“Each piece in the collection is designed to foster and cultivate the spirit of a ‘Mehmooni,‘” says the 26-year-old designer, who was born in Highland Park, Illinois and now resides in Brooklyn. “The ‘Taarof’ table, for example, is a modular cocktail table with an optional built-in ice bucket, ashtray, and/or fruit bowl. In addition to promoting traditional Persian gatherings, the collection is both sustainable and carbon-neutral.”

Named for the Persian tradition of etiquette and generosity, the Taarof table is just begging to be a centerpiece at an event, inviting guests to drop their pretensions and get down low on the floor to share snacks and intimate conversation. Part of the fun is its modularity and an element of surprise, since the custom leg inserts just look like part of the design at first glance. And let’s be honest: removing the lids to reveal food, a chilled bottle of champagne, or a surface for burning incense is a pretty cool party trick. There’s something particularly pleasing about the shapes of the table and other elements in the collection, too, with not a single hard edge in sight.

Inspired by the low seating offered at traditional restaurants in Tehran’s Darband mountains, the “Behsheen” chair is a natural accompaniment to the table. It may consist of hard surfaces, but somehow it still seems soft and comforting with its almost fleshy sense of weight. Its simple shapes, reminiscent of natural rocks, could even have a Flintstones-like quality if it were rendered in harder materials.

Then there’s the “Doodool” mirror. If you’re raising an eyebrow at the shape, know that it’s intentional. Maghsoudi describes it as a “lighthearted phallic silhouette,” with an arched top, elongated body, and dual semi-circular feet. Standing 75 inches high, the mirror reinforces the tongue-in-cheek tone of the collection.

The materiality of the Mehmooni collection is another big part of its appeal. Though it may look like conventional plastic, it’s actually all made of a combination of organic materials, including corn-based 3D printed plastic, sustainably sourced FSC-certified lumber, and plant-based resin. All materials were sourced locally in the New York City area and fabricated in Red Hook, Brooklyn, with all carbon emissions from fabrication offset using carbon credits to make the project fully carbon-neutral and emission-free.

“There’s a lot of monotony in life and in decor,” Maghsoudi told Surface Magazine. “It’s important to not only design something beautiful, but design something that will influence how someone behaves. My work encourages people to gather, celebrate, and explore their hedonistic tendencies —sustainably, of course.”

“As the dust settles on my NYCxDesign show, I’m working with several private clients on custom orders. I love helping bring their dream piece to life and knowing that my work helps make their house a home. I’m also partnering with galleries and helping them deliver on their customers’ vision for design. And as always, I’m continuing to find inspiration as I design my next line.”

The post Kouros Maghsoudi’s “Mehmooni” Furniture Collection is a Postmodern Spin on Persian Traditions first appeared on Dornob.

New Brussels-based creative practice Cobra Studios has based its whole postmodern aesthetic on these contrasts. Their debut furniture collection, “SOLIDS,” takes inspiration from the look of Roman architectural ruins, reimagining them through a filter of bright colors, minimalist shapes, and sculptural functionality.

Founders Kenny December and Hugues Delaunay traveled to Rome to study the city’s magnificent ruins before working on the collection. Delaunay in particular has been fascinated by them since childhood, and what interests him most is the way these relics of another era of humanity have remained the same while the modern city sprouted up around them.

In “SOLIDS,” the columns and crumbling walls of monuments like the Roman Forum are simplified into pure resin cylinders, spheres, rectangles, and discs resembling hard candy. Varying in size and translucence, these shapes pierce through sheets of frosted acrylic. The designers wanted them to have a certain brevity and playfulness despite the rather serious source of their inspiration.

They explain that “the mix of heavy, solid legs and a thin, soft top evokes a feeling of comfort and clemency. The supporting elements are so present that they pierce through the table tops, marking the presence of what lays underneath. Their presence organizes the tables. The top that used to be an element of priority, becomes merely a connecting piece. This ancillary function is emphasized by the matte, chalk finish.”

