Back in Brooklyn

UNESCO may have passed over Brooklyn for its first US Design City, but New York City’s largest borough can’t be entirely neglected. Although high prices are pushing creatives further onto the fringes of the city, or even out of it, they are also resulting in the development of large, interdisciplinary creative work and show spaces that are open to the public, like National Sawdust (fall 2015) and A/D/O in Greenpoint (summer 2016). Most of all, however, they are making designers get creative about how they make ends meet. From Todd St. James in Gowanus to Fort Makers around the Navy Yard and Snarkitecture in Greenpoint, Brooklyn is still where some of the most interesting disciplinary boundary-hopping and anti-specialisation happens, in the windsock of American design.

Six new Architonic members from Brooklyn...

Todd St John is a graphic designer and animator who has been doing product, furniture and “experiments” from a Gowanus Studio. St. John thinks that the several media in which he works enrich each other and his work, and that they all share qualities like texture, scale, light, movement, image, abstraction, and materiality.

Lebanese-born Robert Debbane is an artist working near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, who has blossomed into a made-to-order lighting designer, as well. Debbane plays across painting, photography and installation art and criss-crosses traditional art-making methods with digital production. In 2011, he began to explore 3D printing in his art and then to create lighting.

Architect and surfer Andrea Claire, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and the California Institute of the Arts, is Brooklyn-based but has her sights on setting up a studio in Los Angeles in 2016. She regularly collaborates with architects, interior designers and other clients internationally, creating scalable mobile ‘light-art’ and other bespoke pieces. Claire is showing at ICFF at Booth 0826 (L1).

Founded in 2014, Thislexik is six-strong young design collective, housed in a Red Hook atelier made of repurposed shipping containers. As its home would suggest, the studio is committed to making high-quality products from recycled materials, all hand-fabricated. Thislexik is exhibiting at ICFF at Booth 0939 (L1).

A warehouse in Red Hook dating from the Civil War is home to Rhode Island School of Design graduate Brian Volk-Zimmerman, aka Volk, who has been making furniture since 2006. Choice materials appear center-stage in his collection of wooden tables, chairs and storage, all of which embrace traditional joinery techniques. Volk is showing at ICFF at Booth 0922 (L1).

Oeuf are Anglo-French husband-and-wife duo Sophie Demenge and Michael Ryan, whose design brand – as its name would suggest – evokes ideas of the pared-down and essential. Covering, among other product categories, furniture, textiles (in the form of soft furnishings and bedding) and toys, their work strives to align eco- conscious production with eco-conscious consumption. Oeuf are exhibiting at
Wanted Design.

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