TQatar Nov.-Dec.2019 by Oryx Group of Magazines

Cultural November - December 2019

THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE

FUSION

OF THE

ILLUSTRIOUS

Cultural November - December 2019

Nick Cave Using materials that range from twigs to crystals to rainbowcolored hair, the artist makes sculptures that, for all their beauty, are visceral and necessary critiques of racial injustice. By Megan O’Grady Photographs by Renée Cox

The Ground Beneath

THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE

On the cover

Page 60

Nick Cave Photographed by Renée Cox Chicago, June 4.

A detail of Cave’s 2019 “Augment” installation, made from inflatable lawn ornaments.

RENÉE COX

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Wild grasses once covered great swaths of the United States and are now returning as focal points in free-spirited bouquets. By Ligaya Mishan Photograph by Guido Castagnoli Styled by Mary Lennox

QATAR TODAY

SOON

THINGS

Notes on the Culture Contemporary quilts, a hotel by Axel Vervoordt, all-weather shoes and more.

Of a Kind Alison Loehnis’s vintage jewelry. Illustrations by Aurore de la Morinerie

PEOPLE 19

Super Natural Snakes, spiders and other animal jewelry pieces that seem to sparkle with life. Photographs by Kyoko Hamada Styled by Chloe Daley Jewelry Editor Angela Koh

The Thing From Hermès, a lamp like a kite. By Nancy Hass Photograph by Florent Tanet

Time’s Arrow For nearly six decades, Beverly Pepper has bent metal to her will, creating monumental sculptures that rewrite the rules of modern art. By Megan O’Grady Photographs by Federico Ciamei

After the Fall Post-bloom, flowers become dried seed heads — and an entirely different kind of beautiful. By Ligaya Mishan Photograph by William Farr Styled by Steven Edney

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PLACES 25

Another Thing A Rolex watch with a gleaming turquoise face. By Nancy Hass Photograph by David Chow Styled by Todd Knopke

This Is an Indian House Bijoy Jain is creating a new architectural language that acknowledges his country’s precolonial past. By Aatish Taseer Photographs by Tobias Alexander Harvey

The Collective Feast Hidden behind a larger building, the Manhattan apartment of Laila Gohar and Omar Sosa is an urban oasis filled with art and design pieces made by their cherished friends and guests. By Alice Newell-Hanson Photographs by Blaine Davis

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FROM TOP: FEDERICO CIAMEI; KYOKO HAMADA

Notes on the Culture Qatar

Qatari Style by Ibrahim Al Jaidah showcases the warmth of Middle Eastern hospitality; Chef Stefano Ciotti introduces Veritas’ special Northern Italian cuisines; and more.

Life Found in Motion Pictures Ajyal Film Festival breaks boundaries through cinematic dialogue. By Alexandra Evangelista

PEOPLE QATAR 23

On Health and Hustle Rawane Tahtouh, a woman of many talents, on finding joys in acting and fitness. By Alexandra Evangelista Photo courtesy of Rawane Tahtouh Page 104

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PLACES QATAR 31

THINGS QATAR

A Matter of Mindful Design Alila Seminyak embarked on a design journey to capture nature’s essence on the Island of the Gods. By Karen Gines Photos courtesy of Alila Seminyak

A Kindom Up in the Sky

With monasteries sitting pretty at an altitude of 3,000 meters, here’s a chance to look at the world from up in the sky. By Debrina Aliyah Photographs by Chan Mei Ling

What’s On Your Plate? On the island of Bali, two nutritionists dish out burgers that fit your macros. Text and Photos By Debrina Aliyah

The Shoe That Tells a Story A conversation with the Qatari shoe designer Hissa Al Haddad. By Dipti Nair

Tech Savvy Sleek accessories put the luxe in geeky essentials By Debrina Aliyah

Cinematic Voices in Fashion

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FROM TOP: CHAN MEI LING; DEBRINA ALIYAH

In its sixth year, a film festival continues the increasingly relevant dialogue between fashion and social issues. By Debrina Aliyah

T: THE STYLE MAGAZINE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES Editor in Chief Hanya Yanagihara

Creative Director Patrick Li

Executive Managing Editor Minju Pak

Photography and Video Director Nadia Vellam

THE NEW YORK TIMES LICENSING GROUP General Manager: Michael Greenspon Vice President: Alice Ting Vice President, Executive Editor: Nancy Lee LICENSED EDITIONS Editorial Director: Anita Patil Deputy Editorial Director: Armando Arrieta Art Director: Simonetta Nieto Editorial Coordinator: Ian Carlino Coordinator: Ilaria Parogni

In conversation with Kiera Chaplin, who represented the Desert Flower Foundation at the Fashion Film Festival Milano.

Page 51 Publisher & Editor In Chief Yousuf Jassem Al Darwish Managing Director & CEO Jassem bin Yousuf Al Darwish

ART Senior Art Director Mansour El-Sheikh

Fashion Editor Debrina Aliyah

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Junior Correspondent Alexandra Evangelista

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PHOTO COURTESY OF FASHION FILM FESTIVAL MILANO.

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General Manager Dr. Faisal Fouad

EDITORIAL Chief Editor Ezdihar Ibrahim Ali

Introduces

For the textile artist Adam Pogue, necessity has always bred invention. “I didn’t have money, and I wanted to decorate my place,” he says, so Pogue, 41, began He also showed the piece to Roman Alonso, the co-founder of the crafting things for his Los Angeles apartment, upholstering a sofa Los Angeles design firm Commune. “It was obvious that Adam is in a Japanese boro-style hodgepodge of thrifted denim, knotting an artist,” says Alonso, who commissioned Pogue to create curtains a rag rug for the floor and making curtains to use as room for the dining room of his Los Feliz home, requesting that they dividers. By 2015, Pogue, who in college studied architecture and resemble stained glass. Pogue immediately thought of sculpture, was wondering if he might make something Adam Pogue’s “Orange the Korean tradition of bojagi — patchworked squares more of his sewing projects. On nights and weekends, Quilt” (2018; left), made of cloth joined with hand-sewn sealed seams. A quilt he had begun piecing together a quilt, what he with hemp linen, mixed cottons and canvas, and is typically layers of fabric with batting in between, describes as a “Bauhaus-y” composition in bright “First Quilt” (2016), which but bojagi can be a single, translucent sheet, finished colors like magenta, yellow and blue. When he shared incorporates denim, on both sides; hold it up to the light and the seams the project on Instagram, the response prompted painters’ drop cloths and vintage nautical flags. echo the lines created when panels of stained glass him to quit his day job. Quilts, he recognized, are He also made the floor are soldered together. After learning to replicate “universal, something that I could put my aesthetic covering, curtains and the technique on a machine, Pogue delivered three into, that other people could love and use.” wall hanging.

ADAM POGUE’S “ORANGE QUILT,” $8,000, AND “FIRST QUILT,” $8,750, THEFUTUREPERFECT .COM. ALL COMMISSIONS AVAILABLE THROUGH COMMUNE DESIGN

Photograph by Philip Cheung

panels comprising a Tetris matrix of shapes and erratic pops of color — bojagi by way of Frank Lloyd Wright, with a little of Kazimir Malevich to boot. These days, Pogue sells patchworked quilts, ottomans and pillows through Commune, sometimes incorporating vintage textiles that Alonso finds on his travels. Pogue also has a hand in several of the firm’s projects — making curtains for the restaurant of a forthcoming museum in Los Angeles; creating window panels for the Ace Hotel in Kyoto, scheduled to open next year; and appliquéing a giant wraparound sectional in Japanese indigos for a client’s San Francisco residence. He still works out of his home, a loft in downtown Los Angeles filled with furniture he’s made, including a Donald Judd-inspired plywood daybed. And he remains thrifty, upcycling old kimonos donated by a neighbor or using an old mailbag procured from an Army Navy surplus store. When he does buy fabric, he’ll dye it with saved onion skins. “I like to touch every part of them,” he says of his works, which balance intricacy with playfulness. Take the embroidered cloth cover he made for his turntable, or the ottoman he upholstered that looks to be wearing a patchwork Dickensian sleeping cap. Like those of the renowned African-American quilters of Gee’s Bend, Ala., (“another huge influence,” he says), Pogue’s compositions are painterly and abstract, free-form and intuitive. “He just has this instinct for it,” says Alonso. Pogue thinks of it a bit differently. “Too much math,” he replies, when asked if he might eventually expand into making clothing. “I’m more of a cook than a baker. I’m throwing things in the pot to see how they taste.” — Julia Felsenthal

MINI MARKET

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Distinctive Timepieces

Known as the Vault, the new high fine jewelry and watch floor at Saks Fifth Avenue’s flagship includes a wide array of men’s (or unisex) timepieces, many of them one-of-a-kind or limited edition. Clockwise from above: Franck Muller Round Tourbillon Diamond Emerald watch, covered in over 500 baguette-cut stones, $1,200,000; Hermès Arceau Serti Clou evening watch with a black aventurine dial, $45,100; Chopard Alpine Eagle watch in stainless steel, $12,900. (212) 753-4000.

THOUGH THE FURNITURE designer Brett Miller handcrafts chunky oak stools and walnut coffee tables in a ramshackle barn in Catskill, A bar-height version N.Y., he resists what he terms the “macho of Miller’s Butt Stool upstate woodworker thing”: that ste(left), with a red oak top and Douglas fir legs, reotype of a flannel-clad carpenter who and a Chubby Chair, makes unfeeling, hypermasculine work. crafted from eastern Instead, his ergonomic pieces, at least 12 of white pine and tulipwood. which will be on display later this month at the Los Angeles home goods store Lawson-Fenning, are the result of an intuitive, tactile approach that prioritizes warmth and softness over clean edges. Take, for example, his anthropomorphic Butt Stool, a low, kidney-shaped seat with four stocky whitewashed wooden legs that resemble elongated Tic Tacs stood upright. The outline of the stool’s red oak top, originally inspired by a commission from a friend to create an aesthetically pleasing take on a Squatty Potty, is based on the designer’s own seated form. (Taller versions of the piece now line the bar at Relationships, a minimalist coffee shop and design showroom in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.) Miller, 30, has only been making work on his own since 2017, following a year spent assisting in the studio of the Hudson, N.Y.-based furniture company Fern, and remains mostly self-taught: Until he moved to Catskill from his native San Diego in 2015, he was a semiprofessional baseball player. “Because I never had any formal training, the idea of precision and straight lines never got beaten into me,” he says. “I just go with what I feel.” — Alice Newell-Hanson

Bums in Seats

ROOMS WITH SOUL

“I DON’T LIKE to do hotels,” says the 72-year-old Belgian designer Axel Vervoordt, whose career began half a century ago with his reimagining of several dilapidated 15th- and 16th-century houses in Antwerp’s medieval center. “It’s 35 of the same thing.” He’s made a few exceptions, conceiving of a presidential suite for the Greenwich Hotel in Manhattan in 2014 and a new wing for the Bayerischer Hof in Munich last year. But the newly opened Purs — set in a 17th-century, gable-roofed former chancellery building in the western German river town of Andernach — is the first hotel whose interiors were designed entirely by Vervoordt and his team. “It was a small project, but the historically protected building proved convincing,” says Purs’s owner, Rolf Doetsch, who, like Vervoordt, was delighted when, during the renovation, workers dug up old Roman coins and The hotel lounge, jewelry, as well as a 2,000-year-old miniature bronze statue of Minerva. with Axel Vervoordtdesigned cubic Inside, Vervoordt and his project manager, Erik Van der Pas, adhered to a walnut tables and version of wabi-sabi, privileging rough-hewn and period-appropriate materials, 1990s-era paintings including Flemish stone tiles from a historic house in Belgium and a vintage by Sadaharu Horio. French pharmacy counter (now the reception desk), over those with perfect polish. They also came up with a different scheme for each of the 11 suites: One has rich red walls and Vervoordt’s signature earthtone linen-covered couches and chairs, while another features a muted blue entrance that leads to an airy bedroom. Elsewhere, there is art by the 20th-century European artist group Zero and its Japanese counterpart, Gutai: Several of Yuko Nasaka’s panels of concentric circles hang in the hotel restaurant, which, thanks to the chef Christian Eckhardt, has already won two Michelin stars. — Gisela Williams

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: BRETT MILLER BUTT STOOL, $1,100, AND CHUBBY CHAIR, $3,250, JACKRABBIT.STUDIO/IMAGES BY CHRIS MOTTALINI; MICHAEL KÖNIGSHOFER; COURTESY OF CHOPARD; COURTESY OF FRANCK MULLER; COURTESY OF HERMÈS

NOTES ON THE CULTURE

continued from page 13

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: BURBERRY SHOES, US.BURBERRY.COM. SALVATORE FERRAGAMO SHOES, FERRAGAMO.COM. JACQUEMUS SHOES, JACQUEMUS.COM. PRADA SHOES, PRADA.COM. STELLA MCCARTNEY SHOES, (212) 320-8350. HERMÈS SHOES, HERMES.COM. TOD’S SHOES, TODS.COM. PIERRE HARDY SHOES, PIERREHARDY.COM. JIL SANDER SHOES, JILSANDER.COM. DRIES VAN NOTEN SHOES, BERGDORFGOODMAN.COM

MARKET REPORT

Clockwise from top left: Burberry, $790. Salvatore Ferragamo, $1,150. Jacquemus, $550. Prada, price on request. Stella McCartney, $455. Hermès, $1,100. Tod’s, $675. Pierre Hardy, $745. Jil Sander, $1,190. Dries Van Noten, $740.

All-Weather Shoes

Rubberized high-tops, brogues and boots for rain or shine.

Photographs by Mari Maeda and Yuji Oboshi

NOTES ON THE CULTURE QATAR

Ajyal Film Festival comes to a close with a celebration with all participants; below, Elia Suleiman in a conversation with journalists during a press briefing of It Must Be Heaven.

Life found in motion pictures DOHA FILM Institute presented the seventh edition of the Ajyal Film Festival held at Katara Cultural Village showcasing a line-up of feature films and a series of short programs. Ajyal – Arabic for generations – brings people of all ages and nationalities together through cinematic dialogue. Over six days, the theme “Find Film, Find Life” is embodied in 96 films – local, regional and international – from 36 countries. The film festival brought together Qatar’s growing film community, from budding filmmakers to genre fans, in celebration of the much-anticipated annual event. Ajyal Film Festival’s selections were curated not just for entertainment but also to inspire literacy and creativity in both the audience and creators. Four hundred jurors from 45 nationalities including 48 international jurors traveled to Doha for the Ajyal Jury Competition where films were critiqued based on creative and emotional encounters. Inspiring stories, compelling characters and a

unique mix of genres and styles expressed creative and cultural understanding through the powerful medium of film. “Ajyal is more than just films,” says HE Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, Chairperson of the Doha Film Institute (DFI). “It is a journey that will stay with you forever – the people you meet and the things you see will not end with the festival, but encourage you to carry forward the spirit of what you learned.” This year’s edition also promoted cinema as a medium of global positive change and as a platform to empower the region’s youth and inspire film enthusiasts in Qatar. It Must Be Heaven, a film portrayed and directed by the award-winning Palestinian auteur Elia Suleiman – winner of the Jury Special Mention and FIPRESCI Critics’ Award at the Cannes Film Festival – takes center stage as part of the feature films in the festival. Speaking just four words in the entire 97-minute film, Suleiman uses his penetrating gaze and expressive body language in

PHOTOS COURTESY OF DOHA FILM INSTITUTE

16 T QATAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE

Ajyal Film Festival breaks boundaries through cinematic dialogue.

