Author Archives: Ida Torres

The Georgia Art Show Turning 9 Broken 3D Prints Into Music

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Every fabrication lab in the country is quietly accumulating a problem. Failed prints, test runs, leftover filament, the ghost of every prototype that didn’t make the cut. Most of it ends up in the bin. Architect Hyojin Kwon noticed this and, instead of moving on, asked a different question: what if all that discarded plastic could hold a note?

The result is Ninefold: A Distributed Resonant Field, a collaboration between Kwon’s design studio Pre- and Post-, percussionist and composer Jeremy Muller, and architect and material researcher Misri Patel. It’s currently on view at the Reeves House Visual Arts Center in Woodstock, Georgia, through September, and it is one of the more quietly radical things happening in design right now.

Designers: Hyojin Kwon × Jeremy Muller x Misri Patel

The installation is made up of nine large-scale forms, each one 3D-printed from discarded PLA collected from campus makerspaces and fabrication labs. The team shredded that waste into pellets, blended it with virgin material, and ran it through a pellet-based additive manufacturing process. The resulting objects are not identical. Some grow into tall, slender columns. Others widen into chambers or narrow toward their centers. Each carries its own texture, its own layered color variation from the mixed-batch sourcing, and its own distinct harmonic frequency. Together, they form a distributed sound field, meaning the sound is never coming from one place. It moves with you.

That last part is what makes this more than a sculpture show with a good concept. As you walk through the space, your position changes the acoustic picture entirely. Tones overlap, separate, recede. You’re not passively observing nine objects; you’re completing the field. The project draws on the thinking of composer Edgard Varèse, who called for “organized sound” as architecture, and on the spatial music systems of Iannis Xenakis and Le Corbusier. Those are not small reference points. They’re pointing at a lineage that treats space itself as a musical instrument, and Kwon, Muller, and Patel are building within that tradition using material that would have otherwise ended up as landfill.

The aspect of Ninefold that deserves real attention is how seriously it takes the material. The layered plastic isn’t hidden or smoothed over into something that looks deliberately “designed.” The texture is part of the expression. You can see the deposition, the color shifts, the history of what it was made from. The project doesn’t pretend the recycling didn’t happen; it foregrounds it. That honesty feels important at a moment when sustainability has become more of a marketing category than an actual practice.

The nine forms were also fabricated in modular sections, which means they can be transported, reconfigured, and reinstalled elsewhere. That might seem like a logistical footnote, but it matters: an installation about material longevity should probably have a long life. These objects weren’t made to be shown once and archived.

Ninefold is part of a dual exhibition that also includes Plastic Reimagined: Material Agency & Circular Design, developed with students from Georgia Tech’s graduate architecture program and curated by Carolina Cuevas. The full show runs through September at the Reeves House, and admission is free. If you’re near Woodstock, Georgia, it’s worth the trip. If you’re not, the images alone carry something worth sitting with. A lot of projects right now wear sustainability as a label. Ninefold actually earns it, and then manages to also be beautiful, which is rarer than it should be.

The post The Georgia Art Show Turning 9 Broken 3D Prints Into Music first appeared on Yanko Design.

Konny Just Solved the One Thing Baby Slings Never Could

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I am not a parent myself, but I have been around enough parents that I make some unsolicited observations (to myself, to be fair), especially when it comes to them carrying babies and toddlers. Whenever I see them carrying babies on a sling, I keep thinking, “That doesn’t seem to be that comfortable for both the parent and the kid.” So it’s interesting to see baby brands try to come up with design solutions for this kind of problem, since it’s something that will be around forever.

South Korean baby brand Konny’s contribution to easing the life of parents is the Dual Support Hip Seat Carrier. It aims to solve two of the prevalent problems that they face when using slings. First, it has a foldable hip pad and back pad to make it more comfortable for the kid. Second, the parent doesn’t just bear the weight on one shoulder because of this carrier’s Dual Support.

Designer: Konny

This portable baby hip seat carrier’s main purpose is to replicate the security of a parent’s arms so the baby is upright, safe, and comfortable. It has a foldable hip pad combined with a back pad to give this sense of security. It even has a non-slip bottom so the kid will not slide off the seat, which I sometimes see happen with other seat carriers. The seat is made of soft 3D mesh, giving a more comfortable feeling for your baby as you carry them around.

