What’s Happening: A show at the Museum of Modern Art eschews doom-and-gloom sustainability narratives to reveal the ingenious ways designers are tackling material innovation.

The Download: In one of Maarten Baas’s most poignant works, two uniformed men wielding long-handled janitorial brooms continuously push garbage into the shape of analog clock hands over a 12-hour loop. Sweeper’s Clock, which the Dutch artist created in 2009, addressed the urgency of mitigating pollution and ecological degradation long before terms like “microplastics” or “greenwashing” entered the lexicon. Time is running out until full-fledged environmental calamity, Baas warned—and much of the onus rests on designers to innovate new production techniques that lessen the impacts of mass manufacturing through advances in reuse, upcycling, and biomaterials.

Sweeper’s Clock is a fitting backdrop for “Life Cycles: The Materials of Contemporary Design,” an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art that reveals the ingenious, unconventional ways that more than 40 designers have rethought how materials can be deployed for mass-market products in the name of environmental protection. Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design, pulled a multitude of such objects from the museum’s archives that marry traditional craft and advanced technology. They range from the zero-waste collaboration of Tomáš Gabzdil Libertíny’s honeycomb vase made by 40,000 bees to Nendo’s flowering Cabbage Chair, which repurposes leftover paper from the fabric-pleating process used for Issey Miyake’s Pleats Please line of clothing.

Antonelli also included lesser-known examples of material ingenuity, especially from the global south, such as Fernando Laposse’s Totomoxtle project that repurposes husks from heirloom varieties of Mexican corn into colorful tiles, and Indonesian designer Adhi Nugraha’s eyebrow-raising reuse of cow dung into lamps and speakers sporting a papier-mâché texture. Antonelli also tapped Ghanaian-Filipina artist Mae-Ling Lokko to create wall panels made of coconut shells and mycelium, produced entirely from natural energy. “There’s a lot happening in the non-Western/Northern hemisphere that can be educational for us designers to learn how to deal with climate change,” Antonelli explains, “so we need to do more.” The show readies a hopeful eye for a symbiotic coexistence between humanity and nature—but reminds us to innovate our way there before the clock stops ticking.

In Their Own Words: “The environmental crisis is front and center in everyone’s mind,” Antonelli says. “Design has an integral responsibility, and any act of good design should involve awareness, empathy, respect, and consideration toward all objects, organisms, and ecosystems—as well as future generations. Design can be an agent of positive change and play a crucial part in restoring the fragile ties between humans and the rest of nature. The materials with which objects are made, and our cultural attitudes toward them—as designers and as citizens—lead this evolutionary process.”

Surface Says: We’ve never been so mesmerized by cow dung.

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Lined with extravagantly designed retail showpieces, Miami’s prestigious Design District is a hotbed of luxury and glamour—a reality Celine surely took into consideration when conceiving its latest flagship. Capturing a harmonious blend of timeless sophistication and modern brutalism, a vision conceptualized by image director Hedi Slimane, the two-floor boutique is the epitome of refined architecture, marrying a range of natural stones like grey travertine and Arabescato marble with warmer elements such as oak and brass.

The ground floor, primarily dedicated to women’s leather goods along with the brand’s fine jewelry, is adorned with antique gold mirrors and a striking marble “perfume organ.” Upstairs, Celine Homme and women’s ready-to-wear collections are displayed amidst glass and polished stainless-steel showcases, aligned with a Basaltina tile grid. The space is further elevated by Slimane’s sculptural furniture and a collection of contemporary artwork, including paintings by Simone Fattal and Maia Ruth Lee, that imbue the French label’s Magic City jewel with a certain je ne sais quoi worthy of its neighborhood.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is an adage for the ages—and one the innovators at Herman Miller have long kept in their back pocket. Besides staying faithful to trusty staples of midcentury office design like the enduringly popular Aeron Chair, the trailblazing furniture brand has only tweaked its brand identity five times in its 100-year history. So as its centennial anniversary loomed, and a major merger with Knoll was behind them, an overhaul was in order. “The last brand identity served Herman Miller well for 25 years, but that system predated many of the touchpoints we now have with the Herman Miller customer,” Kelsey Keith, brand creative director, tells It’s Nice That. “What we needed was an evolution of the brand, and a complete design system, one that could flex from a mobile phone screen to a physical space and everywhere in between.”

The brand enlisted Brooklyn design agency Order for the job, which became an exercise in subtlety. Irving Harper’s iconic M-shaped logo, which he famously designed in less than an hour, remains intact. But the brand was eager to refresh its longtime typeface, FF Meta, designed by type titan Erik Spiekermann as the “antithesis of Helvetica.” That ubiquitous typeface evokes the period when Herman Miller came into itself after experimental moments in the brand’s infancy. Avoiding a full step backward, Order adopted the Helvetica-adjacent Söhne from Klim Type Foundry as an homage to this era, when “their most iconic pieces truly become solidified into the modernist canon,” partner Jesse Reed explains. Bright, expressive colors complement the change and set an optimistic tone to kick off the next century.

When: Until Jan. 27

Where: Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, West Palm Beach

What: The artist’s maze-like exhibition comes to life at the West Palm Beach gallery, where her painted Sanyan canvases bring political paintings, landscapes, and portraiture together with a dreamlike color palette. Fragmented scenes, such as a hidden embrace, a tangle of limbs in a portrait, or a crowded, uproarious gathering, connect to a prevailing sense of uncertainty: within the perception of self, the global political climate, and even the environment each canvas depicts. Both Omuku and the gallery liken the works to a collection of half-finished sentences, encapsulating their sense of precarity.

As timepieces go, Shinola’s new ceramic Monster is not coyly or ironically named. A true sports watch, its ceramic case is complimented by a rubber strap and a scratch-resistant bezel. The wave-etched dial and case back harken to the erstwhile fire boats of the Great Lakes, from which Shinola’s hometown of Detroit is perched a stone’s throw away. $2,150

Studio CAHS is a New York City–based architecture, design, and development firm guided by craftsmanship, personalization, and preservation. Founded by Caterina Heil Stewart, the boutique studio’s suite of capabilities is anchored in a respect for architecture, an emphasis on the value of time and materials, an expertise in furniture curation and a commitment to visual movement and harmony.

Surface Says: While no two projects are exactly the same, Studio CAHS has a knack for transcending trends, thanks to an eye for midcentury furnishings and contemporary artwork.

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