SHOWTIME

More than the product, what dazzles at ICFF 2015 are the displays. In past years most exhibitors came with no-nonsense presentations, while the handful that came with more ambitious ones stood out. This year it’s just the reverse. Nearly all the installations have a sense of theatricality, with custom partitions, canopies, lighting, and display fixtures. Many have signage, lit promotional images, and seating areas for visitors. Those exhibitors who came with the same kind of barebones installations they did in the past (a table, a binder of product samples, a signboard, and a stool for their rep to sit on) look plain indeed.

In addition, this year’s event has a cool, unified feeling. Many of the booths have a slate grey or black carpet, or bare concrete floors. And many have black or grey painted walls. There’s a terrific rhythm to the layout and no corners lack energy. There are intimate booths mixed in with grand ones, booths showing tabletop items mixed in with booths hawking furniture, and brazenly lit booths mixed in with shadowy ones. It’s a pleasure to walk the aisles of the Javitz Center and take in the spectacle.

There’s a lot of the same kinds of things on display as in in past years: stools made from tree trunks, tables made from geodes, and hand-stamped wallpaper. But this year they’re displayed with more sass and polish. Standouts include booths by the Austrian contingent (who built a giant purple metallic backdrop), Antolini (who built a life-size marble labyrinth) and BECBrittain (who sunk one of their spare LED chandeliers into a pocket jungle garden). The prevailing sensibility is no longer craft, it’s show business.

May 22, 2015 by Nalina Moses

BURNING BRIGHT

This year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) has its share of charming hand-blocked wallpapers, embroidered throw pillows, and driftwood end tables, but what shines most brightly are the LED light fixtures. LED technology is advancing so rapidly that each year brings lights that are more energy-efficient, longer lasting, less costly, and with improved light quality. LED’s are so much more smarter and smaller (about an eighth of an inch in diameter) than incandescent, halogen and fluorescent bulbs, that they might do for lighting what steel did for construction – bring about an entirely new model for design.

And just as the first wave of steel-frame buildings were clad in stone panels to give the sound appearance of a building, most LED light fixtures are designed with shades and baffles that, primarily, give the sound appearance of a lamp. Vendors at ICFF are cloaking LED diodes in nostalgic fittings, with shades made in warm materials (dark woods, textured metals, cardboards, felt), as if trying to soften the technology before permitting it into our living rooms. One Swedish company even sells an LED pendant that looks like a bare incandescent bulb.

Only a few designers seem interested in exploiting the tiny size of the bulbs. Unsentimental designers tend to line the diodes up in lines, like a tape, or add a long, cylindrical lens to them, turning the brilliant pinpoints into light sabers. But there are hints of what lies ahead. One English fabricator is showing wallpapers that have LED diodes integrated within their baroque patterns, and one artist is showing lamps made of clouds of them, that resemble models of the atom more than chandeliers. They get at the potentially revolutionary question: what does an LED light fixture look like?

Image of “Bubble Chandelier” courtesy of Pelle Designs.

May 28, 2014 by Nalina Moses

I saw a young man at this year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) ride a bike through it, and it struck me that he had exactly the right idea. This year’s show is significantly smaller than it’s been in previous years, but it still fills the entire lower level of the Javitz Center. The show is usually fun to walk through, and each new booth has the potential to surprise and delight. But this year I spent just an hour on the floor and then took a seat while my friend finished her viewing. The show felt like an endless array of the same handful of products: artisinal wood tables, artisinal hand-blown glass lamps, and artisinal wallcoverings.

I’m all for a return to craft, sustainable materials, and small-scale fabrication. But most of the artisinal-minded products at ICFF are too obsessively designed and machined to be authentically artisinal, or even artsy. Their one-off hand-finished look is just an aesthetic. It’s obvious that behind the reclaimed materials and artfully irregular finishes, highly ambitious trained designers (frustrated architects, perhaps?) are at work. The rage for handmade stuff has already been parodied, lovingly, by the iconic Put a Bird On it! skit on Portlandia. What’s the limit to the number of artisinal products the market can bear? Isn’t it just a matter of time before the sensibility, like all other trends, falls out of fashion?

May 24, 2012 by Nalina Moses