About


Fred Villanueva
98 Greenwich St., Third Floor South   NY, NY  10006  Telephone: (917) 554-5286


Shortly before I moved to New York in 1994, I was given a rare opportunity: to design a line of steel furniture, to catalog it, to develop an identity for a metalworks, and ultimately to promote and market the whole concept "grass roots" style.

Inspired primarily be such luminaries as Isamu Noguchi, Antoni Gaudi, and Frank Gehry, between 1994 and 1997, I designed over 400 pieces of furniture as concepts. Though few were actually manufactured (not more than ten pieces in all), the ability to concieve an idea for a product-object was an invaluable art and design experience.

My approach was primarily sculptural, eventually evolving into studies of both the design and manufacturing process, where beauty should not compromise important principles such as modularity and ease of production.

Along with the experience of product design, I designed a studio building and it's interior, taking an "International Modernist" approach to a metalworks that had primarily served a purely utilitarian market: the manufacture of fences, security gates, and stair railings.

This creative approach helped to broaden the way that the centuries old trades of wrought iron manufacture and artisanship were percieved, and served to further my own ability to think of form and space from multiple perspectives: those of product designer, sculptor, and architect.