Industrial-Design

When Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby announced on 20 May 2026 that their London studio would close after 30 years, they ended a partnership that put one product into the hands of 8,000 Olympic torchbearers and another under millions of office workers. The question this piece sets out to answer is the simplest one anybody asks after such an announcement: what, exactly, did Barber Osgerby make between 1996 and 2026? The answer is roughly four dozen products of consequence, spread across a tight roster of manufacturers — Vitra, Flos, Cappellini, B&B Italia, Established & Sons, Knoll, Hermès, Isokon Plus, Mutina, Fredericia and Emeco — plus one Olympic torch, one circulating coin, and two sister practices that outlived the founding studio in different corporate hands. What follows is that catalogue, in order. ...

Pauline Deltour, who died at 38 on 5 September 2021 after ten years running a Paris studio that produced roughly 180 industrial-design objects, has finally been given the survey her catalogue deserved: the Pauline Deltour MADD Bordeaux retrospective is the first show to hold all of those objects in a single room. “Pauline Deltour, une apparente simplicité / An Apparent Simplicity” began on Wednesday 22 April 2026 with a 7 p.m. reception at 39 rue Bouffard and runs until 21 September 2026, the inaugural show of the partially reopened museum. It is co-curated by Bérengère Bussioz, Konstantin Grcic, Caroline Perret and Étienne Tornier, with exhibition design by Perret (CPWH) and Grcic assisted by Claire Pondard. The Pauline Deltour MADD Bordeaux survey is the first time her commissions for Alessi, Muji, Lexon, La Chance, Hem, Tolix, Discipline, Forge de Laguiole, Established & Sons, Cire Trudon, COR, JEM and Puiforcat have been gathered in one place, and the show is unusually graph-shaped: the curatorial premise is that an industrial designer’s life work is best read as a network of brands, artisans and dates rather than as a chronology of forms. ...