Icon Buzz - Designs & Arts

CITIZEN: Citizen mixes up art, design and concept yet again with their new online archive of ordinary objects that belong to ordinary people (including Ross Lovegrove). Virtually Mine began as a gallery exhibit where visitors were invited to bring possessions that were meaningful to them. Each of these was photographed, tagged and added to the digital archive, along with some information provided by the owner.

This CITIZEN:Citizen project offers an opportunity to look at our relationships with the objects in our lives.

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We went to see the North American premiere of Awadare tonight at design gallery Commissaires in Montreal. Awadare is a furniture collection that combines austere painted steel frames with babiche, a leather weaving technique with aboriginal origins that many will recognize from traditional snowshoes. The juxtaposition is striking, the two extremes of structured manufactured modernity and an ancient organic form. That’s Mush! above, a lounge chair with a metal base that resembles the runners on a sled. Awadare is the first collection by Samare, a design collective made up of four architect designers (Laurie Bedikian, Nicolas Bellavance-Lecompte, Mania Bedikian and Patrick Meirim de Barros) who first met at the University of Montreal. After Commissaires the collection is off to Milan and SaloneSatellite, the launch pad for up-and-coming designers.

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Luflic had some amazing chairs at Toronto’s Interior Design Show this past weekend, really catching the collective eye with two pieces called In The Round. Both these production-ready chairs, designed by Brent Cordner, are named after the in-the-round knitting technique and over 50 feet of wool sleeve is used to cover the tubular steel frame for the felt version and 30 feet for the stitch version. The Snowshoe chair (after the jump) won an award at IDS for Best prototype and it is an incredibly light chair made from a composite of wood and Kevlar and based on the traditional snowshoe. The Meander chair is a continuous length of nickel-reinforced copper tubing that results in surprisingly comfortable sculptural seating.

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