It also takes into consideration the comfort of the parents since they’re carrying the heavy load, so to speak. The carrier has wide shoulder straps that are able to spread the weight evenly across the back to avoid the one-shoulder strain that a lot of parents experience. You also have the option to carry the baby from a hip position or a front-facing hold. The fabric used is the same stretch-and-resilience material that the other Konny Baby Carriers use, a fabric tested and trusted through over one million carriers sold.

The Dual Support Hip Seat Carrier weighs only 0.5 lbs and can be folded into a small enough item to put in a purse or a diaper bag. But when not being used to carry a baby, it can actually function as a chic and stylish bag that you can carry stuff around with. It claims to be a one-size-fits-all accessory as it is accessible for all kinds of body types.

What I find particularly reassuring, especially for those who aren’t baby gear experts, is that the Dual Support Hip Seat Carrier is IHDI certified. The International Hip Dysplasia Institute recognizes baby carriers that actively support healthy hip development in infants, so this isn’t just a comfort win for parents; it’s a safety win for babies, too. That kind of certification adds a layer of trust that goes beyond just good design.

And speaking of good design, the carrier actually won the 2024 Good Design Award, one of the most prestigious design honors in the world. The jury praised it for achieving a “near-perfect balance between infant safety and parental convenience,” and honestly, it’s easy to see why. The fact that it doubles as a bag when you’re not carrying a baby is already a clever touch, but knowing that the structure was the result of dozens of prototypes and extensive real-world customer testing makes it even more impressive.

The Dual Support Hip Seat Carrier is available on konnybaby.com starting at $59.99, and it comes in a range of colors, from classic Charcoal and Black to more playful options like Green Tea and Blue Grey, as well as a Corduroy version for something a little more textured.

As someone who has watched many a parent struggle with a squirming toddler and a lopsided sling, I’d say this is the kind of product that makes you think, “Finally.” It may not replace the full-on baby carrier for long hauls, but for that “carry me now” stage, when your toddler suddenly decides their legs no longer work, this seems like exactly the right tool for the job.

The post Konny Just Solved the One Thing Baby Slings Never Could first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Italian Lamp That Uses Toy Race Cars as Light Bulbs

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Most lighting gets chosen the same way people pick curtains: functional, inoffensive, and quickly forgotten. You walk through a showroom, you point at something that won’t clash with the sofa, and that’s more or less the end of the design conversation. That’s not a criticism of how people live; it’s just an observation of how light, despite being the single most transformative element in any space, rarely gets to have fun.

Davide Groppi’s Race of Lights is the exception to all of that. The Italian lighting brand, based in Piacenza and known for making some of the most quietly radical lamps in contemporary design, released Race of Lights in 2025. On paper, it is a modular wall lamp. In reality, it is a slot-car racing track that someone decided should also be your light source, and the whole thing somehow works beautifully.

Designer: Davide Groppi

The concept is exactly what it sounds like. An electrified track, made from textured matte black polyethylene, gets mounted on the wall in whatever configuration you want. The track carries current, and the light sources are tiny car-shaped spotlights that snap into place magnetically and can be moved, repositioned, or rearranged any time the mood strikes. The basic kit includes two short straight modules, four longer sections, six curves, and four colored light-cars in green, white, blue, and red. The whole system can run up to five metres across your wall and power up to eight spotlights, each with an adjustable head so you can direct the beam exactly where you want it. This is, objectively, absurd. It is also one of the most genuinely exciting things to come out of the lighting world in years.

What makes Race of Lights so interesting to think about is how it sits within Davide Groppi’s broader body of work. This is a designer who built his reputation on doing less. His lamp Nulla, which won the Compasso d’Oro in 2014, measures just 18 millimetres in diameter and is practically invisible in a ceiling. The name literally translates to “nothing.” The philosophy has always been that the lamp should disappear so the light can remain. Race of Lights does not disappear. It sits on your wall, looped and curved, with little colored cars parked along the track. It makes a statement in the exact opposite direction of everything Groppi has been doing, and yet it makes complete sense.