From top to bottom: Rawane Tahtouh's workout routine; Tahtouh holding a detox drink as

distilling the soul of Palestine whilst reviving the forgotten art of silent comedy. Even with the absence of dialogue from his character, he was able to spark the curiosity of the public who dug deep into its meaning. Clearing the air, he described his character as someone who is seeking for an alternative homeland and felt the need to experience and become part of what is going on in the world. The character leaves Palestine because of the ongoing internal struggles, only to discover by a twist of fate that conflicts are going on everywhere, not just in his homeland. “This is about global violence, globalization and the Palestinisation of the world,” says Suleiman. Sorry We Missed You portrays a family who is struggling to make ends meet in modern-day England. Directed by Ken Loach – an English filmmaker and winner of the Audience Award for Best European Film at the San Sebastián International Film Festival 2019 – the film sketched the devastating effects of the 2008 financial crisis which led the husband and wife to engage in “zero-hour” contract work which deprives them of any real employment benefits or security. The inevitable consequence is palpable as they struggle to keep their family together on a tight budget. You Will Die at Twenty is a compelling film about a Sudanese boy named Muzamel who was cursed by a Dervish prophecy to die at the age of 20. Directed by Amjad Abu Alala, a Sudanese filmmaker born and raised in the United Arab Emirates, the film portrays how a family living in a small village in Sudan struggles to keep their child’s fate at bay. Nearing their son’s impending doom, a cinematographer named Suliman entered his life which led to the discovery of a whole new world through the man’s old cinema projector. The thought-provoking film invites the audience to explore the possibilities of the boy’s future if he should accept his fate or step into the new world that he has just discovered. Apart from the impressive array of feature films,

Ooredoo presents “Made in Qatar”, returning as a two-part program this year with 22 internationally and locally made short films, documentaries, and experimental narratives, exhibiting the everexpanding influence of the country’s burgeoning film industry. “Qatar’s film industry will rise with our youth,” Al Mayassa said in her speech at the official opening of the festival. “This is why I encourage you to rise to this occasion and take this opportunity to learn together and become part of a global movement of youth that is making a difference.” Before the year ends, the festival will also celebrate the Qatar-India 2019 Year of Culture through a presentation of highly-acclaimed short dramas and comedies in a special program called “Made in India”.

The invaluable exchange of culture also unfurled in the local arts and creative community of Doha with the inauguration of Ajyal Creative Hub featuring Ajyal Tunes and ARC – which showcases the works of emerging multimedia artists. As part of the creative section, Qatar’s largest pop-culture event ‘Geekdom,’ in partnership with Qatar National Tourism Council, also enabled participants to embrace their inner nerd with its electrifying video-game tournaments, cosplay competition, and exciting animated screenings. “Ajyal Film Festival is a way to explore new horizons of creative and cultural understanding through the powerful medium of film. Take heart in this inspiring journey of learning and building a community,” says Fatma Hassan Alremaihi, Chief Executive Officer of DFI and Festival Director.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF DOHA FILM INSTITUTE

From top: A father and daughter scene from the movie Sorry We Missed You; a scene from the movie You Will Die at Twenty.

MSHEIREB MUSEUMS, Doha’s heritage house and cultural hub, hosted a book launch by the author and CEO of the Arab Engineering Bureau, Ibrahim Al Jaidah. His new title, Qatari Style, is a compilation of various interior spaces showcasing the warmth of Middle-Eastern hospitality with the charm of the local culture. The featured interiors celebrate personal and local curations reflected in the spaces, but also the extent of foreign influences on local culture. Qatar, though just a small peninsula in the Arabian Gulf, served as a crossroad for trade and migration routes and the influences of various cultures can be observed in interiors throughout the country. — Alexandra Evangelista

PALATABLE EXCELLENCE EXCELLENCE IS SYNONYMOUS with Veritas, a Northern Italian dining spot inside Doha’s urban oasis. Crafted by Michelin-starred chef Stefano Ciotti, one of Italy’s most noted culinary stars, Veritas is the ultimate destination for global gourmets with its rich and authentic flavors. The seasonally influenced menu is anchored by fresh antipasti, rich home-made pasta, grilled meat, and seafood. Prepared with small plates and pure ingredients, Ciotti proposes all the hallmarks of traditional Northern Italian fare which is characterized by an abundance of butter, risotto, polenta, and cheeses. — Alexandra Evangelista

IMAGINARY UNIVERSE KAWS: He Eats Alone and "Holiday" arrive in Doha.

GO BIG OR GO HOME is a philosophical concept proposed in Brian Donnelly's first-ever solo exhibition in the Middle East. The American contemporary artist, more famously known as KAWS, featured forty artworks representing the artist’s studio practice in the Garage Gallery at Doha Fire Station. A monumental 40-meter long inflatable sculpture titled “Holiday” was also found “chilling” in Doha’s Dhow Harbour. Acclaimed art historian Germano Celant curated the exhibition as he explored the artist’s career and vast body of work over the past twenty years. The figures by KAWS bear witness to the cosmopolitan spirit of art “without place” that conveys an imaginary universe. — Alexandra Evangelista

PHOTO CREDITS: MSHEIREB MUSEUMS; VERITAS / AL MESSILA RESORT & SPA; MOHAMMED AL-EMADI (KAWS); QATAR MUSEUMS

NOTES ON THE CULTURE QATAR

THE QATARI STYLE

Michelin-starred chef Stefano Ciotti introduces Veritas' special Northern Italian cuisines.

18 T QATAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE

Qatari Style by Ibrahim Al Jaidah showcases the warmth of Middle Eastern hospitality.

ARTS AND LETTERS

Beverly Pepper, photographed in her studio in Todi, Italy.

columns in place, the pieces suspended in the sky, descending millimeter by millimeter. The mayor comes over to congratulate her, followed by friends and other passers-by: “Bellissimi, signora, grazie.” Pepper smiles. “I’d forgotten how good they are,” she says of the columns, finally, after the hubbub subsides. The irony is that, for all their modern poise, once installed, the four ‘‘Todi Columns’’ might always have been there: relics not from the 1970s but the Iron Age, the kind of archaeological remnants that make you aware of your own minuteness in the larger human project. The effect is similar in nearby Assisi, where “Ascensione” (2008), a massive bisected curve of Cor-Ten steel stretching upward — a kind of skateboard ramp to the heavens — seems perfectly in place a stone’s throw from the Basilica of St. Francis. Public art can sometimes feel ponderously corporate or impersonal, but the unroofed splendor of Pepper’s site-

At 96, the American-born, Italybased sculptor Beverly Pepper is at both the height and very end of a career that has outlasted her peers and challenged the assumptions of modern art itself.

specific works can prompt unexpectedly potent encounters. Wandering through Todi’s emptied piazza during the dinner hour, the silence has a certain volume; I feel freshly aware of my feet on the planet under the demarcated sky, the passing clouds overhead, the exclamation marks of the columns’ shadows underfoot. They don’t dominate but punctuate. They are framing devices for wonderment. Time, that fourth dimension, has always been an essential element in Pepper’s work — a desire to create

Time’s Arrow By Megan O’Grady Photographs by Federico Ciamei

IT’S EARLY ONE APRIL morning in Todi, Italy, and the installation is already underway: the four sculptures in pieces on a flatbed truck in the deserted piazza; the dawn sky lit a dramatic ombré, like a Giorgio de Chirico painting. Within the hour, the town begins to wake: flocks of schoolchildren, men and women oblivious to the russet-colored steel monoliths — each around 33 feet high and weighing about eight tons — slowly rising in their midst. The artist arrives, observing the scene from a small white car tucked in a corner of the piazza. “I get goose pimples,” she says. “It’s been 40 years.” It’s hard to imagine now, but in 1979, when the American sculptor and environmental artist Beverly Pepper first created the columns for this ancient Umbrian hill town, their presence was controversial. Monumental contemporary sculpture was novel here then, and Todi’s modest square, which dates at least to the 11th century, is itself a sacred space: The evening I arrived, I was met by the face of Christ, his blurry visage projected on the duomo for the town festival. But traditionalists’ attitudes have changed, in large part because of the Brooklyn-born artist herself, who has made her home in Italy since the 1950s and has been an honorary citizen of Todi for a decade. Those Tuderti (as people from Todi are known) old enough to remember the columns’ first appearance speak with reverence for the woman who bends metal like paper, who makes chunks of steel transcendent; their return, they say, feels like a necessary correction. Pepper recalls how, in those days before 3-D digitalmapping software, she walked the piazza to understand its proportions. The morning after the columns were installed, following a night of rain, she arrived alone. “I was overwhelmed by what I’d done,” she says. Today, she watches quietly, fretting (unnecessarily) about the safety of her assistants, who, with the help of the crane operator, are stacking the

ARTS AND LETTERS PEOPLE 20 T QATAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE

Among the objects in her studio are plaster castings from a more whimsical creation — not art — of Pepper’s for Christmas with the family one year.

something outside history, something bigger and more enduring than herself, than all of us. Its passage is evident in the cycle of seasons in her earthworks — a transformative winter in “Palingenesis” (1993-94), a 227-foot-long cast-iron relief embedded to a retaining wall in a Zurich hillside, or with “Thel” (1975-77) on the Dartmouth campus in New Hampshire, where cantilevered pyramids disappear entirely when it snows and reappear when it melts for students to lounge upon. Its fingerprints are unmistakable in the moody patina of her cast-iron pieces, like Federal Plaza’s “Manhattan Sentinels” (1993-96), or the velvety finish of her iconic Cor-Ten works, which she’s been making since the late 1970s. In 1964, Pepper was among the first sculptors to use the industrial alloy, which oxidizes and stabilizes without the use of paint or sealant. If the weather doesn’t cooperate with enough rain to rust a sculpture before it is unveiled, she jokes that her assistants will just have to pee on it.

AT 96, PEPPER is in deep time. Her children, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham and the photographer John R. Pepper, have grown children of their own. She recently became a great-grandmother. Pepper’s monumental sculptures and land art, the products of an extraordinary six-decade-long career, can be found on three continents; she’s been awarded countless commissions and prizes. And yet her legacy is still unsettled. If Pepper’s story illuminates how a place can stake its claim on an artist’s psyche and soul, the geographic remove from New York’s art world that gave her space to innovate also kept her from the sort of fame enjoyed by other monumental sculptors of her caliber, like Sol LeWitt or Richard Serra, both of whom she admires. Pepper simply didn’t play the game. This did not, however, keep her from finding early representation by such important New York City galleries as André Emmerich and Marlborough, as well as acclaim from prominent critics. Then there’s the fact that Pepper’s eclectic, allusively titled body of work tells a complicated story, one that imprecisely adhered to the rigid tenets of Minimalism, with its anti-referent stance and self-justifying manifestoes. In retrospect, one can’t help but feel her instincts were right

all along; even her oldest pieces feel sui generis, not pinned to a single point in art historical time. (Her touchstones are at least as European as they are American; she especially loves Brancusi and Piero della Francesca). “I don’t like to get caught in any kind of mental trap when I’m working,” she says. “I feel and see. Things fall from my mind to my hands.” Pepper never serializes; she’s avoided cultivating a sole trademark style, preferring to explore a range of materials and processes intuitively, with an almost Zen-like attention to the “divine accident,” as she calls it, the chance encounter. If a cricket lands on her sketchpad (she’s constantly sketching), she’ll simply include the insect in her drawing rather than brush it to the ground. Later, something of the architecture of its body may appear, transfigured, in a sculpture. One of the many divine accidents of her career occurred when she discovered glacial erratics — immense angular rock slabs — on a collector’s property in California and incorporated them into her “San Anselmo Monolith” (2007-10). “You have to listen to the materials,” she tells me. “Bronze is very controlled; metal — anything you can bend to your will — you have to figure out how to make warmth come to it. Each material has its own kind of aliveness.” Pepper’s animism doesn’t feel mistily numinous but rather born of a fascination with the geometric building blocks of the natural world. There is, of course, another reason she’s remained on the art world’s periphery: Misogyny takes a bow. In the opening paragraph of a virulent New York Times review of her 1987 Brooklyn Museum retrospective, John Russell wrote, “Rome is a charismatic place, and by all accounts Ms. Pepper is a charismatic person,” before blasting the show — at the time, among the largest ever devoted to a living sculptor by a major New York museum — as “one of the most debilitating, hyped-up and deeply offensive exhibitions of the postwar era.” (Reading this, Pepper took to her bed for two weeks.) It’s that old story, the unsung brilliance of a woman who is somehow threatening to someone. Industrial fabrication and land art have always had a macho cast, and in fact, there weren’t a lot of women sculptors of her generation in the factory bending sheets of metal with welders or casting ductile iron alongside engineers accustomed to building balustrades and bridges. (Other trailblazing 20th-century giants of sculpture such as Louise Bourgeois, Barbara Hepworth and Louise Nevelson made their work in foundries.) Pepper also failed to fit the narrative of second-wave feminism: As an abstract artist, she wasn’t embraced by the burgeoning women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s, and she’s yet to have had her moment of rediscovery. The expectation runs strong now, as it did then, that creative women make art of their faces and psyches. But Pepper has always resisted such categorical labels as “woman artist”; in Italian, she insists on being referred to not as scultrice but scultore. This has been Pepper’s year, beginning with a retrospective of smaller-scale early work at Los Angeles’s Kayne Griffin Corcoran: arched steel ribbons like three-dimensional brush strokes; polished stainless steel boxes that reflect their surroundings enigmatically. In February, a second show of recent monumental sculptures made of Cor-Ten steel opened at Marlborough’s downtown New York gallery — a return to the curve after many years of sentinels, wedges and obelisks. At the Venice Biennale in May, she showed more of those colossal torques and twists. This month, the Beverly Pepper Sculpture Park opened in Todi, featuring 16 works donated by the artist in a landscape of her design. (The 2019 ‘‘Todi Columns’’ have made their permanent home here.) She’s also just completed construction of her latest “amphisculpture” — classically inspired outdoor performance spaces she’s built in New Jersey, New York’s Westchester County and Pistoia, Italy. This one, in L’Aquila, seats a thousand people and is the artist’s gift to the Abruzzan city still rebuilding after the 2009 earthquake. It has already become a popular public gathering place for concerts, its smooth, curving rose-and-white granite shell rising out of a valley just down the hill from the glorious Basilica di Santa Maria di Collemaggio, built more than 700 years ago of the same local stone. This sensitivity — to history, ecology and the community — defines Pepper’s earthworks in contrast to land art’s associations with earth-gouging excavations in far-flung desert locales. Even in her most ambitious projects there’s a lack of bombast. They range from the very urban — Barcelona’s spectacular 115,200-square-foot “Sol I Ombra Park” (1987-92), featuring a cresting mound of earth covered in ceramic tiles in shimmering azulejo blues — to the pastoral: “Hawk Hill Calgary Sentinels” (2008-10), which includes pyramids constructed on soil excavated from a wetland restoration project outside the Canadian city. Pepper’s ongoing conversation between the natural world and what we build on

Time, that fourth dimension, has always been an essential element in Pepper’s work — a desire to create something outside history.

