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Hand-built bicycles represent a unique and largely unsung marriage of design, craft and art. While the world is full of bicycle manufacturers and bike shops have sprung up in major cities seemingly everywhere, these compellingly beautiful objects stand apart in "Bespoke: The Handbuilt Bicycle," currently at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York through August 15th. But while planes, trains and automobiles have all been the subjects of worshipful museum shows, these transportation masterworks have never been honored before. Sacha White, owner and master bicycle builder of the Vanilla Workshop in Portland, Oregon, had long wanted a showcase for his work. "When history is written, I want my name to be there," says the sandy-haired 33-year-old.   MORE >>

Hand-built bicycles represent a unique and largely unsung marriage of design, craft and art. While the world is full of bicycle manufacturers and bike shops have sprung up in major cities seemingly everywhere, these compellingly beautiful objects stand apart in "Bespoke: The Handbuilt Bicycle," currently at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York through August 15th. But while planes, trains and automobiles have all been the subjects of worshipful museum shows, these transportation masterworks have never been honored before. Sacha White, owner and master bicycle builder of the Vanilla Workshop in Portland, Oregon, had long wanted a showcase for his work. "When history is written, I want my name to be there," says the sandy-haired 33-year-old.

He got his wish when he sold one of his machines to Michael Maharam, principal of his family's eponymous textile company, a self-confessed object junkie and an ardent lover of design. Hand-built bicycles are among Maharam's many passions. "I thought it was amazing that no one had ever done a hand-built bicycle show before," he says. "It's a craft, the same as jewelry-making is a craft." Maharam convinced Holly Hotchner, director of MAD, to stage the exhibition and suggested to White that they join forces as co-curators. "The choice of builders was left up to me," says White. "But the bulk of the work putting the show together was done in New York by Michael."

The exhibition features the work of six builders: Mike Flanigan, Holliston, MA; Jeff Jones, Medford, OR; Dario Pegoretti, Calonazzo, Italy; Richard Sachs, Warwick, MA; J. Peter Weigle, Lyme, CT; and White himself. The men range in age from the early 30s (White) to 50s (Pegoretti). The only thing they share in common is their passion for hand-built bikes, created in a painstaking process that involves master metalwork and an artist's eye in the application of paint and decorative finishes. Pegoretti, who builds racing bikes for world-class professionals, is just as famous for his boldly painted designs as he is for his craftsmanship. (He uses no lugs and builds his frames using state-of-the-art steel.)

The 21 works on view in the show range from fixed-gear to road racing, cyclocross to mountain, as well as commuter machines and a randonneur bike designed exclusively for long-distance racing. There's even a tricycle built by White for his daughter. White, who has been called the Picasso of frame building by Bicycling Magazine, has a passion for variety. Another builder in the show, Richard Sachs, aims for perfection via one design, making endless iterations of his elegantly sleek red racing frame. White will give no specifics as to why and how he picked the craftsmen for the exhibition, saying only, "I chose the ones who inspire me. The way they stay true to their vision helps me." He estimates that worldwide there may be as few as 150 custom builders.

White started out with a passion for vintage scooters but, after he moved to Portland to become a bike messenger, his interests changed. When his bike broke down, he brought it in to a friend to be repaired. That was the moment he realized that bikes could be built; it inspired him to set up his company. "The bicycle is an incredible invention," he says. "You can do the same thing on a bike as you can in a car."

