Michael James Casey, a visionary designer and architect, founded the dual-focused design company MJCNYC in 2022. Following a multitude of passions, Michael crafts contemporary furniture for your surroundings and handcrafted streetwear for your attire. MJCNYC offers a unique perspective on furniture, lighting, and clothing designs. The 2023 collection showcases robust brutalist and art deco influences among chairs, consoles, and lighting fixtures that are pioneering in their style, poised for increased production and ready to enhance your personal spaces. Learn more about Michael James Casey in this week’s Maker Monday.
The Slade chair catches attention with its bold, brutalist presence.
Andrew Joseph: What inspired you to become a designer?
Michael Casey: Drawing was always my favorite thing to do as a kid, and I was on track in high school to go off to art school, but chose architecture instead for a greater challenge and the opportunity to learn a highly technical, marketable skill. This career as a registered architect has given me a strong eye for composition, detail, materiality, and color, all of which have informed the creation and development of the first-ever furniture collection.
More subjective artistic explorations with linoleum block pattern making, sewing, and fabric dyeing have led to the creation of the debut streetwear collection, as the second track and much more attainably priced line of the company. Both design lines emphasize small-batch hand craftsmanship and one-of-a-kind creations, operating under the new brand MJCNYC.
AJ: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received as a designer?
MC: When you are deep in the creative process and find yourself stuck at a particular point or dissatisfied with your work, take a break. Stepping back for an hour, or ten, or a whole week and then revisiting the project always helps me. The things you were so hung up on before suddenly seem much better than you remember them being when you return. It’s a trick that I find works every time.
The Tegan console embodies an Art Deco vibe, featuring scalloped doors and sleek stainless steel legs.
AJ: How do you stay creative and inspired?
MC: Traveling as much as possible, both far afield and more locally. I recently visited Medellin Colombia for the first time and loved it, gathering so much inspiration from that lush, verdant, brick-filled city on my first trip to South America.
Getting a car in the first year of the pandemic has now given me the opportunity to more frequently get out of the city and change up my scenery and mindset. I love to take weekend trips upstate but my favorite place to go all summer is the beach, both in the city, Long Island, and New Jersey. I’m happiest on a hot summer morning with the car packed up for a day by the ocean.
AJ: How do you balance functionality and aesthetics in your designs?
MC: I have never subscribed to the idea that form follows function, I don’t think of it in a linear sense one way or the other. Both are inherent to the character of the thing you’re creating, whether it’s a building, a chair, or a t-shirt. Aesthetics may draw you in but it’s the functionality of the thing that will ensure its longevity and special attachment to your life.
AJ: What is your favorite design trend from the past?
MC: I love the postmodernist era of the late 1970s through the 1990s, especially as it pertains to architecture. The international style and Modernism had run its course with all these sterile glass and steel boxes, and designers started to ratchet up the references, the colors, and you started to get a lot of really interesting resulting forms and materials in architecture again.
I think that Worldwide Plaza tower in Hell’s Kitchen NYC, with its squat form, brick facade and copper roof with glowing pyramid is a beautiful and unsung skyscraper in the Manhattan skyline, the best of the city’s post-modernist towers built towards the end of the twentieth century.
With its gleaming splayed legs, reminiscent of the iconic Miss Sputnik design, the Knox lamp effortlessly draws your gaze from any corner of the room.
AJ: What is your favorite type of furniture to design?
MC: Chairs. My entire collection started with the chairs, and it’s the type of furniture for which I have the most concepts in my sketchbooks over the years. The two chairs in my 2023 Collection, Slade and Grange, were borne from these angular sketches. Evocative of infrastructural concrete and metal machine forms, these solid wood pieces stand out for their sturdy splayed stances and faceted forms, catching the light and shadows at different angles that help anchor them into their spaces.
AJ: Style (or design) icon and why?
MC: Virgil Abloh, and that is a relatively new one for me. He and his Off White label are the closest template for my goals in founding MJCNYC. As a fellow Chicago native with a technical and educational foundation in architecture, who then took a left turn into product and apparel design, collaborating with artists of many different genres and in the process appealing much more to the masses.
Not everyone can appreciate a well designed set of technical construction drawings, but everyone truly loves their favorite t-shirt, and I’m seeking to create products that establish that kind of direct emotional attachment, to make you fall in love with both the seat in your living room and the shirt on your back.
This unique personal and professional background forms the core of the MJCNYC brand identity: a creative company with a rigorous technical foundation, seeking to design and sell contemporary furniture, objects, and clothing to the masses.
About the Maker | Established in 2022 by designer and architect Michael James Casey, MJCNYC brings a distinct approach to the shape of furniture, lighting, and clothing products. The 2023 collection features both striking furniture pieces and colorfully dyed apparel, distinctive goods that will stand out in a sea of mass produced merchandise.
The furniture line features sturdy brutalist and art deco inspired chair, console, and lighting pieces that are the first of their kind, ready to scale up in production and to enter and elevate your own spaces. The streetwear line features hand dyed, tagged, and printed t-shirts that have been thoughtfully designed and arrive ready to hit your back and hit the town.
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