As always, last week Miami's very own homegrown international design fair, Design Miami ran alongside Art Basel, the mega art fair, exhibiting a wide spectrum of design from throughout the 20th century. Although Design Miami has always championed design in all its forms, highlights of this year's programming focused on architecture, interiors, and industrial design. Curbed photographer Silvia Ros took a tour of the show. Check out her photos, above.
One of only two known remaining prefabricated houses designed by Jean Prouvé, known as Maison 8x8, mass produced to combat the post WWII French housing shortage, was one of the centerpieces of the fair. The "8x8" refers to the building's dimensions, in meters. Simple, utilitarian, but somehow still a pleasant living space, it had a striking counterpoint in a "portable" holiday cottage designed by Charlotte Perriand, also designed for mass production, a bit earlier in 1934, but never constructed until today. A collaboration between Louis Vuitton and Perriand's daughter, La Maison au bord de l'eau was erected behind the Raleigh Hotel for the week.
New York-based avant garde architectural practice FormlessFinder created a pile of sand with a tent roof on it for the fair's entrance called, very directly, Tent Pile. By the end of the fair, kids and a certain blog editor had caught on to its potential as a mountain worth climbing and successfully scaled the top.
Galeria Rossana Orlandi of Milan had a particularly flamboyant chair by Eiri Ota called Peacock Chair which, yes, looked like a peacock's unfurled plumage. It was a perfect Kodak moment. Audi had some kind of fancy race car on display (two of them actually) in an auto show exhibit 'site specific installation' called Fragmentation consisting of red rhombuses scattered behind the cars. Thinking they were benches for the nearby bar that would occasionally serve champagne, people kept trying to sit on the red boxes, to be shooed away by pretty girls who watched over the cars. Finally, there was Terence Riley, who curated an exhibit on four possible designs by four starchitecture firms for a condo development planned at the site of the Coconut Grove Bank building. The winner, Rem Koolhaas' Office for Metropolitan Architecture, will be built there through a collaboration between the Terra Group and Related. The sales center is being constructed now, on the seventh floor of the old bank, according to Terra Group's main man, David Martin.
· Design Miami coverage [Curbed Miami]