Cool Hunting

Vienna Design Week 2008: Pure Austrian Design's In The City
Meeting with Julia and Andrés Fredes, founders of Pure Austrian Design (as well as their own studio Juland), last week was a great introduction to the Austrian design scene, including Vienna's second annual design week and their pop-up installation, " In The City." The showcase of Austrian-designed furniture was housed in a giant bubble smack dab in the middle of the Museum Quarter (a...

Designed For Kids: A Complete Sourcebook
by Rebecca Odes The recent explosion of high-design kids gear has been hard to ignore and "Designed for Kids: A Complete Sourcebook," by Phyllis Richardson, culls the greatest hits of the modern kids marketplace into one hefty hardcover package. With its textbook-ish format, the book seems aimed at design professionals rather than consumers but for anyone on the hunt for smart kids stuff it's...

Spaced Out: Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties
"Spaced Out: Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties" explores the crash pads, hippie communes, infinity machines and other far-out dwellings of the time period. Author Alastair Gordon, whose other works have dealt primarily with the clean modernism of airports and mid-century Hamptons homes, turned his attention to the design, architecture and visual culture of LSD-inspired era, much of which hadn't been adequately preserved or...

TokyoLife: Art and Design
Tokyo demands your attention. Both the city's appearance and its visual output are impossible to summarize, though they always grab the eye. "TokyoLife: Art and Design" attempts to get a handle on the amorphous style of the megalopolis by looking at the actual players behind it. The book highlights the work of more than 80 creative minds— including painters, architects, fashion designers, filmmakers and...

Bradley Price: Angle Parking
For the forthcoming ICFF in New York, Brooklynite Bradley Price was one of eight designers selected by Bernhardt Design to be featured in the ICFF Studio, a new platform for showcasing prototypes during the furniture fair. Bradley's design, "Angle Parking," is a clever take on the ubiquitous—and often boring—bookcase. By skewing the angle of the bookends to 45°, the shelving can accommodate 12½" deep...

Poetry Nightstand
A surefire way to impress that guy or girl you take home Friday night is to stack scholarly books on your bedside table, as if you casually dropped them there after breezing through some weighty tome on relational aesthetics or quantum theory. For those without the time or brain capacity, you may consider the Poetry Nightstand, designed by Marian Lassak. Although it's not a...