Jessica Herman

Surrounded by thousands of books and countless magazines, Gillian Carrera peers through her black fashion-forward spectacles to discuss a timeless, if elusive, topic: form and function. It's on her mind today, because she, the School of the Art Institute's Fashion Resource Director, recently juried a Chicago-based furniture competition organized by TENbyTEN magazine's editor Annette Ferrara and the local Design Within Reach (DWR) store proprietor, Jessica Wingate.

A broadening interest in contemporary design, fostered by stores such as IKEA and DWR and even Target's designer lines, has opened up opportunities for artists to show their own home objects and furniture to a receptive audience. Featuring the competition's twenty-four finalists, the December 9 exhibition at Chicago's DWR studio is one opportunity for the public to see these individuals' work. With curatorial help from local art and design authorities who acted as the jury, Modern + Design + Function-Chicago Furniture Now pointed us to a handful of Chicago's up and coming designers from its list of finalists.

Ammar Eloueini
As a studio professor of architecture at University of Illinois at Chicago, Ammar Eloueini is accustomed to working on a grander scale than individual objects. Pushing aside his Starbucks cup, he pulls up a grid of icons on his computer desktop. Clicking into the CAD program to show how he produces his designs digitally--hence the name of his studio, Digit-all--he begins to discuss his recent work. In Chicago, he designed the "Skin Tight" show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, from the mannequins to the color of paint on the walls. He has also been collaborating with fashion icon Issey Miyake, working on the interior design of Miyake's Berlin store, which opens this month.

"There's a way to think technologically in a sustainable way," he begins, suggesting that people do not generally associate the two approaches. "There's a way to bridge that gap." While Eloueini may seem removed from his designs by working entirely digitally, he is finely attuned to the sustainability and environmental impact of his work.

He picks up a New York Times article reviewing the John Jasperse ballet performance that features his polycarbonate structure.

"In an hour-and-half, you can have the entire set mounted. The material is fireproof, it's durable and it comes in a palette of colors," Eloueini says, selling the "high-end plastic" as the ultimate in functionality. The material is portable, durable and sustainable. After a year of touring with the company and metamorphosing over the course of each performance, the set is still in good condition.

Polycarbonate was a natural choice for his "Modern + Design + Function" entry. Providing its own interior structure and hinges due to the way that the plastic is cut, Elouieni's chair weighs less than five pounds. "The idea is just one panel with zip ties [to secure the chair's form]. It will come scored, and you will fold it and assemble it with some ties," he says. "The whole idea is that you can use it and once you want to move, you can take the zip ties out."

Michael Koehler
Situated in a brick warehouse that houses a hodgepodge of artists, Michael Koehler's sprawling studio is a dusty, no-fuss woodshop. A massive easel lining one wall hovers over stacks of furniture-making encyclopedias and art books profiling anyone from Andy Goldsworthy to Donald Judd. Koehler periodically changes his visual stimuli, shifting from architecture-school drawings of yesteryear to Beastie Boys album covers. Squares of foam core are push-pinned to a support beam, hung like empty picture frames.

"I make boxes," the custom-design furniture maker says simply. His thick hands pick up one of a half-dozen models that led to his final competition entry: a 16-inch-tall wooden "game table" that you can climb into like a picnic table. Pointing out almost indistinguishable differences between the models, he says that he made the product this fall for Wicker Park's design/clothing boutique hejfina. Initially conceived as an extension of a "runway system," Koehler explains, "It's low and fat and thick and heavy-looking, sort of an environment in itself."

The resulting product illustrates two characteristics that typify Koehler's work: he maintains a nearly monogamous relationship with wood, particularly walnut because "it's generic but not everyday," and he likes to experiment with proportion and scale.

"I sort of built complexity into the box," Koehler says as he begins to elaborate about other projects that he's completed in the city. "Architecture still has a lot do with it," he adds and mentions a few of his influences, from Bauhaus theory to Le Corbusier on up to Jean Michel Frank. His resume ranges from tailoring a residential media center to constructing the interior of the stylish men's boutique Apartment Number 9. He also outlined the space of the restaurant Avec, which he describes as "a long cedar wooden tube shoved into the base of this building."

Drawing from his University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee architectural training, Koehler sketches journal pages replete with corrections and measurements. "It's about massaging that into something functional that has an organized concept," he says.