“The designs seek for contrast. The supports are heavy, yet transparent. Colorful yet cold. Hard, yet so soft. The distinct volumes can function as singular elements, but they decided to stay connected. The intersecting and contrasting pieces, free-standing, will hit their mark in any interior.”

The “SOLIDS” collection consists of coffee tables, side tables, dinner tables, and complementary lamps, with names like “Cicero,” “Priape,” “Santa Maria Dei Clarici,” and “Otho” after Roman churches, gods, and generals, all in shapes that “affirm the graphic design.” The floor lamp features a cylindrical glass shade supported by a thin three-legged stand, casting a green light on each of the tables.

Cobra Studios was born when architect December and scenographic designer Delaunay needed a new dining table for their apartment, and subsequently decided to make the perfect one themselves. Bringing their diverse skills and talents together, the duo experimented with materials and shapes to find their own defining aesthetic and identity.

“Hard shapes need to collide with soft touches. The pieces need to be minimalistic yet very decorative. Every piece needs to withstand time and art movements. Cobra Studios tends towards creating a world of its own, a certain form of light living, naïve but such fun.”

The designers also told Wallpaper that they’re playing with natural materials like terracotta and stone for their next collection, so we may see an interesting pivot from the synthetics of “SOLIDS.” Whatever they come up with, there’s no doubt it will be fresh and creative.

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Improbable Beginnings

Sam Grawe, former brand director for enigmatic designer Herman Miller, was happy living with his wife and son in the San Francisco Bay area for 15 years. In fact, when the family began toying with the idea of moving to Michigan so Sam could be closer to Miller’s headquarters, the couple had just purchased an Eichler home in upscale Marin County.
Despite the sudden change in lifestyle, the Grawes managed to find the perfect home in Grand Rapids (about an hour away from Miller’s headquarters). Designed by local architect Richard Wright in the 1970s, Sam recalls being particularly smitten by the big bronze panels hanging on its front doors. Coupled with the rest of the home’s architecture, that bronze proved irresistible. “It just seemed like this totally bizarre, Brutalist, postmodern house,” he recalls.

Visionary Potential

The Grawes immediately saw the potential hidden behind the home’s 70s trappings, which had obviously been built to the highest possible standards of the decade. An intercom system had been installed for communication between all rooms, the home’s walls were covered with upscale Evelyn Ackerman wood panels interspersed with elegant grasscloth, and chic teak parquet floors abounded. A particularly opulent Koi pond even graced the landing of the central stairway.

Not long after they moved in, Grawe started doing some rough sketches of his visions for the house in Adobe Illustrator and presented them to Becker & Sanders, a local contractor recommended to him by a fellow Herman Miller associate.
Eventually, every floor and wall in the home was resurfaced, otherwise altered, or removed entirely. The Grawes notably knocked out a wall in the dining room and got rid of a kitchen bar. Simultaneously, they also preserved several aspects from the original design, including the unique front doors (sans the brass panels) and their diminutive rosewood door handles, as well as the striking brown glazed bricks in the foyer.

Since both Grawes are passionate about cooking, it’s no surprise that their kitchen was completely overhauled, with matching state-of-the-art appliances now filling the space and a charming nook displaying their cookbook collection on one end. The room’s rough walls (and the walls all throughout the home) were smoothed out to soft, silky finishes, and huge skylights were put in above the central staircase to flood the space with natural light. Original furniture pieces are mingled with new styles to strike an ideal balance. Sam was particularly delighted to find a classic George Nelson coffee table from the 1960s for the home — a piece he’d desired for a long time.

The Grawes did nothing to alter the house’s exterior, as they already felt that it was perfect, including the windows graced with Romanesque arch detailing. Although the family will soon be moving out of the dream house, they cherish the memories they have of watching their sons grow up in it and will never forget its magical ambiance. “Even when there’s snow covering the skylights, light in the house is always great, no matter [the] season,” Sam fondly reminisces.

