One of the year’s most eagerly anticipated design exhibitions opened last month at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Given the extraordinary six-decade career of Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988), the title ‘I Am Not a Designer’ carries a certain irony. The exhibition explores the refined objects, projects, and defining moments that established Noguchi as one of the most influential figures in modern design. I asked the exhibit’s co-curator, Monica Obniski, about the title. She is the Museum’s curator of decorative arts, and my recent guest who concluded the spring series of ‘Collecting Design: History, Collections, Highlights.’ Apparently, in a famed interview with Noguchi, published in the journal League Quarterly in 1949, one of his most productive years in design, he declared, “I am not a designer.” And it is this quote, charged with much of his intellectual perspective on his place between art and design, that is not only the title of the landmark exhibit but also stands at its core, suggesting a lifetime of questioning the role of the ‘designer’ in his oeuvre.

Unlike past monographic exhibitions on Noguchi—too many to count—this one is the first to present the full scope of his work in design. It is rich beyond words: industrial design, one-of-a-kind furniture, exhibition design, prototypes, collaborations on architecture projects, interiors, functional sculpture, gardens, playscapes, and playgrounds. From the show and its accompanying book, we learn that Noguchi’s scope of design was larger than that of any other American designer of his generation.

As many artists engaged in design, Noguchi wanted to be seen as a sculptor rather than as a designer, although, as we learn, in challenging times of financial insecurity, he turned to industrial design as a major source of income. But, as Obniski notes, to Noguchi, who was born in Los Angeles to a Japanese poet father and an American writer mother, and who split his time between Japan and America for most of his life, it was not simply a quest to be recognized as an artist, as he seamlessly moved between sculpture, furniture, gardens, and playgrounds. He always emphasized form, but in accordance with Japanese holistic philosophy, he developed an interdisciplinary approach, blurring the lines between art and design. It is the Nagomi, an ancient Japanese concept of cultivating balance, calmness, emotional well-being, and harmonizing opposing forces, which ultimately shaped his views. On May 7^th, the High Museum of Art celebrated the 50th anniversary of Playscapes, the only playground Noguchi built in the US, which was commissioned by the Museum in 1976. He drafted many plans for playgrounds throughout his life, capturing his vision of art in the public space, but most of these proposals were rejected.

Atlanta has many reasons to celebrate the life and legacy of one of the most critically acclaimed artists of the 20^th century, and having Monica Obinski as my guest in concluding the spring season of the series was a treat, revealing the five-year curatorial concepts of the exhibition. Our talk focused on Noguchi’s furniture, which is as fascinating as the stories attached to his work. They grew from the relationships that he had forged throughout his life, and those narratives have become an integral part of their histories. Like many successful artists, Noguchi leveraged personal relationships to propel his career and to collaborate with some of the most fascinating cultural figures of his time: Merce Cunningham and John Cage; Louis Kahn; Martha Graham; and George Nelson, to name a few. These relationships brought about some of the most imaginative and iconic design projects of the 20^th century. George Nelson recruited him to create furniture for Herman Miller; with Ozeki Jishichi Shoten, the producer of paper lanterns in Gifu, Japan, with whom he developed the blockbuster product, Akari Lamps; with Kenzo Tange, Japan’s father of modern architecture, with whom he collaborated on the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and the Sogetsu Kaikan in Tokyo, and more.

An entire chapter in the book is devoted to the magical tables he created for three leading figures in the history of the Museum of Modern Art: Philip L. Goodwin, a member of the board of trustees; A. Congar Goodyear, a philanthropist and the Museum’s president; and William A. M. Burden, who served as a trustee and the Museum’s president during the 1950s; he nicknamed the three his ‘fancy friends.’ For Goodyear, he created the first table in laminated wood for his new and modernist home in Long Island, an organic-shaped table which later became the point of departure for his famed coffee table IN-50 for Herman Miller. For Goodwin, he designed a table with one enormous opening, inspired by the sea arches of coastal Japan, which today is in the permanent collection of MoMA; and the dining table he created for Burden’s summer house in Northeast Harbor, Maine, which was demolished in a fire.

Dressing functional objects with sculptural identity was Noguchi’s brilliance, and the roots of this practice can be found quite early. At one time, the young aspiring artist Noguchi worked as an assistant at the Parisian studio of Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, from whom he inherited the vocabulary of reduced abstracted organic forms and from whom he learned to work with carving tools. He could never have imagined that someday he would be considered one of the most important artists of the 20th century, just like his mentor, who famously revolutionized sculpture, shifting from realistic modeling to abstractions. ‘What Brancusi does with a bird, or the Japanese do with a garden,’ Noguchi said later, ‘is to take the essence of nature and distill it — just as a poet does.’ And like his mentor, who created furniture in hand-carved wood and stone, Noguchi, when creating his total, holistic, handcrafted environment, devoted much of his effort to design, and his furniture reflected his artistic philosophy of simplified, pure, organic forms.

As any design historian would tell you, the origin of the designer’s training is apparent in the final product. Architects, for example, create different furniture than do fashion designers. With Noguchi, every piece contains his sculptural thoughts and personal vocabulary. Unlike the biomorphic forms of his contemporaries – Ray and Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen, Marcel Breuer – who followed the direction, set by MoMA’s curator Elion Noyes, who initiated the “Organic Design in Home Furnishings” competition, Noguchi pieces are rooted in the mind of an artist, not an industrial designer. Many of the pieces he created for industrial design were not great commercial successes, and some, like the Chess Table and the Sofa, remained at the prototype stage. But two of his works—the Noguchi Coffee Table and the Akari Lamps—remain among the most popular, iconic, and sellable mid-century masterpieces of design, with enduring appeal. The exhibition ‘Isamu Noguchi: I am not a Designer,’ highlights his impact on contemporary design of his time, and demonstrates, through the amazing selection, why he became widely considered as one of the most admired designers of the 20^th century.

The long-awaited book, co-edited by Obniski with Marin R. Sullivan, with contributionos by numerous experts, is a treasure for any design, art, and architecture library, filled with new information and fantastic period images. It is divided into three categories, organized thematically – Making Multiples; Elements of Architecture; and Shaping Spaces. Together, the exhibition and publication reveal why Noguchi’s work continues to feel remarkably modern—balancing artistic vision, functionality, and timeless beauty.

The exhibition will be on view at the High Museum of Art until August 2, 2026 and will be traveling in different configurations.

David Haskell is the award-winning editor-in-chief of New York Magazine. Trained as an architect at Yale University, he is passionate about urban design and was one of the early proponents of bike-sharing in New York City, which ultimately led to the launch of the CitiBike. He co-founded Kings County Distillery, producing whiskey at the waterfront Brooklyn Navy Yard, which is also the site of his own studio. It is here that David works with clay, creating pieces on the pottery wheel and forming sculptures in his own voice. I am hosting him here today in celebrating his upcoming solo exhibition ‘Boom Beach’ at Donzella LTD Gallery in New York.

There is a certain allure that has become attached to contemporary studio ceramics in recent years. It is a part of the renewed interest in the handmade, a movement which emerged as a response to the increasing digital world. The crafted object emphasizes authenticity, sustainability, and personal, emotional expressions while signifying an interest in materiality and in elevating the individuality. Clay is particularly intriguing because it is powerful, layered, and complex. It has been used to express gender, identity, poetic storytelling, and even political statements.

