Aleksandra Pollner

Porcelain fortune cookies for the smashing

In explaining how she came to collaborate with design shop Object on a collection of porcelain fortune cookies, Seattle-based designer Aleksandra Pollner points to three tenets: form, past experience and material. Certainly it’s form that caught our eye first when we happened upon her pieces at the New York Gift Fair this week. Smooth and simple, the pristine white porcelain cookies are as beautiful as …

Made in Japan

100 new design products

American architect Naomi Pollock curates a selection of 100 products that embody contemporary Japanese object design in her new book, “Made in Japan.” Her selections show what adherents of the Japanese aesthetic have known for some time—that a spoon is never just a spoon, a chair much more than just a place to sit. Introducing the book, she explains that the phrase “made in Japan” …

Concrete

The material's many forms explored in a beautiful monograph from Phaidon

From the Pantheon to the Hoover Dam, concrete has literally shaped the civilized world as we know it. Although once referred to as “the cheapest (and ugliest) thing in the building world” by Frank Lloyd Wright, concrete’s adaptive properties have propelled it to the forefront of many design movements from brutalism to modernism, being used in some of the most monumental structures the modern world …