A FEW DAYS before the installation, I visit Pepper at the verdant rolling hills surrounding Torre Gentile, the village in Todi that has been her home since the early 1970s, when she and her husband, Curtis Bill Pepper, the journalist and author, bought and renovated the castle at the top of a cypress-lined road. At the time, no Americans lived here, but so many of the Peppers’ visitors ended up acquiring property in the area — including the New Yorker writer Jane Kramer and the Abstract Expressionist Al Held — that it’s become known as Beverly Hills. Several years ago, before Bill died in 2014, the couple built a one-story home surrounding Pepper’s studio, and this is where I find her, perfecting models for her latest sculptures, including two taut, tapering curves sweeping dramatically upward. “A little bit thinner here,” she tells one of her assistants. “It looks like a fat woman.” Following a bad fall three years ago, Pepper uses a wheelchair, and while she no longer makes her own full-scale models in plaster, her process still moves from sketches to maquettes in poster board, which she often fabricates at that size before going bigger. Everything she creates must look imprevedibile, or “unpredictable,” with an “incredible tension,” she says, “otherwise, it’s boring.” It’s sometimes hard for her to know when to stop: Even her iconic ‘‘Todi Columns’’ weren’t spared a makeover. When the price of transporting the originals from Venice turned out to be prohibitive, she remade them instead, taking the opportunity to finesse their proportions: “The neck was too stumpy.” The wine comes out at lunch — an informal affair served at the kitchen table involving ravioli and greens from Pepper’s garden — and so do the stories, from her memories of Alice B. Toklas — “She came to lunch and it was rather disconcerting because she had a pronounced mustache,” recalls Pepper, “but Bill liked to flirt with all the gay ladies” — to the time Betty Friedan cornered her at an event — “She looked like a truck driver, that’s the nicest thing I can say, and she said, ‘Well, are you with us or are we not together?’ I said, ‘None of you invited me in!’ ” Italy has been Pepper’s home for nearly seven decades, but her voice

and screwball humor are all Brooklyn. She was born Beverly Stoll in 1922; her father sold rugs and furs. The only art in their house off Flatbush Avenue was a painting of a ship on velvet. The Depression cast a shadow, but two women made Pepper believe she could do anything: her mother, Beatrice, an activist for the NAACP who made space for Pepper in the basement to paint, and her paternal grandmother, Rose, who fled Vilnius as a teenage Menshevik prone to speechmaking against the czar. (In 2005, Pepper completed an earthwork in Rose’s honor, “Walls of Memory, For My Grandmother,” for which she gathered branches from a nearby forest and embedded them in concrete.) “There’s a while, a lifetime, when you’re young and you don’t realize you’re a woman,” Pepper explains. It didn’t last. At 6, after she bought a box of colored pencils from the neighborhood store with a dollar pilfered from her mother’s pocketbook, her father beat her so viciously she couldn’t attend school for a week. “I left home in my mind then,” she says. At Pratt Institute, where an invitation to join a sorority was rescinded after it was discovered that she was Jewish, she was barred from pursuing industrial design, which involved unfeminine things like saws and welders. Her mother’s fear that she would become a “starving artist” led Pepper to graphic design and commercial art, and by 24, she was a successful, if restless, art director at a Manhattan advertising agency. Inspired by a young illustrator in her office (named, fatefully, Jorie), she got on a boat to Europe, enrolling at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where she studied with the Cubist painter André Lhote and Fernand Léger, a champion of outdoor public art. A workbench littered with tools “It was an amazing experience in the Todi studio. Pepper began sculpting in her late 30s, because I felt like Eve — I had just after a trip to Angkor Wat. discovered that I was naked,” she says of her arrival in Paris. Pepper was painting then, mostly social realism, as she absorbed the scenes of poverty and suffering she saw in postwar Europe. She was alone in Rome when she met Bill, an art history enthusiast and former Army Air Force intelligence, at what was then an artists’ hangout, the bar at the legendary Hotel d’Inghilterra. (Decades later, when her daughter checked into the hotel, asking that they give her a good room while she was on a book tour, the elderly portier told her, “Signora Jorie, I’ll give you the room you were conceived in.”) Pepper and Bill married in Paris and eventually settled in Rome, where the artist had her first show, of paintings she’d made in Paris, at Galleria dello Zodiaco. (By all accounts, the connective tissue in the couple’s 65-year marriage was a deep respect for each other’s work — one verbally gifted and analytical, the other creative and intuitive, both ravenous in their desire to know more, to see more.) After Bill became Newsweek’s Mediterranean bureau chief, he would bring home the Cinecittà actors he was profiling for lunch and entertain everyone with inside

stories from the Vatican. Rome’s dolce vita period tends to be misremembered as a glitteringly hedonistic time, but they were also very lean years: “You know what the dolce vita was about? Cheap help,” Pepper says dryly. In her memory, it was a period when creative people banded together to reimagine the world; Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini were simply her friends. Pepper’s daughter was irked by the flow of guests. “Sometimes it would make me crazy,” Graham recalls. “I would think, ‘We have no money. Why are we having so many people come and eat all our food and drink and enjoy themselves when we are going to be struggling?’ Later, I understood: They had to feel alive, they had to feel not alone.” A sensualist, Pepper at times supported the family by writing cookbooks; the first, in 1952, “The Glamour Magazine After Five Cookbook,” includes a recipe for mock turtle soup. A more gastronomically appealing follow-up,

it calls our attention to our experience of the land rather than her mark upon it. “I can hear it,” she says of the earth. “Can’t you?”

AS SHE TELLS it, Pepper became a sculptor during a seven-month trip through America and Asia in 1960 with her 10-year-old daughter. She was 37, and she needed a fresh perspective. In Japan, mother and daughter dove with pearl

Artworks of Pepper’s, clockwise from top left: “Activated Presence,” made in 2000 from Carrara marble; “Prisms,” made in 1968 from stainless steel; the new ‘‘Todi Columns,’’ which were installed this year at the Piazza del Popolo in Todi, Italy.

decades? As she approaches her centennial, Pepper is undeniably still making some of the greatest work of her career. How, and why, does this woman of steel do it? But perhaps these are simply the wrong questions to be asking of an artist who has always had to find ways to realize her grand projects without wealth or fame. Perhaps defying the insurmountable obstacles she faced as a woman to create her body of work is its own triumph. As in monumental sculpture itself, perspective is everything: the faultiness of what we call art history, with its false dream of meritocracy, reflects the limitations of the people who create it; it is, after all, not carved in stone but a living chronicle to be reinterpreted, blasphemized, blown up and rewritten. PEPPER’S EXISTENCE — of an artist of her generation and achievement, who happens also to be a woman — speaks to a simple truth. This is a story not of “dogged determination” but of how the force of her talent might be powerful enough to explode our own assumptions about an era — even many years after that era has, at least in art historical terms, passed. When the artist wakes in the night and reaches for her sketchpad and box of pencils, the 6-year-old trading her security for the potential of her imagination seems close at hand, as does the apprentice to art and beauty arriving in Europe at its apocalypse. Time bends, in such moments, like a sheet of molten metal. The creative impulse, for Pepper, has become a form of faith. Currently, she’s prototyping the development of an island created in Venice’s harbor to regulate the flow of seawater to the sinking city, a design that includes a public amphitheater with a channel of water coursing through it, culminating in a beacon rising high into the air — a reference to lighthouses of the past for a future that feels once again uncertain. The festivities in Todi have ended, and Pepper needs to get back to her studio. “There’s so much to be done,” she says. Time only moves forward.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: BEVERLY PEPPER, “ACTIVATED PRESENCE,” 2000, CARRARA MARBLE; BEVERLY PEPPER, “PRISMS,” 1968, STAINLESS STEEL; BEVERLY PEPPER, “TODI COLUMNS,” 2019, STEEL, INSTALLATION IN PIAZZA DEL POPOLO, TODI, ITALY, PHOTO BY GEORGE TATGE. ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF BEVERLY PEPPER STUDIO

ARTS AND IN LETTERS FASHION PEOPLE PEOPLE 22 T QATAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE

“See Rome and Eat” (1960) is a testament to how quickly she was permeated by Italian culture. “It’s very difficult to move into another world and not have a judgmental aspect of it and accept that there is another way to do things,” says the artist, who has never thought of herself as an expatriate. “And it’s a rock and a hard place. I had good, good luck being able to arrive at the exact right time in France, and then Italy, and then you know, it was a roller coaster. But what a great roller coaster.” This enterprising, improvisational mode extended to her art practice. In the 1950s, Pepper painted mostly at home, often using her young daughter as a model. Memories of Pepper and her exacting gaze recur in Graham’s poetry, from the young woman holding a basket of lemons calling out to her child in “Cagnes-sur-Mer 1950,” her voice seizing “the small triangle of my soul,” to the elderly artist holding mortality at bay with her charcoal and paper in “Mother’s Hands Drawing Me.” If Pepper “wasn’t the kind of mother who did bedtime rituals,” as Graham puts it, her work ethic was thrilling (and influential). The two remain close and speak daily by phone. “If I had to choose between a force of nature and a warm, fuzzy presence, I’ve been accustomed to love the force of nature, and to get my nurturing from there. But I ended up with a force of nature as a daughter,” she says. Graham recalls how her mother, dressed for an evening out, would return to her basement studio while she waited for her father, burning holes into her long white leather gloves. Sometimes she enlisted her daughter’s help with the soldering. “I would just hold whatever it was and close my eyes, and I was terrified of the little sparks that strike you,” Graham remembers. The artist and the poet have collaborated once: When Pepper designed the “Sacramento Stele” (1998), four 18-foot-high monoliths surrounded by redwood trees outside the California Environmental Protection Agency building, she asked Graham, a vocal environmentalist, to contribute. The result, “Also Blooming,” has never been published and exists only in the words incised into the pietra serena stone.

divers; in Varanasi, India, they waded the Ganges amid the ashes from the funeral pyres. But what especially gripped Pepper’s imagination was the mid-12th-century Khmer temple complex at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, engulfed at that time by the elephantine roots of banyan trees. For 10 days, Pepper returned to the site to sketch the trees grappling in a kind of death match with the ancient carved heads and doorways — sculpture not simply as object but total environment, in concert with time and nature. When Pepper returned home to find that a grove of elm trees had been felled near her home in Rome’s Monte Mario, she bought them all and carved them into writhing biomorphic oblongs. Two years later, Pepper was among a handful of sculptors chosen, along with Alexander Calder and David Smith, to participate in the Festival of the Two Worlds’ exhibition “Sculture Nella Città” in Spoleto, for which the selected artists fabricated new work in Italian steel factories. There was one problem — Pepper didn’t know how to weld. No matter: She approached a local blacksmith and learned from him. In the factory in Piombino, she worked three shifts a day alongside industrial laborers, who called her Bev. On many subsequent factory floors — smelly, hot, dirty — Pepper found her artistic being: She discovered the potential of Cor-Ten at U.S. Steel in New Jersey in the 1960s; she experimented with ductile iron at John Deere in Moline, Ill., in the late 1970s, where she made her iconic “Moline Markers Ritual” (1981), 13 delicately textured totems, a chess set for deities. Another lesson from the factory floor: the ability to speak, with directness and humor, across social barriers. This is a skill that she would rely on in public commissions, which, in those predigital days, involved flying in — dressed, as always, in jeans and cowboy boots — and making a presentation in front of a board. “Beverly is like a flexible stone,” says Dale Lanzone, who has worked with Pepper over the past three decades on more than a dozen major site-specific works, public and private, currently on behalf of Marlborough. “She has the appetite to remake the world.” Sixty years after her fateful trip to Angkor Wat, Pepper can no longer lift heavy tools or walk the terrain of her earthworks, yet that appetite to create and the scope of her vision remain undiminished. So what propels an artist in winter to go on, largely unrecognized, through the

ON WELLNESS

On Health

and Hustle

Apart from a careful diet, Rawane Tahtouh keeps her health balanced with a workout.

Rawane Tahtouh, a woman of many talents, on finding joys in acting and fitness.

SHIFTING EFFORTLESSLY FROM being in front of the camera, Rawane Tahtouh is the latest icon in the Arabian entertainment world where fitness is becoming increasingly popular. “I’ve been acting since I was eight, so I guess that came first,” Tahtouh says, sharing memories of her younger self memorizing pages of thick scripts in her early days of acting. “And then in school, I started becoming very aware of the nutritional aspects of the food that we were consuming,” she recalls. Starting with her circle of friends, Tahtouh shared her interest and began guiding people toward healthier food choices. This led to her degree in nutrition and dietetics from the Lebanese American University in

Lebanon and, shortly after graduation, she opened a specialized clinic to help people improve their relationship with food and their bodies. Offering one-on-one and group consultations as well as customized nutrition programs, Tahtouh works by managing external factors with physical needs. “When some people are stressed, depressed and angry, they either tend to overeat or not eat at all. This also affects their sleeping habits,” she explains. Private consultations allow her to dig deep into a person’s life to carefully and effectively be of help, resulting in a much better state of mind and body. As her clinic flourished, so did her acting career and the multi-tasking icon is determined to hold onto both paths. “I try to manage both

but there are times when I prioritize one over the other, it depends. But I’m handling them both in moderation since I really want to succeed in both fields,” she says. “What inspires me is the connection with people,” she says. Even in the opposing nature of her career in acting and nutrition, she found common ground – connection and communication. She continues: “With acting, I feel like I can communicate and help people through entertainment while with nutrition, it’s about growth and wellness.” It’s evident in the feedback she receives from patients in her clinic or a fan telling her that she has helped improve their lives through her roles on screen. “Psychology is greatly

PHOTO COURTESY OF RAWANE TAHTOUH

By Alexandra Evangelista

Tahtouh shares this knowledge on how to fit nutrition into the high-speed lifestyles of her clients. “We live in a world where people want quick fixes and fast results. I think it’s difficult for people to understand that habits take time to develop and consistency is the key for ultimate health. For example, I stay in touch with my clients even if when they are travelling but they have to make the right choices.” The actress is also currently doing a study on food safety and quality management. “A huge part of being healthy is preventing diseases by executing quality control over food choices,” she explains. “And sometimes this means incorporating cheat meals into your defined routine to bring a positive psychological effect which often relates to the invigorating feeling of freedom,” she adds. As a public figure, she uses social media prominently to showcase her lifestyle. Interestingly enough, what was built as a place for connection and appreciation has been tainted and has become the cause of so much stigma. We are way past denying that social media has become a huge part of our lives and this is the same for Tahtouh as well. A firm believer that the power of the mind is as important as nutrition for overall health, she points to the effects of social media in affecting body and self-image. She explained eloquently with expressive gesticulation while stressing the need to eradicate the idea of “perfection” in social media. “It’s good and bad at the same time,” she says. “It’s unfortunate though, it is increasingly veering towards the negative and becoming a source of unhealthy emotions.” “The image is different than the reality,” she points out, “which is why we should stop comparing ourselves with the well-curated images in social media. Because comparison and chasing perfection will only lead to us losing our real identities.” Setting aside the physique, a common attribute associated with being healthy, we asked Tahtouh for her opinion on what really makes a person healthy. She simply said, “I think a healthy person is someone who is at peace with their mind and spirit.” It is indeed true that the energy of a person precedes them. Having the ability to radiate positivity is an uncommon way to associate with a healthy lifestyle. “The mind and the body are deeply related to each other so the best option is to have them both healthy.”

From top to bottom: Rawane Tahtouh's workout routine; Tahtouh holding a detox drink as part of W Doha's Look Good Feel Good menu; W Doha's Healthy Tasting Station.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF RAWANE TAHTOUH

ON WELLNESS PEOPLE QATAR 24 T QATAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE

related to nutrition,” she says. “And this is why I try to tap into both – mind and body – when connecting with people.” Influence is a very powerful sword in the present generation that, when wielded carelessly, it can do more damage than good. Which is why, despite having many titles under her belt, Tahtouh uses her influence to spread awareness and positivity within her reach. Around the clock and even off screen, she has set herself as an example to many. When asked to describe the best thing about this, her hands embraced each other and a twinkle flashed in her eyes as she said, “Doing something good for the people.” Tahtouh has always been on the listening end of the conversation when talking about achieving ultimate wellness. So we asked her to share what has improved in her life as soon as she embarked on a healthy path. “I really felt comfortable with my body image,” she recalls. “When I look at myself, I’m satisfied and I feel so nice when I give off a positive impression to others because, it is true that looks are the first thing people see before they get to know you.” Digging deeper, she recalled a time when she wasn’t in such a healthy state which constantly made her feel so unconfident and guilty about her own body. She continued: “Back then, I was anxious because I felt like I was ruining my health.” It is quite difficult to picture an unhealthy Tahtouh given her beautiful figure and upbeat personality, but she confessed to having gone through the same struggle as so many others. Her career as a public figure, dietitian and actress allows her to promote a healthy lifestyle on and off-screen, including her recent appointment as W Doha’s Wellness Ambassador. Tahtouh has been collaborating with the luxury property since last year to develop various wellness tools including a nutrition-based menu called Feel Good Look Good. This project was driven by the common fallacy that a balanced diet is difficult to maintain while travelling. “We want to create a bridge where travel and nutrition coexist with simple concepts like the Grab and Go, where guests can just pick up healthy snacks and detox drinks on the go,” she explains. Presented in a fun and informative manner, the hotel introduced “Wellness Journey”, a series of monthly workshops that focuses on specific health topics led by Tahtouh, followed by interactive fitness sessions and live cooking sessions with the executive chef. “When you attend the workshop, you feel like you can take charge of your wellness and you leave with the motivation to make a change towards a healthier lifestyle,” she says. No stranger to a busy schedule herself, she often plans in advance to ensure that she stays on track. “We don’t have set hours or routines in the acting industry, so I prepare my own food and think ahead,” she says.

ON ARCHITECTURE

This Is an Indian House India is a country where Modernism — both the philosophy and the aesthetic — has always sat uneasily alongside the traditional. By turning his gaze backward, the architect Bijoy Jain is offering a new concept of what an Indian building might be.

