Press
Sheer Genius
By Michael Webb, photography by Iwan Baan. Tours Diego Cano-Lasso's cantilevered Mount Washington house, built with SelgasCano: "Andrew Riiska, an artist whom Cano-Lasso met at SCI-Arc, contributed a bench and stool enriched with colourful upholstered blobs" — the Lion Turtle Chaise Lounge and the Rainbow Hassock, both pictured in the spread though not individually named, sitting alongside two massive boulders craned into the house as side tables before the windows went in.
He Dreamed of a Midcentury Compound on an "Unbuildable" LA Hillside. It Took 12 Years.
Feature on Diego Cano-Lasso's 12-year Mount Washington house project, featuring the Rainbow Hassock.
A Series of Cantilevered Beams and Slender Posts Compose Cano House Above Los Angeles
By Christina Vergopoulou. The Rainbow Hassock appears as furniture within the house.
Market
On the Lion Turtle, debuted at Cranbrook's 2023 graduate exhibition: "My upholstered dots look like islands in a wood stream." The piece note adds detail the site's own page doesn't cover — the stone-pine base carved from a single slab; merino-wool felt donated by Graf Lantz, molded and stretched without stitching, a technique borrowed from millinery; bulbous legs turned from aromatic cedar trunks Riiska played on as a kid at his grandfather's property; and an apron support of sugar pine unearthed behind an oil tank in his mother's garage.
Gorgeous Sustainable Furniture
By Carren Jao.
Disaster Provokes Creativity
By Jennie E. Park.
Business as Usual for Blogger Jules Yap
By Lee Mei Li. Featured the Spring Back Banker's Chair.
Furniture as Art as Furniture: Studio Furniture of Southern California
Andrew's pages, pp. 89–90, ran alongside fellow Southern California makers Edmund Griffin, Samuel Moyer, and Tanya Aguiñiga. On the Bubble Wrap Chair, catalogued here as "Bubble Belt Chair": "The Bubble Belt Chair is designed to be the most wasteful chair in the world. Every time you sit down you have the option to pull on the seat cushion to unroll new bubbles to pop. Built from recycled Douglas fir that was once an actual conveyor belt for the canning industry." On the Kick Ass Chair: "When I was a kid, my father had his electrical contracting shop next to Mr. Carter's carpentry shop. One day I went in there with my dad and there was a telephone booth–sized machine made out of 2 by 4 boards... You stood in the booth and pulled a string and the boot would kick you in the ass... Mr. Carter has long passed. My mother and siblings think I made the whole story up. I had no one to corroborate my story so I built my own version in chair form."
Best Hand Made Gifts, 2013 Holiday Season
By Craig Nakano.
Art From Fallen Trees
Everything Solid Melts Into Air
By Harris Silver. Covers "Wrong Side Up," the solo exhibition at Jai & Jai.
Gallery Listing — "Wrong Side Up"
Jai & Jai's own ad in that week's LA Weekly, promoting Andrew's solo furniture exhibition "Wrong Side Up," on display through April 15, 2012, at 648 N. Spring St. in LA's Chinatown.
Feature: Andrew Riiska
Off a Scrap Heap
By Lisa Boone. On how a Craigslist ad for 12 tons of scrap wood became "The Dunnage Show": designer Samuel Moyer spotted the listing and knew it was right for L.A. Box Collective. "Sam found the posting and said, 'Let's get it. We're the ones who can do something with it,'" said Leigh Kivowitz Spencer, who represented the group. The collective bought and hauled the oak and elm from a San Fernando Valley storage unit and turned it into one-of-a-kind furniture, including the Cloud Pony Bench, pictured with the article, alongside pieces by Casey Dzierlenga, Cliff Spencer, David Johnson, and William Stranger.
Best of Ikea Hacker 2010
Featured the Spring Back Chair.
A Shopper's Guide to L.A.'s New Design Scene
By Monica Khemsurov and Amy Prince. The guide's gallery listing for Fifth Floor Gallery — "part art gallery, part furniture showroom," curated by founder-architect Robert Apodaca, one of the eleven members of L.A. Box Collective — names its must-have as "Inky and Pac Man tables by Andrew Riiska for L.A. Box Collective, $400 and $500."
How Harrison Ford's Son Converted an LA Picture House
By Lucie Young.
Ford&Ching Come to Oakland
By Jordan Kushins.
The Art of Style
Photography by Robert Deutschman, profiling a small group of California furniture designers styled and shot in the magazine's fashion pages alongside Edmund Griffin, Samuel Moyer, Susan Hornbeak Ortiz, and Tanya Aguiñiga. Andrew's page, on the 80-Leg Table: "My designs are prose full of metaphors. The 80-Leg table is my attempt to capture the visual and emotional feeling of driving through a field of corn. However, like a good H. P. Lovecraft story, I keep the monster vague and hidden, leaving room for the reader to use his or her own imagination to fill in the details of the beast — that is why I love watching people interact with my work."
Finds: What's Hot and Happening in California Design — "Enter the Dragon"
By Chris Le. Featured the Dragon Table, included in "Action/Reaction," the fourth California Design Biennial at the Pasadena Museum of California Art: "Andrew is one of those craftsmen who straddles the contemporary and traditional worlds," says curator Alissa Walker.
Action/Reaction: California Design Biennial — Product Design, Curated by Alissa Walker
The Dragon Table was project 9 in the biennial's Product Design section, credited: "Firm: Riiska Design · Designer: Andrew Riiska · Client: Ford & Ching · Photo: Matt Lee." Curator Alissa Walker's essay frames the section's larger thread: "The garage tinkerers, the idealistic visionaries, the activist artisans, they're all working here... California designers still manage to make products that capture our imagination even as they protect the planet, improve cities, and save lives."
Eco Finds: Dispatches from the Green Scene — "Coming Together"
By Nicole Powell. On LA Box Collective, the group of eleven Southern California furniture makers Andrew co-founded: "a group of 11 Southern California furniture makers who share a vision of environmentally and socially conscious design... this summer, the group is repurposing 'dunnage' — scraps used for skids on shipping containers — to create one-of-a-kind pieces," on view at Fifth Floor Gallery, Los Angeles. Andrew appears in the group photo alongside the rest of Box Collective. The same issue's Dragon Table feature, two pages earlier, ran without either writer realizing they'd covered the same maker twice.
Ford&Ching Marshmallow Boxes
Everything is Hackable Including Furniture
By Emily Bond.