Handling a foam-core model that looks like a perfectly executed high-school science project, Koehler explains that the wooden sticks, a tad thicker than toothpicks, represent the steel detail he sometimes includes. Constructed by design-oriented colleague, Carson Maddox, the steel component adds a degree of lightness to Koehler's designs by lifting the structure barely above the ground. Otherwise, Koehler's a one-man act from start to finish.

Carson Maddox
Carson Maddox's studio fills a chunk of the gutted shell in a rusty Garfield Park warehouse. His workshop is a spacious composition of tables and their respective blades--band saws, table saws and lathes--along with random floating fragments, like a toddler's tricycle. Resting under one of the tables is the skateboard that Maddox occasionally uses to maneuver efficiently around the room.

Sliding back to the racks of rods, tubes and flats in the corner, Maddox's conversation drifts from wood to steel. "Steel is so flexible and so versatile and so underused in aesthetic design," he says.

Selected as the maker of steel equipment when he worked at Kansas' Waxman Candles in college, the Kansas City native was forced to familiarize himself with the material. The challenge was not farfetched, considering Maddox's proclivity to dissect anything he does not understand from the inside out. "I never had an alarm clock that lasted more than two or three months when I was a child," he says.

Like many of Maddox's designs, his competition entry, an outdoor chaise, incorporates steel and the exotic but sustainable Brazilian wood known as Ipe. While the chaise is stretched out on the warehouse rooftop, the rest of Maddox's prototypes lounge around his office space.

A look at Maddox's collection shows his evolution as a designer and exposes the process of his work. He walks from the prototype of a stool that he constructed to a bar; the craggy steel support pieces of the bar mimic the base of the stool, and the look evolves into a smoother final version of the bar stool that Maddox eventually sold.

Standing in the sleeker half of his sprawling studio, the long-haired designer dims the lights just so and sets out a few candles. He waxes momentarily over the importance of light in establishing the appropriate atmosphere.

The space is set off by a harmonious forest of plants--from a Wandering Jew to cactus to bamboo--tapping the inside window panes, facing a sky bleeding orange. Maddox has conjured a pure, organic aesthetic in the midst of his industrial neighborhood.

Helen Nugent
Focusing on more than functionality and aesthetics alone, Helen Nugent discusses her designs like an inventor. "Design could become more provocative, more questioning. What do you want from a table in your life?" Nugent asks hypothetically. "[What I do] is not market-driven. I prefer that the object that results is not an object that already exists."

Standing in her bedroom, she points to recent examples of her work, ordinary materials used in unconventional ways: "Malevich," a blue Plexiglas display shelf shaped liked a cross, houses a potpourri of perfume bottles. She calls her table lamp "Utsurio"; exposed on the shade is a red photograph of a Kmart lamp. Explaining how her projects unravel, Nugent says that she first establishes a concept and then finds her appropriate materials. Many of the pieces, such as Utsurio, are self-referential.

As a relatively simple and understated design, Nugent's entry is anomalous to the rest of her "more toward the edge" creations. Designed as part of a series of lamps, Nugent never made the lamp "because it seemed very functional, very utilitarian," but it was a perfect fit for the competition. She examines the photographic-quality rendering of the design on a computer program, "Form Z"; stacked atop one another, the floor lamp is composed of three silk shades. "You can bring the light to you," she says, describing how the middle shade swings out by pulling the metal ring wrapped around it.

Doing undergraduate studies in environmental art and graduate studies in design at Glasgow School of Art, Nugent became comfortable experimenting with materials. Now working as a design instructor and the coordinator of the Design Objects program at the Art Institute, Nugent continues to straddle the divide separating art from design. "If you look only at the end product, it can get blurry, but if you look at the intention, it's more clear [who is an artist and who is a designer]," Nugent explains. Focusing on the process as well as the product's function, Nugent manages to embody both of these roles.

Hannes Wingate
Hannes Wingate pops upstairs mid-conversation and retrieves a ball of newspapers which he steadfastly unwraps upon return. From the mass of papers, he reveals an authentic, bird-made nest that he found in Oregon.

"The nest represents individual perfection," he says, explaining his fascination with this pure, natural form. "It's created by valueless materials and fused into something that is extremely functional and precious. After it's used it can recede seamlessly into the environment."

As he lays the fragile wreath of sticks down beside a chair made solely of woven mini-blades, Wingate displays the evolution of his "Nest/Basket/Stool."

