Pushing the boundaries of materials, making, and form, 43 recently acquired design objects are installed in the museum’s Process Galleries, along with documentation of the designers’ creative process. The working sketches, prototypes, and videos featured in the exhibition elucidate the making of these objects and demonstrate how technology such as 3-D printing enables the fabrication of impossibly intricate furniture forms, plastic garments that can drape like fabric, or customized medical devices that are lightweight and strong. The exhibition also examines how designers use conventional hand-worked materials to advance traditional techniques through a contemporary sensibility, exploring or emulating natural growth processes and forms. Breaking with traditions to make exciting new products, today’s designers wield the latest technologies and manipulate materials to reinvent the familiar or introduce something entirely new and needed.
Ammar Kalo practices architecture and industrial design at his namesake studio in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. His work ranges from architecture, interior design to furniture. The Stratum Chair’s concept and appearance were driven by his desires to “express materiality” and to take advantage of new fabrication technologies. Kalo laminated plywood and CNC milled a complex path...
The Enignum Free Form Chair by Joseph Walsh curves, swirls and ripples in a manner that is reminiscent of furniture from the Art Nouveau period, yet it is contemporary in its overall aesthetic. Joseph Walsh, a self-taught designer and builder, started working with wood at the age of eight, and honed both his woodworking skill...
Michael Izrael Galmer was born in 1947 in the former Soviet Union, living there through much of the Cold War. Despite the difficulty of these years, Galmer attended Moscow University, earning a Ph.D. in physics while pursuing his interests in drawing, painting and sculpture, looking to nature for inspiration. As a student, he did not...