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Inspired by a paradox-loving painter and sketcher, this offbeat hillside home puts the ‘fun’ in ‘functional’ … then takes the ‘ctional’ right back out.

Weichlbauer Ortis Architects designed this home for the Austrian countryside with its own set of strange juxtapositions – cubic volumes covered in grass, contrasting with the natural greens all around, for instance.

But the most remarkable – and really strange – set of steps, are, well, the steps … a series of concrete stairways that often go nowhere, start or stop abruptly, or are even turned on their sides.

Weird window extensions reinforce the surrealistic effects of these other design moves, making for a playful and dizzying composition on all fronts (and backs, and sides, and upside-downs).

The post Escher-Inspired Home is Covered in Grass & Abstractions first appeared on Dornob.

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What makes these surreal structures uncanny is their near-believability. While the buildings are not quite impossible, in most cases, these renderings stretch the limits of the improbable. The settings are almost exclusively mundane – boring gray skyscrapers, with a twist (or a bend, depending).

The story of illustrator Víctor Enrich begins and ends with art, though brief flirtations and flings with urban design and architecture came along the way.

In the end, and perhaps not a shock to those viewing his work, real-world construction limited the potential of his imagination.

What started as sketches at age ten evolved into computer models as a teen, developing into ever-more-realistic photography edits as the artist aged with the available tools.

In his own words: “The works tend to resurrect the urban form, probably the most overlooked field of the architectural world … the cities of today have not been designed.”

“Most of them were never designed, so what we see is the result of very random processes of addition and subtraction of objects, buildings, roads etc, pending on strong private economic interests.”

“There is a background process of understanding the city at a geometric level. Urban spatialities are analyzed and described in order to rescue the anonymity of them by applying all kinds of geometric operations that the buildings themselves inspire.”

About Victor:

“Urban form, in all its versatility, represents the exploration core of Barcelona-based Víctor Enrich. This Catalan-born artist (1976), who attended college studies at the Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB), had already manifested a big devotion to the geometry of cities during his childhood years, a passion which has evolved into his actual artistic practice. Organic deformations, heavy structures set to fly or long-distance displacements are just few of the wide range of actions that Enrich applies to ‘his’ buildings with the aim to uncover what is hidden in every architectonic structure, a set of actions whose execution wouldn’t be possible unless by combining two of Enrich’s most passionately loved fields of knowledge: Digital Photography and 3D Rendering.”

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Form meets function in playful postmodern style with these contents-shaped doors that open up into clothing storage for children.

Peter Bristol, a Seattle furniture maker, goes straight to the point with visual cues – heck, even as an adult we could sometimes use a reminder, right?

Boys and girls versions add a cute twist as well, though one could hope for a third unisex option too. Since they are hand-crafted individually, it seems like an easy alternative to add.

“The cabinet is made from ¾” ULDF and finished with conversion varnish. The drawers are 9 ply ½” maple plywood, dovetailed and finished with clear catalyzed lacquer. All cabinet and drawer components are cut, drilled and dadoed on a CNC table router. Assembled with a combination of screws, pins, staples, glue, and Pacific Northwest fresh air.”

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Could two halves of one furniture design be crafted more differently? What starts as an ornate, highly decorated antique looking wooden dresser on one side transforms into the most abstract, minimalist and modern-looking of wood storage cabinets on the other.

In short, though both sides can be seen to belong to specific historic stylistic periods, there is a way in which they represent opposite aesthetics as different as postmodern paintings and ancient cave carvings – conceptually as far apart as art and/or design can get.

Despite the actual space of transition between the ancient- and ultramodern-looking pieces of this unlikely whole, there is something smooth about the transition – assisted by a few key points of physical overlap and the continuation of color from the hand-carved half to the through to parts of the machine-built half.

Designed by Ferruccio Laviani for Emmemobili , the aptly named ‘Evolution’ oak sideboard may be the strangest attempt to fuse styles from separate centuries into a single, mass-produced and market-ready furniture object.