“COME INSIDE,” SAID Bijoy Jain. It was a bright April day of prodigious heat in Mumbai, India, with the monsoon still weeks away, and I wondered if the 54-year-old architect enjoyed witnessing that first beguiling effect his building had upon me. No sooner had we stepped inside the private residence, built in 2008 and known as Utsav House — utsav means “an occasion” or “festival” in Sanskrit but is also a palindrome of vastu, the ancient Indian science of architecture — than the temperature fell by a few noticeable degrees. We were in Alibag, a cluster of coastal villages on the Arabian Sea where Mumbai’s rich have houses. Jain, who has designed a number of homes, such as Utsav, is an unlikely choice of architect for this place. Mumbai is a crass, brass-balled town where only those who do not have money are discreet about it. Utsav — with its outer walls of black basalt, its smooth, waxed concrete floors and louvered windows of opaque ribbed glass — feels as if it had come up out of the ground, less a house than an intervention. Large, airy rooms with low beds and spartan furniture are arranged around a central courtyard of red earth, where glossy, large-leaved verdure grows. A lap pool, tiled with river stones from the western state of Gujarat, feeds the garden with its overflow. The house feels utterly transparent, as if built by a man possessed of a horror of interior walls. It has those subtle flourishes that come to certain artists who, in the process of paring down their craft to lean mass alone, feel a sudden nostalgia for the lyrical: There is a lily pool — pink flowers against dark water — tucked into the side of a courtyard-facing living room. Old-fashioned light switches, whose chrome has been sedulously scrubbed away, vanish into

the smooth taupe surface of the interior walls. “The house is not an object, a ‘machine to live in,’ ” wrote the Romanian historian Mircea Eliade in 1959’s “The Sacred and the Profane,” taking a swipe at Le Corbusier, “it is the universe that man constructs for himself by imitating the paradigmatic creation of the gods, the cosmogony.” Utsav is such a house, a small act of hierophany, a cheeky nod to the notion of the “imago mundi,” or miniature cosmos, as Eliade used the term. It was impossible to live in such a place without being reminded on a daily basis of the fragility and beauty of our lease on the earth. I was taking it all in when Jain, sitting across the dining table from me, began to tell me the story of a suicide. I had asked him how he dealt with the ugliness of modern building in India, and he, in response, told me of a young garden hand who had worked for him before hanging himself some years ago in his own house. At a wake of sorts, held in a small room with a corrugated roof, the young man’s family gathered. The monsoon had arrived and a strong wind blew. Jain, who has a way of restoring to architecture that most basic The lap pool of Utsav human idea of a refuge from the elements, said, “When House, built by the you’re in that environment, you’re so fragile and exposed. architect Bijoy Jain in 2008 in Alibag, a All you want is to be in a contained, secure space. How do cluster of coastal you enable yourself to be contained in extreme conditions? villages just outside of Fragile, as well as a sense of being contained — that is Mumbai, India. In the ’90s, Jain spent time where stillness exists.” there reconnecting Jain was 18 when his own brother hanged himself. with a non-Western Within a year and a half, his parents died of heart attacks. idea of architecture.

By Aatish Taseer Photographs by Tobias Alexander Harvey

PLACES

ON ARCHITECTURE

inventions and themes in a mood of reminiscence — the mood of the 19th century — regardless of their relevance to mass, space, line and coherence.” If fusion seeks to achieve a deep unity of spirit between two different architectural traditions, allusion seeks merely to paste the symbols of one tradition onto another. British building in India was for the most part an exercise in allusion. The meeting of Britain and India did not produce an enduring synthesis. When the British left, India’s own building traditions were paralyzed. What took their place was the seeming cultural neutrality of what was then called the International Style — modernity, in a word — which produced an awful proliferation of nondescript residential colonies on the edges of crumbling British cities, which, in turn, abutted medieval Indo-Islamic cities, swiftly turning to slums. The challenge then, for any architect working in India today, is how to break past the layer of nonporous rock that is British rule in India in order to creatively engage with a decayed but living tradition of Indian building, masonry and craftsmanship.

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He was completely alone in the world. Hearing this, I began to think differently of the atmosphere in Utsav. The secular, mote-filled stillness, the diffuse light and serenity, the feeling of being exposed; all these lend the house something of the character of a shrine or a sanctum — an ashram. THROUGH ITS PREMODERN phases, Indian architecture was effortlessly palimpsestic, one of the truest examples of the vision of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who wrote in his 1946 book, “The Discovery of India,” of a place “on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and Above: the 2012 yet no succeeding layer had Copper House, also completely hidden or erased in Alibag, shows the what had been written influence of Japan on Jain’s sensibility. previously.” India’s oldest stone Right: Jain’s 2014 buildings are stupas and House of Nine Rooms, rock-cut caves of Buddhist in Alibag, where brick floors and fullorigin, built in the centuries height doors merge before the Common Era. seamlessly with the These were preceded by an surrounding greenery. older tradition of building in wood. When Buddhism declined in India, and a resurgent Hindu faith rose, between the fourth and seventh centuries C.E., it was the ghost of Buddhist architecture, visible in both the apsidal shape of certain temples and in the use of stone-latticed windows, that was resurrected in a new tradition of Hindu temple architecture. With the coming of Islam to India in the second millennium C.E., many features of Indian building, such as screens, carved brackets, corbeled arches and deep eaves projecting hard black shadows, became part of Indo-Islamic architecture. Dynasties rose and fell, the religious makeup of India changed, but Indian architecture, like Indian food, music and literature, was able to absorb the new influences.

It was only with the coming of British rule to India in the 18th century that a culture that had prided itself on its powers of assimilation was confronted with an unassimilable influence. The irony of precolonial and colonial contact was that while the former was outwardly more violent, it was inwardly creative, whereas the latter, though less physically violent, stultified the Indian spirit. For the first time in India’s history, cultural assimilation became a forced imperative rather than something natural and organic. As late as 1929, 18 years before British rule was to come to an end, the English architects Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker published an official statement on building a new capital for India. Their intention was “to express, within the limits of the medium and the powers of its users, the ideal and fact of British rule in India, of which New Delhi must ever be the monument,” but the statement also revealed how contrived British building in a city that was once an ancient seat of power could feel. The English writer Robert Byron was in the new capital for its construction, and in his wonderful 1931 essay “New Delhi,” he makes an important distinction between what he describes as “fusion” and “allusion.” “The first,” Byron writes, “is the use of diverse architectural inventions and ornamental themes, whatever their dates or racial origins, simply for their practical value in creating an artistic unity and in giving effect ‘to the values of mass, space, line and coherence in the whole design.’ The second is the use of these same

JAIN AND I had met a few hours before our visit to Alibag on a dock in Mumbai, near the iconic Taj hotel and the Gateway of India, the arch the British built in 1924 in honor of the arrival of King George V and Queen Mary 13 years earlier. An armada of small fishing boats and hulking freighters, their bottoms red and rusting, lay as if dazed on the flat, oily surface of Mumbai Harbor. Alibag, which sits on the Indian mainland overlooking the island of Mumbai, is a short boat ride from the southern tip of the metropolis. It has in the past 15 years been overrun by day-trippers, tourists and, of course, the 1 percent — industrialists, socialites and Bollywood stars. Jain knew the area long before it had any of these associations. After his parents died, he spent a decade in the West, first studying architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, then living in Los Angeles, New York and London. While in the United States, he fell in love

“We didn’t have an architecture school until the 1900s.” Yet India has a codified tradition of building that stretched back at least as far as Ajanta and Ellora. Three years before the National Institute of Design (N.I.D.) was first established in 1961 in the Gujarati city of Ahmedabad, Charles and Ray Eames had written a manifesto for the institution in which they stated that it must reckon seriously with “the quality and the values of a traditional society.” But that did not happen. Instead, as in so much of the old non-West, past and present sat uneasily next to each other, never resulting in an exciting hybrid. This meant that as tradition calcified, Indian modernity remained a mere top soil, neither able to nourish itself through contact with the Indian past, nor able to move beyond a derivative relationship with the West. “Why was [the question of tradition and modernity] not part of the dialogue or conversation?” Jain asked, reluctantly questioning the architects who had gone before him, men such as Charles Correa and the Pritzker Prize-winning Balkrishna Doshi. “Not to question modernity today,” he added, “would be folly.” As we stepped into the boat, I saw Jain framed against the backdrop of all of neo-Gothic British Bombay, with its red tiled roofs and shadowed arcades and porticoes. This was Rudyard Kipling’s Bombay of steeples, cupolas and trefoil arches, now blackening in the sea air, now with sprigs of peepul sprouting through their entablatures. The British city graded into a post-independence landscape of blue

glass and steel, foursquare towers and bungalows with iron-barred windows. Sandwiched in between all of this, as ubiquitous as the glittering sea and copses of palms, was a city of slum and shanty, already hunkered down under blue tarpaulins in anticipation of the monsoon. What did Jain, who believes so much in making one’s peace with one’s surroundings, think of the British city directly behind him? “It is just a backdrop,” Jain said, adding of the Gateway itself: “It’s a terribly proportioned building. They should take it down. It would open the city to the sea.” He said this without a trace of a smile as our little boat charted a foamy path across the harbor. “STOP THE CAR, stop the car!” We were now on the mainland, approaching Alibag, when we passed a nomadic settlement, the likes of which one sees all the time in India, a collection of village huts on an arid piece of land. But Jain saw an articulation of what might be his core philosophy when it comes to building: How does one inhabit the earth with the least possible effort? He pointed to the fencing of bramble that formed a perimeter around the settlement the nomads had established, observing the hearth to one side, an ashen circle in the pale earth, and bright-colored clothes hanging from a line on the other. Nothing about this way of living outdoors seems primitive to Jain, nothing about it is to be dismissed: For him, I sensed, this is a real architectural inheritance. “It’s viscerally there in all of us,” he said, speaking of the urge to be in tune with nature. “This is one of those few places where that connection is still very strong.” Jain has built 10 private houses, as well as studios, a mountain lodge and a reading room, the majority in India, mostly centered around or in Mumbai, but increasingly his projects are located in more international destinations, such as Italy, Spain, France and Japan. He is not romantic — or not excessively so — about the realities of modern living. That this nomadic settlement should exist in India alongside towers of steel and glass seems to strike him as an opportunity. What appears to inspire him most about the country is that it is still a place where one can observe the rudiments of how One of the three premodern people developed their bedrooms of Utsav House. Jain earliest notions of shelter. “One tries to connect cannot become nostalgic,” he said, the indoors with “and yet one can still recall that the outside in a way that evokes experience in a world that is moving a more ancient at a different speed.” By “that way of life. experience” he meant the deep atavisms that yet survive within us. “Because if we lose that spirit,” Jain said, “we lose everything. If it comes to that, we will have to reclassify what human beings are.” After our visit to Utsav House, we had a lunch of grilled fish and prawn curry at another private residence designed by Jain in Alibag, the House of Nine Rooms, built in 2014. Here again was a central courtyard open to sky, which Eliade likens to the smoke hole in a temple and sees as part of a communication with the transcendent. Here again were bare untiled floors and the constant presence of wind and earth. There was a stillness, a permanent air of afternoon and an interior that was magically cooler and airier than the exterior it felt so much at peace with. The site sloped downward, so the house had been set on many levels. The floors

with land artists such as Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer and Mary Miss, and with Minimalists like Donald Judd. Their work reminded Jain of the rock-cut Buddhist caves. “To come upon their work,” Jain said, referring to the land artists, “was the same thing experientially as [visiting the famous caves in] Ajanta and Ellora. They linger.” After Jain returned from living abroad in 1995, he spent months in pre-gentrification Alibag, isolated, as a fierce but revivifying monsoon thrashed the western coast of India. It was here that he taught himself about Indian trees, developed the astonishing simplicity and quiet that characterizes his work and, most important, broke from the limitations of being a Western-educated architect and found a way to speak to a living artisanal tradition in India of carpenters and stonemasons, painters and craftspeople. Describing days without electricity and venomous snakes coming out of their burrows, Jain said that Alibag gave him “a perception of what it means to be agrarian in India.” Jain was confronting a problem that haunts every aspect of creative life in India: what to do with the past. India has produced over 40 centuries’ worth of writing, painting, music and architecture, and yet when each of these art forms met its modern iteration through British rule, the meeting of past and present, traditional and modern, was not merely sterile — it was corrosive. Jain saw the problem of tradition and modernity like this: “Architecture is a Western idea,” he said,

ON ARCHITECTURE PLACES 28 T QATAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE

and walls were of a scorched reddish-black brick, the throwaways of the kiln, both sturdier and more attractive than normal bricks. If Jain has learned anything from the artisans of traditional India, with whom he is in daily contact — not instructing but collaborating with — it is the secret of watching them work with their hands, hammering out their creations with the least possible exertion. “Movement is minimal,” Jain said admiringly. My suspicion that doing less — the art of subtraction, predicated on a zeal for leaving things unsaid — mattered deeply to Jain was confirmed when later that afternoon he began to speak rapturously of Masanobu Fukuoka, the author of the 1975 classic “The One-Straw Revolution,” who pioneered the “do-nothing” school of agriculture, eschewing the plow and chemical fertilizers. I suspect Jain dislikes heavy-handedness, not merely on aesthetic grounds but because he sees in it a criminal failure of imagination. To disrespect negative space is, I venture to say, in Jain’s estimation, to lose the right to act. After lunch, we drove to Jain’s Copper House, built in 2012 in another inland village farther west. The house is a two-tiered structure with a cupric roof enclosing a basalt courtyard that contains an immense boulder, placed asymmetrically to one side, redolent of an Isamu Noguchi sculpture. Japan has clearly entered Jain’s soul, where it has fertilized what feels like the ancient Buddhist-Jain austerity of India. When Jain was younger, his parents had taken him on long drives across the length and breadth of the country, where he had been introduced to Indian antiquity. In 1972, during a car trip north, the family stopped at the newly constructed city of Chandigarh, a triumph of Modernism set against the foothills of the Himalayas. Outside Le Corbusier’s 1953 government building called the Secretariat, the 7-year-old Bijoy refused to get out. “I saw this huge . . . it was a giant thing. I had to be whisked away. I couldn’t get out of the car. That’s my experience of Chandigarh.” Jain was at pains to say that this was not necessarily a criticism of the city — which the writer V. S. Naipaul described as a place where “India had encouraged yet another outsider to build a monument

to himself” — but I suspect it was. The modern architect whom Jain unreservedly loves is Louis Kahn. Jain said of Kahn’s palatially geometric National Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh: “The building itself is an excavation, it’s a subtraction. It’s not a frame structure, not column and beam. It’s like water that carves rock.” It was a supreme compliment. MY TIME WITH JAIN was meant to end in Alibag, but unexpectedly, the architect invited me to his office, Studio Mumbai, which he built in 2014, and where he lives, if not quite above the shop, then adjacent to it. A few hours later, I found myself driving to the southern Mumbai neighborhood of Byculla. I passed mosques and minarets, and tube-lit chawls (tenements), where behind grille windows a thousand evening meals were being prepared and a thousand televisions flashed. It was squalid and decaying, and yet so overwhelmingly human. I could not help but wonder what Jain would make of these scenes. Would he, like most of the city’s moneyed classes, shut them out behind air-conditioned cars and hermetically sealed high-rise apartments? Or would he find a way to make creative use of the hard, gritty reality of urban Mumbai? Jain was waiting for me on the street. He pushed opened one leaf of a vast metal gate, and I found myself in what felt like a mews, open to the night air but infused with the germ of the Mumbai chawl. Pendant lamps ran down the length of the street, on either side of which were open units.

Jain lived in one, and at the far end of this magical street were the ateliers of Studio Mumbai. Despite the lateness of the hour, they teemed with industry and activity. It was part modern studio, part forge or medieval workshop. Jain’s new obsession was tazias — the miniature mausoleums made of colored paper and bamboo that Shias in India parade through the streets during their month of mourning. These giant structures, which Jain had discovered were mandalas, geometric forms with mystical or cosmic significance, cast long skeletal shadows over the walls of Studio Mumbai. I had until that moment been guilty of believing that Jain’s immense talent was confined to designing beautiful houses. But now I saw his full ambition. The architect had set himself the task of what a young Brahman in Varanasi once described to me as pulling the thread of the past forward and tying it to the future. It was renaissance that Jain was after. “I knew that we could build like we used to build,” he had said earlier that day. But for rebirth to occur, wasn’t it necessary that the death of the traditional Indian past be acknowledged? Earlier, Jain had spoken of the grief of the 16th-century Mughal emperor Akbar, who, after the death of a cherished Sufi saint, had built him a white marble mausoleum in the red sandstone city Akbar constructed near Agra called Fatehpur Sikri — a city of pure folly, which was soon to be abandoned, for it ran out of water. Driving home to my hotel from Studio Mumbai, the words Jain had used to describe Akbar’s coral capital returned with new force and meaning: “He conceived of a place where there is life in death.” Above: the exterior of Utsav House betrays its airy interiors. Below: a teak bathtub overlooking palm trees at the House in a Coconut Grove, which was built in Alibag in 2007.

