At the Cooper-Hewitt, Thomas Heathwerwick’s Spare Furniture

THE DAILY PIC (#1427): In his big survey show at the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt museum in New York, the British designer Thomas Heatherwick tends toward a style you could call “Jetsons Rococo”: A bridge that unfurls itself over water; a “pavilion” that is like a giant dandelion puff. Or at least that’s true of his big building projects. His furniture, on the other hand, is often spare and conceptual. This “Plank” bench is just what it says: A plain plank of wood that, thanks to a bunch of pivot-points, folds into several iterations of a seat. It resists that most dangerous of adjectives in design: “futuristic”. (The equivalent word in fine art is “poetic”.)

(Courtesy Heatherwick Studio)

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