April 2012 Release
a limited edition tray for Newton Vineyard numbered and imprinted with the designers’ insignia
FSC Certified Walnut Wood
$499

Reflecting the Chinese and British heritage of Newton Vineyard’s founders, the tray’s basic shape is a golden rectangle–a traditional Western conception of harmony and proportion. The asymmetrical, intersecting lines on the tray’s top is based upon an historic Asian motif, which creates negative spaces that mirror the division of Newton’s properties into vineyard blocks, on which different varietals are grown and harvested.

The “terraced” edges of the coasters/trays, evoke the slopes of Spring Mountain and its unique terracing that conserves water and retains natural soil nutrients.

A “hidden cave,” a recess beneath a coaster/tray that extends into the tray’s leg, holds a corkscrew and references the Chardonnay cellar built into Spring Mountain to conserve energy and harness the earth’s natural temperature regulation.

The coasters/trays can be removed from the tray, reminiscent of a puzzle, and a nod to Newton Vineyard’s icon wine, “The Puzzle,” which is created by blending the best grapes of the season’s five-varietal harvest.

ADIEU
with Greg Bethel

2009
gas-fireplace ‘logs’
for the ardent modernist
slip-cast porcelain

For the ardent modernist, these porcelain, gas-fireplace “logs” offer a torrid farewell to our stylistic past: “Goodbye, Queen Anne.” “So long, Mister Chippendale.” “Farewell, William, and to you, Mary.” (And this project may also symbolize our current historic period—one of global financial crisis, where furniture is burned not for the crime of ornament, but out of economic exigency.)

“To me, and to all the cultivated people, ornament does not increase the pleasures of life. If I want to eat a piece of gingerbread I will choose one that is completely plain…Modern people understand this.” – Adolf Loos

Exhibitions
04.2009
Tuttobene
Milan ITALY

Select Press (web)

feb 09
/core77.com/

Piggy is a set of two savings banks that nest together. The larger “momma” bank is for a child’s personal savings, and the smaller bank is for the child’s charitable savings.

THE POWER OF PIGGY

We believe that this simple product, Piggy, can truly make the world a better and more compassionate place.

Piggy helps teach kids about charitable giving, with the hopes of inspiring new generations of caring, sharing, philanthropic citizens.

With 12,000 children born each day in the US, imagine the social impact if just a fraction of them learned powerful lessons
of gratefulness and kindness to others.

USING PIGGY

We suggest that children learn to set aside 10% of their income to charity. Parents can discuss with their kids about who they would want to help most. When the baby bank is filled, a special event can be planned to deliver the money to the charity, or a trip to the bank and post office to mail a check.

The goal is to create positive feelings of doing good will make an indelible mark upon their character and place philanthropy as an important and intrinsic aspect of their life.

For resources on possible charities, go to the ‘Charity’ tab of our site.

PIGGY FEATURES

• Hand-cast ceramic
• Set of banks: one ‘momma’ and one ‘baby’
• Modern, minimal design
• Glazed in pale pink or bright white
• Small pig nests with the large ‘momma’
• Removable bottom plugs on each
• Ships safely in fun “quote box”

PACKAGING QUOTES

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
- The Dalai Lama

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
- Winston Churchill

I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.
- Maya Angelou

It is every man’s obligation to put back into the world at least the equivalent of what he takes out of it.
- Albert Einstein

Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.
- Mahatma Gandhi

No one has ever become poor by giving.
- Anne Frank

Compassion is not religious business, it is human business, it is not luxury, it is essential for our own peace and mental stability, it is essential for human survival.
- Dalai Lama

A good heart is better than all the heads in the world.
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton

In separateness lies the world’s great misery, in compassion lies the world’s true strength.
- Buddha

To care for anyone else enough to make their problems one’s own, is ever the beginning of one’s real ethical development. – Felix Adler

The life of a man consists not in seeing visions and in dreaming dreams, but in active charity and in willing service.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

2006
urethane (UV stable), hand cast by the designers
6. 5″ x 6.5″ x 6.5″

 

The Cubby coat hook challenges traditional form–rather than a coat hook being a fairly linear element (like a nail), Cubby is a volume.  The center space offers storage for keys, wallets, gloves, sunglasses, or other small items.  The outer surface allows purses and scarves to be hung and offers a wider, more collar-friendly support for coats.  Many Cubbyies can be attached to the wall linearlly or randomly, in different colors, and each family member can have their own coat “space.”

Awards

2006
Best of Year Award
Interior Design Magazine
Roscoe Award – Accessory

2006
Best In Show
Design Within Reach
Chicago Furniture Now

2006
Competition Winner
Interior Design Magazine
Future Furniture

Exhibitions

10.2008
Design Within Reach
MDF: Past and Present
Chicago Arts District
Chicago IL

2006
Design Within Reach
Chicago IL

2006
PS studio
Chicago IL

Select Press (print)

12.2006
Interior Design Magazine
Roscoe Awards: Best of the Year

10.2006
Interior Design Magazine
Future Furniture Award Winners

02.2006
Chicago Tribune

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud contends that aggressiveness is a fundamental human instinct whose inhibition is a necessary obligation of social life:

“Men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but that a powerful measure of desire for aggression has to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment.”

