Kicking the Tires

May 20, 2009
PENELOPE GREEN

Fragment from article:
Several booths away, Ms. Lupton found domestic resolution in a “stitched table” at Uhuru, part of the Brooklyn Designs collective, which had set up a booth toward the back of the exhibition floor, near where the design colleges were presenting their student work. The coffee table is made from two slabs of walnut “stitched together” with plastic X’s ($4,800). Ms. Lupton liked its natural-industrial yin-yang, and the story that accompanied it. Those X’s are sliced from sheets of recycled plastic (shredded detergent bottles that have been pressure molded, in fact). And that walnut died a natural death, according to Uhuru’s Web site, which proclaims that the wood was harvested from trees that had “come to the end of their natural lifespan or that have been felled by storms or culled due to disease,” like an old horse.