White has two brands: He's the sole builder for Vanilla, producing only about 30 bikes a year; Speedvagen, his other company, makes racing bikes, fabricating around 300 annually. His six-person shop does the prep work for Speedvagen machines, and White sometimes brings in other master builders to finish them. But the shop follows the same production methods and there's no difference in the cost: Prices range from around $5,000 to $12,000, depending on the complexity of the details. But he doesn't want people to view them as luxuries. "If we're seen as only making luxury goods, that's not good. We make machines to be ridden," he says. "There's real value-fit, design and fabrication-that's melded into one machine that will perform amazingly." madmuseum.org, vanillabicycles.com
PORTRAIT: DAVID NEEDLEMAN   << LESS

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Behind two industrial gates in a once-wealthy São Paulo neighborhood called Santa Cecília, the studio of Brazil's renowned design duo the Campana brothers hums with life. Light saturates the interior through factory windows, polycarbonate walls and graphical louvers, revealing a high-ceilinged anteroom crowded with children's plush toys. The toys are actually their oft-celebrated (and heavily collected) armchairs, constructed from piles of stuffed alligators or dolls hand-stitched in the country's northeast. There also sits chimeric hybrids of wicker and monobloc plastic, made for Artecnica in 2008 for a project called TransPlastic, that resemble patio furnishings devoured by ravenous hedges.   MORE >>

Behind two industrial gates in a once-wealthy São Paulo neighborhood called Santa Cecília, the studio of Brazil's renowned design duo the Campana brothers hums with life. Light saturates the interior through factory windows, polycarbonate walls and graphical louvers, revealing a high-ceilinged anteroom crowded with children's plush toys. The toys are actually their oft-celebrated (and heavily collected) armchairs, constructed from piles of stuffed alligators or dolls hand-stitched in the country's northeast. There also sits chimeric hybrids of wicker and monobloc plastic, made for Artecnica in 2008 for a project called TransPlastic, that resemble patio furnishings devoured by ravenous hedges.
 
Past this clutch of seating, the street-level floor and ceiling fall away to expose a basement where a goggled man welds the curly steel canopy of what seems to be a tree. An evolution of the brothers' scribble-like Corallo seating for Edra (2003), this tree will become La Gloriette, a sustainably created pavilion perched on looping stalks of native and pliable apuí wood. It’s set to make an introductory splash at this spring's Salone del Mobile in Milan, and in 2011 will entertain guests at the 19th century-style garden of Veuve Clicquot's historical Hotel du Marc in Reims, the company's executive retreat. It's the latest commission in a growing list of collaborations between the brand and a list of international designers such as Tom Dixon, Front Design and Karim Rashid.
 
Having just wrapped up their Antibodies retrospective at Vitra, they opened their midtown Manhattan Camper flagship, whose windows drip with molded rattan, in February. They also published their first monograph, entitled Campana Brothers: Complete Works (So Far), with Rizzoli in March, and later this year they'll launch tied-bamboo bowls and baskets with Alessi. Humberto (eldest, reticent, a former lawyer) and Fernando (youngest, architect, the talker) are Paulistanos by birth and established their studio out of this space, which was Fernando's apartment, in 1983. With their collaged aesthetic, hands-on fabrication, collaboration with artisans and research into ordinary materials (plastic tubing, scraps of wood), the two have helped put contemporary Brazilian design on the map. "We call what we do ‘contamination," explains Fernando. "We give form to banal situations and 'potentialize' those banalities."
 
While theirs isn't an aesthetic immediately associated with Veuve Clicquot, it's nevertheless a modern celebration of tradition and sustainability (environmental and social) that suits the champagne maker to a T. La Gloriette exemplifies the brothers' use of eco-friendly and regional materials, as well as the craft-based character of their work, which constantly drafts languishing artisans into service: seamstresses, welders, weavers. "We try to make a portrait of our environment," says Fernando. His brother agrees: "The treasure of the Third World is the time people take for the banal. Other countries don’t do that anymore."
 
