In April, Metropolis Magazine published a designer profile on The Principals. The feature highlights their collaborative research based practice and highlights The Liquid Body Flask which they designed for Areaware.
Photo courtesy of The Principals.
"It was 2011, and Seskunas was living and working as an architect in Berlin, while Constantine and Williams, an industrial designer and a master craftsman respectively, were employed at a metal shop in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Seskunas had designed the piece, but it required a kind of fabrication know-how that he had trouble finding in Germany. Constantine had been a friend since childhood and they had studied together at Pratt Institute, so Seskunas reached out to him for help. With Williams in tow, the three planned a charrette at the metal shop when Seskunas was next in New York. “It was an entirely self-motivated project,” Constantine remembers. “I think we did it in one evening.”
Later that year Seskunas left Berlin for good, and the trio founded the Principals, settling in Greenpoint in Brooklyn. Operating under that moniker, which evokes both elementary school hegemony and the Three Musketeers, they have produced a series of architectural installations, retail spaces, and products that are often aesthetically dissimilar but feel conceptually unified. All of their projects, be they the Dead Chair tables—which recast iconic chairs as foam table supports—or their memorable Liquid Body steel flask (sold at the MoMA Store and other retailers), are open to users’ interpretation. “People say the flask is a grown-up Capri Sun,” Constantine says. “It’s a form of success when design does that,” Seskunas chimes in. 'We're always mining our own personal histories.'"