Paved States Expands at NeoCon for Edition 02

Last year Paved States showed up to NeoCon with something to prove. A suite at The Mart, a roster of emerging designers, and a hunch that Chicago was ready for its own experimental design platform. It turned out to be right. This year, Edition 02 had something harder to pull off: following it.

Paved States x Haworth DesignLab returned to NeoCon from June 7-10, expanding from a single suite into Suite 121 and the South Lobby, two of the most trafficked spaces in commercial design. Co-curated by Patricia Urquiola and Sixtysix Editor-in-Chief Chris Force, the show brought together 13 designers from across North America working in furniture, lighting, sculpture. The environment unfolded as a series of lived-in settings anchored by a central analog lounge, with curated playlists and guest DJ sessions from Dylan Gold, Tommaso Conforti, and Tone B. Nimble keeping the space breathing throughout the week.

The opening cocktail reception on June 8 doubled as the launch party for Sixtysix Issue 16. The room was exactly what the show has become: a gathering point for designers, collectors, and the design-curious, moving between the designed objects and the concept store. By the end of the week, the exhibition had hosted thousands of guests and picked up a HiP Award, recognition that the show’s contribution to NeoCon is being felt well beyond its own walls. 

“DesignLab has grown, edition after edition, into a more layered ecosystem, not simply a platform to show objects, but a space where emerging creatives can test ideas, materials and rituals of living together,” Patricia said.” With Paved States, this dialogue becomes even more porous: design meets art, music, publishing and community, allowing young voices to be seen not only as makers, but as authors of new cultural conditions. For me, this is what young creatives should focus on today: developing a point of view, staying open across disciplines, and asking what kind of world their work helps to imagine.”

“Paved States was always meant to celebrate designers who are exploring what the future of living looks like,” said Chris. “This year, with Patricia and an incredible group of designers, we brought something unique to NeoCon that had its own pulse.”

The designers brought with them work that didn’t feel like it was made for a trade show. Madeline Isakson’s practice is built around overlooked, mass-produced objects: Styrofoam packaging, plastic tubes, the kind of stuff headed straight for the dumpster. She collects, reconfigures, and casts them in aluminum and bronze. The result is a kind of material alchemy, objects that read as weightless but land with a thud, cheap forms made suddenly precious and obscenely permanent.

“Styrofoam will be around for 500 years,” she says. “Taking something that is very long-lasting but meant to be discarded and lightweight, and then making it out of something that is still long-lasting but so obscenely heavy, just so durable and more obviously long-lasting.” There’s humor in it, she’ll tell you, but also a reframing of the materials. 

Jean-Michel Gadoua, working out of Montreal under Galerie Mold, brought two pieces that couldn’t be more different in method but feel completely of a piece in sensibility. The first, his decorative screen The Osiris of This Shit, made of raw aluminum, had a presence that’s hard to pin down: transparent enough to see through, mysterious enough to hold your attention. 

The second was a chair built around a technique he’s developed of wrapping steel structures with melted plastic. 

“I can control part of it just to make sure it’s functional, you can sit on it,” he says, “but everything I create using this technique is kind of a world of their own.” 

Kiki Goti came from New York by way of Greece with a body of work that lives somewhere between decorative arts and fine arts, a distinction she’s not particularly interested in maintaining. Her glass figures, made in Venice in collaboration with local glassblowers, are small female forms inspired by the women in her family circle. Each one is unique, shaped by a process that leaves little room for precision and a lot of room for surprise. 

“It’s like a performance,” she says of working in the furnace. “There’s no precision in those rooms.” A cabinet piece she also showed, with ornamental details that curve and protrude in ways that feel both unnecessary and completely essential, pushed the conversation about decorative arts somewhere more contemporary. “The unnecessary parts of design are also the most necessary parts,” she says.

Zac Benloulou of Pavilion Audio Systems brought entirely analog bespoke sound systems that treat acoustic performance as a design problem worth solving. His pieces anchored the central listening room, grounding the space in both function and form. 

“The idea around installed, built sound systems was much more common in the ‘60s,” he says. “This piece is entirely analog. The overall design pulls from references to Dieter Rams’ work.”

Rounding out the exhibition were works from Stefano Giacomello of Studio Rotolo, Ceren Arslan of Bureau Betak & EXIT, Hank Beyer and Alex Sizemore of HBAS Co., Hannah Bigeleisen, Lauren Goodman, Malcolm Majer, marmar studio, Homan Rajai and Elena Dendiberia of Studio AHEAD, and The CULT’s Guillermo and Alaide Alejandre from Mexico, a continental spread that gave the show its breadth and kept it from feeling like any one city’s scene.

The week’s programming matched the ambition of the space. Patricia Urquiola hosted two “Patricia Asks Anything” sessions, one Monday and one Tuesday, sitting down with each of the exhibiting designers for the kind of conversation that only happens when another designer is asking the questions: the instincts behind the work, the doubts that sharpen it, the material obsessions that drive it. Moderated by Chris Force, the sessions gave the show an intellectual backbone that most trade fair programming doesn’t bother with. Benjamin Edgar, Chicago designer, founder of Boxed Water, and the man behind An Object Company, joined Chris for a panel called The Curiosity Framework, a conversation about building a practice without a rulebook that felt particularly well-placed in a room full of designers doing exactly that.

Tim Nicholson, the celebrity jeweler known as Secret of Manna, walked participants through his process of turning pop culture artifacts into sculptural wearable art, then custom-molded each of them on-site for a one-of-a-kind silver tooth cap to be handcrafted and delivered after the event. Noel Mercado, the Chicago-based artist and craftsman who appeared in last year’s Paved States retail lineup, led a leather wallet workshop built around hand-stitching, stamping, and his distinctive approach to materials and cultural storytelling. Sinead Cleary and Liz Topp, founders of Chicago’s experimental floral studio Nerine, closed out the week with a session on floral design as sculptural practice, each participant composing their own arrangement to take home in a silver vessel.

The Gantri-sponsored concept store served as the launch of their wireless collection, and brought design and lifestyle objects into the mix alongside a Sixtysix-curated bookstore and newsstand stocked with titles including AFM, AnOther, Frame, Konfect, i-D, and more. Furniture you could touch, records playing, workshops running, books to flip through, a DJ in the corner.

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