The Italian design firm Sawaya & Moroni often commissions new furniture pieces by guest designers who are primarily artists or architects. Many design firms follow this strategy, but for some reason most of the really original design commissions come out of Sawaya & Moroni. I’m not sure why. I’m not a fan of all their work (especially the Zaha Hadid benches), but they take chances. What I find interesting about these two pieces in particular is that they’re tipping over into the realm of art and fantasy, or even the weird, without seeming jokey or childish (like Karim Rashid or Alessi) or too arch. Above is by Marcello Morandini, Italian designer and architect, Chair, 1991, from here. Below is “Sit-Sat” by artist/architect Massimiliano Fuksas (video here) with Doriana Mandrelli, who works for Alessi. I’m really not a fan of Alessi, but nearly 20 years later this object still seems quite arresting. I wouldn’t want either of these at home, but I’d like to see them in a public space.

“Sit-Sat” is a giant seating sculpture made of painted multilayered plywood. Photo from dezeen. “The piece “invites you to find new ways of sitting,” according to Sawaya & Moroni, who compare it to an ancient eroded rock, sacred Aboriginal mountains and Dogun earth dwellings.”

Missed on eBay. If you have this Jaleh and Joseph scarf and don’t want it any longer, I will pay. Need it very badly.

From the Canadian Design Resource. Late 70s Quebec vase from the Sial company.

Birch/Bříza mug by Czech company whitefruits.

It’s from 2006, but seems to have been a prototype only and does not seem to be in production now, which is unfortunate.

Japanese designer and computer scientist Asao Tokolo has devised a way to tile a pattern of arabesques in such a way that each square tile can be randomly rotated and still match up with all of its neighbours. It’s much more complicated than it looks and scholarly papers have been written on how he did it. He has produced a number of applications of the design – tiles, stencils – but the most satisfying one is a beautiful set of fridge magnets which allows you to produce endless patterns of your own. From the NYT’s The Moment. 

“Dazzle painting,” devised in Britain during WWI, was based on the theory that its complex optical patterns would confuse enemy naval rangefinders by disguising a ship’s speed and direction. It employed a number of visual tricks including the painting of false bow waves on portions of the ship other than the prow. There’s a fascinating explanation of how it was meant to work here. Interestingly, the concept was invented by an artist, a marine painter named Norman Wilkinson. When devising dazzle painting Wilkinson adapted some of the abstract, graphic style of constructivism and cubism even though he himself was a much more traditional painter (click below). Women artists from London’s Royal Academy of Arts dazzle-painted small scale models for optical studio testing before the design for each warship was finalized. It would be impossible to make this kind of stuff up, though perhaps it’s not surprising that historically it’s been standard practice for artists and designers to devise wartime camouflage. In the end the military effectiveness of dazzle painting was uncertain, but it did have the effect of being very good for ship’s morale, and it produced some surreal and beautiful ships. More photos in our Flickr pool, and see also the Tate Modern article on their camouflage exhibition, and more historical information here.

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