David Haskell’s biomorphic objects are composed of collapsed forms and elements, first shaped on the wheel as geometrical forms, and then manipulated and assembled into free and abstract compositions, becoming organic sculptures of immaculate surfaces and intriguing shapes. I hosted him in the second episode of the spring season of Designing the 21st Century about his vision, work, and why clay matters.

Robert A.M. Stern, the architect who became synonymous with the affluent architecture of New York City and that of the seaside villages of the Hamptons, passed away on Thanksgiving. He rose from humble beginnings in provincial postwar Brooklyn to the top of the profession with a powerful firm of hundreds which he founded nearly six decades ago.

Stern’s prestigious limestone-clad towers were shaped by his passion for the landmark apartment houses of New York City, built during the golden age of skyscrapers in the 1920s. His high-end coastal homes were also born from his love for history. Here he revived the Shingle Style, a vernacular American architecture developed in New England during the late 19th century, which he turned into the most popular architectural style of the casual-elegant homes on the East Coast. He transformed both into the most prosperous real estate formula in recent memory.

Stern was a cultural figure who reminded New Yorkers that their heritage is glamour, and that what they really like is traditional. His 18-year tenure as the Dean at Yale School of Architecture revived the school’s prominence.

To remember Robert A.M. Stern is to illuminate his contribution to the story of architecture, I have invited renowned architecture critic and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, Paul Goldberger. His tribute to Stern published in the New York Times shortly after his death is titled The Architect Who Designed New York City Like a 1930s Movie.

Watch the first episode in the spring 2026 season of Designing the 21st Century on YouTube or listen to it in Spotify.

Few architectural designers have influenced the profession as much as Bill Sofield and his partner Emma O’Neill at the eponymous firm Sofield Studio. The Sofieldian magic, as their work came to be known, emphasizes exceptional elegance and taste, restrained glamour, and polished spaces, defined by their core belief that interiors are a part and not separated from architecture.

Bill Sofield, our guest this evening, is a true master of spaces that are all at once intellectual, emotional, deeply layered, and crafted to the highest standards. No two projects are alike. Each one is unique, each bespoke. The common signature is born from an exceptional knowledge of art and design history, from bringing together the extremes, from crafting a sense of austerity, and a meticulous attention to detail that is unparalleled.

If you have ever visited one of the hundreds boutiques that Sofield created for Gucci, Bottega Veneta, and Tom Ford, you know that entering those charismatic spaces makes you feel as if you are at a museum, or a nightclub, or as if you are an actor in classic Hollywood film. You would also know that Sofield is a performer, a conductor under whose hands makers of all disciplines, and designers work in collaboration to craft his visionary and imaginative spaces, turning each into an extraordinary experience that feels larger than life. He creates homes for some of the most sophisticated and discerning people in the world. His clients are daring people full of curiosity who are looking to live in special places and interesting homes. They know that he would push the envelope, and like a magician, would forge unexpected ideas, filling their homes with a fresh personality and fascinating stories.

From the micro to the macro, Sofield has worked with the most powerful real estate developers and talented artisans alike, because the hands of the craftspeople are embedded in every corner of his spaces. He knows objects like only few, using them in the most exquisite way that breathes life into the architecture. During his three-decade career he discovered forgotten houses, buildings, furniture makers, and designers of the past. He gave them a second life by reshaping historical buildings with new typologies, as much as creating new buildings in his own voice.

The new landmark 656-page book, Studio Sofield, is as elegant as its visionary interiors, celebrating an entire career that was developed and shaped over the years through some never-before-published spaces. The Studio’s recent project of renovating and converting the triangular Flatiron Building into residential apartments is one of the most anticipated and talked-about projects in New York’s recent memory. Reshaping one of the world’s most iconic buildings—a symbol of Manhattan designed by Daniel Burnham, America’s most influential architect and urban planner at the turn of the 20^th century – is another successful story of turning the historical into the contemporary, and of leaving a significant impact on this city that we love so much.

Event at the Museum of Arts and Design - April 30, 2026.

When I asked Larry Weinberg, founder of the research-driven design gallery Weinberg Modern, to select three designers for our talk on collecting postwar American furniture, his unexpected selections—T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings, Edward Wormley, and Paul Mayen—are all designers who came to represent the market in its educated state, while also hinting at its dynamic shifts. They were not among the legion of star designers during the Age of Mad Men—quite the contrary. Designers like Ray Eames and Charles Eames, along with Harry Bertoia, Florence Knoll, and Eero Saarinen, were the household names, but not them. Each carved out a unique style during the mid-century period, and today their work has a special place in the design market as interest in mid-century modern furniture (1945–1965) keeps growing.

Larry Weinberg was my recent guest in the series ‘Collecting Design: History, Collections, Highlights.’ His four-decade career in the world of vintage American mid-century design has made him a leading expert in the field. He has seen the cycles of the market from the initial rediscovery and the entry-level, affordable collecting of the early 90s (when historical scholarship excluded mid-century design), to the specialized and stabilized, investment-driven collectors, museum acquisitions and exhibitions, handling thousands of authentic objects of design under his hands. There is simply no greater authority on American postwar design.

Weinberg graduated from Amherst College, and together with Andy Lin, co-founded Lin-Weinberg Gallery in New York – first in SoHo and then in Gramercy Park – when mid-century modern was sold at second-hand thrift shops. It was one of Manhattan’s earliest galleries focused on vintage modern design, which quickly became a hub for anyone intrigued by living with chic, fresh mid-century furniture and for those who sought to develop and deepen their taste with nostalgia. While this furniture was considered outdated and undervalued at that time, not long after, MCM was created.

Weinberg and Lin define the role of the design-dealer in New York. Not just commercial salespeople, but scholars who provide in-depth academic reach and authentication, who have the power to educate collectors, while developing the connoisseurship of a new field. It was before the emergence of scholarly literature and before museums devoted entire exhibitions to the subject. The only reference texts to reconstruct the narrative were old articles and manufacturers’ catalogues. In short, Weinberg positioned the sale of design in a similar way to that of galleries’ fine arts pieces. His forward-thinking approach and his elevation of postwar American designers are now seen as being ahead of the game, and that aspect of evaluating design has become part of the gallery’s identity. Lin-Winberg Gallery’s booths at the annual Modernism Show at the Park Avenue Armory, which pioneered the fair devoted exclusively to design, became known for museum-quality pieces and for presenting design in historical and cultural contexts. The gallery’s groundbreaking 2009 exhibition ‘The Future at Home: American Furniture, 1940-55,’ clearly put American design on the map.

In 2009, he opened Weinberg Modern, his own gallery, where he continues to offer design icons providing scholarly information as well. In recent years, he has shifted his focus to rare books and catalogs of design and architecture. This scholarly approach was also evident in our conversation, which focused on the three American designers—T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings, Edward Wormley, and Paul Mayen—whose work is affordable and should be the focus of emerging collectors, interior designers, and those new to the market.

Terence Harold Robsjohn-Gibbings (1905–1976) was a decorator, furniture designer, tastemaker, and thinker whose innovative ideas on interior design during the postwar era had a formative impact on American domestic culture. He was prolific, and his books and articles on interior décor, his lectures, and industrial design all introduced him to the American public. He had three fundamental chapters in his career as a furniture designer, which were at the core of the furniture he designed throughout his career: his singular outlook on modern design (rooted in Greco-Roman sensibilities), classical principles, and early American domestic culture.

