Skip to main content

NYCxDesign awards given to floating lamps and a pop-up Black Forest restaurant

In only its second year, New York’s design competition NYCxDesign 2017 attracted more than 700 entries from around the world. Awards in more than 50 categories were presented at the Museum of Modern Art that was also broadcast on Facebook Live. Among the winners was Gaggenau, a 333-year-old German metal and consumer durables design and manufacturing firm.

Gaggenau won the Architectural Pop-Up competition with Restaurant 1683, a four-night pop-up restaurant in New York. The restaurant was the first of a three-year celebration of the company’s one-third millennium anniversary.

Restaurant 1683

Gaggenau began in the Black Forest mountain range in Germany when a blacksmith hand-forged the first nail from molten iron. The Restaurant 1683 pop-up in Chelsea was designed to give diners an experience that bridged 17th-century Germany with contemporary art, design, entertainment, and culinary expression.

Recommended Videos

In addition to clusters of real trees and raw timber construction dining tables and cooking stations, the restaurant walls featured murals of trees and waterfall features. Lighting focused on the tables and chef workstations heightened the forest effect. Don’t feel like you missed out by not making a reservation as the performance design was invitation-only.

According to Gaggenau, three-star Michelin chef Daniel Humm, the co-owner of two restaurants in New York City, Eleven Madison Park, and The NoMad, oversaw the creation of the Gaggenau Restaurant 1683.

Milan-based Luceplan Lighting was a dual-award winner at NYCxDesign. Luceplan designers won the Sconce and Pendant/Chandelier categories.

Counterbalance Wall, designed for Luceplan by Daniel Rybakken, won the Sconce category. The design’s counterweight allows the long arm to be positioned where needed for the LED diffused light.

Odile Decq designed the futuristic-looking Soleil Noir for Luceplan. The lamp is made of molded polyurethane foam with a LED lamp hidden inside a disk that diffuses the light. The asymmetric support cable is thick and strong enough to keep its appealing unusual shape.

From an immersive restaurant experience to lights that appear to float in the air, these 2017 NYCxDesign Award winners travel from a deep dig into history and a tradition of excellence to forward-focused fixtures.

Bruce Brown
Bruce Brown Contributing Editor   As a Contributing Editor to the Auto teams at Digital Trends and TheManual.com, Bruce…
Save up to 30% on this Joe Manganiello endorsed robot pool cleaner
man relaxing while beatbot cleans his pool

Summer is almost here and if your pool is still being cleaned like it’s 1995, it’s time for a change. Right now through May 31, Beatbot is offering up to $820 off the AquaSense 2 Series, along with a 3-year full replacement warranty that practically screams "peace of mind."

Whether you fancy spotless walls, leaf-free water, or just fewer hours holding a skimmer pole, the AquaSense 2 Series is an AI-powered lineup that will take on your deep end with ease. Super-Man actor, Joe Manganiello, mentioned the AquaSense 2 Ultra is, “sleek, quiet, and way better at cleaning than I ever was.”

Read more
Nanoleaf reveals two gorgeous new smart lights for your home and garden
Nanoleaf Rope Light above a couch

Nanoleaf is one of the biggest names in smart lights, offering a variety of bulbs, panels, and even a unique skylight with support for over 16 million colors. That lineup is expanding today with the launch of the Nanoleaf Rope Light and Nanoleaf Solar Garden Light -- two striking new products that look like an excellent way to bring a pop of color into your home.

The Nanoleaf Solar Garden Light is arguably the most exciting of the two, as the company hasn’t ventured into the outdoor space too often. Sold as a two-pack for $50, the Garden Light is Nanoleaf’s first-ever solar-powered lighting solution. Built with an IP65 weatherproof rating, eight LED branches that splay out from a central stem, a built-in daylight sensor to toggle the lights on and off, and support for a variety of RGB colors plus tunable whites, it should make a fun companion for most outdoor spaces.

Read more
Amazon Memorial Day sale 2025: The 35 best tech deals
Apple MacBook Air 13 M4 front angled view showing display and keyboard.

The Amazon Memorial Day sale is already up and running, which means there are some amazing discounts available for all kinds of tech products. Whether you're looking for upgrades to your home entertainment setup, additions to your arsenal of mobile gadgets, or devices that will simply make life easier, there's surely something for you from the retailer's Memorial Day deals this year.

There's a chance that you get overwhelmed with the sheer number of offers from Amazon though. To help you decide what to buy, we've gathered the 35 best tech deals that we've found below. Read on and see if anything catches your eye, but you shouldn't take up too much time because we're not sure how much longer stocks will last for these products. It won't be a good idea to wait until the final minutes of the holiday before you make your purchases -- proceed with your transactions from Amazon's Memorial Day sale as soon as you can.

Read more