Joey Aji

Joey Aji is a designer working between sculpture and furniture from his studio in Brooklyn. His pieces begin with architectural fragments like domes, columns, corbels, and carved ornament, which he rebuilds digitally, adjusting and distorting the forms until they feel slightly removed from their origins. Growing up Syrian American around Orthodox and Mediterranean architecture, Aji carries those forms with him, translating references that once felt heavy and inaccessible into a language he can reshape by hand.

Each piece starts as a parametric model before being 3D printed and brought into the studio, where Aji coats and hand-finishes the surface with cement, marble dust, and mineral-based resins. The finished objects lose any trace of their printed origins and read as something closer to stone, while remaining light enough to achieve forms that would be nearly impossible to carve. His references pull from Baroque and Gothic architecture, liturgical objects, and biomorphic shapes with an almost prehistoric quality, all compressed into the same object.

Aji's work questions the linear nature of time. The results are functional, but hard to pin to any era, and his practice makes the case that ornament and historical reference belong in contemporary design, creating pieces that carry narrative and visual density while remaining usable. In 2026, he was named winner of the Emerging Designers Spotlight at ICFF in New York.