ICONIC OLD CLASSIC

bestofyear

iconic old classic

sheltonmindel and architecture + information

Private office, New York

Experiencing perhaps the greatestJames Turrell piece in New York doesn’t require a museum membership. You only need to have business to conduct with this family-run office. Rising through its doubleheight reception area is Turrell’s enormous hollow egg shape, a chamber that required a laborious sixmonth process to construct from white solid-surfacing and concealed LEDs. Typically for this master of light and space, his mysterious conceptual sculpture alters our perceptions. Once you enter the egg and encounter the shifting colors inside, everything outside it looks different for a few seconds.

Like the Turrell, its surroundings make us see the world differently. A Manhattan office, it turns out, can be as graciously proportioned and serene as a Palladian villa. That’s thanks to the impressive real estate: 40,000 square feet of a tower by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and even more so to the joint efforts of the interiors firms, led byInterior Design Hall of Fame members Lee Mindel, Brad Zizmor, and Dag Folger, the latter two the co-founding principals of A+I. Mindel relates the egg installation to the philanthropic work done by the client: “This is a metaphoric think tank. They desired contemplative spaces, as opposed to some others that we all know of. That’s something beyond interior design.”

—Ted Loos

SHELTONMINDEL: LEE MINDEL; GRACE V. SIERRA; MICHAEL NEAL; MARC C. NEWMAN; EMILY M. MERONEY; MARGARET O’CONNOR. ARCHITECTURE + INFORMATION: BRAD ZIZMOR; DAG FOLGER; CHERYL BAXTER; NISHA MARY PRASAD; CHRIS SHELLEY; ABBY KUSKIN; AARON WHITNEY; KATINA MAX KREMELBERG.