Fundamentally there is a tension between the freedom to gratify these natural desires and the conformity demanded by civilization.  What results is a muted, guilty, and ultimately a discontent populous in which the possibility of a more complete happiness has been traded for a degree of security.

Umbrellas for the Civil but Discontent Man combines a symbol of gentlemanly refinement—the full-sized, dark umbrella—with an element of more manly sword-bearing times.  The umbrellas offer brief psychological respite from the dictates of social amiability; aggressive fantasies are allowed and encouraged on the daily commute to the office.  The effete civilian’s grasp of the handle takes him into the world of the masterful samurai, the medieval barbarian, or the triumphant cavalryman.

Exhibitions

04.2009
Tuttobene
Milan ITALY

Select Press (web)

feb 09
/thinkgeek.com/

mar 09
/core77.com/

feb 09
/gizmodo.com/

/charlesandmarie.com/

2005
pvc pipe, electrical components
three heights: 18″, 21″, 23″ all 4″ diameter

This project is an exploration of the relationship between beauty and waste. Scrap PVC sewer pipes and drainage pipes salvaged from a construction site become the raw material for the production of an aesthetic (and functional) domestic object. Inspired by the structural efficiency of bird bones, which must be both strong and light, the form of this lamp visually reflects nature’s logic. Conceptually, this lamp draws upon bones as residual markers of life, to remind the consumer of the enduring material aspects of products at the end of their useful existence and after they enter into the waste stream.
Exhibitions

01.2008
Museum of Science and Industry
Smart Home: Green and Wired
Chicago IL

05.2006
Haute Green, Brooklyn, NY.

12.2005
Scene in Chicago. Judy Saslow Gallery, Chicago, IL.

05.2005
Sustainable Furniture: Chicago Designers Respond. Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL.

Select Press (print)

10.06.2007
Wall Street Journal

09.2007
PVCdesign. Issue 6

01.2007
Natural Health Magazine

07.2006
The Chicago Reader.

Fall 2006
Viva (Canada)

06.18.2006
The Observer

2010

This bench acknowledges the fallen tree as our earliest mode of furniture. Here the humble form of a hollow log is celebrated and made anew with tufted upholstering.

Exhibitions

10 may
CITE Goes America: 400 Square Feet Later
New York NY

10 may
Where One Starts From
Private Solo Exhibition
Chicago IL

Select Press

10 winter
CS Interiors Magazine
“Best of the City 2010″

10 august
Chicago Magazine
“Best of Chicago”

2010 marked the 19th Annual Wreathing of the Lions. The museum invited Materious to reinterpret the wreath, a joyful symbol of the holiday season.

The wreath concept combined the look of traditional North American cranberry wreaths with the hopeful spirit of Buddhist and Taoist wishing trees. In the wishing trees tradition, part of the lunar new year celebration, children throw oranges with attached paper notes over banyan trees. We integrated these two holiday customs by incorporating “wishes for the world in 2011,” written by Chicago-area children, into one of the 2,011 clear and red plastic spheres that make up the wreaths.

Some favorite wishes include:

“My wish for the world in 2011 is….

… that people will care for others more than themselves.
… for the world to be more united.
… a cure for cancer.
… to have civil rights and to stop war.
… no one will go hungry.
… that everybody’s problems go away.” Select Press

2010 november
NBC News

2010 november
NPR

2010 november
Chicago Sun Times

2010 november
TimeOut Chicago

Stacker Vase made of porcelain reconfigures to accommodate tall and short flowers

2007
maple wood, laser engraving
80″ x 14″ x 15″

Advanced capitalism presents consumers with goods whose material origins and production history are often veiled, whether intentionally or as a natural consequence of the system’s complexity.  Karl Marx’s writings on fetishization address this mysteriousness acknowledging that commodities are not only material things, but social things that reflect human relationships.  Fetishization can be understood as both an over-valuation of these non-material/peripheral qualities, or (more esoterically) an under-valuation, where the individual labor and social forces are not apparent to, or duly considered by, the consumer.

Marxist Fruit Bowl is a typical wooden ladder with a traditional wooden fruit tray permanently attached atop; the two components are recast as a single entity—a fruit bowl—that speaks to production issues and social relations surrounding the consumption of fruit in America.  Its utility as a fruit bowl necessitates that users climb the ladder, acknowledging in a small way the efforts of the often migrant- or itinerant-fieldworkers who make possible the quantity and variety of produce available for so many others’ enjoyment.

 

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.
-Karl Marx