THE ARTIST’S LIFE

smaller residences that landlords erected in the 19th century behind the cover of larger buildings to increase rent revenue. Despite its origins, the building, which now has five units, is calm and oasis-like. At once hemmed in and bucolic, it evokes the dwelling in Virginia Lee Burton’s 1942 children’s book, “The Little House,” the looming metropolis pressed up against it. From the inside, the couple’s third-floor, 700-square-foot apartment gives away nothing of the surrounding city: “It feels like a nest,” Sosa says. The four oversize windows in the open-plan front room are ringed by English ivy, and the home is decorated with both design classics (leather-backed brass Jacques Adnet dining chairs from the 1940s that Gohar bought at auction) and custom pieces (an ’80s-esque burled-maple veneer dining table with chunky cylindrical legs made by the New York artist Sam Stewart) that feel untethered from both time and place. Though Gohar has lived in Manhattan for 10 years and Sosa for three, “we both feel a little like foreigners,” she says. Accordingly, they have designed their apartment as a colorful sanctuary in which to enjoy the company of the people with whom they feel most comfortable: their friends, an everexpanding cohort of multinational artists, cooks and art directors, who often stop by for tea or dinner. “One of the main reasons to keep a nice home is to welcome people that you love in it,” says Gohar, 31, whose professional life also revolves around entertaining. Over the past decade, she has made a name for herself by producing conceptual installations out of food for art and fashion clients: In 2017, for instance, she conceived a concrete-inspired dinner — with clay-baked fish and caviar-stuffed potatoes disguised as pebbles — in New York for Comme des Garçons that was inspired by the notes of its latest fragrance. She shares with Sosa, 36, an unwavering commitment to zaniness, executed, almost paradoxically, with utmost precision, and the aesthetic they have cultivated together in their apartment, much like that of

THE COLLECTIVE FEAST

the interiors featured in Sosa’s magazine (recent stories have showcased the homes of the painter and sculptor Fernando Botero and the Queens-born fashion designer Telfar Clemens) comes from their ability to create unlikely juxtapositions. Layering eras and genres, they blend classically handsome elements (Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni’s mid-20thcentury Toio floor lamp, a working 19th-century cast-iron fireplace) with off-kilter accents: sherbet-colored Venetian glass tchotchkes, say, or a Stephen Sprouse-inspired shower curtain printed with an image of the musician Iggy Pop posed like Jesus on the cross. The result is an environment that seems to be in lively conversation with itself — the physical equivalent of a raucous dinner party. GOHAR LOOKED AT 90 or so apartments in Manhattan before finding one that met her precise requirements in 2013 (she and Sosa had met through mutual friends that same year and were married in 2017). She wanted somewhere, she says, that felt “European and familiar” to her, and with its early

In their New York apartment, an artist and a graphic designer encourage their friends to come for dinner — and, before leaving, to help remake the space around them. By Alice Newell-Hanson Photographs by Blaine Davis

A leather-upholstered door by the artist Sam Stewart leads to the couple’s art-filled bedroom, where a photograph by Richard Kern and a print by Ellsworth Kelly hang above a painting by Chung Eun Mo and a drawing by Nathalie Du Pasquier. The orange commode is by Nicola L.

LIKE MANY OF the millions of immigrants who have arrived in New York City in the last three centuries, Laila Gohar and Omar Sosa live in one of the downtown walk-ups that were built to accommodate the surge of new residents who have defined the city’s culture since the mid-1800s. Less common, though, is the layout of the couple’s building; to reach the home of Gohar, a Cairo-born artist, and Sosa, a Barcelona-born graphic designer and publisher who co-founded the interiors magazine Apartamento, you must first enter a former tenement built in the mid-19th century on a nowbustling stretch of Spring Street, just west of the Bowery, then walk down a narrow, dimly lit hallway that opens into a 400-square-foot courtyard densely planted with laurel and vivid green birch trees. At the opposite end, down a leaf-strewn brick path, you’ll find a four-story red brick structure. Dating to that same period, it is one of New York’s so-called backhouses, the

THOUGH THE APARTMENT was pristine when Gohar moved in (its former owner was the Italian architect Massimiliano 20th-century wooden floors, brick walls Locatelli), the kitchen was a typically compact New York galley tucked behind and sensible layout — rectangular living a slatted wooden dividing wall. Two years ago, with the help of the local design area at the front, rectangular bedroom practice VDGR, the couple replaced it with a 14-foot-long counter with a blue-gray at the back — their home does feel Old Formica work top along the eastern wall of the main room, as well as a new built-in World, an impression that’s under- pantry. Beneath open shelves crowded with mismatched serving vessels, Gohar’s scored by their approach to inhabiting knives are suspended across a three-foot-long magnetized ceramic knife strip it. Up to three times a week, the couple that resembles an outstretched hand. Like many objects in the apartment, it was hosts impromptu dinners: Gohar serves custom-made for the couple, in this case by the artist Sam Stewart. colorful salads alongside grilled meat or Stewart, who is best known for his immersive interior installations featuring fish, typically followed by retro sweets tubular furniture, has in fact transformed various corners of their apartment. To such as Mont Blancs (puréed chest- fill an awkward spot in the living room, he built a low-slung kidney-shaped sofa, nuts with whipped cream) in antique evocative of a 1970s-era swimming pool, and now fitted with a natural linen slipsilver cups or miniature candied fruit; cover. Down the hall is his most recent addition to the space: a new door with a the guests are invariably a mix of old Gothic ogival arch and a small barred window that opens into the bedroom. In friends and visiting design-world icons. stark contrast to the room’s minimalism — it’s furnished only with a frameless bed Sometimes the gathering will begin or and “La Femme Commode” (1969), a persimmon-hued wooden armoire by Nicola end in the courtyard, and there must L that’s shaped like an abstract Rubenesque female figure — the door is upholalways be Champagne. The stered in umber and ocher For a video tour of Laila staff at the wine store around leather patches that evoke Gohar’s apartment, the corner have become so the walls of a medieval visit tmagazine.com. castle. “In some way, I feel accustomed to helping peothis apartment is his case ple who are on their way to the apartment that they recommend study,” says Gohar. Indeed, giving their bottles based on what Gohar is cooking friends the freedom to experiment (she has usually stopped by earlier in the inside their apartment is perhaps the day, the night’s groceries in tow). couple’s greatest act of hospitality. Unlike most hosts, though, Gohar “There is something about the home and Sosa often involve guests in their that’s sacred and private and just for decorating scheme. The apartment’s us,” Gohar says. “But at the same time, walls and floors, recently painted and it’s a collaborative space.” carpeted in restrained shades of white Like all New Yorkers, they someand pale cream — inspired by a sud- times fantasize about leaving, but den vision Gohar had of the space as a Sosa says, “There’s no other place cloudlike sanctum, “in which everything in the world where we have so many is melting into everything else”— have friends.” Gohar recalls how in the become a blank canvas on which ’90s, her parents’ terra-cotta-red they display gifts and acquisitions in house in central Cairo seemed to

‘There is something about the home that’s sacred and private. But at the same time, it’s a collaborative space.’

accommodate an endless stream of acquaintances and relatives at their many parties. Dozens of guests, from all generations — ambassadors from the nearby embassies, the local fishmonger, various uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews — would arrive on Saturday nights, the crowds spilling out under the garden’s mango trees. That is how Gohar has always imagined her adult life, and “even though this space is small,” she says, “it serves the same purpose.”

LOWER RIGHT PHOTO: © 2019 RAY JOHNSON ESTATE/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK (LOWER FRAMED ART ON RIGHT WALL); © MAN RAY 2015 TRUST/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NY/ADAGP, PARIS (DESK LAMP ON TOP RIGHT OF FIREPLACE)

THE ARTIST’S LIFE PLACES 30 T QATAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE

Clockwise: Laila Gohar in the courtyard outside her home; the kitchen; works by Louis Eilshemius, Harold Ancart, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Helen Mann Van Cleve and Jean-Philippe Delhomme hang over a sofa designed by Stewart. “The Giant Foot” (1969) is by Nicola L, and the lamp on the bench is by Ingo Maurer.

ever-changing arrangements. Hung salon-style between the living room’s casement windows, there’s a pulsating oil-and-acrylic color-field painting from 2018 by the New York artist Matt Connors, with whom Sosa is working on a monograph; a shield-shaped sculpture from 2017 by the Los Angeles artist Peter Shire; and a vibrant still life of a bowl of sun-washed oranges, painted in 2016 by the Toronto-based artist Nadia Gohar, Laila’s younger sister. Much of the couple’s furniture was also purchased from or created by people they know: A five-foot-long turquoise chaise longue in the shape of a foot, a 1969 work by the late French Pop artist Nicola L — whose son and grandson are friends of the couple, and about whom Sosa is publishing a book with Apartamento — dominates the front room, and a molten-looking amber-and-chartreuse resin Open Sky Crosby chair (1995-99) by the Italian architect Gaetano Pesce (which formerly belonged to another friend, the New York interior designer Jim Walrod) animates the dining space.

ON ARCHITECTURE

Alila Seminyak embarked on a design journey to capture nature’s essence on the Island of the Gods. By Karen Gines

CLEAN ARCHITECTURAL LINES expressed in a green vertical garden, a soothing breeze and the lapping sounds of crashing waves greet guests as they pull up to the entrance of the resort – a welcome that Alila Seminyak conceived to capture the essence of Bali while respecting nature and the island’s identity. A distinctive blend of contemporary architecture enveloped in native wall-crawling plants, green roofs and green spaces set the tone across the sprawling estate, a theme that is also expressed in

A pathway at the the grand foyer and lobby. “Alila Alila Seminyak was built with the concept of resort in Bali leading sustainability in mind,” explains toward the beach. Anie Tidara Sari, the resort’s assistant director of marketing. “The resort’s extensive labyrinth of green corridors and natural landscaping with rooftop pools and gardens creates a green environment that contributes to the reduction of energy consumption.” A relatively new addition to Seminyak’s beachfront coastline, Alila Seminyak was built in

PHOTO COURTESY OF ALILA SEMINYAK

A MATTER OF MINDFUL DESIGN

ON ARCHITECTURE

make their daily offerings, while also providing guests a glimpse into the traditional Balinese home. “The preservation of these features provided inspiration for the overall resort layout, which is based around the concept of a Balinese family compound,” Sari says. Traditional Balinese elements such as wood carvings, batik technique and ceramics are blended harmoniously with the hotel’s modern minimalist design which includes two hanging infinity pools and a main pool that visually opens into the ocean. The sustainability

narrative won the design team an honorable mention in Architectural Design in the 2019 Architecture MasterPrize. A traditional Balinese home is grounded on philosophical values and built to respect spiritual elements to strike a harmonious relationship between man and the environment. Khemka strived to make the connection between contemporary and traditional design by preserving and respecting the land’s environment while creating a modern luxury escape for guests. “Consciously, the inspiration was

High wall plant hangings envelope the facades of the rooms.

PHOTO COURTESY OF ALILA SEMINYAK

32 T QATAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE

PLACES QATAR

2015 with designs by Gaurang Khemka at the award-winning Singapore architectural firm URBNarc. It is one of the few beachfront properties tucked in the secluded stretch of Petitenget. Instead of creating another fancy run-of-the-mill luxury establishment, the URBNarc team decided to preserve the local landowner’s family home, including an ancient ancestral temple that has stood on the site for generations. The temple became the central focal point of the entire property, allowing the landowner and his family continued access to

always for the hotel to belong to its context and pay homage to its environs,” explains Khemka. The lobby is bright with constant natural light while an inviting breeze draws you into a natural exploration path around the property. Every corner discreetly incorporates a traditional Balinese touch from ceramics to their embroidered pillows and yet, Alila’s trademark of luxury living is very much present in the details. Every room is designed to maximize views with complete sliding doors and wide balconies, allowing guests to commune with nature. The interiors are sleek yet functional, tucking away televisions, minibars and other functional electronics, inviting guests to connect instead with the tranquility of the land and its surroundings. The bathrooms evoke traditional Balinese gardens overlooking the ocean with complete privacy thanks to the lush greenery and timber screens that surround the hotel. “We place sustainability at the forefront, obtaining the highest level of accreditation from EarthCheck for its Building Planning and Design Standard,” says Sari. The hotel was built using one hundred percent local building materials and has incorporated environmental and sustainable solutions to minimize greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption and waste management. Alila Seminyak is the first resort in Indonesia to surpass the EarthCheck standards, achieving a 44-point best practice score against the industry norm of five points. The resort’s eco and energy solutions include the use of local and recyclable building materials, operating completely paperless and using its own bottled water. In addition, low energy light fixtures, rainwater harvesting, environmental and building management systems were implemented in the property’s development. “The hallmark of our resort is the combination of innovative design and luxury in unique locations, set apart by an unprecedented level of private space, crafted artisanship, personalized hospitality, and bespoke journeys,” says Sari. Alila means “Surprise” in Sanskrit and perhaps the best surprise with the Seminyak location is its integrity to luxury living while upholding tradition and environment as a pinnacle for design.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF ALILA SEMINYAK

From top: View from the infinity pool of Alila Seminyak; Balinese design integrated with the hotel modern furniture; view of the room facades.

PLACES QATAR

WANDERLUST

A Kingdom Up in The Sky With monasteries sitting pretty at an altitude of 3,000 meters, hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a chance to look at the world from up in the sky.

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By Debrina Aliyah Photographs by Chan Mei Ling

ON A CLEAR DAY, the snow-capped mountains of Everest seem to float in the sky when viewed from an elevation of 3,000 meters. To the naked eye, the powder-white peaks appear as clouds that hover majestically over the Himalayan ranges which a nation of very happy people have called home for the past one thousand five hundred years. In a country with no traffic lights, where chilies are a national obsession and the conventional GDP marker has been replaced with a Gross National Happiness index, it is tempting to illustrate Bhutan as just a destination of fun facts. But for this remote Buddhist kingdom where centuries-old culture and tradition are still very much part of daily life, its history of uninterrupted sovereignty is a valuable lesson on embracing modernity without compromising on identity. Though the World Wide Web and television arrived in Bhutan only two decades ago, mobile data coverage across the mountainous country is impressively efficient, equipping the

young generation, monks included, with a communication channel to the world. With just a little over seven hundred thousand inhabitants, more than 70 percent of the country is covered by forests resulting in a negative carbon footprint, an achievement that the government has pledged to maintain as part of its mission to be the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first 100 percent organic nation. Agriculture is rooted in traditional farming techniques with little use of pesticides or industrial practices making the shift to sustainability and organic processes a breeze. As a parliamentary monarchy, both the king and the chief monk are still very much revered for their roles within a social and religious context. Through the lush green valleys dotted with historic fortresses and shrines, and the mountains where colorful prayer flags fly high, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the experience of Zhiwa Ling hotel was meeting monks, nuns, farmers and artisans that helps constructed over five years with nearly all define this enigmatic nation.

details finished by hand.