In the first chapter, he worked as an interior decorator in New York, creating luxurious and handmade furniture, mostly carved in wood, and designed in Grecian forms. This body of work includes the 200+ pieces he created for his most ambitious project, the interiors of Casa Encantada in Los Angeles. These pieces attracted extraordinary interest in the first decade of the 21^st century but somehow fell out of favor and do not fetch their previous numbers. Robsjohn-Gibbings’ second chapter as a furniture designer was marked in the postwar years, when between 1943 and 1956 he entered into a partnership with the Widdicomb Furniture Company, working as its lead designer in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The designs, meant for postwar American suburban homes, are modernist with a touch of traditional American furniture and formed in classical sensibility, all made of wood. With the exception of the Mesa Table—the showpiece of the collection—these pieces remain affordable and are sold in auction houses in the US and Europe. The Mesa Table, a dramatic coffee table, designed in organic-biomorphic form, is fetching six figures today and is regularly used by leading interior designers such as Pierre Yovanovitch. Weinberg recalled handling them when they were sold for $10K. The third chapter began when Robsjohn-Gibbings moved to Athens in 1960 and collaborated with Greek cabinetmaker Susan and Eleftherios Saridis, designing furniture inspired by ancient Greek pottery. These pieces are still in production.

Weinberg’s selection of Paul Mayén (1916-2000) was surprising. The Spanish architect and industrial designer, with a bachelor’s in Fine Arts from the Cooper Union in New York City, and a master’s in architecture from Columbia University, became known for designing the visitors center at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. He also designed furniture and lighting. In the 1950s, Mayén met fellow art student Edgar Kaufmann Jr., with whom he would have a personal relationship and work partnership that would last until Kaufmann’s death in 1989. His unadorned lamps and tables were made with modernist industrial materials—aluminum, glass, chromed brass, and Plexiglas— and were produced by his company, Habitat. The forms are structural, minimalist, functional, with geomantic precision, clean lines, and structural honesty. His pieces, often offered by Wright Auction, typically sell for a fraction of their production cost.

We concluded with the most obvious choice, American designer Edward J. Wormley (1907-1995), whose work was the subject of a 1997 groundbreaking exhibition at Lin-Weinberg, “Edward Wormley: The Other Face of Modernism.” It introduced and rediscovered one of the most productive designers of the Age of Mad Men.

The 55-year-old Wormley was one of the six furniture designers featured in what has become an iconic photograph published in the July 1961 issue of Playboy Magazine, in an article titled ‘Designs for Living.’ There, he was seated on his Armchair model 5480 produced by Dumbar with which he forged a decades-long relationship. During this time, he designed over 20 pieces of furniture a year, and both he and the company were very successful. Although Wormley was a modernist, he sought to fuse modern ideas with traditional values and to imbue his furniture with handcraftsmanship. His tile-topped tables, which were inserted with clay tiles by Otto Natzler and glass tiles by Louis Comfort Tiffany were particularly striking, demonstrating his approach in merging craft with industry.

In today’s collectible design market, American mid-century design is the winning way to live with affordable vintage modern. All objects images courtesy Wright.

At the Raisonné gallery in SoHo, four monumental porcelain coffee tables stand at the heart of the smashing solo show of award-winning French ceramicist emmanuel boos, called Noir C’est Noir. Each table is dramatic, architectural, and pristine, blending art and function. All of them are unlike anything I have seen before. Their dramatic scale is balanced by the restrained urban and industrial-type palettes, which made me think of the urban facades that work as the exterior of the streets of New York City. A colleague of mine who attended the opening night of the exhibition whispered, “I don’t know anyone who would not want those coffee tables at their homes.” I was intrigued by the artist’s exquisite vision, technique, and the journey that brought him to create these masterpieces of contemporary design. I discovered a fascinating man who is an artisan, an artist, and a scholar all at once.

What did I learn from boos after spending nearly two hours over a Japanese lunch in the Upper East Side in Manhattan? That deep knowledge and passion for history are essential to the evolution of any creative mind, that education is the only engine and road to progress, and that any artistic career is a process of continuous learning. Not that I did not know all of this before, but our conversation certainly reinforced my own knowledge.

Many ceramicists today are occupied with the mission of crafting furniture in ceramics and moving clay from vessels and sculptures to furniture, and yet very few have done it successfully. I am not talking about furniture made in ceramic tiles—a practice popular at the turn of the 20th century with designers of the Arts and Crafts Movement and with several French ceramicists in the mid-century, where tiles were used as surfaces—but about clay dictating the design and vice versa, where authenticity is achieved through challenging the material, pushing boundaries, and reaching what has never been achieved before. With the introduction of handcraftsmanship to the interior space since the early years of the 21st century, accomplishing furniture in clay has become a triumph.

boos’ entire oeuvre is on display at the exhibition — vessels, wall sculptures — but the furniture in porcelain is what grabbed my attention. They have grown from his lifelong journey and scholarship in the world of ceramics, from dreaming big and forging a career path, to scholarly study, and on to academic and practice inquiries. It is these authentic efforts that make his furniture intriguing, fresh, unexpected, and entirely beautiful. boos found the formula after decades of exploration into the realm of the clay, filled with transitions and many new beginnings. His confidence and intuition are clearly communicated in the final products.

boos devoted his career as a ceramicist to searching, reviving, and practicing glazes, becoming a virtuoso and a world’s expert in the field of glazes. For many ceramicists, clay is a tool to express narratives and memories. For boos, the narrative itself is the technical achievement, and connecting to the past, with his ability to fuse innovative and traditional methods to create contemporary design in the most unexpected way. Whereas ceramicists today seek to craft contemporary design in seamless forms, for boos, the objects are composed of repeated parts, where the seams are multiple, and those brick-form blocks are crafted in slabs of porcelain molded by hand. The process he has mastered is like poetry.

While his passion and work in clay has brought him to live in many places across the globe (such as China, Korea, England, Germany, and France) it was while he was in the US as a high school student in an exchange program that he was first introduced to ceramics. Exhibiting in the US for the first time is certaily closing of a circle. He was then trained as a potter in Paris and went to apprentice with Master of Art (Maître d’art, a distinguished titled awarded by the French Ministry of Culture to those of exceptional expertise who ought to pass it to the next generation) Jean Girel. Spending three years at Girel’s Burgundy-based studio formed the foundation, he learned from the master of the art of the glaze, while the two began mixing their own porcelain. His PhD dissertation at London’s Royal College of Art was entitled ‘The Poetics of Glaze. Ceramic Surface and the Perception of Depth,’ and his fellowship at Sèvres, France’s national manufacture for porcelain brought another layer of depth to his work.

The 2024 Loewe Craft Prize Special Mention told me how he transitioned from the wall sculptures for which he became well known (represented by Galerie Jousse Enterprise), to furniture that happened by chance. This was when he was commissioned to create a fireplace. Now that he is moving his studio from Mannheim, Germany, back home to France, he is anticipating a new beginning as connecting with his past.

Photography: Zach Pontz for Raisonne.

When I visit Milan on a design mission, I seek for that cotemporary Milanese experience combined with the luxury and peace of a great retreat. Therefore, my choice for a hotel this time was – The Bvlgari. Milan has its classic traditional wonderful grand hotels that make you dive into the Northern Italian old world, but there is no other place where you can fully integrated into the Milanese essence of today than the Bvlgari. If Milan is the capital of the contemporary design world, a melting pot of the old and the new, and a paradise of hidden gardens, then the Bvlgari embodies these notions. Because it relies on the philosophy that a hotel, any hotel should be fully integrated within its surroundings in order to evoke the local experience in its most elegant and authentic sense.

