contains a hypocrisy which reflects only our exterior selves. He is asking us to contemplate a more complex and poetic possibility of reality. The title, like the nine lives of a cat, represents the possibility of inner lives or the soul of the mirror.

Gilad’s mirrors are simple rectangular wooden frames that have been injected with stories. The reflection of the spectator is no longer only objective but contains more than the present. The functional aspect becomes secondary; the cords over the glass, the voided gilded frames and the bronze sconce in front of the user’s face are not here to decorate the mirrors. Some of the mirrors contain historical references combining the present with the past; a reference to other lives besides our own. Others play with structure, distorting our perception of the mirror as an object.

9 Mirrors by Ron Gilad, at Dilmos, Milan, via: domus