CONSTANTIN & LAURENE BOYM
Constantin and Laurene Boym are New York-based designers whose work exists between design, architecture, conceptual art, and furniture. Through Boym Partners, the husband-and-wife duo developed a body of work that transformed ordinary consumer objects into carriers of memory, humor, politics, and personal narrative.
Rather than beginning with entirely new forms, the Boyms often started with things already embedded within everyday life - a Sears catalog, a discarded package, a souvenir, a famous painting, a wall clock, or an architectural landmark. By subtly altering these familiar objects, they reveal the cultural systems and emotional histories hidden beneath ordinary consumption.
Since founding Boym Partners in New York in 1986, Constantin and Laurene have produced furniture, domestic products, exhibitions, installations, and limited editions that continue to influence conversations surrounding collectible design. Across four decades, Boym Partners has demonstrated that design is not simply a process of creating new objects, but a way of uncovering the histories, memories, and meanings already embedded within everyday life.
Sweeterfat is proud to work with Constantin and Laurene Boym as a curatorial and creative partner, collaborating on exhibitions, research initiatives, new editions, and future releases. Through this ongoing relationship, Sweeterfat seeks to preserve the studio's remarkable history and contribute to its continuing evolution.
Rather than beginning with entirely new forms, the Boyms often started with things already embedded within everyday life - a Sears catalog, a discarded package, a souvenir, a famous painting, a wall clock, or an architectural landmark. By subtly altering these familiar objects, they reveal the cultural systems and emotional histories hidden beneath ordinary consumption.
Since founding Boym Partners in New York in 1986, Constantin and Laurene have produced furniture, domestic products, exhibitions, installations, and limited editions that continue to influence conversations surrounding collectible design. Across four decades, Boym Partners has demonstrated that design is not simply a process of creating new objects, but a way of uncovering the histories, memories, and meanings already embedded within everyday life.
Sweeterfat is proud to work with Constantin and Laurene Boym as a curatorial and creative partner, collaborating on exhibitions, research initiatives, new editions, and future releases. Through this ongoing relationship, Sweeterfat seeks to preserve the studio's remarkable history and contribute to its continuing evolution.
AVAILABLE WORKS
HIGHLIGHTED PROJECTS AND SERIES:
Explore the evolution of Boym Partners through four decades of projects, ideas, and collaborations:
1955-1986
Origins: Boym Partners
Projects: The Cheapest Lamp Possible, Nota BeneConstantin Boym studied architecture in Moscow before continuing his education at Domus Academy in Milan. Laurene Leon Boym studied fine art at the School of Visual Arts in New York City before earning a master's degree in Industrial Design at Pratt Institute.
Together they founded Boym Partners in New York in 1986. Rather than working within a single discipline, the studio quickly moved between industrial design, architecture, furniture, exhibitions, public art, and limited editions.
From the beginning, the Boyms were less interested in inventing entirely new forms than in revealing the hidden stories already embedded within familiar objects. This philosophy would become the foundation for every major project that followed.
Recycle series - vase
Late 1980’s
Reimagining The Everyday Object
Projects: Recycle Series, Clock designsDuring the late 1980s, Boym Partners established many of the ideas that would define their practice over the following decades. Rather than treating consumer products as finished designs, they began viewing everyday objects as raw material capable of carrying memory, humor, and cultural meaning.
Completed in 1988, the Recycle Series became one of the studio's earliest and most important projects. Discarded bottles, containers, and commercial packaging were carefully preserved and transformed into new works that questioned conventional ideas of value, permanence, and waste. Long before upcycling or even recycling became a common design strategy, the Boyms proposed that discarded objects could function as historical documents of contemporary life. The project established a methodology that would reappear throughout the Boyms' work: beginning with existing objects and allowing design to emerge through reinterpretation.
At nearly the same time, Boym Partners began producing a remarkable series of clocks that challenged one of the home's most familiar objects. Works including the Mona Lisa Clock, Laborious Clock, and Moving Clock transformed timekeeping into a conversation about art history, labor, and visual perception. Rather than simply measuring time, the clocks invited viewers to reconsider the symbolic roles they can carry.