Zhiwa Ling Hotel An architectural gem envisioned by architect Peter Kampf, nearly every part of the hotel is handmade, from the massive hand-carved wooden beams to the colorful hand-painted ceilings and walls by sixty local artisans over the span of five years. Its main lodge and cottages, featuring 44 rooms, are set in a lush landscape in the hills of the Himalayas. The hotel’s private temple was constructed using 450-year-old wood sourced from one of Bhutan’s most sacred sites, the Gangtey Goemba monastery, where guests can experience rituals including decorating ritual cakes to offer to deities. Satsam Chorten, Paro. www.zhiwaling.com Taj Tashi Nestled in the valley where the Wang Chu river runs, the property is a great base to explore the Thimphu region, home to some of the kingdom’s most revered monasteries. Taj Tashi mirrors the architecture of the country’s traditional fortresses with interiors adorned by classical hand-painted Buddhist murals. Sixty-six rooms and suites overlook the mountains while the spa offers guests the opportunity to try a traditional hot stone bath. Unwind with a drink on the terrace and take in the spectacular view of traditional homes perched on the mountains. Samten Lam, Chubachu, Thimphu. www.tajhotels.com

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHAN MEI LING

Gangtey Lodge A 12-room lodge built to recreate traditional Bhutanese farmhouses with a strong focus on green operational practices. Designed by Mary Lou Thomson, the property’s common spaces were conceived to carefully frame the panoramic views of the Gangtey Valley with floor-to-ceiling windows. With ultra-mod fittings and amenities, the lodge finds a perfect fit with luxury travelers but integrates into its surroundings through sustainable architecture. The rooms feature artefacts and ornaments sourced from local homes. Just under the Monastery, Phobjikha Valley. www.gangteylodge.com

DO Tiger’s Nest Monastery It is no coincidence that all the monasteries were constructed on dangerously steep mountains or impossible cliffs as the journey to the sacred sites is considered a laborious test to be passed before being allowed to ask for blessings. The Tiger’s Nest monastery in Paro is probably the most symbolic monument of the kingdom both for religious pilgrims and visitors, requiring up to four hours of uphill ascent to arrive at the site depending on fitness levels. It is home to precious relics and invaluable temples. Take in the views and relish the mystical legends that surround the stone mountain where the monastery sits. Earth Cultures. www.earthcultures.co.uk Punakha Dzong Built at the confluence of two major rivers, the Pho Chhu and Mo Chhu, which converge in the Punakha Valley, the fortress was the administrative seat when the region served as the capital of the country from 1637 to 1907. Home to a hundred-pillar hall featuring exquisite murals, the fortress gives an understanding of Bhutanese carved woodwork and art. Punakha Dzong is notable for containing the preserved remains of Zhabdrung Ngawang Namgyal, the unifying leader of Bhutan, as well as a sacred relic known as the Ranjung Karsapani. Central Punakha. +975 17676729 Phobjikha Village Just beyond the famed Gangtey Monastery in the Phobjikha Valley lies its namesake village. Here, one of the world’s rarest birds, the blacknecked crane, migrates from the arid plains of Tibet to spend the winter in a milder climate. Phobjikha, at an altitude of 2,900 m, falls under the district of Wangduephodrang and lies on the periphery of the Black Mountain National Park. Visit a traditional farmhouse in Gangtey Valley and partake in the daily chores of a Bhutanese household, light butter lamps at the 13thcentury Khewa Lhakang monastery or mountain bike up the strenuous climbs of Lawa Pass. Yana Expeditions. www.yanaexpeditions.com

Taj Tashi mirrors the architecture of the country’s traditional fortresses.

STAY

WANDERLUST

Centenary Farmers’ Market To get a glimpse into the country’s initiative in becoming a 100 percent organic nation, step inside the busiest domestic fresh market where apples and puffed rice are aplenty. Farmers from around the kingdom set up their stalls every weekend to peddle freshly harvested produce that is relatively small in size yet full of flavor, a typical indicator of natural farming methods. Snack on puffed rice and corn flakes – the natural cereals are among the most widely consumed grain products here. www.cfmthimphu.com

PLACES QATAR

EAT Folk Heritage Museum Restaurant Try Eema datshi, a simple dish of chilies with yak cheese that is a national staple present at every meal. Eaten with red rice or buckwheat pancake, the creaminess of the dairy mellows the spiciness of the local chilies. The restaurant serves traditional-style dishes including braised beef and stewed potatoes in cheese. Make room for exceptional buckwheat cookies and take away homemade jams and dried fruits. Kawajangsa, Thimphu. +975 02334637

Clockwise from bottom-left: Ema datshi, a local staple of chilies and yak cheese; multi-colored wood frontages, small arched windows, and sloping roofs define the architecture; a stall at the Centenary Market peddling freshly harvested apples.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHAN MEI LING

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Zombala Momos are dumplings of Central Asian origin, and here in Bhutan they are stuffed with cheese, beef or vegetables. The locals flock to Zombala where the queues can get testy during the weekend for the both the deep-fried and steamed versions. A cheap and cheerful local dive near Hong Kong Market – get ready to jostle for a seat. Doendrup Lam, +975 2 324 307.

JEWELRY REPORT

Clockwise from top left: Wendy Yue snake bracelet, $16,000, modaoperandi .com. Fratelli Piccini spider necklace, $32,000, fratellipiccini.com. Van Cleef & Arpels lemur brooches (sold as pair), $473,000, vancleefarpels.com. Munnu the Gem Palace parrot ring, price on request, (212) 861-0606. Chopard butterfly brooch, price on request, chopard.com.

SUPER

Creatures of the sea, land and sky sparkle with diamonds, emeralds, black opals, rubies and more.

NATURAL 37

Photographs by Kyoko Hamada Styled by Chloe Daley Jewelry Editor Angela Koh

JEWELRY REPORT

GUTTER CREDIT TK

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THINGS

Clockwise from top left: Bulgari snake necklace, price on request, (800) 285-4274. Lord Jewelry dragonfly brooch, price on request, (213) 489-0039. Chopard peacock earrings, price on request. Temple St. Clair snake necklace, price on request, (212) 219-8664.

GUTTER CREDIT TK

Clockwise from top left: Cartier crocodile ring, price on request, (800) 2278437. Paul Morelli spider earring (sold as pair), $18,000, paulmorelli.com. David Webb frog brooch, $22,000, davidwebb.com. Verdura swan brooch, $57,500, (212) 758-3388. Lord Jewelry moth ring, price on request.

JEWELRY REPORT

PHOTO ASSISTANT: OWEN ANGOTE. STYLIST’S ASSISTANT: HOANG DINH

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THINGS

Clockwise from top: David Webb octopus brooch, $135,000. Daniela Villegas chameleon ring, $36,000, danielavillegas.com. Munnu the Gem Palace bird ring, price on request. Hermès horse ring, $45,000, hermes.com. Harumi Klossowska de Rola elephant ring, price on request, Dover Street Market New York, (646) 837-7750. Selim Mouzannar snake necklace, $94,800, Marissa Collections, (800) 581-6641.

By Nancy Hass Photograph by Florent Tanet

Coulisse Z-shaped table lamp, $7,150, hermes.com.

After Hermès asked the 45year-old Spanish industrial designer Tomás Alonso to create a small line of lamps, he visited the Paris house’s famed private museum. Located above the flagship store on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the space holds more than 20,000 non-Hermès objects, amassed over nearly 150 years, which have inspired the company’s clothing and accessories. Amid antique saddlery dating back to the Mongol invasion, Alonso, whose studio is in the London borough of Hackney, discovered a set of collapsible Victorian paper dioramas and some folding lamps from the early days of electric light. “I realized that packability, or at least the illusion of that, is at the heart of Hermès,” he says. “The idea that beautiful things can travel the world with you.” The lamps he conceptualized don’t actually fold, but they nonetheless are kitelike and airy, hovering between the ephemeral and the substantial. Crafted from handmade Japanese paper and bamboo in three colorways, each with a different configuration, including a T-shape and a single panel, the collection is named for coulisses — painted pieces of scenery that give a stage set its dimension. Lit by an LED light source on a pivoting coppercoated hoop to add geometric complexity, the fixtures stand as minimalist sculptures, aflame from within.

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THINGS

MAKING IT

TO FLOWER, literally and figuratively, is to reach the peak of one’s possibility, from which there is no direction but down. Or so we have been taught: that lushness equals splendor, that when a blossom wilts and fails, the plant that bore it is finished, returned to drabness, spent of purpose. Spring is a pageant, winter a graveyard. What a shock, then, this past spring at the venerable Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea Flower Show in London, to see — amid the ravishment of color and swollen blooms — an array of seed heads, pale and close to pure sculpture, without a petal in sight. It was at once austere and flagrant, a rebuttal of cherished notions of what a garden should be. This, too, is beauty, it seemed to say: this diminishing, these skeletons that remain after the gaudy heyday of blossoms is past. The exhibit was the work of Steven Edney, the English plantsman, horticulturalist and regular on the beloved BBC Radio Kent show “Sunday Gardening.” He has earned multiple gold medals from the R.H.S. for his floral displays, including his radical, petal-less one this year. Since 2005, he has also held the position of head gardener for the Salutation, a private mansion turned boutique hotel in the medieval port town of Sandwich, Kent, in the English countryside. The estate was completed by the architect Edwin Lutyens in 1912, and in May 1950, it became the first 20th-century home to be designated by the government as a Grade 1 property of “exceptional interest.” But by the time Edney was hired, the gardens — also Lutyens’s meticulous work: 3.7 acres inspired by his collaborations with the landscape designer Gertrude Jekyll, mixing stately geometric structure with informal sprawl — had gone derelict, after what the Sunday Telegraph garden columnist Francine Raymond has described as a history of “absentee owners, a suicide, disappearing bankers, repossession, greedy businessmen.” So Edney had to educate himself in the art of resurrection and reinvention, introducing 2,000 species of plants, the showy alongside the everyday, heirlooms among exotics, tender and hardy alike. Along the way, he started to challenge the established thinking that values spring and summer blooms above all (sometimes to the detriment of a garden’s biodiversity) and to investigate the possibilities of fall and winter. “You have to unlearn what you’re taught to move forward,” says Edney. He questioned the incessant demand for tidiness and “perfection” in a garden, which leads many to pinch off shriveled flowers before seed heads can form. The traditional argument for this grooming procedure, a routine part of gardening called deadheading, is that it can encourage another bloom. To Edney’s mind, that’s a limited view; a plant’s worth shouldn’t be confined to the brief moment of its most overt and brazen appeal. In his work at the Salutation, he embraces a plant’s full life cycle, in flower and in death — where others

dismiss winter as a dormant, liminal season, he insists that vitality may be found all year. For a seed head is no drab aftermath. Like a flower, it adds color to a landscape, from russets and umbers to flaring golds to lunar whites. One of Edney’s favorites, Veronicastrum virginicum “Lavendelturm,” retains its spikes in winter, upright, skinnier, with a blush of purple deepening into brown. In lieu of ripeness, seed heads throughout the gardens present an eerie, ossified architecture: tightmouthed trumpets of Iris sibirica, alliums like exploding stars. Flat-topped sedum might reach barely 10 inches, while miscanthus (silver grass) towers eight feet high, with long woolly tapers of seeds drifting down. EDNEY KNEW IT was a risk to submit seed heads to the Chelsea Flower Show. A longago entry following similar lines, from another gardener, had been met with opprobrium and, according to Edney, a stern warning to “never do that again.” The decision by the R.H.S. to award him a gold medal this year is certainly a sign of the changing times, where environmental concerns have come to the fore. Indeed, seed heads are crucial to the well-being of a garden that’s home to more than plant life: When the weather turns, animals take shelter in crannies of unpruned stems, feed on protein-rich seeds and use the heads’ wispy fluff to build nests; their survival depends on this communion. Historically, gardening has often been an act of control, bringing a riotous landscape to heel and imposing on it the stamp of human will. Edney’s approach is a kind of relinquishment: to follow the plant’s lead. “You’re bound to the fate of your garden,” Edney says — and not only in spring, when the going is good. “Every day. Every month.” He is now at work on a book that makes a case for gardening year-round, with an eye to sustainability and recognizing that every garden exists within a greater landscape. To love a garden in winter, however beautiful, is to accept that beauty is not a plant’s sole mission, nor should it be. We prize the lilies of the field for toiling not, but usefulness, too, has its honor. And if a seed head is viewed simply as a marker for a lost flower, it is also an acknowledgment that we can only exert so much power over the world around us. “People used to be so afraid of death in the garden,” the Dutch plantsman Henk Gerritsen once said, as recounted by the English garden designer and writer Noel Kingsbury. In 1978, Gerritsen began building a naturalistic, unregimented garden in the Netherlands, where seed heads and bare stems were left to stand through the winter, in collaboration with his partner, the photographer Anton Schlepers; he lost Schlepers to complications of AIDS in 1993, before being diagnosed himself with H.I.V. and dying in 2008. “Now a whole generation has known death,” he said. “So we do not ban it from the garden anymore.”

After

Allium, achillea, iris, sorghum, miscanthus, dipsacus, eryngium and other seed heads were plucked from the garden of the Salutation, a hotel in Kent, England, and arranged in one of its lounges by the head gardener, Steven Edney, who prizes a plant’s full life cycle — not just its fair-weather prime.

In the barren charms of a winter garden, a flowerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dried seed head is as prized as its fat bloom. By Ligaya Mishan Photograph by William Farr Styled by Steven Edney

the Fall

THINGS

Turquoise is not uniquely American — there are deposits in Asia, South America and the Middle East — but Arizona has long been considered the premier worldwide source of the bewitching opaque blue-green mineral. The phosphate of copper and aluminum takes its modern name from the Old French word for “Turkish” (it was brought to Europe from mines in Persia during the Middle Ages). In pre-Columbian times, Native Americans unearthed unusually vibrant veins in colors from jade to baby blue, and many still regard the stone as sacred. Rolex, the Geneva-based watch company, made its first turquoise-faced watch in 1983; its designers have occasionally redeployed the earthy yet dramatic mineral over the years. This version of the classic Day-Date 36, in gold, sports the first such dial in nearly a decade. Fashioned from a wafer-thin slice of polished Arizona turquoise, its numerals and bezel are studded with more than 100 brilliant-cut diamonds. The effect? An azure patch of late afternoon sky above the mesas, just as the stars begin to emerge. Rolex Day-Date 36, $56,500, rolex.com.

PHOTO ASSISTANT: TIMOTHY MULCARE

By Nancy Hass Photograph by David Chow Styled by Todd Knopke

FOOD MATTERS

WHAT’S ON YOUR PLATE?

On the island of Bali, two nutritionists dish out burgers that fit your macros.

A LARGE MURAL OF ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER in his early bodybuilding days adorns the cement-finish wall at the entrance of the open kitchen of Henem Chaar and Matt Bolton’s bistro, just 100 meters away from the black sandy beach of Canggu, in the hip southern region of Indonesia’s famed Bali island. The stylized pop art is just the kind of inspiration you would expect to see at Macro Kitchen, the couple’s new fitness venture in Asia. Here, Schwarzenegger is holding a fork in his right hand and a huge stalk of broccoli in his left while flexing in his signature bodybuilding side chest pose. “He knew what nutrition was,” Bolton says. “That physique was built on good old solid knowledge of eating right.” This is the philosophy that brought

Macro Kitchen to life, a nutrition-based eatery founded on the couple’s obsessive search for the right food to feed their lifestyles. Opened last spring, the bistro serves a menu of well-loved classics executed with macro-nutrient compositions in mind. Fresh ingredients are key with a cue from the locality – think dragon fruits and tempeh – but it is the quality of the macronutrient sources that the kitchen is most concerned with. “In pursuit of optimal health, these nutrients have to come from the cleanest sources, hence our menu is crafted only from organic meat, free range eggs, cold-pressed oils and natural sweeteners,” explains Chaar. “And thanks to the bountiful local produce, we are able to use banana and cassava flour in addition to oatmeal instead of wheat.” From early morning right up to late afternoon, the kitchen dishes out sweet and savory pancakes, protein bowls and porridges, tacos, salads and burgers in addition to a whole concoction of shakes

and smoothies. The Tutti Fruity pancake is served with a generous drizzle of dragon fruit sauce and coconut flakes, the Fragglerock bowl is a nutrient-packed punch of kale and spinach goodness, while the Look Who’s Talking taco wraps coconutmarinated chicken in a wholesome sweet potato tortilla. The portions are generous, and the repertoires look almost too delectable for a healthfood joint. “Have we discovered the magic?” Bolton jokes. The key lies in the couple’s nutritional knowledge training that has allowed them to fine-tune recipes in the right macronutrient proportions that support health and fitness The Desperate Dan objectives. Chaar is Nutritional burger with charcoal Coaching Institute Level 1 bun and slowcertified while Bolton has cooked pulled beef.

