Metropolis’ Kristi Cameron Selects from Etsy
by brooklynmodern | June 1st, 2010
A Console by Wheeler’s Studio is one of the many modern pieces available on Etsy
Cameron writes:
As a design editor, I see an ongoing parade of mass-produced furniture, so it’s sometimes easy to forget Modernism’s long craft history. Sure, Charles and Ray Eames performed furniture miracles with bent plywood and fiberglass, and those kinds of material experiments live on in contemporary feats like Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec’s Slow Chair. To me, minimalism is uniquely lovely when it bears the fingerprint of the human hand — think of Hans Wegner and George Nakashima, whose poetic ways with wood helped mainstream the movement. Another of my favorite Modern traditions is the clever repurposing of materials: no one did it better than Achille Castiglioni, who made an art of using off-the-shelf industrial parts to fashion his unforgettable product designs. Happily, there are plenty of examples of the handcrafted and the reinvented on Etsy — my digging even turned up a few pieces by the masters themselves! Click here to visit article.
