Most design wants you comfortable. The Haas Brothers prefer you slightly unsure whether the stool is furniture or a creature deciding whether to trust you. At the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, Uncanny Valley (11 April–16 August 2026) gathers some eighty-five works by twin artists Nikolai and Simon Haas into a mid-career survey that treats that unease as a material—not a marketing angle. The title steals from robotics: the zone where almost-human forms become creepy. Their answer is to live there on purpose.
Organised by Cranbrook Art Museum with Laura Mott, the show is the New York stop of a national tour (Blanton next; Mint after). Founded in Los Angeles in 2010, the studio has spent fifteen years blurring art, design, craft and code while remaining, by their own account, essentially self-taught. MAD is the right host: a museum that still argues craft has a future, not a gift shop.
Beasts that refuse to be accessories
The iconic Beasts arrive with personality before function—zoomorphic sculptures that can also hold a body, or refuse to. Fur, brass, ceramic glaze: the hand is never hidden. Wallpaper* once called their bestial furniture brutish in a way that both attracts and repels. That double pull is the design. Readers of this magazine who prefer objects that refuse to decorate will recognise a cousin temperament: less moral severity, more psychological theatre, same allergy to polite surface.
Beside the creatures sit Endless Paintings—algorithmically generated landscapes nodding to early computer graphics—and Emergent Sculptures grown from code toward self-generating form. The digital is not a polish layer. It is another kiln, another glaze chemistry, another way to let form surprise its makers.
Fantasy with a payroll
The brothers call their method “problem-solving fantasies.” The phrase is useful only if you hear the labour inside it. Collaboration is not a footnote: the Freaks series, developed with MonkeyBiz beadworkers in Cape Town and later with women makers in Lost Hills, California, insists that exuberance can still be collective. In a collectible-design market that often buys the story of the hand while erasing the hands, that claim needs testing—and the exhibition at least puts the partnerships in the room rather than the press release alone.
The dissenting beat is the obvious one. Mid-career surveys of market-beloved studios can become victory laps: Instagram monsters, limited editions, the uncanny made cute. Whether Uncanny Valley keeps its teeth depends on whether visitors still feel the slight wrongness after the first photograph. Craft without friction is only product.
Where the hand finishes the glitch
Compared with the soft public stubbornness of gt2P's inflatable plaza, the Haas objects are more private and more feral—domestic scale, wild psychology. Compared with the mineral memory of fire in Jongjin Park's porcelain strata, their materials stay closer to animals and screens. What this magazine keeps defending in praise of the visible hand is still here: the mark that proves someone decided, revised, risked.
A 256-page Phaidon Monacelli monograph travels with the show. Useful, secondary. The primary argument is on Columbus Circle through mid-August: that contemporary craft can be algorithmic and still need a thumbprint; that furniture can look back; that the uncanny is not a bug in the culture of making. It is, for these twins, the brief.