Because the brand has never really been about minimalism for minimalism’s sake. The design language has always carried a sense of emotion. Groppi has spoken about light as a tool for seduction and curiosity, about design emerging from the heart as much as the mind. Race of Lights just takes that emotional dimension and makes it literal. The inspiration was childhood, specifically the memory of electric slot-car racing sets, the kind where small cars zip around a winding track spread across the living room floor. The track moves to the wall; the cars stay put and illuminate. Play becomes design, and the object retains the spirit of the original thing it was borrowing from.

The result is a piece that functions as a legitimate lighting solution and as a conversation starter and as something closer to a sculptural installation. You can compose it in a new shape whenever you want. That kind of flexibility tends to age well in a space, because you never quite exhaust the possibilities.

Cynics will say it is a gimmick. I understand the instinct, but I think that reading misses the point. Good design has always borrowed from play. The best chairs make sitting feel effortless. The best lamps make light feel intentional. Race of Lights makes light feel like something you chose with genuine enthusiasm rather than resigned practicality.

Lighting does not have to be a decision you make and then stop thinking about. Davide Groppi has spent decades proving that point in quietly different ways. Race of Lights is just the first time the argument came painted in red, white, blue, and green, with tiny cars attached.

The post The Italian Lamp That Uses Toy Race Cars as Light Bulbs first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Italian Lamp That Uses Toy Race Cars as Light Bulbs

Posted on by

Most lighting gets chosen the same way people pick curtains: functional, inoffensive, and quickly forgotten. You walk through a showroom, you point at something that won’t clash with the sofa, and that’s more or less the end of the design conversation. That’s not a criticism of how people live; it’s just an observation of how light, despite being the single most transformative element in any space, rarely gets to have fun.

Davide Groppi’s Race of Lights is the exception to all of that. The Italian lighting brand, based in Piacenza and known for making some of the most quietly radical lamps in contemporary design, released Race of Lights in 2025. On paper, it is a modular wall lamp. In reality, it is a slot-car racing track that someone decided should also be your light source, and the whole thing somehow works beautifully.

Designer: Davide Groppi

The concept is exactly what it sounds like. An electrified track, made from textured matte black polyethylene, gets mounted on the wall in whatever configuration you want. The track carries current, and the light sources are tiny car-shaped spotlights that snap into place magnetically and can be moved, repositioned, or rearranged any time the mood strikes. The basic kit includes two short straight modules, four longer sections, six curves, and four colored light-cars in green, white, blue, and red. The whole system can run up to five metres across your wall and power up to eight spotlights, each with an adjustable head so you can direct the beam exactly where you want it. This is, objectively, absurd. It is also one of the most genuinely exciting things to come out of the lighting world in years.

What makes Race of Lights so interesting to think about is how it sits within Davide Groppi’s broader body of work. This is a designer who built his reputation on doing less. His lamp Nulla, which won the Compasso d’Oro in 2014, measures just 18 millimetres in diameter and is practically invisible in a ceiling. The name literally translates to “nothing.” The philosophy has always been that the lamp should disappear so the light can remain. Race of Lights does not disappear. It sits on your wall, looped and curved, with little colored cars parked along the track. It makes a statement in the exact opposite direction of everything Groppi has been doing, and yet it makes complete sense.

Because the brand has never really been about minimalism for minimalism’s sake. The design language has always carried a sense of emotion. Groppi has spoken about light as a tool for seduction and curiosity, about design emerging from the heart as much as the mind. Race of Lights just takes that emotional dimension and makes it literal. The inspiration was childhood, specifically the memory of electric slot-car racing sets, the kind where small cars zip around a winding track spread across the living room floor. The track moves to the wall; the cars stay put and illuminate. Play becomes design, and the object retains the spirit of the original thing it was borrowing from.

The result is a piece that functions as a legitimate lighting solution and as a conversation starter and as something closer to a sculptural installation. You can compose it in a new shape whenever you want. That kind of flexibility tends to age well in a space, because you never quite exhaust the possibilities.