Text and Photos By Debrina Aliyah

FOOD MATTERS THINGS QATAR 46 T QATAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE

certifications specializing in nutrition, hormone, strength and conditioning training. “Next to every item on our menu, we list the count of protein, fats and carbohydrates. Although different people require different daily intakes, our dishes are designed with a well-balanced composition of the three macros ensuring that you feel satiated and well fueled,” Chaar explains. The macros on the menu are the reason why the bistro has become a favorite haunt of the island’s fitness community. For the substantial demographic of digital nomads who either live in Bali seasonally or permanently, fitness and surfing are important pasttimes that are well complemented by a considered diet. “Some already have an idea of what and how they need to eat so they know what to order based on the macros of our dishes,” Chaar says. “For others, it’s always a fun experience introducing the idea that food is made of nutrient blocks and we always encourage them to DIY something, like our customizable porridge so they get a feel of how it works.” For a comprehensive nutritional solution, the kitchen also offers weekly or monthly meal plans that are completely customized to the individual’s macronutrient requirements. Prepared fresh and delivered to the client daily, the service is offered with a preconsultation to determine how the meals can fit into the client’s daily life. “We pride ourselves on creating a culture that is sustainable and getting people to understand that a purposeful diet is not a fad. It is something that you learn so you can put into practice for the rest of your life, we hope,” Bolton explains. Before moving to Bali, Chaar and Bolton had spent half a decade in Qatar where they individually pursued careers in sports and fitness. Though their time in the desert city has been rewarding where they worked with clients of diverse nationalities and background, they felt the yearning for a more pared down and relaxed existence. They knew their expertise and passion in fitness and health could be useful anywhere in the world and, after several trips to Asia, Chaar knew that they would find a fit among the new generation of global nomads. “If only I could explain the feeling that ran through me, the first time I cruised down a chaotic Balinese street on a

Clockwise from top-left: A make-yourown porridge bowl where you get to pick flavors; Bolton and Chaar have over 20 years of combined experience in health and fitness; house-style nut butters on-the-go; the Tutti Fruity pancake with almond and coconut flakes, chia coconut yogurt and honey.

scooter knowing that I am heading into a new chapter and working on something that truly matters to me,” she says. The new rhythm of life has given the two the freedom to specialize further in the field of functional sports and performance nutrition. Chaar recently attained a podium finish in the Jakarta Wod Off, a functional fitness throwdown, and Bolton is now coaching at Crossfit Wanderlust, one of Asia’s most recognizable fitness collectives just a couple of miles away from their bistro. “There’s a growing shift towards nutrition-based eating here and we are ready to embrace what’s to come next,” Chaar says.

BY DESIGN

THE SHOE THAT TELLS A STORY A conversation with the Qatari shoe designer Hissa Al Haddad.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF HISSA AL HADDAD

From top: Qatari shoe designer Hissa Al Haddad; a model wearing Haddad’s designed pieces.

GIVE A GIRL the right shoes, and she can conquer the world, said Marilyn Monroe, reflecting the philosophy of the talented and ambitious Qatari shoe designer Hissa Al Haddad. Haddad launched her eponymous shoe label two years ago and has since gone international with fashion week appearances in both Paris and London. A communications specialist with Qatari telecommunications giant Ooredoo for the past eight years, Haddad pursued both her bachelor’s and master’s degree in communication engineering at the University of Leeds in the UK, but her real love is fashion. “I have always wanted to do something related to fashion and design. As a child, my mom would enjoy dressing me differently from the other kids. We would go to different designers and tailors to customize outfits. In the ‘90s, we were really into the trend of coordinating whole outfits so we would get plain shoes and add crystals or designs on them to match the dress,” Haddad explains. When she returned to Qatar after her studies in 2015, she decided to pursue shoe designing and her research led her to Palma Libotte, the secretary general of the Italian Chamber of Commerce in Qatar. Together, they travelled to Italy where she found partners who understood her stylistic influences and vision to kickstart her brand. “I have always loved shoes and am always looking for ways to make them look and fit better,” says the 30-year-old. “I often look at shoes and feel that they could have been made better in terms of comfort. I mean, to be honest, we women don’t really want our feet to suffer just for style,” she laughs. Haddad then began a study into the size and fit of shoes on different women as part of her groundwork to creating a base frame for her designs. “The fit of each shoe is different and there were a lot of considerations to be made to achieve a balance between comfort and style,” she explains. “Shoes define how you walk and in turn are a part of your body language. High heels have come to be the epitome of beauty and since most women dream of walking confidently and comfortably in high heels, I wanted to make those dreams come true,” she says. The first capsule collection of five designs debuted in the autumn of 2017 during Paris Fashion Week expressing the theme of Islamic architecture and Qatari heritage. “I used gold, jewels and crystals which are a part of Qatari fashion, and pearls which represent Qatar’s cultural roots,” the designer says. The shoes feature curves and angles reminiscent of elements from Arabic and Islamic architecture with opulent embellishments that have long been a favorite among Arabian women. “We also have a more discreet collection featuring the same silhouette that you can wear day and night. I started off with satin but have now shifted to a mix of leathers for a more contemporary feel,” she explains.

By Dipti Nair

Clockwise from top right: Haddad wearing her designed pieces; a pair of nude heels designed by Haddad; a contemporary woman on-the-go as the brand image of Haddad's shoe line.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF HISSA AL HADDAD

BY DESIGN THINGS QATAR 48 T QATAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE

After the launch in Paris, the brand was scouted by the British Fashion Council and in the following seasons, she showcased in both London and Paris. “We received very positive and encouraging response from influential insiders who were pleasantly surprised to discover a growing fashion movement from the Gulf region,” she recounts. “There was a perception that we were not very fashion conscious and that we were quite traditional. I had lots of enquiries not only about the brand but also about my culture and Qatar. It was quite an amazing experience being able to represent Qatar on an international stage,” she says. The brand is currently available in Qatar’s high-end retailer Salam Stores and on e-commerce, but Haddad is focused on expanding into European markets. “It’s a brand for the contemporary woman on-the-go. She needs comfortable footwear that will make her feel beautiful. She could be wearing an abaya or a suit or a short skirt, but the style is on her feet,” she says. It is no surprise then that when it comes to footwear, Haddad is a fanatic. She has a collection of over three hundred pairs of shoes and while Haddad claims Manolo Blahnik to be her favorite, she is not averse to buying a pair of shoes from the high street. “I do have a preference for specific brands because of their signature aesthetics, but I never restrict myself. I bought shoes from local markets just because I found the fit and look to be perfect. Sometimes I buy shoes not to wear them but just to add to my collection because I am taken by a particular design,” she says. And the one design that she feels every woman should invest in? “Red pumps. I believe women who wear red are the strongest. Red is the color of strength and it means you are a risk-taker who isn’t afraid to show what you are made of.”

MARKET REPORT

Tech Savvy

Sleek accessories put the luxe in geeky essentials. By Debrina Aliyah

PHOTO COURTESY OF CHAOS; LE POM POM; BANG & OLUFSEN; ROSANTICA; HADORO; BERLUTI; NATIVE UNION

Clockwise from top-left: Gold lanyard, QR420, Chaos, AirPod straps, QR220, Le Pom Pom, Speaker, QR1000, Bang & Olufsen, Phone case, QR3,105, Rosantica, Charging pad, QR1,963, Hadoro, Charging kit, QR3,446, Berluti, Phone dock, QR520, Native Union

IN FASHION

In its sixth year, a film festival continues the increasingly relevant dialogue between fashion and social issues.

Cinematic Voices in Fashion

IT BEGAN SOMETIME during the rise of social video streaming platforms, where visually engaging short clips became the très chic way to communicate fashion concepts over traditional printed pages. Among the pioneers were the eccentric Italian house Miu Miu which launched a series of short fashion films based on abstract storylines but rich in aesthetics where the clothes spoke the loudest. And it was around this time that Constanza Cavalli Etro realized how quickly the new medium had gained ground through social media. “Short attentiongrabbing videos that can be shared with just a click. It was as if the fashion narrative that had gone dusty for a bit has found a brand-new way to come back to life,” says the communication consultant who then kickstarted the Fashion Film Festival Milano – its first edition in 2014 took place concurrently with Milan Fashion Week and featured stalwarts like Wes Anderson and Roman Polanski.

PHOTO COURTESY OF FASHION FILM FESTIVAL MILANO

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THINGS QATAR

By Debrina Aliyah

Waris Dirie, founder of the Desert Flower Foundation, highlights women’s issues at the Fashion Film Festival Milano.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF FASHION FILM FESTIVAL MILANO

From top: In conversation with Kiera Chaplin, who represented the Desert Flower Foundation at the Fashion Film Festival Milano; Constanza Cavalli Etro founded the festival in 2014 with a vision of inclusiveness.

This year’s edition flew the inclusiveness flag high with a special focus on women’s rights and eco-sustainability, issues that have been much discussed within the industry in recent times. The festival’s official selections, previews, conversation panels, and program content have been geared to create awareness on initiatives supporting women and the environment including the much-talked-about Peter Lindbergh: Women’s Stories documentary. With these two themes at its heart, the festival started receiving submissions for its official screening and annual competition in March this year. “There were entries from over fifty countries, a testament to the festival having grown to be a constant exchange of global artistic expressions, idioms, voices and experiences,” Etro says. Giorgio Armani headed the 2019 jury panel which included Vicente Todoli, artistic director of the Pirelli Hangar Bicocca Foundation, Waris Dirie, founder of the Desert Flower Foundation, and Oskar Metsavaht, conscious fashion and sustainable luxury advocate. “We brought together prominent personalities from different fields to be able to select films that are truly diverse and representative. And as for Armani, I would say he was among the first who created the dialogue between cinema and fashion with his work in the movie American Gigolo. He understood even then that these two worlds can come together to create an engaging and relevant narrative,” Etro explains. Over two hundred films were selected for official screenings while fifteen were awarded in categories that included Best Green Fashion Film, Best Documentary and Best Director. Emily Ford-Haliday won the Best New Fashion Film category for her documentary, Fashion In the Dark, a project that explored fashion and identity with people who are blind or visually impaired. “I am encouraged and proud to be a part of such an amazing and unique festival that actively celebrates and promotes diversity, sustainability and inclusion through fashion film,” Ford-Haliday says of her award. Body positive womenswear brand FantaBody was awarded Best New Italian Designer for its dance video Body Confy Dance directed by Enea Colombi and the brand’s founder Carolina Amoretti. “It’s all about being comfortable in your own body and allowing it to move freely,” Amoretti says. “Beyond the films and videos, the festival is very social and informative because the films are a means to starting important conversations on contemporary issues,” Etro explains. With the support of major players in the Italian fashion community,

While big houses dominated the headlines in earlier editions, it has always been Etro’s vision to steer the festival as a platform for new and emerging talents to showcase their work on an equal footing as the greats. “I see it as a big cultural meeting point, where works from all over the world from both new and established talents present different viewpoints, aesthetics, narratives and stylistic codes,” she explains. From the very beginning, the festival has always had an open-door policy where film submissions and screenings are free of charge, allowing the public to participate in the programs as opposed to the “invite-only” norm of fashion week. “We want everyone to experience fashion in a new way and by using a familiar channel like cinema, it is the perfect vehicle to democratize an industry that has long been considered snobbish,” Etro says. “A fashion film is a cinematographic experience that enlarges our vision of the world and of the contemporaneity; it is the new communication medium used by fashion to express itself in the digital era.”

IN FASHION THINGS QATAR 52 T QATAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE

the festival presented a series of talks featuring influential personalities with topics ranging from independent publishing for females to the future of fashion films in the modern landscape. Dirie alongside activist Kiera Chaplin also presented a dialogue on the initiatives that the Desert Flower Foundation has been pursuing to create awareness against female genital mutilation around the world. On the green side, Metsavaht in conversation with fashion sustainability expert Hakan Karaosman discussed the relationship between nature and fashion while introducing the premiere of the documentary ASAP – As Sustainable As Possible, As Soon As Possible. Etro sees the 2019 edition as the springboard to the festival’s future. Having moved from its annual September schedule to November, it has come into its own without having to ride on the city’s fashion week calendar. It is now the largest festival of its kind in the world, and with its continuous opendoor policy, it’s set to make a mark for both the fashion and cinematic industry.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF EMILY FORD-HALIDAY; FANTABODY; FASHION FILM FESTIVAL MILANO

Clockwise from top left: Behind the scenes of Fashion in the Dark; a jumpsuit from Fantabody; Metsavaht promotes socio environmental practices through awareness; Mark Bozek, producer of “The Times of Bill” presents the European premiere of the documentary at the festival.

November-December, 2019

A tableau of foraged local Phragmites australis, Miscanthus sinensis, dried darnel ryegrass and wild pheasants, arranged by Ruby Barber, the owner of the Berlin floral design studio Mary Lennox. (Page 62)

PHOTOGRAPH BY GUIDO CASTAGNOLI

54 Nick Cave 62 Grasses Gone Wild

NICK CAVE

THE INAUGURATION OF Nick Cave’s Facility, a new multidisciplinary art space on Chicago’s Northwest Side, has the feeling of a family affair. In April, inside the yellow-brick industrial building, the classical vocalist Brenda Wimberly and the keyboardist Justin Dillard give a special performance for a group that includes local friends, curators and educators, as well as Cave’s high school art teacher, Lois Mikrut, who flew in from North Carolina for the event. Outside, stretching across the windows along Milwaukee Avenue, is a 70-foot-long mosaic made of 7,000 circular name tags with a mix of red and white backgrounds, each of them personalized by local schoolchildren and community members. They spell out the message “Love Thy Neighbor.” The simple declaration of togetherness and shared purpose is a mission statement for the space, a creative incubator as well as Cave’s home and studio, which he shares with his partner, Bob Faust, and his older brother Jack. It’s also a raison d’être for Cave, an uncategorizable talent who has never fit the mold of the artist in his studio. Best known for his Soundsuits — many of which are ornate, full-body costumes designed to rattle and resonate with the movement of the wearer — his work, which combines sculpture, fashion and performance, connects the anxieties and divisions of our time to the intimacies of the body. Exhibited in galleries or worn by dancers, the suits — fanciful assemblages that include bright pelts of dyed hair, twigs, sequins, repurposed sweaters, crocheted doilies, gramophones or even stuffed sock-monkey dolls, their eerie grins covering an entire supersize garment — are compulsively, unsettlingly decorative. Some are amusingly creature-like; others are lovely in an almost ecclesiastical way, bedecked with shimmering headpieces embellished with beads and porcelain birds and other discarded tchotchkes he picks up at flea markets. Even at the level of medium, Cave operates against entrenched hierarchies, elevating glittery consumer detritus and traditional handicrafts like beadwork or sewing to enchanting heights. By Megan O’Grady In invigorating performances that often involve Photographs by Renée Cox collaborations with local musicians and choreographers, the Soundsuits can seem almost shaman-esque, a contemporary spin on kukeri, ancient European folkloric creatures said to chase away evil spirits. They recall as well something out of Maurice Sendak, ungainly wild things cutting loose on the dance floor in a gleeful, liberating rumpus. The surprising movements of the Soundsuits, which change depending on the materials used to make them, tend to guide Cave’s performances and not the other way around. There is something ritual-like and purifying about all the whirling hair and percussive music; the process of dressing the dancers in their 40-pound suits resembles preparing samurai for battle. After each performance, the suits made of synthetic hair require tender grooming, like pets. Cave’s New York gallerist, Jack Shainman, recalls the time he assisted in the elaborate process of brushing them out — “I was starting to bug out, because there were 20 or 30 of them” — only to have Cave take over and do it all himself. Much beloved and much imitated (as I write this, an Xfinity ad is airing in which a colorful, furry-suited creature is buoyantly leaping about), they can be found in permanent museum collections across America. Their origins are less intellectual than emotional, as Cave tells it, and they’re both playful and deadly serious. He initially conceived of them as a kind of race-, class- and gender-obscuring armature, one that’s both insulating and isolating, an articulation of his profound sense of vulnerability as a black man. Using costume to unsettle and dispel assumptions about identity is part of a long tradition of drag, from Elizabethan drama to Stonewall and beyond; at the same time, the suits are the perfect expression of W. E. B Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness, the psychological adjustments black Americans make in order to survive within a white racist society, a vigilant, anticipatory awareness of the perceptions of others. It’s no coincidence that Cave made the first Soundsuit in 1992, after the beating of Rodney King by the Los Angeles Police Department in 1991, a still-vivid racial touchstone in American history; almost three decades later, the suits are no less timely. “It was an almost inflammatory response,” he remembers, looking shaken as he recalls watching King’s beating on

The most joyful living artist has also spent his career critiquing America’s darkest impulses, using his gorgeous, bedazzled sculptures to create one of the most indelible running commentaries we have on race and inequality.

Nick Cave, photographed in his Chicago studio on June 6, 2019.

