Touching the Edge

Italian designers seek to redefine consumers' relationships with objects

by Stefano Caggiano A few years ago, Giovanni Delvecchio and Andrea Magnani worked together on a thesis project in Product Design in Faenza—a little northern Italian city famous for a long tradition of ceramic manufacturing. What the two up-and-coming art designers were doing, however, had nothing to do with ceramics. They were actually conceiving their Resign project, which continues to attract people interested in repurposing …

Big Leaf Manufacturing

The Seattle-based woodworkers use years of experience to take artistic risks

By Sam Bovarnick Roy McMakin opened Big Leaf Manufacturing in 1997 as a workshop for his furniture and architecture firms, but now maintains a level of independence that allows it to take on commissioned projects. Seattle-based Big Leaf has since established itself as one of the finest specialty woodshops in the world, and we recently paid them a visit to see how they go about …

Word of Mouth: Cairo

Sailing, cocktails and watching the sun set between the pyramids in the metropolis on the Nile

by Laila Gohar While Egypt continues to make headlines for a revolution which led to the ouster of a nearly 30-year-old political regime, the sprawling megacity has a thriving underground scene that beats and buzzes with energy around the clock. The city—once a cultural hub for the region—is a marriage of old a new, with pharaonic treasures and ancient world heritage sites existing alongside medieval …