Cynics will say it is a gimmick. I understand the instinct, but I think that reading misses the point. Good design has always borrowed from play. The best chairs make sitting feel effortless. The best lamps make light feel intentional. Race of Lights makes light feel like something you chose with genuine enthusiasm rather than resigned practicality.

Lighting does not have to be a decision you make and then stop thinking about. Davide Groppi has spent decades proving that point in quietly different ways. Race of Lights is just the first time the argument came painted in red, white, blue, and green, with tiny cars attached.

The post The Italian Lamp That Uses Toy Race Cars as Light Bulbs first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Children’s Bed Adults Keep Wishing Came in Their Size

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Most children’s furniture falls into one of two camps: purely practical pieces that look like they belong in a hospital ward, or aggressively themed designs slathered in cartoon characters that parents quietly regret within a year. Gaudutė Žilytė, a product designer based in Vilnius, Lithuania, had no patience for either when she created the SAULUTĖ bed, and the result is the kind of children’s furniture that adults actually covet.

The name nods to Saulė, the Baltic sun goddess and one of the most enduring symbols in Lithuanian folk culture, representing life, warmth, and protection. It’s an apt reference for a bed designed with a child’s comfort and safety at its center, though what makes SAULUTĖ remarkable is that it earns that reference without leaning on it. The design does the heavy lifting.

Designer: Gaudutė Žilytė

The first thing you notice is the color. A rich terracotta orange upholstery wraps the entire frame, paired with a cooler blue mattress surface that creates a contrast that feels deliberately considered rather than randomly cheerful. It reads warm without being sugary. The palette is one of those design decisions that ages well, which matters a lot when you’re buying furniture for a child who will spend most of a decade in the same room.

The silhouette is low and grounded, almost daybed-like in its proportions, giving the piece a visual lightness that typical beds don’t have. The overall form is soft and rounded at the edges, a shape that reads as playful without resorting to novelty. Žilytė describes the design as playful and minimalist, and that combination is harder to pull off than it sounds. Minimalism has a tendency to go cold. Playfulness has a tendency to go chaotic. SAULUTĖ sits neatly at the intersection of both without tipping into either.

The real intelligence, though, is in the functionality. A built-in shelf sits integrated into the headboard, designed to hold books, a nightlight, or whatever small objects make a child’s bedtime feel like theirs. This is not a decorative gesture. It replaces the need for a separate nightstand in rooms where space is almost always limited, and it keeps the essentials within arm’s reach without cluttering the floor. In a child’s room, that kind of spatial thinking matters enormously.

Then there’s the protective side wall, a guardrail built into the design that keeps younger children safe during sleep without looking institutional or industrial. A lot of safety additions to children’s furniture read as afterthoughts, bolted-on solutions that disrupt the visual integrity of the piece. Here, the guardrail is absorbed into the overall form. It looks like it belongs. It looks like it was always supposed to be there.

What Žilytė has understood, and what a surprising number of furniture designers miss when it comes to children’s spaces, is that function and form are not competing priorities. The shelf is functional, yes, but it also breaks up the headboard in a way that makes the overall silhouette more interesting. The protective wall adds safety, but it also frames the sleeping area, giving the bed a sense of enclosure that children intuitively find comforting. Every practical decision contributes to the design rather than fighting against it.

SAULUTĖ is available in two sizes, which means it works for both younger children and teenagers, a lifespan that most children’s beds never manage to cover. The design is deliberately neutral enough to grow with the child, which is a courtesy to both the family budget and the environment. Furniture that lasts longer is, by default, furniture that performs better.

Few things in furniture design are as genuinely satisfying as a piece that has clearly been thought through from every angle. Not just aesthetically, not just practically, but both at once. SAULUTĖ manages to be a beautiful object that also happens to serve a child’s actual daily life. That’s not a low bar. In children’s furniture, it’s almost revolutionary.

The post The Children’s Bed Adults Keep Wishing Came in Their Size first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Cleaning Robot That Knows When a Bathroom Needs It

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Public restrooms have, for the longest time, been a design afterthought. They get built, they get scheduled for cleaning twice a day, and everything that happens in between is considered someone else’s problem. Nobody glamorizes it. Nobody puts it on a mood board. And yet the state of public restrooms affects millions of people daily in ways that are deeply tied to comfort, dignity, and public health.