Indeed, Brazil is a rich assemblage of ethnicities, eras, aesthetics and materials both high and low. The Campanas' salvaged-then-collaged aesthetic bows its head to the resourcefulness of the favelas and is representative of, even seminal to, contemporary Brazilian design. They stand self-consciously between the favela residents who create "an architecture of scarcity" and the São Paulo businessmen who jockey for the latest Hermès helicopter. With all the brothers' metaphorical and literal seams, La Gloriette also merges these unlikely worlds. After all, they know a bit about stitching things together. campanas.com.br   << LESS

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"I attach importance to fineness. I am more nervous." Ryuji Nakamura is comparing himself to Jun Aoki, the Tokyo-based architect for whom he worked prior to opening his eponymous studio in 2004. That attitude has produced interiors and furniture that are literally featherweight, and whose delicate features require tireless curiosity to fully comprehend.   MORE >>

"I attach importance to fineness. I am more nervous." Ryuji Nakamura is comparing himself to Jun Aoki, the Tokyo-based architect for whom he worked prior to opening his eponymous studio in 2004. That attitude has produced interiors and furniture that are literally featherweight, and whose delicate features require tireless curiosity to fully comprehend.
 
Although Nakamura's birthplace, Nagano, is home to the famous Buddhist temple Zenko-ji, Nakamura says the everyday houses he encountered walking to and from school turned him on to architecture. He first pursued an education in the discipline there, too, but "It was rather too free," he says. Even in his student days, he contrasted the freewheeling academic atmosphere with a precise aesthetic that allows no excess.
 
Atmosphere, scenery commissioned by the Tokyo Chamber Opera Theatre for the György Ligeti end-of-the-world opera "Le Grand Macabre," shows those proclivities still in development. For the two-night performance in February 2009, Nakamura suspended 242 strands of furry polyester ribbon from battens in the theater's fly gallery. The swags are arranged in a skewed grid that amplifies the sense of perspective; operating from catwalks high above the stage, crew members moved 10 battens at a time, further transforming the distorted landscape below and forcing the singers to move with it in tandem. The ribbons' catenary curves may represent apocalyptic wreckage, but the benefit of extreme minimalism, Nakamura says, is that the audience can project any number of symbols onto the stage.
 
For Blossom (2009), a cosmetic redo of a Nagano wedding venue's dining room for which Nakamura changed only one wall, sharp eyes are as necessary as an elastic mind. To exploit the little daylight that enters the space, the architect clad the wall in a sheet of stainless steel laser-cut into 12,000 flowers and painted white. The heat of fabrication caused the infinitesimally thin metal to warp just enough so that each shape projects outward slightly differently, creating a remarkably diverse, yet subtle, pattern of changing shadows.
 
In pursuit of fineness, Nakamura has particularly devoted research to a wave-like form that looks something like the mouth of a goldfish. "The wave can fill a big volume with little material," he explains, and the 38-year-old has laser-cut the shape in aluminum to produce the garden stool Nukegara 2 (2009). Working in vulcanized paper, he has made the lounge chair Hechima 4 (2008) as well as Kuma (2006), a teddy bear that seems beyond Nakamura's anxious personality -- until he explains that it is really a totem meant for healing. "It makes one feel grounded," he says of the animal. "I can look at it for a long time" -- which could also be said about his newest work Colorful (2010), a 3-D grid of multicolored corrugated paper that changes hue according to the viewer's position.
 
Even Nakamura's most substantial works appear ready to be whisked away by a gust of wind. In one of several spaces he has designed for the eyeglass chain Jin's Global Standard, a series of paneled corridors is folded into funhouse proportions. Elsewhere, to hold eyeglasses, he invented a tiny vulcanized-paper shelf that looks like a curling Post-it. "I would like to design a house, museum and church," Nakamura says. When he does, expect the building occupants to appear hardier than the structures themselves. ryujinakamura.com   << LESS

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Knowing the ropes of breaking into fashion photography all too well, London-based gallery Spring Projects—housed in the same building as esteemed photo house Spring Studios—used its February exhibition, “Oh! You Pretty Things,” to celebrate the UK’s most promising emerging stars. Creative agency Six Creative and Spring Studios’ Mark Loy collaborated with the gallery’s director Andree Cooke to choose five artists—Alice Hawkins, Daniel Jackson, Josh Olins, Angelo Pannetta and Jacob Sutton—whose work solidifies the new generation of shooters who transcend conventionality by commenting on glamour, perfection, sex and pop culture.   MORE >>