“A unique and iconic element of great strength, Evolution transfers to the viewer the power of the evolution that the world of wooden furniture has undergone in recent decades. From the large, hand-carved decorations representing the fine cabinet-making that made the classical style possible in all its richness, to the formal cleanliness of dry, rigorous volumes of a more rationalist, current trend.”

About designer Ferruccio Laviani:

“Born in Cremona in 1960, he studied at the Istituto Professionale Internazionale per l’Artigianato Liutario e del Legno di Cremona and received his diploma in 1978. He then went on to attend the Politecnico di Milano Architecture Faculty and graduated in 1986, after studying on the courses taught by Achille Castiglioni and Marco Zanuso. During this period he also studied at the Politecnico di Design di Milano, a private school from which he received his diploma in 1984. In 1983, he began working at Studio De Lucchi, becoming a partner in 1986 and leaving the firm in 1991 to open his own Studio in Milan.”

“He works as an architect in the areas of product design, interior design, art direction and graphics. He has been Art Director at Kartell since 1991 and has held this position for various other companies including Flos, De Padova, Foscarini, Moroso, Society (Limonta) and Emmemobili.”

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When it rains, something strange happens … all of those bustling urban pedestrians staring at their feet begin to catch glimpses of the architecture above and around them, turning just a little bit of their world upside down.

Puddling is a minimalistic white photographic tumblog (Tumblr blog) with pictures posted to it by Madeleine Digangi, featuring ordinary scenes as framed by pools of standing water on city streets and sidewalks.

The structures themselves are not extraordinary, and surely it would be hard to find beauty in the muddied rainwater, yellow lines, green bike paths or crumbling curbs alone.

But together, well, the compositions have an ephemeral and collaged quality that would no doubt make a postmodern Narcissus want to look deeper, and perhaps even cause him to fall in.

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Yasutaka Yoshimura Architects titled this solution ‘nowhere’ for a reason – the occupant could seemingly be in any time or place, detached from yet connected to their surroundings in a unique and visceral way.

One problem with living in a place with a beautiful ocean and mountain view is that other people are cramming to see the same things you are – neighboring homes and other vacationers crowd the coastline in this much-desired spot along the Japanese waterline.

The clever solution in this case was a series of tubes – or rather: long narrow rooms that all point out toward the open water. Most of these are capped by full wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling panes of glass, creating a jarring sense of proximity to the outdoors.

Simultaneously, a sense of privacy is achieved with respect to people walking along the shore diagonally across the way (or traversing the side street that wraps behind the residence).

Punched openings still provide ways to travel sideways between spaces, but each room retains the feel of being directed out toward (and over) the water to views of the ocean and Mount Fiji beyond.

This contemporary concrete house is neither about the interior nor the exterior design – it is about the spatial experience shaped at the intersection of the two. The success of the project rests in part, too, on the impressive ability of the architects to plan around a triangular lot that could at best be viewed as a serious design challenge.

The facade, while interesting, is not itself the focus – it is merely a by-product of the designers maximizing a variety of experiences to be had within the house.

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Wall clock, calendar and mortality reminder all wrapped up in one odd work of (post)modern art. The so-called ‘Chrono Shredder’ provides a palpable (or pulp-able?) physical reminder that all things are temporary, and we can never wind back time in this world. The artist fittingly describes it as a “poetic time machine.”

Created by Susanna Hetrich, the simple red box shreds each day’s calendar page as it passes, and leaves the tangled paper strands to curl, bunch and pile up on the floor in a messy heap. This fits right in the middle of her portfolio of creative work, which ranges from abstract installation artworks to apparel and photography.

She considers the calendar a kind of performance art piece (albeit robotic rather than human in nature), and it is never stationary: each day slowly shreds in realtime so that minute changes are visible even on an hourly or second-to-second basis if one is watching closely. While not yet for sale, she does have plans to release a limited-edition version at some time in the future.

