Design & Architecture

Recycled rubber, nero marquina marble, cast concrete, LEED-certified tire byproduct: these are the materials Arielle Assouline-Lichten keeps returning to.

Caitlin Mociun starts with the stone.

Chen Chen and Kai Williams make objects that turn industrial materials into unexpected forms.

Seiter's starting point is always what's already there: the weed pushing through cracked asphalt, the post-industrial soil that nobody catalogued.

Emma Christine Hall designs books that argue against automation and accident.

Gaetano Pesce believed design should express "more human feelings, less abstraction, less being neutral" — the human touch, personal stories.

Trained in classical ballet before she ever touched a sewing machine, Iris van Herpen treats the body as a moving system: something that generates force, not just wears cloth.

Kevin Barrett Kane believes the letter comes before the image.

Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer was born in Vienna, and studied photography, philosophy and Dutch.

Gulsum Keskinoglu trained as a sculptor in Turkey (first at Isparta Anatolian Fine Art High School, then in the studio of sculptor Tevfik Turen Karagozoglu) before landing in Williamsburg and opening Awita New York Studio in May 2023.

Jennifer Waverek founded BKLYN CLAY to provide practicing and experienced creatives with access to quality ceramics space.

Mirrors are the starting point, but the question Bower Studios keeps asking is more slippery: what does a familiar object have to do to make you stop and look? Founded in 2013 by Danny Giannella and Tammer Hijazi (both former fabricators at Uhuru Design) the Brooklyn studio CNC-cuts its mirrors in-house, bends steam-curved walnut frames, and laminates tinted glass to construct pieces that play geometry against perception.

Bowne & Co.

Brooklyn Spark opened in Bushwick last spring as a working studio for makers of all levels, built by nine co-founders who wanted to reclaim what rising rents had taken from Brooklyn's DIY scene.

Choplet Ceramic Studio opened in 2006 in Williamsburg to welcome a lively community working in a non-competitive environment that encourages and inspires artistic growth.

Stone, brass, hard maple, walnut, Brazilian soapstone: the material comes first at Fort Standard.

Weeds are not a problem to solve at Future Green Studio: they're a design prompt.

gnA Studios operates as an art studio available to artists and creatives to use for hosting classes and intimate events, photo and video shoots on a pay what you can basis.

GRT Architects—Tal Schori and Rustam-Marc Mehta since 2014—designs across scales with an obsessive attention to materials and craft.

Lichen runs on the premise that good design shouldn't require a trust fund or a design degree to access.

MakerSpace NYC gives people access to the industrial tools they'd otherwise never afford.

Makeville Studio believes everyone should experience the satisfaction of working with your hands.

Caitlin Mociun starts with the stone.

Monumental Labs splits the work: robots rough-shape stone in hours, humans carve the fine details.

James Akers and Ali Feeney started Nebula Neon in 2020, a custom neon fabrication shop that works across art, retail, film, architectural lighting, and restaurants.

People come to Drawing Room looking for a space for themselves.

Wood arrives at 276 Greenpoint Avenue as raw slab (American black walnut, spalted maple, cherry, oak) air-dried for up to eighteen months before a hand touches it.

Satellite imagery, CCTV archives, 3D game engines, geospatial analysis.

Recycled tire rubber was not supposed to be the starting material for a furniture practice.

Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu (a Dutch architect who trained under SANAA in Tokyo and a Chinese-American architect schooled at Tulane) founded SO–IL in Brooklyn in 2008 with a question embedded in the name: what are solid objectives, exactly? The studio works across perforated-metal residential facades, mesh-and-hammock public installations, affordable housing courtyards, and art campus galleries, but the through-line isn't typological.

TAKK's work critically engages with the integration of ecological frameworks into architectural discourse and spatial production, aiming to develop new material and political imaginaries for the built environment.

UrbanGlass was founded in 1977 by three recent art school graduates.

Founded in 2012 out of a Bloomberg Administration survey that mapped the scale of New York's design economy, NYCxDESIGN started as a City Council initiative and has since become the city's official annual design festival: a nonprofit that coordinates a week of independently hosted events across studios, showrooms, schools, trade floors, and public plazas in all five boroughs.