Knowing the ropes of breaking into fashion photography all too well, London-based gallery Spring Projects—housed in the same building as esteemed photo house Spring Studios—used its February exhibition, “Oh! You Pretty Things,” to celebrate the UK’s most promising emerging stars. Creative agency Six Creative and Spring Studios’ Mark Loy collaborated with the gallery’s director Andree Cooke to choose five artists—Alice Hawkins, Daniel Jackson, Josh Olins, Angelo Pannetta and Jacob Sutton—whose work solidifies the new generation of shooters who transcend conventionality by commenting on glamour, perfection, sex and pop culture.

“Fashion photography, like all art forms today, is evolving with intense variety,” Cooke says. Take Hawkins, who has shot beauty pageant contestants in their native environments to examine the definitions of beauty, or Olins, who adopts an over-styled aesthetic to interpret his childhood icons.

What bonds the seemingly disparate quintet is an approach that exemplifies how the industry has changed. “There’s a feeling of dissatisfaction with overly manipulated imagery, and an appetite for work that has a feeling of genuineness,” Sutton says. “Photography has never been the deliverer of truth, but good photography always gives the viewer the perception of it.” springprojects.co.uk
 
Photos copyright: Josh Olins, Jacob Sutton/Hana Al-Sayed, Jacob Sutton, Daniel Jackson   << LESS

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James Coombes and Dominique Gonfard see the bright side in a depressing marketplace. The two met in a restaurant four years ago, married last November and officially launched Lerival just a month before their wedding. It was a love match with the market, too: the New York-based company, which produces furniture designed by architects, has already expanded into European distribution.   MORE >>

"When I was doing my masters in architecture, I began to notice that a lot of firms were doing interesting furniture work, as a custom piece or to test a material or fabrication process," Gonfard, 28, says of her student days at Parsons. "But the pieces weren’t getting the attention they deserved." In these less-harried times, 27-year-old Coombes adds, "Architects have more time to consider alternative ventures that come their way."

Sometimes acting on a tip about designs gathering dust, or simply recognizing that an oeuvre could work nicely writ small, Coombes and Gonfard introduced local and international firms Della Valle Bernheimer, Incorporated, Moorhead & Moorhead, nARCHITECTS and Carl Fredrik Svenstedt to their alternative venture, and enrolled them to supply the firm's first series of products. "All the talents possess unique and singular approaches to their work, yet have a sharp attention to details and materials in common," says Gonfard, "as well as an ability to work consistently and meticulously across varying scales."

The results largely straddle scale with modularity. In the Plate Shelf by nARCHITECTS, reconfigurable aluminum plates slip in and out of slotted white-oak volumes, and the Hex Table by Incorporated grows and shrinks according to the number of stainless-steel pods arranged within a single footprint. It's similar in principle to Incorporated's Endless Sofa, in which five-inch-wide segments of leather-wrapped foam are zippered together.

Honestly conveying the relationships between material and fabrication, the Moorhead & Moorhead-designed Felt Stool is a sheet of industrial felt folded and riveted into a three-dimensional form that is simultaneously structure and upholstery. And by CNC-routing concentric hoops from two sheets of furniture-grade plywood, Svenstedt created the undulating Infinity Bench. "We pride ourselves on maintaining intimate relationships with the designers and the fabricators, and we’re really trying to involve both in the development process," says Gonfard.

Looking ahead, the couple mentions that some of the greatest examples of modernist furniture were the work of architects. For this spring's ICFF, they'll spotlight Della Valle Bernheimer's Jack table, which features—surprise—modular linking legs and a topographical desktop whose mass-customized indentations accommodate the user's size and organizational preferences. They're also developing new pieces with Los Angeles architect Elena Manferdini and other Mies in the makings. And Gonfard promises that the innovation of these pieces will not only make a splash in the design world, but also "influence the overall way we do business." lerival.com   << LESS