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The design writer and collector Dung Ngo owns more than 10,000 pieces of cutlery. It started 25 years ago, when Ngo turned 30 and decided that “the cutlery I bought after college from Target, no longer fit who I was.” He found a 40-piece set he loved in a vintage shop for $400, and spent a week searching through old design journals until he identified it: Composition, by the renowned Finnish designer Tapio Wirkkala. These days, a complete Wirkkala set can fetch upwards of $3,600.
The discovery started an obsession, with Ngo buying piece after piece of iconic cutlery from eBay and antique shops, searching for matches to grainy photographs he found in design magazines from the 1940s, 50s and 60s. “I became hooked,” he said.
That vast collection – which has to be stored out of Ngo’s New York apartment – is the basis of his new book, “Knife Fork Spoon: Modernist Cutlery 1900–2025,” due out in August. The 600-page survey of iconic flatware is accompanied by a recently-opened exhibition at the Denver Art Museum which features over 150 designs, chronologically arranged across themes like airlines, children and travel.
Both projects trace 125 years of flatware design, but, “I thought, that’s not the full story,” said Ngo, who is also editor in chief of the architecture and design journal, AUGUST. “There is also a future to this category, and maybe I can actually participate in that future in a real, physical way, rather than just writing about it.”
