Category Archives: Design

Before attending London’s Royal College of Art (RCA), Anton Alvarez spent two years at a craft school in Sweden, mastering the techniques of traditional cabinetmaking. Yet it was only after the London- and Stockholm-based designer set aside those time-honored skills that he was able to start his career in earnest, inventing a new joinery method he calls “thread wrapping” for his RCA thesis—a project that made him a breakout design-world star and got his sculptural pieces into a London Design Museum show last fall, alongside works by Arik Levy and Maarten Baas. Continue reading →

After graduating from the Glasgow School of Art’s graphics program in 2006, Anna Karlin took a position at a prominent design firm in her native London. Two days later she quit. “People are not put on earth to work within such a confined, one-dimensional expression of their creativity,” she says. It’s a bold statement, reflecting her refusal to allow her talent — or ambition — to be hemmed in. Continue reading →

The designer Lindsey Adelman is embracing her dark side. Who knew she even had one? Since opening her New York studio in 2006, she’s become known primarily for her Bubble Series chandelier, an industrially-inspired brass armature blooming with charmingly lumpy blown glass globes. It consistently tops the shopping lists of architects and designers like Peter Marino and Kelly Wearstler; a sheik in Kuwait has one, and Ivanka Trump has two in her new Park Avenue apartment. “It’s almost like hanging a tree branch from your ceiling,” Adelman says, who, as a design student at the Rhode Island School of Design, also dabbled in sculpture.

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While anyone would be grateful to receive Design Miami’s annual Designer of the Year Award and join the ranks of recipients like Konstantin Grcic, Marc Newson, and Zaha Hadid, for David Adjaye the honor also represents a particularly uncanny moment of professional synergy. Having spent the better part of his career designing in and around the art world—traversing the same borders that Design Miami purports to blur—the Tanzania-born, London-based architect is now gearing up to produce his own series of limited-edition furniture. Adjaye has never been one to limit himself to a single creative role, whether it’s masterminding a 10-year documentary photo-research project on urban Africa’s built landscape—released this month as a book, African Metropolitan Architecture (Rizzoli)—or designing the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., scheduled for completion in 2015. He calls his practice “holistic.” A more apt description may be superhuman. Continue reading →