Like the iconic brand, the hotel is nothing less than a timeless glamour. Bvlgari was founded in Rome in 1884 as a Jewelry shop and had quickly made its name for magnificent Roman jewels filled with colored gems, formulating a worldwide reputation for Italian excellence and its traditional and exquisite craftsmanship. The founder, Sotirios Voulgaris was born in 1857 and came from the Epirus Village of Paramythia, the largest Aromanian center of silversmithing in the Balkans. The company’s international success had evolved into a global and diversified luxury purveyor of products and services, ranging from fine jewels and high end watches to accessories. The hotel brand was established in 2004 and the Milanese location was the first.

The hotel was built on a site of a historic convent dating back to the 18^th century and designed in the Italian neoclassical style of that era. In fact the entire lobby an the core of the hotel is situate in that old structure The story of this building is fascinating as in 1813, both building and its magnificent gardens became the home of Milanese family Lucini Passalacqua. The mind behind the exceptional and seamless blend of the old and the new is the architecture firm of Antonio Citterio Patricia Viel, while the stunning garden the work of Sophie Agata Ambroise, a Swiss landscape designer.

The Bvlgari is a hotel in black and white, fresh, airy, filled with natural light, and immaculate attention to detail, making you feel like you are at your stylish home away from home, because it is so comfortable. Having breakfast in the garden, the stunning spa, the Italian cuisine, the lush linens, for all of these reasons, when I visit Milan on a design mission, the only place to I want to be is the Bvlgari.

We would like to acknowledge and congratulate all participants in the series ‘Collecting Design: History, Collections, Highlights’ over the years, some of the world’s leading experts who are currently participating at the PAD Paris fair. These are our selects from their booth.

In celebrating Frank Lloyd Wright’s 159^th birthday, USModernist will hold its annual gala in the famed house the American archtiect designed on Petra Island, 50 miles north of Manhattan.

Its story began in 1949, when an engineer named Ahmed Chahroudi bought an entire heart-shaped island on Lake Mahopac, 50 miles north of Manhattan, and commissioned wright to design a house. The owner could not afford the 5,000-square-foot house, and the architect reduced the project to a small cottage which was built. The unrealized design of the futuristic, bold house remained in the form of sketches, elevations, and a floor plan, which was declared by Wright as ‘surpass Fallingwater.’ It took sixty years and one man, Joe Massaro, who had to fight to place the building alongside the forbidden waterline, as was envisioed by Wright to realize the building, and in 2007 it was completed.

On Sunday, June 7, You can visit the house for a brunch inside the Massaro House, where you would meet Thomas Heinz, the architect and Wright expert who redrew the original plans to meet 21st-century building codes. You’ll tour the original Cottage, designed by Wright for the original clients. You’ll meet the owner, Joe Massaro, and his family. You’ll meet Fred Wilmont, who built all the cabinetry to Wright standards, and of course, the host George Smart, Founder and CEO of USModernist in celebrating 159th birthday (June 8) of the greatest architect of the 20th century.

The Walker Guest House, designed by Paul Rudolph and constructed in 1952 on Sanibel Island in Florida is offered for sale. This glass beach house remained where it was constructed until 2019, when it was offered for sale by Sotheby’s. I hosted a talk on that occassion which I called “Glass Houses by Design Legends,” exploring its relatonship to other glass houses of its time. It was purchased by art collector Peter Galliaert who moved it to Yucca Valley, California where it’s remained in storage until this rare appearance. Now, it is offered for sale by Basic.Space.

The house’s most distinctive feature is its system of adjustable exterior wooden panels, raised and lowered by 77-pound, red-painted cannonball counterweights sourced from its original site on Sanibel Island, Florida. When closed, they function as shutters; when opened, they form shaded canopies — allowing the structure to continuously transform in response to light, climate, and use. The Walker family and Sanibel residents nicknamed it “The Cannonball.” Rudolph believed people need both “caves” and “goldfish bowls” to live in; this house delivers both within a single architectural form. He described his earliest designs as “sketches in the sand” and the finished structure as something that “crouches like a spider in the sand” — alive to its environment in a way few buildings ever achieve.

Commissioned by Walter Walker — Harvard-trained physician, investment manager, and grandson of T.B. Walker, the Minnesota lumber baron who founded the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis — the Guest House reflects a lineage of American patronage rooted in art, architecture, and civic engagement. Since its original construction, the house has been privately acquired and relocated to California, where it will be exhibited in its entirety at the Pacific Design Center this spring. It is offered for sale with its original interior furnishings and architectural plans — an exceptionally rare distinction for a structure of this period, and a testament to the care with which it has been preserved across more than seven decades. I was surprised to see in the current images that the house was furnished in 60s pieces rather than according to a 1952 mode.

This landmark beach house, which was sold in 2019 for approximately $900K is currently exhibited at the Pacific Design Center and offered for sale at $2 million. Images credit: Matthew Kavanagh, courtesy Basic.Space.

Brazilian vintage furniture is everywhere these days and can be found at design auctions, in monographic exhibitions at galleries and museums, in the digital marketplace, in magazines and academic literature, and in interiors featured in shelter magazines. The furniture, designed in postwar Brazil by a handful of modernists, was crafted pieces in modern, chic, sculptural forms from local exotic hardwoods, imbued with a strong sense of local identity, distinct from mid-century furniture created elsewhere. These furniture pieces have a powerful, dramatic presence in the interior space and stand out from what was produced in other countries during the postwar years. As soon as Brazilian furniture entered the global market in the early 2000s, it became an instant favorite among art collectors, interior designers, and architects. Yet, with the enormous number of copies flooding the marketplace every season in recent years and the industry replete with unauthorized reproductions, replicas, and unauthentic pieces, Brazilian mid-century furniture has long moved away from the innocuous position it held when it first entered the international design market. It is no longer newly discovered, yet it is still praised as the last undiscovered piece of furniture from the mid-century era.

In the two-and-a-half decades since it was first exhibited in European and American galleries, Brazilian Modern has slowly but steadily gained connoisseurship, emerging from the shadows cast by postwar furniture from France, Italy, Scandinavia, and the US, while establishing a permanent place at the forefront of the collectible design market. Today, it is among the most desirable areas of historical design, admired by collectors, architects, interior designers, and museum curators for its unique sensibility, sensuous and unique forms, richly grained hardwoods, regional handcraft traditions, and its inherent postwar narrative of Brazil, as the country transitioned from dictatorship into democracy, marked by urbanization and modernism. From 1945 to 1964, it was known as the Fourth Republic. To illuminate the current position of Brazilian furniture in the global design market, I invited Flavio Santoro, founder of the São Paulo-based gallery, Diletante Brasil, a pioneer of this market, and one of the world’s most trusted sources for exceptional, authentic Brazilian furniture.

Like many other design dealers across the globe, Santoro started his career with a ‘second-hand shop. This was in the early 2000s, years before Brazilian furniture became collectible and long before the emergence of any English-language literature on the subject. The pioneer scholar, São-Paulo-based historian and curator Maria Cecilia Loschiavo Dos Santos, began documenting and analyzing modern Brazilian design history in the early 1980s and has since published numerous books, articles, and critiques in magazines and international academic conferences. Santoro has worked with her in cataloging some of the pieces he discovered.