Together, these projects introduced a theme that would remain central throughout the Boyms' career: the most ordinary objects often possess the richest cultural meanings and interpretations.
1990’s
Consumer Culture, Memory, And Everyday Systems
Projects: Searstyle, Timeless Objects, Strap Furniture, Sex Rugs & Handy Rugs, Use It Containers, Souvenirs for the End of the CenturyThroughout the 1990s, Boym Partners expanded their investigation from individual objects to the larger systems that organize everyday life. Retail catalogs with replacement parts, household products, and public monuments all became frameworks for exploring how design accumulates cultural meaning over time.
One of the clearest expressions of this approach was Searstyle (1992). After discovering that Sears sold replacement furniture parts through its mail-order catalog, the Boyms began assembling new furniture from these mismatched components. The project transformed an overlooked commercial system into a commentary on conceptual design.
This same curiosity appeared in projects such as Use It Containers, where brightly colored plastic storage vessels turn a humble home container into a more considered object that ultimately entering the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art. Rather than separating mass produced products from collectible design, the Boyms suggested that these household objects should be considered with the same seriousness as limited editions.
By the second half of the decade, the studio increasingly turned toward architecture as another form of cultural memory. Missing Monuments explored buildings that had disappeared, remained unrealized, or survived primarily through collective memory. The project illustrated how architecture often lives as powerfully through stories as it does through physical structures. Rather than commemorating completed projects, the series suggested that the absence of something could possess cultural significance.
These ideas culminated in Souvenirs for the End of the Century (1997), the conceptual beginning of what would soon become “Buildings of Disaster”. Rather than commemorating triumph, the project asked how architecture becomes permanently transformed by the events that occur around it, laying the foundation for one of Boym Partners' most influential bodies of work.
2000’s
History Becomes Design
Projects: Buildings of Disaster, Salvation, The Ultimate Art Furniture SeriesThe events of September 11, 2001 fundamentally changed the public reception of Buildings of Disaster. Originally conceived before the turn of the century, the series continued to expand in response to contemporary events as they unfolded, eventually growing to include 25 miniature monuments spanning nearly two centuries of conflict and tragedy.
Rather than depicting destruction itself, the Boyms focused on architecture as an emotional trigger. Familiar buildings became compact souvenirs whose meaning depended entirely upon the viewer's own memories and associations. Buildings of Disaster challenged the traditional role of monuments by asking how history is remembered, collected, and ultimately consumed. Each miniature asks viewers to supply the missing event from memory, turning architecture into a trigger for collective remembrance rather than a record of physical destruction.
At the same time, Boym Partners continued blurring the distinction between art and design through The Ultimate Art Furniture Series (2006). Sourcing from paintings that were in Laurene’s mother’s collection, the series transformed these historical artworks into functional objects such as chairs, benches, mirrors, and tables. Rather than treating the paintings as untouchable images, the Boyms invited viewers to physically inhabit them, collapsing the boundaries between furniture, sculpture, and fine art.
Alongside these experimental works, Boym Partners continued designing products, interiors, and exhibitions for companies including Alessi, Swatch, Flos, Authentics, and Vitra, demonstrating an unusual ability to move fluidly between industrial production, museum exhibitions, and limited edition designs without compromising the conceptual thoughtfulness that defined their practice.
Constantin and Laurene Boym sitting with their dog Ziggy in Boym Park
2009-Present
Lasting Influence
Projects: Boym ParkBy the end of the 2000s, Boym Partners established itself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary design. Their work received the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Product Design in 2009 and entered the permanent collections of institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Yet the studio's lasting influence extends far beyond awards and museum collections. Long before terms such as critical design, upcycling, and art objects became common within contemporary practice, the Boyms demonstrated that ordinary objects could carry extraordinary histories.
Sweeterfat is proud to work with Constantin and Laurene Boym as a curatorial and creative partner, collaborating on exhibitions, research initiatives, new editions, and future releases. Through this ongoing relationship, Sweeterfat seeks to preserve the studio's remarkable history and contribute to its continuing evolution.