Inside Joy Division’s new boxset

Back in 2022, the founders of award-winning design studio Objects of Common Interest, Eleni Petaloti and Leonidas Trampoukis, based between New York and Greece, launched their resin fabrication studio in Piraeus – a physical extension of their commitment to ‘artisanal craftsmanship and human-centred design’ – thanks to a series of unplanned events.

Master craftsman and artisan Ovidiu Colea had maintained his own resin workshop in Long Island City, New York, for years, and a chance meeting with Petaloti inspired an interesting possibility. Looking to retire, Colea offered to pass on all his machinery to Objects of Common Interest and relocate it to Piraeus, to be managed by the two designers and their team. Fuelled by their passion for experimentation, making, and pushing material boundaries, they jumped at the opportunity.

‘Resin is a very demanding material because it needs precision and needs the context to be able to be cured properly,’ says Trampoukis of its attraction. ‘Temperature, heat, dust all affect its quality. So there is a certain type of predictability in how you can achieve a perfect result, controlling the environment and controlling the circumstances. But then there is this magic of randomness and the magic of surprise that comes when you open the mould.’

Watch our film, directed by head of video Sebastian Jordahn, to delve into Objects of Common Interest’s process.

It's a funny thing, Peter ‘Hooky’ Hook tells Craig McLean down the line from a California hotel room, ‘to still relish something that you did under very difficult circumstances’.

The bass player – once of Joy Division, then of New Order, now of The Light, the band he formed to play both those previous bands’ songs – is talking about Eternal (Live). It’s a lavish new Joy Division boxset comprising 14 CDs, documenting 16 gigs, and two DVDs of filmed performances. The audio, video and accompanying photography and text vividly capture the short, intense onstage existence of the band, their lifespan cut short after the 1980 death by suicide, aged 23, of Ian Curtis, the frontman who struggled with depression, severe epilepsy and the side-effects of his medication.

With the boxset’s spruced-up, 2026-level sound mastered at Abbey Road Studios, the grotty, sticky pub and club venues of 1979 and 1980 never felt more present. And with artful updates on Joy Division’s visual language, their heritage and iconography have rarely felt more alive. Here, Hook, drummer Stephen Morris, art director Peter Saville, and photographer Anton Corbijn reflect on the imagery that helped make Joy Division.

New York has no shortage of venues to view great 20th- and 21st-century design – the Cooper Hewitt, the Brooklyn Museum, the Met and the Museum of Arts and Design, to name just a few. Less common, though, are places to view rarities, prototypes and other design B-sides in an archive-like atmosphere, outside the constraints of an exhibition thesis or a permanent collection. The co-founders of R & Company – one of America’s most esteemed collectible design galleries – are looking to change that by opening their long-time storage facility, Building 86, to the public for the first time.

The 16,000 sq ft warehouse, located in a former machine shop in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, housed the gallery’s permanent collection, designer archives, photo studio and administrative spaces for the better part of a decade. But co-founders Zesty Meyers and Evan Snyderman recognised an opportunity: ‘The idea of being able to share 30 years of collecting with our clientele seemed like a really great idea,’ says Snyderman. ‘Everything in this building has a story.’

Anna Fixsen took a tour, as Snyderman and Meyers shared their ten favourite finds.

We always applaud best-in-class design. And when it comes to scissors – everyday but, for some, crucial analogue tools – this high-end pair by German specialist Horl deserves a nod. The key point of difference is the spring-loaded quick release that enables the two blades to be easily separated for individual sharpening, using Horl’s own suite of sharpeners, bringing them back to as-new condition. There, and we made it almost to the end without describing them as ‘a cut above’.