His presentations at Design Miami over the past few years on museum-quality Brazilian vintage furniture have cemented Diletante’s status as one of the leading experts in the field. Lina Bo Bardi’s rare examples of the Bowl Chair, crafted in woven fiber landed from his booth at the permanent collection of the Carnegie Museum of Art; and an original tea cart, which was included in his most recent booths, and which Warsaw-born São Paulo modernist Jorge Zalszupin designed in 1959 in molded wood, is in the collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. My conversation with Santoro focused on the foundations of modern design in Brazil, as expressed in the work of three visionaries whose furniture has become a value-driven acquisition: Joaquim Tenreiro, José Zanine Caldas, and Zalszupin. The three adopted a variety of principles of modern design, pioneered Brazilian modernism, and created highly organic forms and ergonomics.

When Brazilian design was first rediscovered and showcased in the US in the early 2000s, the instant star was Joaquim Tenreiro (1906–1992), an immigrant from Portugal who settled in Rio in the late 1920s, and who was a pioneer of modern furniture design in Brazil, which he began creating in the early 1940s. The design quality and craftsmanship of his pieces were both superb. At the time, he supplied furniture to clients with progressive taste, including modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer. A master woodworker, Tenreiro learned his exceptional skills from his father and grandfather—both Portuguese cabinetmakers, but it was his exceptional ability to design the most visionary, elegant, refined forms of lightness, transparency, and minimalism that catapulted him to the pinnacle of the profession, and consequently to the heart of the collecting design market. Santoro calls Tenreiro’s pieces ‘craftsmanship to perfection,’ and the woods the ‘ultimate selections.’ His chairs are particularly beautiful, and he believes his best is the Cadeira Curva Chair, which is slender and airy for mid-19^th-century design, but with a strong historical reference. His dining tables are stunning, featuring painted glass tops, crafted in verre églomisé. Tenreiro had been making furniture for 20 years when he closed his business in the late 1960s to focus on fine art. His pieces are not signed, and considering the high percentage of his furniture on the market that is misattributed or forged, it is more important than ever to acquire them from a reliable source.

With a growing consciousness of sustainability in design and of a holistic, regenerative approach that minimizes environmental impact by integrating ecological factors, Tenreiro’s title as the superstar of the Brazilian Modern market has been supplanted by architect-artist José Zanine Caldas (1919–2001). The vision, philosophy, and vocabulary of the two as expressed in furniture could not have been more different. While Tenreiro designed for bourgeois homes and sophisticated modernist residences and public buildings, Caldas was a radical environmentalist who created furniture as a political statement. His most valued pieces are powerful, heavy, biomorphic, and crafted of solid tree trunks. In fact, his career falls into two phases. Caldas moved from his hometown in the state of Bahia, and launched his career in Rio, and then cofounding Fábrica Moveis Artísticos Z, a furniture company dedicated to producing moderately priced modernist designs in plywood. In the 1950s, he moved back to Bahia and, driven by a passion for forest preservation and environmental stewardship, began to sculpt charismatic, solid-wood furniture from fallen native trees. He used indigenous craft techniques to honor the natural character of the wood. It is clear that these pieces today lead the market of Brazilian modern furniture.

I concluded the talk with the work of Jorge Zalszupin (1922-2020), a Polish-born Jewish architect who emigrated to Brazil after WWII and settled in São Paulo, where he founded an architecture office and L’Atelier, a furniture design manufacturer. His collaborations with Oscar Niemeyer when producing furniture for the new capital city of Brasilia has brought him to the forefront of Brazilian modernism. His tea cart has become iconic. A staple in Brazilian households during those years, Zalszupin’s sculptural approach and the oversized wheels, inspired by baby strollers which he remembers from his youth in Poland, have become one of the most recognizable pieces of furniture of mid-19^th-century Brazil.

While the most substantial modernist monument in postwar Brazil was the capital city of Brasilia, a futuristic city erected in the center of the country, it came to symbolize the end of a military dictatorship and the victory of democratically elected president Juscelino Kubitschek. Designed by Oscar Niemeyer, the architect of the United Nations headquarters in New York City, Brasilia remains a destination. But another true legacy of this golden age lies in its modernist design—pieces shaped by optimism and ingenuity that can still be brought into everyday life.

All images courtesy Diletante. https://diletante.com.br/

Architect Amnon Rechter and I go back a long way—a multi-generational friendship. My uncle, renowned music critic and theater director Michael Ohad, is known to have discovered Rechter’s mother, the celebrated actress Hanna Maron. Their life-long friendship grew from their mutual love for the theater and from their shared roots in Germany. Maron’s husband was Yaakov Rechter, the prominent architect and recipient of the Israel Prize who created some of Israel’s most iconic buildings, including auditoriums, hotels, medical centers, and theaters. Yaakov Rechter also designed the interior of my family’s home in Tel Aviv. Amnon Rechter, a third-generation architect who leads Israel’s oldest architectural dynasty, has shaped much of Israel’s built fabric in recent decades with prominent public architecture commissions such as court houses, hospitals, music halls, and many civic centers.

When Amnon called me last week to invite me to a private screening of a film based on his and his father’s story, I went along without knowing anything about it because I love films about architecture and I wanted to support an old friend visiting town. It was a dramatic and surprising evening, watching a film based on a fascinating and moving story about what has become the shortest-lived political monument in history. Titled Monument, the drama is based on the little-known monument by the father-and-son team of Yaakov and Amnon Rechter, played by Jon Voight and Joseph Mazzello, which they built in Lebanon to honor South Lebanese Army soldiers who were killed in the first Lebanon War of the 1980s.

It all started during one dinner party held at an elegant home in Tel-Aviv where Rechter met American filmmaker Bryan Singer. He casually told him the unbelievable story that happened during the late years of the Israel’s occupation of Lebanon, when he built a monument to honor the South Lebanon military who fought the terrorist organization Hezbollah. Singer immediately envisioned a film based on this story and Monument was born.

Just months before the turn of the millennium as the protests against the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon intensified—like the rise of the Four Mothers organization who demanded an ultimate withdrawal—Uri Lubrani, the famed consultant to the Ministry of Defense, approached the father and son architects and asked them to design the monument. It was a thank you gift for those who lost their lives in that war. He demanded that the construction should be secretive.

There are many layers to that film. It captures the escalating political conflict in Lebanon and Israel’s occupation of a “security zone” in southern Lebanon and the anti-war movement with their demand to withdraw, which was finalized in May of 1999 under the administration of Prime Minister Ehud Barak. The film reveals the relationship between the fatally ill father and his son, including the dynamics in one of Israel’s most celebrated architecture offices. However, the main focus is the architecture itself. It is the monument, the architecture, that is the most powerful and memorable aspect of the film. It allows the audience to experience the power that heroic architecture has to evoke emotions, make political statements, and impact history. The monument, which was fully constructed for the production of the film (in Greece) composed of two towers, representing Christianity and Islam, along with concrete slabs etched with the names of those killed. It stood in the raw nature of southern Lebanon like a giant, abstract statement with the charged political situation attached to it.

In 1999, Netanyahu suffered a defeat in the Israeli general election, losing the premiership to the Labor Party’s leader Ehud Barak. With the change of the administration, Israeli troops were withdrawn from Lebanon, and just 36 hours after the dedication ceremony of Rechter’s monument, Hezbollah operatives blew it up. In comparison, in 1926 the short-lived Monument to the November Revolution, the iconic brick of ideology that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe created for the leaders of the Spartakusbund and martyrs of the revolution Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Berlin-Friedrichsfelde, was destroyed by the Nazis nine years later. This Monument lasted 36 hours.

