These three designers have one foot in the art world.

Not every designer seeks a relationship to art. Not every designer needs one. There is, however, a particular bloodline of art history canon whose allure is hard to overlook: those that got to play in all the ponds. The Carlo Mollinos. The Nando Vigos. Designers tend to wait around, waiting to be invited into art and opera and fashion. Few in the end would know what to do if an invitation ever arrived in the mail. Those that need the room don&rsquo;t waste time waiting to be asked for it. They hurl themselves into the labor and trial that accompanies reckoning with new skills and norms, knowing they have a foundational philosophy guiding them that is bigger than any singular material or project. Here are a few of our favorite cross-disciplinarians who work omnivorously across the visual universe&mdash;leaving their thumbprints wherever they go, from the stage to the white cube and back again.

Reddymade

"Becoming" by Reddymade

Public art is a tentpole at Reddymade, Suchi Reddy&rsquo;s namesake firm. The reason the trained architect and designer favors the typology of public art is its instant feedback loop. You don&rsquo;t have to wonder how the world is going to respond. Once it is installed, it immediately generates interactions and reactions. Reddy appreciates the way that art can provide shortcuts for sharing emotion and information at once. Her newest artwork, &ldquo;Becoming&rdquo; (2023), will be installed in Surrey, Canada. The work is about the immigration experience that operates simultaneously as a literal and metaphorical passage&mdash;the visitor walks through it like an elongated folly. Reddy wanted to stress the feeling of distance, and the way passing from one place to another changes one&rsquo;s perspective a little at a time. Assimilation is an ongoing experience, not an endpoint. 
&ldquo;Becoming&rdquo; is interesting to think about in relation to the architect&rsquo;s other forthcoming project, Nine and a Half, which revolves around a stimulating partnership with a 100-year-old manufacturer in <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/shwetambari-mody-indian-savoir-faire-artisanal-collaboration-interview-designer" target="_blank" rel="noopener">India</a> famous for their saris. The title of the collection, Nine and a Half, gets its name from the length of fabric that comprises a sari. The objects themselves break from the sari&rsquo;s functionality to become other objects that relate to the body, albeit more obliquely, such as upholstered lamps, stools, and a chaise lounge. These objects, due out in the new year, will premiere at a gallery, <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/music/50-years-of-hip-hop-art-museum-exhibitions-fotografiska-fit" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Les Ateliers Courbet, in New York</a>. Later on in the year, Reddy hints excitedly at other opportunities to show artworks&mdash;all of which ultimately feed her commercially facing architecture practice. Usually working in the commercial realm, Reddy thinks it would be especially fun to work in the hospitality space. It is easy to imagine her transforming a hotel into a sculpture.

Charlap Hyman and Herrero

Winter Street Gallery

<a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/travel-living/adam-charlap-hyman-follies-architecture-history" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Adam Charlap Hyman</a>, one half of Charlap Hyman and Herrero, is the son of artist Pilar Almon, with whom he often collaborates, including on a recent collection of hand-painted paper lanterns that put us in mind of WOKA&rsquo;s Josef Hoffman globes meeting Isamu Noguchi. Charlap Hyman&rsquo;s sensitivity for the arts leaks out in other ways at bicoastal <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/travel-living/theoreme-editions-designers-french-interior-design" target="_blank" rel="noopener">architecture and </a><a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/travel-living/theoreme-editions-designers-french-interior-design" target="_blank" rel="noopener">design firms.</a> For instance, Charlap Hyman and Andre Herrero are frequent guest curators on the gallery scene. "They&rsquo;ve done it for Tina Kim and Nina Johnson, and, this past summer, at Winter Street Gallery in Martha&rsquo;s Vineyard. "They&rsquo;ve also brought art into design spaces, like when they mounted a show at Friedman Benda and invited French conceptualist <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/art/wet-job-camille-henrot-l-officiel-art" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Camille </a><a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/art/wet-job-camille-henrot-l-officiel-art" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Henrot</a> to contribute one of her rotary phone sculptures with voices hidden inside. Later, Henrot repaid the favor by writing to the office to create a wallpaper for her Palais de Tokyo survey. Charlap Hyman&rsquo;s relationships with the art world operate as a fountain for trickling in both new projects and clientele. 
This is all not to mention the firm&rsquo;s longstanding alliance with the opera. Charlap Hyman is an outspoken patron and collaborator of the American Modern Opera Company. He adds on duties when the firm is called to Europe to make sets for another opera house. It&rsquo;s this dipping between worlds that keeps Charlap Hyman and Herrero light on their feet. Each project has wildly different needs and context. Boredom has no foothold here. The performance and exhibitions are feeding the rooms. The rugs and lamps are nurturing the operas. The buildings are holding everyone together.

Omer Arbel and Randy Bishop began Bocci, their design brand, back in 2005, as a way to generate income for the architectural ambitions that they wanted to pursue without the headache of clients. Bocci grew up to do just that. And along the way, it also became an important creative kiln of its own: one that produces flush outlets, paper-thin ceramic lampshades, and light-up lollipop trees&ndash;as well as many things you have to sign an NDA to look at. Now that their research-and-development furnace is firing on all cylinders, Arbel and Bishop are back to building out mind-boggling homes, and feeling so frisky that they are even opening themselves up to the outside world that they had kept out for so many years. The crack in the door starts with the new <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/travel-living/your-guide-fashionable-berlin-2018" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Bocci Berlin headquarters,</a> where they maintain permanent exhibition space, part of which they will program, and the rest of which is left up to those who approach them. Whoever asks to use Bocci&rsquo;s warehouse for their runway or group show will have to wrestle with Arbel&rsquo;s contribution to the space: the Foam Monster. Part sculpture, part armature, the Foam Monster, despite its name, is not a menacing entity as much as a prompt. It is a mountain of foam that can be carved into to create niches for art and sculpture to be installed&mdash;or perhaps even a person, in the case of a performance. It is an invention Arbel created for the Bocci team but soon realized was too good to keep to themselves. One visit to their studio in Vancouver and one understands that there are decades of surprises still marinating at Bocci for the art world and beyond.

“Look Here” by Reddymade. Photo by Timothy Schneck.

Meet the Designers Shaping the Art World in Their Image

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