"The name alludes to the process of getting there," Wingate says, looking at the prototype of his competition entry. "The nest is an ingenious composition of materials. The basket is a slight refinement of that. More sharply and more succinctly sharpening the focus and manipulating the materials, you end up with a chair."

Wingate employed the basket-weaving techniques that he acquired after studying under London's "punk-rock basket maker," Lee Dalby. "It was part of a larger project of looking into nests as a subversive strategy." Elaborating on the whimsical culmination of his study, Wingate shows photographs of the "Big Nest" that he erected during the wee hours of the night: 18 feet tall by 12 feet wide, his nest-like basket now rests atop a pair of stilts on an abandoned piece of railroad.

Sitting in his apartment, he is surrounded by an amalgam of found objects: a complete set of lithographs from the 1962 World's Fair that his wife found in a thrift shop, figurines of giraffes and monkeys and a collection of plants and vases. Wingate has a background in interior design "but not the kind that collects endless fabric samples." He studied an experimental cross discipline of art and design, with a focus on managing the creative process.

Originally from Sweden, Wingate came to Chicago with his wife, Jessica, the proprietor of DWR. (Neither she nor Ferrara, however, participated in the selection of finalists.) He landed two steady jobs with Studio Gang Architects and a real estate company in Hyde Park and does freelance work designing high-end house interiors and custom-made objects.

He considers what he's doing conceptual art rather than furniture making. To illustrate his point, he flips the pages of his portfolio to an image of a deck that he designed for a corporate lawyer. "It's an environment, but it's only the scale that determines it's a deck rather than a piece of furniture."

Normal Design
Of the three people sitting at Liam Hawry's dining-room table, only two get the visual gag depicted in the Best Buy advertisement that he holds out--that is, only Hawry and his business partner Carl Boyd see the humor in a joke about sustainability. The photograph of a man kayaking through a sea of used computers, Hawry explains, shows the mountains of "e-waste" which we discard as quickly as we produce. Sharing a mission of dispensing green products into the design market, Hawry and Boyd began collaborating a year ago under the auspices of Normal Design.

"Architects in particular are extremely interested in sustainability," Boyd says, explaining the lag in progress among product design as compared to architecture. As a result, these designers, who focus on sustainability and green design, are applying architectural standards and materials to their work. They're also studying to becoming accredited by LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), which is essentially a "benchmark for green construction in North America."

Normal Design's competition entry, the "Bauxite W," is curled up behind the table; made of recycling-friendly HDPE (milk jug) plastic, the sheet framed in clear anodized aluminum functions as a wall divider. Cut with vertical lines like a roll-top desktop, the product ships in a flat box and assembles in minutes. While the wall has a kind of minimalist modern look, Hawry and Boyd cut a pattern into the lines to make it aesthetically attractive. Wiggling out like a serpent or curving in a half-circle, "Bauxite W" displays the kind of playful simplicity that the pair admires in post World War II designers such as Ray and Charles Eames.

Hawry and Boyd are defensively not "vengeful environmentalists" making "crunchy green" products that are totally organic. Instead they see themselves as humanists, committed to a social movement, thrusting forth nontoxic products that benefit the current economy and ecology. They've started off with home and office products, incorporating design ideas that people have come to know through stores like IKEA.

"There's this huge elephant in the room that people aren't talking about," Boyd says. "We're not trying to be abrasive characters but there's a growing awareness in the design community. Designers are realizing that they have the potential for environmental impact."

Well aware of their own capabilities, Boyd and Hawry have lofty aspirations of mass-producing their designs. They envision themselves somewhere in the gulf between IKEA and DWR; the products should be affordable enough for plenty of people to buy them, thereby making an ecological difference but still maintaining long-lasting quality and an appealing aesthetic.

Hawry declares, "This is what normal could and should be."

Aware of their potential to alter an environment, these individuals--fine artists, architects, designers and furniture makers--treat the working and living places that they and their clients occupy as palettes. Like the negative space of a composition, their environments contextualize the designers' work.

Whether or not these designs become "normal" or 21st century classics, the designers' attempts to be innovative, both in form and function, gained them recognition. The School of the Art Institute's Carrera summarizes the process of narrowing the 160 submissions to a short list of finalists. "You can be dazzled [by a design] until you start to analyze it," she says, explaining that aesthetic appeal of a design only gets you so far. "Is it unique? Harmonious? Is it a different way of using plywood?" she asks. "Everything really came down to common sense."

(2004-12-07)

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