Join me at MAD for an illuminating evening with visionary architectural designer Bill Sofield and design historian Daniella Ohad. The conversation will focus on Studio Sofield’s influential blending of architecture and interiors: introducing artisanal handwork to architecture, crafting the ultimate elegance, and designing the interiors for the much anticipated conversion of New York’s landmark Flatiron Building into private residences.

The evening celebrates the recently released firm monograph Studio Sofield Works, which details a four-decade visual journey through historically significant buildings along with contemporary masterpieces, and on passion, transformation, and on the power of the detail. Copies of the book will be available for purchase.

Tickest are available now.

A newcomer to the strong, enduring collecting design market, Jean Touret (1916-2004) has joined the hot list of the French stars of the mid-20th century, whose furniture has achieve the status of blue-chip design. Touret was a sculptor who for 18 years designed handcrafted furniture in wood and iron, and they were exactly what was missing in the dynamic current design market. His name surfaced when the desirable, highly collectible pieces of furniture by Jean Prouve, Charlotte Perriand, and Pierre Jeanneret dried up, with the diminishing supply of rare, authentic, historically significant vintage pieces available for sale in galleries and auction houses. With fresh and exceptionally creative furniture, lighting, and objects, Touret quickly became a celebrated name among collectors, architects, and interior designers. To explore and deepen our knowledge, I have devoted to Jean Touret an entire session in the series ‘Collecting Design: History, Collections, Highlights,’ and to the atelier he established in the rural town of Marolles after the Second World War.

My guest, Banjamin Desprez, is the co-founder, with his wife Helene Breheret, of the Parisian Galerie Desprez Breheret. The duo have championed Touret and helped promote his furniture by curating exhibitions at their gallery and at monographic booths at the Design Miami and PAD fairs. They have become known as the leading experts in Touret’s furnishings, holding extensive archival materials, and assembling the largest collection of his functional work, which they began collecting 15 years before offering it for sale. Touret’s pieces have been recently seen in published interiors by some of the leading interior designers, such as Pierre Yovanovitch and Laplace (the firm of Luis Laplace and Christophe Comoy), which famously used them at the Chesa Marchetta boutique hotel in Sils Maria, founded by Iwan and Manuela Wirth, co-founders of the art gallery Hauser & Wirth. These furniture pieces are rising in value as his reputation grows and demand for his work increases, though they are rarely available in American auction houses, even though Americans make up a significant number of the collectors acquireing them. They are primarily sold in galleries, and occasionally offered by the French auction houses Piasa and Gazette Drouot.

Touret is known to the general public less as a furniture designer and more for the monumental altar he created in the 1980s for the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, visited by millions and now under restoration following the 2019 fire. But in one of several chapters of his artistic life, between 1946 and 1963, while living in the remote town of Marolles, Touret devoted his creative efforts to designing furniture in which his visual language was embedded, and which expressed his life-long passion for wood.

While his pieces have a distinctive French look, they grew from a very different vision and philosophy than the furniture designed by his French contemporaries, Perriand, Prouvé, and Jeanneret. Whereas the more famed figures in French postwar design were socialists who sought to utilize modernist design to elevate the lives of the millions through the use of new materials and machine production, developing industrial design for duplication, Touret focused on the most traditional, almost primitive crafts – wood carving, blacksmithing, basketry – creating artisanal furniture, lighting, and objects. He sought to have the artist’s hands visible, to use local materials, and to provide a source of income for local craftspeople. He was passionate about preserving the crafts, creating furniture in his own voice, free of influence of the modern movement which was developing in Paris. He formed Les Atelier de Marolles, a cooperative of craftspeople who brought his designs to life. The furniture is functional, in modernist, minimal forms, with strong marks of the craftsman’s hand that lend the pieces an expressive quality. Paradoxically, his pieces are simple yet complex. They use sustainable materials—primarily wood and iron—and are humanistic, original, and artistic.

The recent monograph ‘Jean Touret,’ published by Les Editions, is the only source of information on the artist and his work in sculpture and design. It is based on family and magazine archival materials, initiated by his eldest son, Francois, who grew up in Marolles. He contributed an essay entitled ‘The Miracle of Marolles,’ a beautiful and nostalgicand personal tribute, that describes Marolles as an island surrounded by an ocean of wheat, at the heart of which stood the town hall, grocer’s, bakery, and tobacconist’s. The book contains a catalogue raisonné, a comprehensive list of all the known furniture typologies produced during the 18-year atelier, and is accompanied by a website devoted to the legacy of his father. It tells the life story of the kid who was born poor and who started as a bookkeeper at an insurance company in his teens, helping his mother after the death of his father, while enrolling in local night art classes. At 23, during the Second World War, Touret was taken prisoner by the Germans during the German invasion of France. While interned in the Ore Mountains, he fell in love with wood. Seeing the old lumberjacks at work, felling trees with their sons, Touret said that ‘the logger instilled in me the sense of integrity.’ It was during his five years as a prisoner that he learned to love the trees, and when he was back home, he was determined to devote his life to art. He then moved to Marolles in the rural Loire region of central France and began to paint, and his art was represented by a Parisian gallery.

In a local tobacco shop in Marolles, Touret met local craftspeople – carpenters, blacksmiths, basket makers, ceramicists – who crafted furnishings but had no sense of design, inspiring him to establish the Ateliers of Marolles. Isolated in the shop, he developed his own modern vocabulary, designing furniture, lamps, and other accessories in wood and iron, crafted by the local artisans, in addition to creating abstract sculptures in tree trunks, and reclaiming wooden beams and sheet metal. The furniture pieces were modern and artistic, sold directly from the shop to clients, but more substantially at an annual showcase in the nearby town of Blois, and on a regular basis at the Parisian department store Primavera Le Printemps, curated by its artistic director Colette Guéden. This was where Parisian clients discovered Touret’s furniture. Only 8-10 craftspeople were employed at the atelier, and according to Desprez, who met with descendants of the makers, the production was limited to 10-15 dining sets a year. Each piece was carved individually, each one unique, crafted of local red oak.

Ever since reading ‘Parson’s Pleasure,’ the famed 1958 short story by Roald Dahl about a fascinating story that happened to an antique dealer in the Enlish countryside, when I was 16, I fell in love with stories of antique dealers. Benjamin concluded our talk with a fascinating story about a man who showed up at the gallery, asked whether they bought Touret’s pieces, and invited them to his home to see the table. Benjamin had never seen that form of table before, but was reminded of a short film created in 1961 at an exhibition of Touret taken place at a Parisian library, which featured a similar table. When the owner confirmed that his table was purchased as an exhibition at a library in the 1960s, he knew that it was the right one. One more form will be added to the next edition of the book.

All images are curtesy Galerie Desprez Breheret.

Postwar Nordic design is one of the most complex and beloved segments in the current collectible design market. While it has maintained a consistent presence in the market for the past three decades, its focus and identity have noticeably shifted. With the evolution of scholarship, research, new discoveries, museum collecting, and evolving tastes, this market has become more educated, sophisticated, and discerning. than ever before. What was on the rise twenty years ago has fallen out of favor; including steel furniture by Danish designer Poul Kjærholm, laminated wood pieces by the pair Alvar Aalto and Aino Marsio-Aalto, and quirky objects by Finnish designer Tapio Wirkkala. These have since been largely replaced by masterpieces from lesser-known names, such as Danish furniture designer Grete Jalk, Finnish lighting designer Lisa Johansson-Pape, and the newly discovered Danish woodworker Peder Moos. You must know what and where to buy—expertise in today’s highly specialized, dynamic field is crucial; one must be responsive to discoveries and sensitive to idiosyncratic tastes. The charismatic objects created in the Nordic world in the mid-20^th century have been recently seen in some of the most beautiful interiors, published in the leading design magazines. To deepen our understanding of their current place in collecting, I invited Andrew Duncanson as my guest for the series ‘Collecting Design: History, Collections, Highlights.’

