How do we define furniture? The goal was to land on a wide range of offerings, but there were parameters: To qualify, each piece was required to have been fabricated, even if just as a prototype, within the past 100 years. Lighting was excluded from the debate — “which is nuts,” said de Cárdenas, a former men’s wear designer who started his firm in 2006 — unless it was attached to, say, a desk. (The Italian architect and designer Ettore Sottsass’s illuminated Ultrafragola mirror, which presaged selfie culture by decades, made the cut.) There were no limits placed on provenance, and a piece didn’t need to have been designed by a known name, or even attributable.

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Persons: Rafael de Cárdenas, Daniel Romualdez, Modern Art’s, Paola Antonelli, Julianne Moore, Katie Stout, Tom Delavan —, Oki, ”, de Cárdenas, Ettore Sottsass’s, Antonelli, Charles, Ray Eames, Le Corbusier Organizations: New York Times, Museum, Modern Locations: Italian