New York’s design industry, defined by an ever-thriving community of independent talents and studios that arguably first emerged during the Great Recession of 2008, is unquestionably resourceful and inventive. Making do with limited resources and exorbitant rents, many autonomous practices come together to share space, mount group exhibitions during and outside of the annual NYCxDesign festival, and increasingly collaborate on fresh designs. Unlike in Europe, where it is slightly easier for independent talents to partner with established manufacturers, self-production and self-promotion are the name of the game here. There is, from time to time, help from centralizing galleries and retail concept spaces like Assembly Line.
Derived from the wildly successful interior practice General Assembly, this hybrid platform has become an essential resource, purveying various furnishing and finishing solutions to fellow trade professionals and individual customers alike. Over the past few years, it has also played host to several solo exhibitions debuting new collections by New York’s flock of fledgling designers.
With the launch of Kawabi and Christopher Merchant’s Amica lighting collection during this year’s New York Design Week, Assembly Line is positioning itself as a patron gallery: one that not only showcases new designs but also helps produce them, making critical connections between talents and manufacturers while linking talents with other talents.
As evident in this deftly imagined offering of pendant, table, and wall-mounted luminaires, the results of the latter arrangement are often greater than the sum of their parts. There is a pairing, matching, and ultimately fusing of expertise: distinctive design vocabularies that complement each other. In this case, it is Merchant’s captivating extruded ceramic process and Kawabi’s—Aaron and Irisa Na-Chan Kawabi’s—masterfully reinterpreted traditional joinery and papermaking techniques.
Both have primarily applied their self-developed, proprietary know-how to lighting design, but this collaboration brings this newly cohered savoir-faire to new heights. Merchant’s earth-tone vessels, identified by their idiosyncratic mold-pulled ridging, serve as the base for Kawabi’s tan-hued geometric and amorphous illuminated structures.
The paired studios iterated this counterbalance across an impressive range: wood-joined and paper-wrapped sconces anchored by textured, only slightly warped ceramic surfaces; a large, free-floating hanging pendant held in place by a small, equally finished ceramic weight. The possibilities of this collaboration seem endless.
In the past, both have operated Brooklyn studios within earshot of each other but did not realize it until recently. However, in response to the exorbitant rents mentioned before, Merchant recently moved to Minneapolis, where he is able to work in a larger, far less costly workspace.
Photography by Ben DeHaan.
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