Since he founded the famed Modernity Gallery in central Stockholm’s design district nearly three decades ago, Duncanson has become a leading voice in collectible Nordic design. He was among a handful of pioneers who began to excavate classic Nordic design during the 90s, when it had been forgotten for decades and considered outdated and banal, excluded from the design conversation, collectintg, chic interiors, and academic and semi-academic literature. He has witnessed it rise from the ashes like the Phoenix, and was among those responsible for the renewal of interest and for injecting a new and vibrant spirit into an entire chapter in the story of modern design by those who pushed boundaries and caused people of their generation to see design in a new light, reclaiming its lost glory. He was at the forefront of that turning point—of the shifts, and the ups and downs—of Nordic design, and was thus able to analyze the current face of the market.

Do not confuse these pieces offered by Modernity with the mass-produced ‘brown furniture’ found in most American homes in the mid-20^th century, and which were mass-produced and lacked the handcraftsmanship that was the DNA of Nordic production. The objects considered collectible ‘blue chip’ today are from designers such as Pavo Tynell, Kaare Klint, and Frits Henningsen, along with unique, rare, specially commissioned furniture and lights of historical significance produced exclusively in the Nordic countries. Those have climbed to the top list of the most desirable pieces in Nordic design among international collectors and interior designers.

The world of vintage Nordic design was in its infancy when Duncanson founded Modernity Gallery in 1998. Without analytical literature, scholarly validation, and little documentation, the enormously talented designers and craftspeople who were actively creating successful designs during the postwar years were forgotten. Reframing and rediscovering, while injecting new interest and spirit into the overlooked and under-recognized designers and their narratives, was a work in progress, still being developed and added to. Bonhams London was the only international auction house dedicated to sales of Nordic design at that time, and those objects were rarely extolled by the leading interior designers of the day.

In the early 2000s, revived interest in this type of furniture was largely due to the newly established Wallpaper Magazine (established in 1996) and its founder and editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, who established it as the global periodical for architecture, industrial design, and fashion; hence, the Nordic world was introduced to its audience, helping put it on the map. Not just design, but travel, culture, and architecture. Duncanson remembers that when Wallpaper Magazine published its guide to Stockholm (including Modernity Gallery), potential clients began referring to that guide when visiting the gallery. Another boost for the popularity of Nordic furniture and lighting was their inclusion in interiors by tastemakers such as Lee Mindel and Pierre Yovanovitch. And the last factor in illuminating high-end Nordic design was the specialized auctions by Phillips held in London under the leadership of Alexander Payne, starting in 2010. The exceptional catalogues with outstanding graphics had brought Nordic design into the heart of the emerging collectible design market. It demonstrated the power of presentation and scholarly, curated sales to elevate the material to new levels and to educate the public. When selecting the right piece, the type and location of production, the year of production, rarity, and condition all play crucial roles in establishing value.

Our talk focused on three designers. Finnish lighting was late to enter the market, but the long, dark winters fostered the creation of exceptional lighting designs. The new star of the market of postwar Nordic design was Finnish lighting designer Paavo Tynell (1890-1973), nearly unknown outside of his country of origin until recently. Tynell, who first encountered metalwork as a teenager when apprenticing to become a blacksmith, devoted his career to manipulating metals into some of the most beautiful lamps of the 20^th century, produced in his own company, Taito Oy Ab, which he established in 1918. His most innovative lighting forms echo nature – the Snowflake and Snowball chandeliers, as well as leafy forms and intertwining vines. In 1947, Tynell worked with the Finland House, a design atelier in New York that showcased the work of Finnish designers and craftspeople. Tynell’s work was a hit in New York, but his lighting designs for the American market were produced by local and Canadian factories. His lightings, made in Finland, typically stayed in Finland and therefore only recently came to the market, .

The taste for architectural furniture has shifted the market to the pieces by Danish designer-cabinetmaker Frits Henningsen (1889-1965) and architect Kaare Klint, who is largely considered the father of modern Danish furniture design for his lasting influence, and who famously finished his architect father’s life project, the expressionist Grundtvig’s Church in Copenhagen. Both made functional, modernist, personal, and innovative forms, timeless and historically inspired, often upholstered in leather with superb craftsmanship. Their furniture pieces were regularly exhibited at the Copenhagen Cabinetmakers Guild exhibitions and are today highly sought after by collectors and interior designers. It is the right time to invest in postwar Nordic design from Denmark, Finland, and Sweden, one of the most complex and beloved segments of the current collectible design market.

In 1924, architect Kaare Klint established a department of furniture design at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. Klint had a crucial role in the success of modern Danish furniture design. He highlighted the role of wood and craftsmanship as crucial elements in the production process. He cultivated and taught a design approach that revolved around the dimensions of the human body and everyday objects, functional purpose, and the refinement of form through studies and measurements of historical furniture types. In 1930, one of the future pillars of Danish design, the legendary School of Arts and Crafts, opened with a cabinetmaker’s day school as one of its courses—just three years after The Copenhagen Cabinetmakers Guild had held its very first furniture exhibition.

ou must know what and where to buy—expertise in today’s highly specialized, dynamic field is crucial; one must be responsive to discoveries and sensitive to idiosyncratic tastes.

All images and objects, courtesy Modernity.

One of the most compelling areas of design collecting today is American modern of the interwar period, known in its own time as Art Moderne. The movement produced exquisite objects of remarkable design quality and bold, radical aesthetics inspired by life in the modern metropolis. They were created by a group of designers, architects, artists, and photographers who emigrated from Central Europe during the first four decades of teh 20th century, and came to introduce and shape the early phase of modern design in America. Some arrived because of religious persecution, others for political reasons, and still others were drawn by curiosity about life in the bustling, rapidly modernizing metropolis of Manhattan.

To illuminate and learn more about this glamorous chapter in the story of modern design, I invited the field’s leading authority, Professor Christopher Long, who together with design historian Jewel Stern has recently published the most comprehensive and carefully researched volume on the subject, entitled The Vanguard: Central European Emigres and American Modern Design, 1910-1940. Despite being primarily trained in Europe, these pioneers sought to charge the new American design with local national identity, an extraordinary achievement. Yet, despite their lasting impact and innovative aesthetics, which revolutionized everyday life, they were rarely acknowledged by early historians of modern design.

This ambitious book, the fruit of four decades of research, published by Yale University Press, presents the story of daring, bold adventurers who challenged conventions and took risks to achieve something radical for life in the new century. Both Stern and Long have published extensively on the topic and are considered authorities, but this is the definitive publication; an indispensable addition to any library of design, architecture, and American culture. They distinguish the project by revealing the lives and careers of the émigré pioneers of American modernism. In their own voice, the two weave the improbable tales of approximately 50 figures, some known and others now largely forgotten. Many of their designs are still undervalued today, both in monetary and art historical terms, and it is time for these designers to receive their due, becuase they came to define American Modernism during the Jazz Age of the 20s and the Great Depression of the 30s, paving the way for America to become the cradle of modern design in the postwar years.

