The Future of Furniture
The International Contemporary Furniture Fair Highlights Designs From Around the World
By CHRIS SCHMIDT
Just when you think you've figured out the International Contemporary Furniture Fair -- where furniture and product designers gather to show their newest wares to vendors, decorators, and architects -- it surprises you.
While the show lacked the kind of upstart energy of some of the younger alternative shows that have sprung up around the city in the past couple years to coincide with ICFF, I managed to leave the Javits Center buzzing with inspiration and new ideas.
All the modern-design stalwarts were represented -- the Umbras, the Knolls, and the Herman Millers. Their displays were tasteful and polished, but lacked urgency.
Italian designers, meanwhile, had colonized an entire wing of the show. There were 40 or so of these exhibitors, but the sleek sameness of their offerings was a little bland: mirrors, mirrors, and more mirrors. The overall effect was so overly serious and lacking in whimsy that you wanted to bring in some children for recess there, just to muck things up a bit.
This was particularly true because it was, if anything, youth that brought energy to the other pavilions at the show. The ICFF invited design schools from around the nation to participate, and their booths occupied the easternmost edge of the main gallery. Students from the The Cranbrook Academy of Art, a Michigan art school known for its freethinking, interdisciplinary approach, had erected a bamboo hut in which to show off their designs. It was appropriate, considering that the Javits Center often feels like some foreign, isolated island.
David Nelipovich, a Cranbrook student who worked in product design before going back to school for his graduate degree, said, "It's fascinating to see how people in the professional world will react to our work, which is more intellectual. And it's just a pleasure to see what everyone is up to."
Mr. Nelipovich's project was "Biographical Consumerism," a product line that follows the individual from "cradle to grave," employing a set amount of only two materials: wood and denim. What begins as a crib morphs into a dining room chair with denim slipcover, and becomes, finally, a coffin.
Recycling and "sustainability" were buzzwords circulating around many of the hippest exhibits -- design for the Whole Foods generation. Indeed, Metropolis magazine, the monthly journal sponsoring the show, titled its juried exhibit of "next generation" designers "Raw." And here again, the pleasures were more heady than visual. Eco-consciousness ruled: There were miniskirts made of garbage bags, to-go food containers made of a biodegradable corn product, and, least practically, a sod sofa that is grown rather than manufactured.
Not all the thrilling designs were science fiction, however. Back in the main pavilion was IQLight, the original interlocking-PVC-panel origami lamp designed in 1973 by Holger Strøm, a Danish professor. Bang on Bang, the Danish company reissuing the design, has been attempting to stop copiers, but with little luck outside of Denmark: The Strøm imprint was everywhere at ICFF. British designer Tord Boontje's 2003 version of the lamp, called Garland, a hanging light bulb cradled in a cascade of silver- or brass-plated leaf and flower cut-outs, has been a bestseller at places like the MoMA Design Store; at ICFF he displayed his newest version of the design which employs the material Tyvek, the nontearable but featherlight paper used for FedEx envelopes.
Inventive use of materials has become such an important aspect of contemporary design that some booths were doing nothing other than promoting a material or manufacturing process. Ammuneal, a die-cut metal firm, had constructed a truly awesome simulacrum of a house, minus the walls, using nothing but stainless steel and powdered aluminum. Nothing was for sale, not even, alas, the aluminum bear-skin rug. But other companies, such as Blu Dot, and even artists like Whitney Biennial alum Sarah Sze, have adopted the bendablemetal process to their designs.
And special kudos must go to the most unusual and uncompromising design on display: The Temple.This 7-foot, concave plastic slab was designed by a truculent Scotsman, Hill Jephson Robb, who refused to admit to any commercial impulse behind the design of his "spiritual and emotional" object (even as he was pushing his press kit on viewers). One may use this temple as a meditation chamber, trampoline, hammock, or perhaps a plate for a very large entree.
Would Mr. Jephson Robb, who left the field of economics to attend St. Martins College of Art and Design, ever produce another product, or was the Temple it? I inquired.
"It depends on if I have another spiritual and emotional experience to match it," he replied. Did he possess a Temple himself? I asked. "Yes, I have one in my bedroom," he said -- but not in place of a bed. I expressed wonder at the dimensions of Mr. Jephson Robb's living quarters. "Yeah, I guess I'm pretty blessed in that department -- at least by New York standards," he said.