That’s exactly the gap that Yangwoo Choi and Ye Jin Lee, two designers from South Korea, decided to address with Spot, a concept for an autonomous cleaning robot built specifically for public restrooms. Published in June 2026, the project has been picking up attention in design communities, and I think it deserves more eyes than it’s gotten so far.

Designers: Yangwoo Choi, Ye Jin Lee

The premise is straightforward but smart: rather than waiting for the next scheduled cleaning, Spot detects contamination after a user exits and automatically cleans the affected area. It plugs directly into the most persistent failure of public restroom maintenance: the window between cleanings. That window is real, measurable, and for years it’s been treated as an acceptable cost of running a public facility. Facilities managers can only do so much with fixed schedules, and when traffic is high, things go wrong fast.

What the designers have created is not just a functional concept but a genuinely considered one. The robot’s form is compact and minimal, rendered in a calm blue that reads as clean, clinical, and intentional all at once. It doesn’t try to be cute or conspicuous. It belongs in the background, doing its job without demanding attention, which is exactly the right design language for something operating in a space that people want to move through quickly and without thinking too hard.

The contamination detection element is where the concept earns its credibility. Autonomous cleaning machines already exist, but most operate on timers or fixed routes with little real awareness of actual conditions. Building detection into the process means Spot responds to reality rather than routine, which is a fundamentally different way of thinking about maintenance. That shift matters more than it might seem at first glance.

I think about the places where this would change things most: airports, train stations, shopping centers, schools. These are environments where restroom traffic is constant and unpredictable, where a single cleaning cycle scheduled at 10am has already become irrelevant by 10:45. The problem isn’t laziness or negligence. It’s a structural mismatch between human-managed schedules and the actual pace of use. A robot that responds to contamination as it happens, rather than as it’s predicted, addresses that mismatch directly.

There’s also a human element worth naming. Cleaning restrooms is physically demanding, often invisible labor, and not a job that gets celebrated or compensated in proportion to how much it matters. A concept like Spot isn’t about replacing people outright; it’s about redirecting effort. If autonomous systems handle reactive cleaning between scheduled visits, human cleaners can focus on deeper maintenance, restocking, and the kind of attention that machines genuinely cannot replicate. That’s a more sensible division of labor.

Whether Spot ever moves beyond concept stage is a separate question, and a legitimate one. Autonomous robots in public restrooms face real hurdles: sensor reliability, durability in wet environments, safety around users, cost of deployment at scale. None of these are trivial. But that’s not the conversation the project is asking us to have right now. What Choi and Lee are doing is pointing clearly at a problem and proposing a direction. The execution can evolve. The clarity of the problem statement is the part that sticks.

Good design doesn’t always originate in places we expect. Some of the most interesting work right now is coming out of South Korea, where designers seem particularly willing to take on overlooked, unglamorous problems with serious intention. Spot is that kind of project. It’s not trying to be beautiful for beauty’s sake. It’s trying to make a specific, difficult experience better. That’s the kind of design that actually changes things.

The post The Cleaning Robot That Knows When a Bathroom Needs It first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Modular Chair That Lets You Swap Parts Like a Building

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Most furniture asks one question at the point of purchase: do you like it enough to live with it, possibly forever? Junha Kahm’s Facade modular chair asks something different. It asks what you want from it right now, with the understanding that the answer is allowed to change.

The design breaks down into two primary systems: a stainless steel tube frame built on a 1:2 proportion ratio, and eight symmetrical PETG panels that clip into it. That proportion isn’t arbitrary. It gives the chair a visual discipline that reads immediately as intentional, a grid logic that references the structural composition of industrial architecture without cosplaying as a building. The frame is the constant. The panels are the conversation.

Designer: Junha Kahm

Each of those eight panels is identical in its symmetry, meaning the A and B parts mirror each other across both the seat and backrest. This is smart, deliberate engineering. Symmetrical components reduce manufacturing complexity and make component replacement genuinely practical rather than a design promise that falls apart the moment you try to source a spare. The panels attach to the frame via bolts and threaded inserts, making disassembly straightforward rather than surgical. The whole chair breaks down into components that, notably, fit inside a standard shopping basket. Kahm included that image in the project, and it lands as both a practical statement and a quiet joke at the expense of furniture that makes you feel like you need a logistics team to move it.