The book is dedicated to John C. Waddell, the pioneer collector and connoisseur of American modern design, whose comprehensive approach and scholarly rigor have helped to promote this important chapter in the story of modern design. His extensive collection, assembled over four decades, has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum and at the Yale University Art Gallery, to which Waddell has gifted the majority of the collection, and which has revealed the impact of international modernism on American design. When others were collecting Art Nouveau and French Art Deco during the 80s, Waddel was already delving into American material culture of the Depression years and discovering its industrial design, a territory nowhere to be found in the literature of art history. Chromium-plated furniture, cigarette caskets, Bakelite accessories, bookends, metal housewares, and cocktail shakers all found their way into his collection, which became the world’s most comprehensive collection of its kind, the result of discovering long-forgotten objects.

True to that objective, the book is arranged chronologically and thematically, tracing the evolution of modern design over the three decades leading up to the Second World War. Each of the 32 chapters is dedicated to a particular designer or to a theme in weaving the story. It illuminates each personal life journey, explaining how they forged their own daring voices within the framework of modern design. They all shared a passion for modernity and for moving design production beyond handicraft, demonstrating the commitment to fuse design and industry.

The book opens with the association established by those pioneers, called The American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen, modeled after similar European organizations—the Deutscher Werkbund, Vienna Secession, and Munich Secession. The association’s monthly meetings became iconic, held at the elegant and renowned restaurant and nightclub, Central Park Casino, New York’s hottest spot during the Jazz Age. They were attended by some of New York’s most influential citizens, including America’s leading architects: Frank Lloyd Wright, George Howe, Raymond Hood. As the hub of American modernism, it was the foremost professional organization committed to elevating contemporary standards, protecting copyright, and advancing modern design.

Austrian designers typically sold their work in elegant specialty shops that catered to Vienna’s wealthy industrial and intellectual elite. German modernists championed modern industrial design, but their efforts remained largely tied to Germany’s public housing programs and were abruptly cut short with the rise of the Third Reich. In contrast, designers working in the United States brought modern design into department stores, making it accessible, popular, and part of the everyday lives of millions. They established themselves with prolific careers, primarily in New York and in Southern California, and created some of the most memorable objects in modern design: Ashtrays, dressing tables, office accessories, kitchen gadgets, modern cars and bicycles, designed as glamorous as The Great Gatsby, as streamlined as life in the metropolis, as exciting as the new skyscrapers of Rosario Candella, all defined by their new American identity, which they forged tabula rasa. It was designed for the zeitgeist, for a new way of living the American modern life.

The book illustrates the personal biographies of each designer, demonstrating the rich background of American modernism. Paul Frankl, who emigrated from Vienna, began creating bookcases in the form of skyscrapers at his weekend cabin in Woodstock, emulating the setback silhouette of Manhattan, and calling them Skyscraper Furniture, symbolizing American modernity. Kem Weber, who came to San Fransico on a work mission of the German pavilion at the Panama-Pacific Internationals Exposition of 1915, got caught up in the outset of the First World War and remained in California, establishing a successful design studio in Hollywood and famously working for Walt Disney Studios. Rudolph Schindler, whom Christopher Long calls ‘the best architect in Southern California at this time,’ had emigrated from Vienna and worked for Frank Lloyd Wright on the Tokyo Imperial Hotel, launching a lifelong love affair with Japanese aesthetics; and dozens more Central European émigrés who pioneered modern design in America, weaving a chapter in modern design.

The recent sustained interest in modern design in academic circles, collecting, and culture makes this book a most satisfying read. It should be enjoyed as a story, as it recalibrates our understanding of the origin of American modern design. And, yes, it is still the most affordable segment in the world of global collectible design.

The eccentric work of French architect Jacques Couelle (1902-1996) has come to capture the imagination and attention of the design community in recent years. While the self-taught architect never entered the pantheon of design history, his cave-like residences, with their plaster walls and organic volumes, which he built in the sixties and seventies embodied the intersection of space-age design and the French art de vivre movement, which came to inject artistic practice in interiors and furniture design. The homes he designed in Côte d’Azur were sculptural and bespoke, where he collaborated with contemporary artists on murals, custom built-in furniture, and other features in interior decoration, and one-of-a-kind, commissioned and lived by creatives and art collectors who sought for jewels, for artistic, out-of-the-ordinary homes. In fact, Couelle began his career in the art world as a dealer in medieval antiquities. His fascination with the natural world and with the work of Antoni Gaudí were evident in his distinctive vocabulary.

Now, London-based interior designer Miriam Frowein renovated one of Couelle’s biomorphic artisanal masterpieces. Nestled in Le domaine de Castellaras, the house, originally conceived in the 1960s. Frowein sought to bring the home to its original allure. “Designing within Couelle’s architecture,” she told me, “means entering into a dialogue with history,” describing her quest to preserve the radical vision and at the same time, bring the house to a contemporary comfort. The powerful sculpted walls have come to provide the perfect backdrop for collectible pieces of furniture. With this project, Miriam Frowein Interiors not only preserves the architectural heritage of Jacques Couelle, but also demonstrates how historical houses of the 20th-century can be lived and reimagined today.

Photography by Benedicte Drummond; style by Laurence Dougier.

Fragility and vulnerability, impermanence and transformation stand at the core of Tel-Aviv-based ceramicist Iris Nesher’s oeuvre. Whereas it is cracks, cuts, or fragmented elements, her pieces reflect a broken continuity, fragmented memories, and her narrative tell the delicate story of her personal experience in the most delicate material – white porcelain. While Nesher’s work is highly personal, at the same time, she is allowing her audience to make their own interpretations by connecting to their memory and by evoking their own personal or collective recollections and stirring a strong emotional response. Challenges, joy, pain, tensions, fear, and the transition between life and death, between the presence and the absence are embedded in her beautiful functional sculptures. In celebrating her first solo show at Les Ateliers Courbet, she created functional sculptures.

‘When we are born, we arrive whole—not yet touched by experience, unfragmented,’ she illuminates the narrative of her artwork. ‘But as we grow and face life’s challenges, a chasm begins to form within us. I have always been drawn to this inner fracture and the way it shapes us.’ Her pieces come to reflect and reveal the complexity of life experience in the most direct way, but also to suggest ways to overcome pain and difficulties, and to find comfort within them. ‘We mourn ourselves; we mourn the way we were. The way we are no longer. The way we will one day no longer be,’ she says.

Nesher’s sculptures are crafted exclusively in porcelain excavated in the French town of Limoges, famously discovered during the Golden Age of European porcelain of the 18^th century. The malleable clay of Limoges has been praised for its whiteness, purity, and strength, and for her, it has been the perfect tool to achieve the plasticity and delicacy, allowing her to form her signature forms – their expressiveness, damaged, fractured, and broken charisma, reflecting melancholy and loss on the way to discovering ways of healing. The imperfection is the first thing you notice in Nesher’s objects, celebrating authenticity, impermanence, and the incomplete, as mirroring the human experience, but they also embody freshness, cleanness, harmony, and uniformity, as the monochromatic helps her to express the powerful narratives.

Nesher presents her design objects here for the first time. Emerging from her art photography and her fine art projects into design has been natural to her, as her objects fuse the functional with the emotional, the expected with the unexpected, the minimalist and the expressive, the mysterious and the clear, the quite and the dramatic. Her dynamic compositions stir a strong emotional response, capturing tensions, excitement, and powerful visual storytelling, which are the central values in contemporary design.

Her solo show will be on view at Ateliers Courbet through May 1st, 2026.