ICFF EXHIBITS • NY INSIDE

Yale, The School of Architecture, is exhibiting the work of students in Massimo Scolari’s advanced studio. The famous Italian Designer of Giorgetti is currently the Davenport Visiting Professor of Architecture at Yale. His studio centers posed the problem of designing a scholar’s center for the funerary complex of King Djoser at Saqqara, Egypt (ca. 2650 b.c.). Part of the challenge was furniture oriented: each student created and fabricated a full-scale prototype of a chair to “furnish” his or her building.

California College of the Arts. Under the direction of Yves Béhar, the newly appointed chair of the the California College of the Arts' Industrial Design Program, participating seniors worked with Gaia & Gino, the Istanbul-based global design presence, on Ouaf-Oauf, a brand of dog products. The project explores the entire brand experience, and incorporates everything from packaging through collateral materials. On display, all stages of the process, and the resulting line of products that have become Gaia & Gino's high-end dog accessories: Cornered.

Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. Objects for the home are often endowed with meaning and emotional content as well as singular or multiple functions.These items in the domestic landscape become "house creatures," as the exhibited projects by select bachelor's degree students of this Italian school's Art and Design Department demonstrate. On display in an environment abtracting the features of "home" are housewares developed over 4 semesters. The projects range from a glass toaster to a sheet metal CD holder to experiments in lighting made of DuPont Surface's new ice white Corian to lighting fixtures developed together with Zumtobel. All of these items aid in a specific task; each however, reflects an individual approach, and individual point of view, and a singular materiality.

Georgia Institute of Technology. Faculty of Georgia Tech's College of Architecture charged graduate and undergraduate students with bridging the never-the-twain-shall-meet gap between the one-off and the mass produced. The challenge involved the complex problem of how to design a reconfigurable system that, unlike a family of discrete objects adapts to serve a variety of functions in the household domain. Students worked to develop an intelligent CAD model that maps to flexible manufacturing mechanisms to yield the necessary customization. Potential solutions in a variety of materials are enabled with the ability to evolve and, as it were, contort, transforming from shelf to seat, from seat to screen, from screen to surface to structure and back again, as necessary.

Philadelphia University. Sponsored by Amuneal Manufacturing, a Philadelphia-based manufacturer, and Foster's Urban Homeware, a Philadelphia retailer of housewares, the students studio explored all aspects of designing a product for the home that succeeds aesthetically and functionally, and economical to manufacture and that does what a retailer requires. This display documents the whole process through presentation drawings, documents, image scans, and working prototypes in metal ranging from wine racks to bookcases to desktop storage to clip boards to computer stands, and more.

University of Alberta. In a highly abstract exercise, students explore design as both poetic and philosophical construct. Participants seek to extract design's full powers of communication as well as its emotional and psychological reverberations. Each project in this exhibit reflects an individual experience of a common concept contained in one word, "decay." The objects that result from the designer's creative processes are meant to form a metaphysical bridge between creator and user.

University of Idaho College of Art & Architecture. This investigation into the complex question of energy use and its consumption in the production of various interior surfacing materials – specifically, composite wood materials – addresses one of today's pressing problems. Teams of students attempt to parse the conundrum of embodied energy and its environmental impact, collecting data on specific composites, working their way back through the manufacturing process, sorting their way through still inconsistent measurement methods, and ultimately arriving at some enlightening conclusions. Research results provide impetus for every aspect of this exhibit, from materials to construction methods to accompanying texts, images, and samples.