Hasta La Ideas

Norway-based Varier Furniture’s “intelligent sitting” philosophy is simple and alluring: “If humans can move in a natural way, even when sitting, the body will feel better and possibly also last longer.” The company combines Form & Function with Movement & Variation, resulting in beautiful chairs that allow the freedom to sit in a variety of positions and still remain comfortable.

The great thing about attending an exhausting furniture trade show like the ICFF is that you occasionally get to rest your dogs by lounging in pieces like these. As you can guess, once I hit Varier’s area, I didn’t want to get back up.

Above: The Penguin, Peel Club, and Tok, the latter being the sexiest update on the Eames classic we’ve yet seen.

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Stilvoll’s beautiful, versatile Crescendo C2 desk uses clever, and nearly invisible, mechanical engineering to provide access to multiple storage compartments, expand in size, adjust in height, and tilt portions of the desktop up into drafting-table angles. Comes in three heights: “School & College,” “Secretary” and “Standing-Desk.” This is a combination of industrial design and craftsmanship at its finest, and the walnut version is particularly eye-pleasing in person.

Use our Essential Guide to NY Design Week 2009 to find the best stuff (Mobile version for your phone too!)

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A packed crowd filled the Metropolis Pavilion on Sunday afternoon to hear Michele De Lucchi interviewed by Paola Antonelli. With two such luminaries it was anyone’s guess who the audience had come to hear. Antonelli, of course, is the senior curator at the MoMA and De Lucchi is a design icon whose trajectory included the Memphis Collective and Alchimia. Upon introducing De Lucchi, Antonelli explained that they had forgone slides in favor of an open discussion since his industrial design was something anyone would recognize upon seeing. Quite an understatement. As the designer of the iconic Tolomeo lamp for Artimide, De Lucchi literally defined the form that most people recognize as an office desk lamp.

Rather than focus on the objects we know so well, Antonelli instead chose to interview De Lucchi about his life and philosophy. Since De Lucchi had been involved with so many pivotal movements, his anecdotes were a virtual who’s who of design icons. After introducing him with the quip, “changing the world one chair at a time,” Antonelli let him tell his life story. After ostentatiously choosing to arrive at the Milan Triennale in a Napoleon outfit, De Lucchi met Ettore Sottsass, the center of the Memphis Collective, and the rest, as they say, was history. Antonelli and De Lucchi’s easy banter filled the rest of the hour with non-stop quotables and a direct connection to the very origins of postmodern design.

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This year’s ICFF saw the launch of British designer Alexander Purcell’s APRRO line, which includes the Tour and JFK Lounge chairs seen above. Click here for more pieces by Purcell.

Netherlands-based bERT&dENNIS (that’s Bert van der Grift and Dennis van der Burch) strive for “Simplicity, fluidity, angularity, utility; organic forms vie with subtle references to Bauhaus, kitsch, traditional Japanese.” Below is their new Fold lounge chair, followed by DotShop. Click here to see more of this Dutch dynamic duo’s work.

Alan Heller’s ergoErgo “combines the health benefits of an exercise ball with the comfort of a cushioned seat;” perching atop the constantly swaying stool forces you to engage your legs and back to stay upright. (Having used an exercise ball as my desk chair for approximately two years, I can see one clear advantage of the ergoErgo–it won’t get thoroughly dirty like exercise balls do, since the only part of the ergoErgo that comes into contact with the floor is the bottom.)

Use our Essential Guide to NY Design Week 2009 to find the best stuff (Mobile version for your phone too!)

View all of Core77’s New York Design Week 09 coverage

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The offsite events during NY Design Week are often as engaging as the main event at the ICFF–in some cases more so–and offer the advantages of a serene, manageable environment, and no pesky registration requirements.

One of the more promising this year is “400 Years Later,” a mostly-for-sale collection at CITE in SoHo, featuring the work of 23 Dutch designers that ranges from adorable to innovative to downright bizarre. We had a chance to walk through some of the show’s highlights with curator Alissia Melka-Teichroew yesterday. The resulting video is exactly what you hope to get from a Design Week show: a showcase that changes your idea of what objects do and how they’re made.

>>Use our Essential Guide to NY Design Week 2009 to find the best stuff (Mobile version for your phone too!)
>>View all of Core77’s New York Design Week 09 coverage

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