The joints connecting the stainless steel tubes deserve particular attention. Made from PETG in a rounded elbow form, they’re molded in white and sit at the intersections of the frame with a deliberate softness that contrasts cleanly against the brushed metal tubes. The angles are precise: 14 degrees at the rear leg splay, with 3 and 8 degree variations at other connection points. These aren’t decorative choices. They give the chair stability and a subtle forward lean that makes the silhouette feel considered rather than rigid.

The panel material opens the design up in a direction that’s genuinely interesting. PETG is semi-rigid, lightweight, and takes color well, which is where the CMF possibilities come in. The translucent versions let the stainless frame read through the surface, keeping the chair visually light. The opaque panels, seen in white and amber orange across different configurations, shift the chair’s entire personality. In orange, sitting against warm light, the Facade looks like something from a terrace in the south of France. In white, it’s crisp and minimal, closer to a studio or a modern dining room. Same chair. Different skin. That’s the point, and Kahm communicates it with a tagline in the project’s moodboard that cuts straight to it: “one point. sixteen panels. infinite facades.”

The architectural reference holds up because Kahm doesn’t use it superficially. Building facades serve real functional purposes: they regulate the relationship between structure and environment, they’re the part of a building most exposed to change and weathering, and on good buildings, they can be updated without touching the core structure. The Facade chair operates on the same logic. The frame is the architecture. The panels are the cladding. If one gets damaged, scratched, or simply becomes the wrong color for the room it’s in, you replace the panel, not the chair.

That reframing matters. The sustainability conversation in furniture design has leaned heavily on material sourcing, which is important, but it often ignores the simpler question of longevity through repairability. The Facade doesn’t require you to care deeply about sustainability to benefit from its approach. You just have to occasionally want things to look different, and most of us do. The clean grid composition keeps all of this from feeling overwrought. The Facade doesn’t announce itself. It sits quietly, reads as a well-proportioned chair, and holds its adaptability as a structural fact rather than a selling point worn on its sleeve. That restraint is, in its own way, the strongest part of the design.

The post The Modular Chair That Lets You Swap Parts Like a Building first appeared on Yanko Design.

Forestier’s New Solis Pendant Looks Like a Seed, Then a Star

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If you’ve ever stood in a room and felt the light fundamentally change your reading of the space, you’ll understand immediately why the Solis collection by Forestier stopped me in my tracks. Designed by German-born, Netherlands-based Jette Scheib, these pendant lights are doing something that most contemporary lighting design doesn’t bother to attempt anymore: they’re asking you to slow down and actually look at what’s above you.

Scheib has been a longtime creative partner with Maison Forestier, a French lighting brand founded in 1992 that has consistently built its identity around natural materials and handcraft. Their collaboration isn’t a commissioned-and-done arrangement; it’s a genuine alliance that has shaped the brand across multiple collections. Solis is the latest result, and it feels like the kind of piece that only comes from two parties who trust each other enough to take a real design risk.

Designer: Jette Scheib

The design itself is deceptively simple. Organic plant fiber, specifically raphia, is hand-woven and stretched over rigid metallic frames, with fine black edging tracing the silhouette. The light that passes through is soft and diffused, mimicking the gentle warmth of late afternoon sun rather than the hard, directed brightness we’ve come to expect from modern interiors. That distinction matters more than people typically give it credit for. Most lighting design optimizes for performance. Solis optimizes for feeling.

The name gives it away, if you know where to look. Solis is Latin for sun, but Scheib built in a second layer of meaning that’s genuinely clever: it also alludes to what grows under the sun, the plant fibers that give these lamps their texture and warmth. A lamp named for both the light it casts and the material born from light. That kind of conceptual coherence is rare, and when it shows up, it elevates an object from product to something closer to poetry.

