Suzanne Delehanty’s 1977 essay “Furniture of Another Order,” for the exhibition Improbable Furniture, advocates for rethinking furniture as art. Artists such as Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Edward Kienholz, and Yayoi Kusama incorporated furniture into their work, while others like Scott Burton made it the foundation of their practice. Delehanty writes that furniture can “slip from the mundane to the metaphysical,” to become objects that have transformed from simple representations of the world we inhabit to a continuous source of experimentation through their process of production, scale and relationship to the human body.

Architects have also utilized furniture as inspiration to extend architecural ideas, study human behavior and challenge societal norms. Examples include Charles and Ray Eames’, Marcel Breuerr, Mies van der Rohe’s, Lilly Reich, Eileen Gray, Gerrit Rietveld’s De Stijl, Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, and Charlotte Perriand. These designers grappled with everything from issues of form, production, lifestyle, an economy of means, and even hygiene.

Trade Between places four emerging designers in dialogue - a showcase for the designer’s abililty to redefine the familiar in ways that open up broader questions about our interactions with objects in the built environment.