The 21-st annual International Contemporary Furniture Fair exhibit include contemporary furniture, seating, lighting, carpet and flooring, wall coverings, textiles, accessories, kitchen and bath, outdoor furniture, and materials for residential and commercial interiors. This event has been taking plase 16-19 May NY CIty.
Look at this
American Gothic Table by Atelier Takagi – Washington DC, USA, I guess it looks very nice:-) I won’t say no to have such table or chair as a part of my home stylish decoration.
“It’s not particularly anything”, says Jonah Takagi when speaking about his table American Gothic. I intuit that he actually means the table is not one particular style, but a fusion of influences instead. In fact here is a product that is the sum of its many parts, which Takagi has merged noticeably well, without conceptual or aesthetic loop holes.
Takagi holds a BFA in Furniture Design (RISD) and, like Searle and Adelman, he mentions the traits of authenticity, honesty and appropriateness when speaking about design process and final products, “the fact I grew up in New England surrounded by a blue blood Yankee, puritanical sensibility has something to do with it – the way I approach the work”. Further add into the mix his Japanese background (Takagi’s father is Japanese), an appreciation of tinker toys and a “nebulous, surreal design process”, and you might be able to imagine how this particular table could be thought up. These influences show themselves in the radial connector designed to join the legs and the black lacquer finish which unifies all of it.
The most fascinating aspect of this table is the sense of tension felt when you look at it. I had cognition of something being unsettled and not quite right, and then I realised that there are 5 legs. This one element is what gives the table its edginess; picturing it with less (4 or 3 even), I realise that if Takagi had not engineered this quirky mutation, it would be just a table with mismatched elements of style.
It would have been easy for Takagi to lose the design of this table to self indulgence and finish with a piece that was stylistically over-cooked and lacking quality of construction; instead the constraint and discipline used in its development has resulted in work that stands with assurance, in the spaces in-between styles.
