RAW: The Next Generation at ICFF, May 15-18, 2004 Rising Designers Take the Stage in New York City

Furniture World Magazine

Who will be the next generation of design stars and how will they change the way we live? This May, during the International Contemporary Furniture Fair® (ICFF®) at the Jacob Javits Center, the most promising emerging design entrepreneurs from around the world will showcase their talents in a new exhibition called RAW: The Next Generation. ICFF draws more than 17,000 interior designers, architects, retailers, and other design professionals to an extraordinary display of the world's cutting-edge modern furniture. This new exhibit will cover over 2,000 square feet in the North Pavilion. Curated by Italian architect, designer, writer and scholar Marco Pasanella, RAW will include work by over twenty designers from around the globe who exemplify the “next generation” of designers and thinkers. Among the newcomers selected for this show are Anne Bannick and Lene Vad Jensen from Denmark, Lume from Massachusetts and SLIK non-wovens from California. These designers are imagining a future where the shoes we wear scrub toxins from the air and our eating utensils are made from byproducts of the very food we eat. Houses have soft, honeycomb-like walls and draperies shed light. Design themes of redefinition, regeneration and renewal are explored in the form of tabletop, furniture, interior environments, textiles and even clothing. This year, the RAW exhibition draws its talent from METROPOLIS Magazine’s “Next Generation” competition. METROPOLIS established the METROPOLIS Next Generation Prize to recognize and encourage today's rising stars in design. The magazine awards a cash prize of $10,000 each year to an enterprising individual or office whose "Big Design Idea" benefits people and the environment, and challenges fellow design professionals to create human-centered products, environments, and communication systems The exhibition will have its own set of jurors: METROPOLIS editor-in-chief Susan Szenasy; Frame magazine editor Robert Thiemann; Sandy Chilewich of Chilewich; Scott Henderson of Smart Design; and others. Together these jurors will select three designers who will be awarded their own complimentary exihibit area at next year’s ICFF.