Hasta La Ideas

An experiment in interactive digital collaboration, Shape The Hive invites people from around the world to create and submit individual artwork online that will be combined into a larger piece for an unexpected installation of enormous scale. The honeycomb-shaped project aims to connect artists by intentionally using the web—the very medium that often disconnects people—serving as both a platform for and reminder about the future of art.

Organized by L.A.-based interdisciplinary studios Kuro Interactive (the same crew behind the rap lyrics Valentine’s) and Vision Design Studio and sponsored by The Art Institute of California Orange County, Shape the Hive will award a MacBook Pro to the most “bitchin” pod as well as a $10,000 scholarship to The Art Institute.

Shape the Hive’s potential is infinite, depending on how many people collaborate. To be part of the community, submit a design or vote for your favorite pod.

One of Manhattan’s brightest contemporary clothing designers Unis recently partnered with Brooklyn’s Sit and Read Furniture for a line of home furnishings sharing the nuanced, timeless appeal of the label’s menswear.

Sit and Read’s Kyle Garner reupholsters the one-of-a-kind vintage chairs with textiles from Unis’ Spring 2010 collection, lending a familiar yet fresh update. A 19th-century walnut armchair, reincarnated in blue-and-white plaid suiting used for a trench coat, looks perfectly classic modern. Playing on the enduring color-block trend in fashion, an Eero Saarinen chair gets done up in navy and gray corduroy, while Kyle revamped a pair of Eames fiberglass shell chairs in felted green wool. “Both furniture and clothes are art forms that are meant to be used,” he said. “The interesting combination is that we’re both using these very utilitarian forms of art.”

Garner began Sit and Read a few years ago with a trove of furniture and props he acquired as a set designer, using a blog to catalog and advertise his wares. It caught the eye of the folks at Unis, who approached Sit and Read to consign some furniture and help redesign its flagship store. Keeping the label’s color palette in mind, Garner noticed spare fabrics in the studio, and the collaboration was born. “Everything that [Unis] makes pants and jackets out of is all completely suitable for upholstery,” he said.

Sit and Read also partook in the second annual Pop-Up Flea last November, with like-minded labels such as Ohio Knitting Mills and The Hill-side.

The line sells at the Unis flagship store or go to the Sit and Read blog to make showroom appointments. Prices for chairs range from $450 to $1,500.

Store photography by James Ryang

On site to present their new collection at Milan Design Week, Fernando and Humberto Campana recently sat down with CH at Spazio Rossana Orlandi to talk about their latest works—a collaboration with Corsi Design Factory called Nativocampana. The collection, 15 vases and baskets, combines fluid resin with the Brazilian designers’ most loved materials, leather, natural fibers and wooden benches. Mixing Italian craftsmanship (each piece is handmade in Corsi’s lab in the heart of Milan), highly-technical resins requiring extensive experimentation and production, along with their signature natural and recycled materials, the resulting gorgeously amorphous forms toe the line between high and low in true Campana fashion.

Is beauty spontaneous or does it emerge from hard work?

Fernando Campana: For me it’s from hard work, everything I do starts from the hands and sometimes things come unconsciously without even knowing if is going to be beautiful. I learn from my mistakes because sometimes the ugliness can be attractive and you can construct beauty from the ugliness.

Humberto Campana: For me beauty starts from your eyes, from the education of your sight. It can be spontaneous or come from hard work, but you get and process it through the way you look at things. This is the procedure to get to beauty. Some people have this sense more easily, but it certainly relies on the education of the eyes.

Your projects seem to be a process of taking order out of chaos.

FC: The concept of beauty has changed drastically in the past 10 years. For instance, when you use gold, it’s already beautiful, but sometimes you have to build nice things from very ugly materials. This is the trick whenever you work with pieces of discarded things—you have to find order into chaos and build something elegant.

HC: Part of our work is to out point beauty within something, which is not so for most people, and so we find beauty wherever it’s not clearly visible. This attracts me a lot. We live in São Paulo, a city with 20 millions inhabitants, which isn’t an easy city at all. The city is also unattractive, you really have to work hard to find and build beauty, because it’s necessary for your well-being.

FC: In Rio de Janeiro instead everything is already beautiful—the nature, the beach, the people, everything is more gentle.

During a 2008 interview Brazilian artist Vik Muniz said that the Campana’s aesthetic relies on gambiarra, a Brazilian concept that describes the local attitude to always get along, to succeed despite all the obstacles. Is that still true in your work?

HC: Gambiarra in Brazil can be a bad word, since we also use it to describe those who steal electricity from their neighbor! It can also be something very amateurish, but on the contrary we try to use this attitude to make very professional things. In our point of view there’s a dose of improvisation there, which is something connected to our work. We are passing through a very bad crisis that makes people do gambiarra, they are finding solutions in order to survive. It’s something very contemporary, even in the European society, meaning smart solutions for very crucial problems with lots of added creativity.

FC: The vases we made with Corsi for example are a kind of gambiarra, but from this Brazilian concept we have deleted the idea of dirt and unclean approach to things, finding a nice, clean solution.

What is the best aesthetic for sustainable products? If there is any, does it have to be rich, poor, surreal, or absent?

HC: Today sustainable products can have any kind of style. Before it was different, because a few years ago it had to be an abhorring aesthetics. Now we can add more elements and make it happier.

FC: Whenever you work with your hands we can talk about sustainability—creating by hand is human ecology.

Nativocampana at Spazio Rossana Orlandi runs through 18 April 2010.

The most exciting new hardware launched by Apple since the iPhone, the iPad presents a brand new platform for consuming online content. To perfectly tailor our publication to the touch-screen medium, we developed the Cool Hunting application—a free app (downloadable now from iTunes).

Pulling off a project like this takes an amazing team. In our case we worked on the design with BBH and development with Front-Ended. None of this would have been possible without our launch sponsor Cadillac or our ad network Largetail.

Combining the strengths of the iPad with those of our recently re-designed site, in landscape mode you can scroll laterally through all of our stories or filter by category. With a simple two finger swipe, you can move from one story to the next, with images bordering the top and information displayed on the left hand side. Videos expand to consume the entire screen, taking advantage of the iPad’s gorgeously crisp display. While the horizontal view is more visual and immersive, the portrait view puts the focus on headlines, allowing you to quickly scan articles.

While many publications are taking a more literal approach to translating their content from print to pad (or web to pad), we chose to create an interface that best suits the user experience and creates new opportunities for our advertising partners. For Cadillac, the first brand to leverage our custom, single-sponsor approach, we worked with BBH to create a section that contains weekly updates of iPad-only Cool Hunting stories, advertorial and content specifically about the CTS-V Coupe.

Available for free from iTunes, we couldn’t be more excited about the application and the seemingly endless possibilities presented by the iPad.

Kitsune Noir today launched the first in a new ongoing series of laser-cut birch wood clocks. The premier edition features the decorative patterns of artist and wallpaper designer Dan Funderburgh created in collaboration with the Montreal-based design/build shop (and CH contributor), Furni. Funderburgh’s design takes on the idea of a traditional Bavarian cuckoo clock, with a typically subversive twist—just a couple of sticks of dynamite lurking under the clock face.

Each design in the Neverend series will be made in limited editions of 88 clocks. The Funderburgh clock sells for $198 in black and natural from Furni.