Solis behaves interestingly in space. The silhouettes shift subtly depending on your angle and the time of day, so the lamp you see at 9am is not quite the same lamp you see at 6pm. Volume appears to expand or contract; weight seems to change. The organic shape can read as a seed from one angle and something closer to a radiant star from another. Scheib’s stated focus was the tension between solidity and lightness, and she’s pulled it off in a way that doesn’t feel like a design statement, just a lamp that happens to feel alive. Because raphia carries natural irregularities, no two Solis pendants are identical either. Every one is technically its own object.

The craftsmanship behind the collection is rooted in a fifteen-year partnership with specialized workshops in the Philippines, where weaving and basketry skills have been passed down through generations. Aesthetics tend to dominate design coverage, but the provenance of an object like this deserves equal attention. The lamp isn’t just something to admire from across the room; it’s the physical result of skill that exists in specific places and specific hands. Forestier’s relationship with those workshops is long enough to be structural, and that’s the real difference between sourcing craft and actually valuing it.

Solis is available in sizes from 40cm to 100cm in diameter, which makes it genuinely flexible. It can anchor a dining table or settle quietly in a corner without demanding attention. It reads well in both contemporary and rustic interiors without looking like it’s trying too hard to belong somewhere specific, which is rarer than it sounds in pendant lighting.

Design objects earn their place by doing more than filling space. The best ones shift your experience of a room, subtly enough that you might not even notice immediately. Solis does that. The light it casts is warm and a little sun-like. The form changes on you. The fiber holds the story of where it came from. That’s not a small thing for a pendant light to carry, and Scheib makes it look genuinely effortless.

The post Forestier’s New Solis Pendant Looks Like a Seed, Then a Star first appeared on Yanko Design.

A Vacant Office Floor Became a School in 3 Weeks

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January 2025 was not a good month for Los Angeles. The Palisades Fire tore through neighborhoods with a speed and ferocity that left little room for preparation, and among the many losses it caused was the complete destruction of Village School’s campus, displacing nearly 300 kindergarten through sixth-grade students overnight. No campus. No warning. Just the sudden, devastating reality of having nowhere to go. What happened next is the kind of story that makes you genuinely believe design can do something meaningful beyond aesthetics. Not in an abstract, feel-good way, but practically, urgently, and with real consequence.

Working alongside the City of Santa Monica and architecture studio OFFICEUNTITLED, Village School took over a vacant corporate office floor inside BXP’s Colorado Center. Within three weeks, students were back in school. Within a single summer break, a fully realized second phase of the campus was designed, approved, and built. The final result is 54,000 square feet of what is now one of the more quietly radical school environments I’ve come across.

Designer: OFFICEUNTITLED (photos by Vittoria Zupicich Photography)

I want to be clear that “office converted to classroom” could have gone very badly. The standard response to a crisis like this is functional but forgettable: fold-out tables, fluorescent lights, and the low-grade sadness of a space that was clearly built for something else. That’s not what OFFICEUNTITLED delivered.

Instead of forcing a traditional corridor-and-classroom layout into a floor plan that was never designed for children, the team looked back at what made Village School’s original campus work. The original school had always valued informal learning, the kind that happens between lessons, during recess, during the wandering and wondering that children do when they’re not being directly instructed. That quality had to survive the move.

The solution was a network of spaces called Imaginariums, playful environments distributed across the floor that invite exploration and collaboration outside the formal classroom. Two internal circulation paths, named Bookworm Boulevard and Growing Grove, organize the flow of the building and give the space a sense of place that pure corporate architecture never would have created on its own. The names alone do work. Children navigate differently when a hallway has a name.

The graphic design strategy deserves its own conversation. OFFICEUNTITLED deconstructed Village School’s logo into five individual colorful figures and spread them across the campus, pairing each with a matching ceiling element. As students move through the grades, from kindergarten to sixth grade, those individual figures gradually come together into the complete school identity. Wayfinding becomes a game. The building itself rewards the experience of growing up inside it. That’s a subtle and genuinely smart idea, one that treats the school’s physical environment as something that should evolve alongside the children who inhabit it.

The project was completed in two phases, with the first enabling emergency occupancy and the second building out the full vision. The fact that the second phase was designed, approved, and constructed entirely within a single summer break is the kind of logistical detail that tends to get buried in architectural write-ups but is actually worth sitting with. It means dozens of people moved fast, made difficult decisions, and still delivered something coherent and considered under enormous pressure. The result doesn’t look like it was rushed. It looks considered.

