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Danish Design Firm HAY Heralds Its 20th Anniversary With a Superb, Highly Tactile Book

Emma Leigh Macdonald

October 20, 2022
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While the Danish design firm HAY is just celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, it has achieved a rarefied place in the design lexicon that’s more often associated with brands many decades older. This standing is defined, in part, by being often imitated, yet maintaining a certain level of quality and integrity. HAY originals can always be told apart from those trying to knock it off.

Last week, Phaidon released the first monograph telling the story of the brand’s universe, its trajectory up to now, and how it has expanded the notion of “Danish design.” The book’s editor, Kelsey Keith, the editorial director and acting creative director at HAY’s now-parent company, Herman Miller (and the former editor-in-chief of the design website Curbed), carved out a scope that tells the story of HAY’s work through the tenets of color, collaboration, and placemaking. The challenge of whittling down what made the cut, she admits, was no easy feat. The monograph includes interviews with and coverage of the brand’s products and collaborations, including with companies such as Ikea and Sonos, and takes space to communicate the input and influence that other cultural spheres such as art, food, and fashion have had over the course of HAY’s work to date.

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“One aspect we focused on that I find especially compelling is how many duos [co-founders] Rolf and Mette Hay have collaborated with over the years,” Keith says. “Everyone in the HAY orbit becomes family, in a sense, but the two-by-two relationships, such as brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec or partners in life and studio like [Stine Gam and Enrico Fratesi of] GamFratesi, reinforce Rolf and Mette’s own ability to work in partnership. It takes intuition and an immense amount of honesty and trust to do what they do—and the results are greater than the sum of their parts.”

The pièces de résistance of the publication, beyond the objects on the pages themselves, are the book’s patterned pages introducing each new chapter. Like a new sheet of wallpaper for each room in a home, these colorful punctuations were designed by Nathalie Du Pasquier, Jodi Barton, and Richard Woods at the request of designer Clara von Zweigbergk, whose design for the monograph as a whole, is one of the reasons it manages to become an object that feels distinctly like a HAY ware in and of itself.

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Alex Tatarsky on Art as a Means to Live Out the Absurd

It’s late August, and I’m walking on Grand Street in Lower Manhattan. It’s one of those summer evenings that’s cooler than expected, a pleasant foreshadowing of fall. I’m on my way to discuss compost with the artist Alex Tatarsky, and as I head east from the subway, I pass through the dense, networked scents of the edge of Chinatown: the briny tang of fish markets, the sweet snatch of a fresh egg waffle from a rolled ice cream shop, the yeasty cloud that floats around the famous bialy shop. Approaching Abrons Art Center, where Tatarsky is doing pick-up rehearsals for an out-of-town run of their show Dirt Trip, this close-packed olfactory landscape opens up into something with more space: a faint vegetal whiff from a small vacant lot, the not unpleasant chemical tang from a passing truck, and beyond these, the smell of a certain rot rolling in from the East River.

Courtesy Blue Note Records

culture

An Album of Cover Songs Honors the Legacy of Leonard Cohen

Though nearly six years have gone by since Leonard Cohen’s passing, the long shadow cast by his legacy as one of the 20th century’s most esteemed and idiosyncratic singer-songwriters shows no signs of lifting from the public’s imagination anytime soon. From the enveloping warmth of “Suzanne,” to the high drama of “Hallelujah,” to the chilling minimalist and gospel juxtaposition of his swansong “You Want it Darker,” Cohen managed to constantly reinvent himself, leaving behind the rare achievement of a musical body of work whose most impressive moments exist across eras.

Courtesy OMA

culture

For a Tiffany & Co. Pop-Up in Paris, OMA Designs a Literal Jewelry Box

Hiring a world-class architecture firm to design a tiny temporary retail space may seem an extravagant choice, but given the high aspirations of Tiffany & Co.—especially now that it’s owned by the French luxury conglomerate LVMH—it makes sense for the American jewelry company’s Paris debut under its new French banner.