More from the artist

“Chrono-shredder is a poetic time machine that reminds us of the momentariness of our life time. Every single day is slowly shredded as time passes by. All that time that is irreversibly lost, receives a tangible presence in the form of shredded paper. As the minutes tick by, the tattered remains of the past pile up under the device. One day is shredded within 24 hours. A shredding pulse is activated very 3 minutes. The device auto-synchronizes at midnight each day. Once started, the Chrono-Shredder automatically and continously shreds the days as time goes by.”

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Many creative architectural projects are called on to respond to existing conditions, like an old residence in an historical style … but what do you do when the home you are starting with is already modern? In some ways, it is hard to tell a ‘second story’ with a newly-added floor if the first floor already appears to be a work of contemporary architecture.

This solution by Dialect Design is subtle, clever and respectful of a box-shaped residence already in place, adding colorful elements that are at once different from the original but also fit in snugly with Modernist themes.

Playful built-in bookcases are tied into the upstairs staircase while circular lights and mirrors dot the bathroom walls of the newly added portion. To call the approach ‘Postmodern’ would be to miss the point – sure, the style in play is probably a fit for the term, but the underlying ‘Modern’ is still there as well.

A splash or color, some new shading elements and other architectural details serve to brighten up the exterior facade, bring in additional light but slot like puzzle pieces within the (perhaps somewhat boring) house plan that predated them.

“Slowing down traffic with curiously hovering red boxes tickling the traditional sensibilities of an urban tree-lined neighborhood, Charlotte’s latest architectural triumph of contemporary design is breaking all conventions.”

“Via a modern climbing library that immediately evokes adventure, stylish comfort, and the intimacy of reading, Dialect Design, a design + build firm, has created an ingenious and refreshingly unexpected space. The Schönberg residence second story addition bears the mark of all things classically Dialect – a sophisticated use of color that effortlessly runs from the coolly subdued to the richly dramatic; an expert and unconventional approach to materials and construction; and an eye for detail so subtle the soul of the design is upon you before you know it.”

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Clothed in paper as skinny as she is, this model looks about as natural and comfortable as the dresses designed around her. Even as women’s evening wear goes, these works may be black-and-white in the literal sense but they are anything but casual or simple – and as a cocktail dress, well, one would have to be extra careful not to spill.

Russian designers Alexandra Zaharova & Ilya Plotnikov of Doberman Studio specialize in the unusual, working with art, advertising, fashion, photography and (as this project illustrates) the intersection of these and other design fields.

A Metropolis-worthy parody, these works poke fun in a postmodern way at the cosmopolitan lives of fashion-savvy urbanites – whether intentionally or not.

Each dress highlights fragile and uncomfortable extremes of contemporary fashion design, while simultaneously impressing us with the clean aesthetic of model, dress and photo combined.

While they may be a bit much for prom or homecoming events, one could almost imagine these bridal gowns with accompanying paper-crafted bridesmaid dresses made to match – though whether you could convince a mother of the bride to wear such an avante-garde outfit is another question entirely.

Are these paper art dresses practical? Of course not. But they don’t have to be. The medium is perfect for a bold, graphic look, making a big statement for a photo shoot. Plus, it makes us wonder whether similar silhouettes couldn’t be recreated in more wearable fabrics, just to add a little visual flair and drama to the boring everyday fashion landscape of t-shirts and jeans.

“We are engaged in photography, retouching, 3D visualization, motion design and 3D animation. Since 2005 we have been cooperating with the largest online advertising agents: BBDO, McCann Erickson, DDB, Lowe Adventa, Instinct, 3SBA; Productions: Just Production, Park Production, Amber Production, Focus Films.”

“We created ads for companies such as Nestle, Mc Donalds, Coca Cola, Unilever, InBev, Visa, Pepsi, Sab Miller, Raiffeisen Bank, Bayer, Megafon, Sberbank and Beeline.”

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