I keep returning to the broader question this project quietly raises: what is an office actually for now? The pandemic accelerated a conversation that hasn’t fully resolved itself, and cities like Los Angeles are still sitting on significant amounts of vacant commercial space. Village School’s interim campus is one answer to that question, a provisional one, sure, but a genuinely hopeful one. A floor built for adults with laptops became a place where six-year-olds learn to read. The infrastructure was repurposed, the community was served, and the design is good enough to make you forget the original purpose entirely. Good design tends to do that. It makes necessity feel intentional.

The post A Vacant Office Floor Became a School in 3 Weeks first appeared on Yanko Design.

A Victorian Coffee Table Just Grew Robot Dog Legs

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Most furniture sits quietly in a room and asks nothing of you. Alexandre Veillon’s latest piece does the opposite. It crouches. It stares. It makes you feel like you walked into someone’s living room and the coffee table is about to bark.

The piece is called Let the Dog Out, and it is exactly what it sounds like: a 19th-century coffee table reborn on four articulated robot legs salvaged from a computer monitor stand. The wooden top, dating back to the 1840s, is all warmth and grain and age, the kind of surface that absorbs decades of living and doesn’t apologize for it. The legs are cold aluminum, jointed and mechanical, like something that crawled out of a Boston Dynamics prototype. Draped between the body and the legs are delicate silver chains that read unmistakably as a collar. It shouldn’t work. It absolutely works.

Designer: Alexandre Veillon

Veillon describes his practice as “bringing together two eras that were never meant to meet,” and that tension is precisely the point. The antique top carries the weight of domestic history, the kind of object that sat in parlors while people wrote letters by candlelight. The robotic legs carry the anxiety of the present, a moment when machines are being built to walk like animals, to patrol warehouses, to navigate the world on four limbs. Putting the two together doesn’t just make a conversation piece. It makes a statement about time, about obsolescence, and about what happens when old things refuse to stay still.

Veillon says the dog “emerged as the obvious choice,” describing it as “an instinctive, primal figure. A creature that seems poised to leap out of its own era.” That last line is doing a lot of heavy lifting, and I think it earns every bit of it. Because the choice of a dog isn’t arbitrary. Dogs have been beside humans for thousands of years, loyal and present through every era we’ve cycled through, from ancient hearths to Victorian parlors to whatever this current moment is supposed to be called. Pairing that symbolism with a piece of 1840s furniture feels intentional in a way that rewards you the longer you sit with it.

The images Veillon posted alongside the piece round out the vision: a detail shot of the wooden top studded with small silver bolts, a close-up of the jointed legs laid out on the floor like a dissected animal, a hand pulling a set of folded legs out of an aluminum equipment case as if loading up before a mission, and a technical illustration of the dog rendered in the style of a military schematic, complete with annotations like “Electro-Olfactory System” and “Fleamatron 1500 Quantum Computer.” It is deeply committed to the bit, and that commitment is what separates this from being a clever novelty. Veillon is building a world around this object, not just an object.

I’ll admit there is a part of me that wonders where the line is between design and sculpture. The piece is not functional in any traditional sense. You wouldn’t rest your coffee mug on it without a second thought, not with those legs positioned mid-crouch, not with that chain dangling like a leash. But maybe that’s the whole conversation Veillon wants to open. Furniture has always carried social meaning far beyond its utility. The ornate Victorian parlor table wasn’t just for setting things on. It was status, taste, cultural identity. By giving that same object animal instincts and mechanical limbs, Veillon is asking what happens when the decorative object stops pretending to be passive.

Designers working in this space, blending antique sourcing with contemporary material references, are becoming more visible, but few are doing it with this level of conceptual commitment. The decision to use computer stand arms rather than custom fabrications is exactly the right call. The off-the-shelf origin of those legs makes the collision more jarring, more honest, and somehow more interesting than any bespoke alternative would have been.

Whether you’d live with it is a completely different question. Whether you should be paying attention to Alexandre Veillon? That one’s easy.

The post A Victorian Coffee Table Just Grew Robot Dog Legs first appeared on Yanko Design.