A collection of racially charged salt and pepper shakers that Cave found in a flea market and keeps in his studio. Opposite: vintage bird figurines, also in the artist’s studio.

television 28 years ago. “I felt like my identity and who I was as a human being was up for question. I felt like that could have been me. Once that incident occurred, I was existing very differently in the world. So many things were going through my head: How do I exist in a place that sees me as a threat?” Cave had begun teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, with its predominately white faculty, two years before, and in the aftermath of the incident, followed by the acquittal of the officers responsible, he felt his isolation painfully. “I really felt there was no one there I could talk to. None of my colleagues addressed it. I just felt like, ‘I’m struggling with this, this is affecting my people.’ I would think that someone would be empathetic to that and say, ‘How are you doing?’ I held it all in internally. And that’s when I found myself sitting in the park,” he says. In Grant Park, around the corner from his classroom, he started gathering twigs — “something that was discarded, dismissed, viewed as less. And it became the catalyst for the first Soundsuit.” For many years after he began making his signature work, Cave deliberately avoided the spotlight, shying away from an adoring public: “I knew I had the ability, but I wasn’t ready, or I didn’t want to leave my friends behind. I think this grounded me, and made me an artist with a conscience. Then, one day, something said, ‘Now or never,’ and I had to step into the light.” Initially, he wasn’t prepared for the success of the Soundsuits. For much of the ’90s, “I literally shoved all of them into the closet because I wasn’t ready for the intensity of that attention,” Cave says. He began exhibiting the Soundsuits at his first solo shows, mostly in galleries across the Midwest; he’s since made more than 500 of them. They’ve grown alongside Cave’s practice, evolving from a form of protective shell to an outsize, exuberant expression of confidence that pushes the boundaries of visibility. They demand to be seen. Following the phenomenal success of the Soundsuits, Cave’s focus has expanded to the culture that produced them, with shows that more directly implicate viewers and demand civic engagement around issues like gun violence and racial inequality. But increasingly, the art that interests Cave is the art he inspires others to make. With a Dalloway-like genius for bringing people from different walks of life to the table in experiences of shared good will, Cave sees himself as a messenger first and an artist second, which might sound more than a touch pretentious if it weren’t already so clear that these roles have, for some time, been intertwined. In 2015, he trained youth from an L.G.B.T.Q. shelter in Detroit to dance in a Soundsuit performance. The same year, during a six-month residency in Shreveport, La., he coordinated a series of bead-a-thon projects at six social-

service agencies, one dedicated to helping people with H.I.V. and AIDS, and enlisted dozens of local artists into creating a vast multimedia production in March of 2016, “As Is.” In June 2018, he transformed New York’s Park Avenue Armory, a former drill hall converted into an enormous performance venue, into a Studio 54-esque disco experience with his piece — part revival, part dance show, part avant-garde ballet — called “The Let Go,” inviting attendees to engage in an unabashedly ecstatic free dance together: a call to arms and catharsis in one. Last summer, with the help of the nonprofit Now & There, a public art curator, he enlisted community groups in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood to collaborate on a vast collage that will be printed on material and wrapped around one of the area’s unoccupied buildings; in September, also in collaboration with Now & There, he led a parade that included local performers from the South End to Upham’s Corner with “Augment,” a puffy riot of deconstructed inflatable lawn ornaments — the Easter bunny, Uncle Sam, Santa’s reindeer — all twisted up in a colossal Frankenstein bouquet of childhood memories. Cave understands that the lost art of creating community, of joining forces to accomplish a task at hand, whether it’s beading a curtain or mending the tattered social fabric, depends upon igniting a kind of dreaming, a gameness, a childlike ability to imagine ideas into being. But it also involves recognizing the disparate histories that divide and bind us. The strength of any group depends on an awareness of its individuals. FACILITY IS THE next iteration of that larger mission, and Cave and Faust, a graphic designer and artist, spent years looking for the right space. Creating it required a great deal of diplomacy and determination, as well as an agreeable alderman to assist with the zoning changes and permits. And while it evokes Warhol’s Factory in name, in intent, the approximately 20,000-square-foot former mason’s workshop has a very different cast. “Facilitating, you know, projects. Energies. Individuals. Dreams. Every day, I wake up, he wakes up, and we’re like, ‘O.K. How can we be of service in a time of need?’ ” says Cave, who gave me a tour in the fall of 2018, not long after he and Faust settled into the space. Dressed entirely in black — leather pants and a sweater, and sneakers with metallic accents — the 60-year-old artist has a dancer’s bearing (he trained for several summers in the early ’80s at a program in Kansas City run by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater) and an aura of kindness and irrepressible positivity. One wants to have what he’s having. “Girl, you can wear anything,” he reassures me when I fret about the green ruched dress I’m wearing, which under his discerning gaze suddenly strikes me as distinctly caterpillarlike. It comes as no surprise that Cave’s favorite adjective is “fabulous.” In contrast to his maximalist art practice, his fashion tastes have grown more austere, as of late, and include vintage suits and monochrome classics from Maison Margiela, Rick Owens and Helmut Lang. “I have a fabulous sneaker collection,” he says. “But you know, the reason why is because those floors at the school are so hard,” he says, referring to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is now a professor of Fashion, Body and Garment. (I also teach at the school, in a different department.) “I can’t wear a hard shoe, I have to wear a sneaker,” he says. Faust teases him: “I love how you’ve just justified having that many sneakers.”

the time, the artist was about to publish his first book and asked Faust to design it; the collaboration was a success, and Faust has subsequently designed all of Cave’s publications. About eight years ago, the nature of the relationship changed. “Before that, I was single for 10 years. I was always traveling, and who is going to handle all of that?” Cave says. “But Bob already knew who I was, and that makes all the difference. Being with someone who is a visionary in his own right and using this platform as a place of consciousness — it’s very important to me.” Upstairs is the couple’s living space and selections from Cave’s personal art collection: a Kehinde Wiley here, a Kerry James Marshall there. (A lesson from Cave: Buy work from your friends before they become famous.) Cave and Faust opted to leave the floors and walls scarred, bearing the traces of its former use as an industrial building. In a small, sunny room off the kitchen, one corner of the ceiling is left open to accommodate an abandoned wasp’s nest, a subtle, scrolled masterpiece of found architecture. Faust’s teenage daughter also has a bedroom, and Jack, an artist with a design bent, has an adjacent apartment. Downstairs, in the cavernous work space big enough to host a fashion show, musical or dance performance, are Cave’s and Faust’s studios. Some of Cave’s assistants — he has six of them, Faust has one — are applying beads on a vast, multistory tapestry, a project

Cave met Faust, who runs his own business from Facility, in addition to supporting the artist as his special projects director, when he happened to stop by a sample sale of Cave’s clothing designs in the early 2000s. The Soundsuits are, for all intents and purposes, a kind of clothing, so fashion has been a natural part of Cave’s artistic practice since the beginning — he studied fiber arts as an undergraduate at the Kansas City Art Institute, where he first learned to sew. In 1996, he started a namesake fashion line for men and women that lasted a decade. If the Soundsuits resist categorization as something to wear in everyday life, they arrive at their unclassifiable beauty by taking the basic elements of clothing design — stitching, sewing, understanding how a certain material falls or looks with another kind of material — and exaggerating them into the realm of atmospheric psychedelia. That he teaches in the fashion department at an art school further underscores the thin line Cave has always walked between clothing and sculpture, all of it preoccupied in some way with the human body, its form and potential energy. His own clothing designs are slightly — only slightly — more practical variations on the Soundsuits: loud embroidered sweaters, crocheted shirts with sparkly jewelry. “He came in and was like, ‘These clothes are so out there, I can’t wear any of this,’ ” Cave recalls, laughing. (Faust politely bought a sweater and still wears it today.) At

AWKWARD PERSONAL disclosures. Long evaluative silences. Talk of “coming to form.” Art-school crits — sessions in which a professor reviews his students’ work — are all pretty similar, but Cave’s are famous both for their perspicacity and warmth. For all his multi-hyphenates, “teacher” may be the role that best sums up his totality of being. “When someone believes in your work, it changes how you see your future,” he says when we meet in the vast, light-filled studios in downtown Chicago, where the graduate fashion students are working. It’s the second-to-last crit of the year for Cave’s first-year students in the two-year M.F.A. program, and the pressure is on to develop their own distinct visual language before they begin their thesis projects in the fall. One woman from Russia has made a set of dresses from delicate organic 3-D-printed shapes — mushrooms, flowers — sewing them together and arranging them on a mannequin; they resemble exquisite body cages. Cave suggests that she should work in muslin on a flat surface rather than directly on the mannequin in order to make the silhouette “less uptight.” Next up is a student from China, who directs our attention to an anchor-shaped object suspended from the ceiling. It is made of small blue squares of fabric she’s dipped in batter and deep-fried to stiffen. She plays Björk’s “The Anchor Song” for us on her iPhone and explains that the textile sculpture is an expression of homesickness, longing and the mourning of a long relationship. We stare up at it silently. There’s a faint whiff of grease. After some back and forth with the student, Cave delivers his verdict: “Your tent is big, but you need to get on your boxing gloves and get in there,” he says. “You should be completely, 100 percent in it, and not let your will dictate. Bring all the parts together.” “That was pretty raw,” says Cave, once we are back in his office, noting that, when given a push, the student with the anchor astonishes everyone with what she can do. He clearly adores all of his charges, and sees teaching as a way of passing on his own teachers’ lessons: a way of liberating the creative subconscious within the technical rigors of design. “You’re looking at what’s there — fabric, shape and form — and asking, ‘How

With a Dalloway-like genius for bringing people from different walks of life to the table in experiences of shared good will, Cave sees himself as a messenger first and an artist second. are you coming to pattern, how are you coming to design?’ And some have just opened up for the first time, and the moment you open up, there are bigger questions, there’s a lot more responsibility, there’s so much more to grapple with.” A second-year student, Sean Gu, stops by to say hello. He’s just returned from China with a suitcase full of completed samples he wants to show Cave. The garments, jackets and vests, have zips and seat-belt-like buckles and artfully drooping corners that were inspired by Chinese political slogans. Cave and I take turns trying them on: One piece, a vest made of reflective polyurethane with multiple armholes and zippers, is our favorite. (Cave wore it best, of course.) The look on his face is one of pure delight in the cool, fabulous thing his student has made. Where, one might ask, did Cave’s seemingly boundless reservoirs of optimism and joy and productive energy come from? The short answer is Missouri, where Cave, born in Fulton, in the central part of the state, and raised in nearby Columbia, was the third of seven brothers. His mother, Sharron Kelly, worked in medical administration (Cave’s parents divorced when he was young), and his maternal grandparents lived nearby on a farm filled with animals. “Now that I look back, it was really so amazing for my brothers and myself to be in the presence of all of that unconditional love,” he says. “We were rambunctious, and of course you fight with your brothers, but we always made up through hugging or kissing. It was just part of the infrastructure.” Personal space was limited but respected, a chart of chores was maintained, and creative projects were always afoot (his aunts are seamstresses; his grandmother was a quilter). Hand-me-downs were individually customized by each new wearer. “I had to find ways of finding my identity through deconstructing,” he recalls. “So, if I didn’t want to be in my brother’s jacket, I’d take off the sleeves and replace it with plaid material. I was already in that process of cutting and putting things

FROM TOP: NICK CAVE, “SOUNDSUIT,” 2012, BUTTONS, WIRE, BUGLE BEADS, BASKET/WOOD, UPHOLSTERY AND MANNEQUIN; NICK CAVE, “SOUNDSUIT,” 2012, MIXED MEDIA INCLUDING SOCK MONKEYS, SWEATERS, PIPE CLEANERS AND MANNEQUIN; NICK CAVE, “SPEAK LOUDER,” 2011, BUTTONS, WIRE, BUGLE BEADS, UPHOLSTERY, METAL AND MANNEQUIN; NICK CAVE, “SOUNDSUIT,” 2013, MIXED MEDIA INCLUDING VINTAGE BUNNY, SAFETY PIN CRAFT BASKETS, HOT PADS, FABRIC, METAL AND MANNEQUIN. ALL IMAGES © NICK CAVE. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY, NEW YORK. PHOTOS BY JAMES PRINZ PHOTOGRAPHY

for Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport called “Palimpsest.” “It’ll all be gathered and bustled, so there’s layers and layers of color. Kind of like an old billboard that, over time, weathers, and layers come off and you see the history,” Cave explains. A front gallery is a flexible space where video art visible from the street could be projected — a nod to Cave’s first job out of art school, designing window displays for Macy’s — or young artists could be invited to display work around a shared theme. Facility has already established an art competition and prizes for Chicago Public School students and funded a special award for graduate fashion students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. “There are lots of creative people that do amazing things but just have never had a break,” Cave says. “And so to be able to host them in some way, these are the sort of things that are important to us, so we thought, ‘Why not?’ ”

THE VULNERABILITY OF the black body in a historically white context is a subject generations of African-American artists have contended with, perhaps most iconically in Glenn Ligon’s 1990 untitled etching, in which the phrase “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background,” adapted from Zora Neale Hurston’s 1928 essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” is printed over and over again in black stencil on a white canvas, the words blurring as they travel the length of the canvas. In her book “Citizen: An American Lyric” (2014), the poet Claudia Rankine, writing about Serena Williams, puts it this way: “The body has a memory. The physical carriage hauls more than its weight. The body is the threshold across which each objectionable call passes into consciousness — all the unintimidated, unblinking and

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: NICK CAVE, “UNTITLED (DETAIL),” 2018, CARVED HEAD AND AMERICAN FLAG PATTERN OF USED SHOTGUN SHELLS; NICK CAVE, “SOUNDSUIT,” 1998, MIXED MEDIA INCLUDING TWIGS, WIRE, METAL AND MANNEQUIN. NICK CAVE, “SOUNDSUIT,” 2010, MIXED MEDIA INCLUDING HATS, BAGS, RUG, METAL, FABRIC AND MANNEQUIN. NICK CAVE, “SOUNDSUIT,” 2009, HUMAN HAIR. ALL IMAGES © NICK CAVE, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY, NEW YORK. PHOTOS BY JAMES PRINZ PHOTOGRAPHY

Clockwise from top: the artist’s 2018 work “Untitled”; a 1998 Soundsuit made from twigs and wire; a 2010 Soundsuit made from a rug and bags; a 2009 Soundsuit made from human hair. Opposite, from top: a 2012 Soundsuit made with buttons; a 2012 Soundsuit made from sock monkeys and sweaters; “Speak Louder,” a Soundsuit sculpture from 2011; a 2013 Soundsuit that includes a vintage bunny.

back together and finding a new vocabulary through dress.” The artist tells an illuminating story about his mother, who managed the household on one income and would still often find ways to send food to a struggling family in the neighborhood. Once, during a particularly tight month, she came home from work to realize that there was no food left in the house except dried corn. And so she made a party of it, showing her sons a movie on television and popping the corn. “It doesn’t take much to shift how we experience something,” says Cave, recalling how she would entertain them simply by putting a sock on her hand and changing her voice to create a character. “It’s nothing, but it’s everything,” he says. “You’re just totally captivated. It’s these moments of fantasy and belief that’s also informed how I go about my work.” Fashion’s transformative power was also something he understood young, beginning with watching his older female relatives attend church in their fancy hats. In high school, Cave and Jack, who is two years older, experimented with platform shoes and two-tone flared pants. High fashion came to town, literally, via the Ebony Fashion Fair, a traveling show launched and produced between 1958 and 2009 by Eunice W. Johnson, the co-founder of Johnson Publishing Company, which published Ebony and Jet magazines, both cultural bibles for black America. “Ebony magazine was really the first place we saw people of color with style and power and money and vision, and that fashion show would travel to all of these small towns,” he reminisces. “Honey, black runway back in the day was a spectacle. It’s not just walking down the runway. It was almost like theater. And I’m this young boy just eating it up and feeling like I’m just in a dream, because it’s all fabulous and I just admire beauty to that extreme. I was just completely consumed by that.” His high school teachers encouraged him to apply to the Kansas City Art Institute, where he and Jack would stage fashion shows, which felt more like performance pieces thanks to Cave’s increasingly outré clothing designs. “I just had what I needed to have in order to be the person I need to be,” Cave says. Also harrowingly formative to Cave’s outlook was the AIDS crisis, which was at its deadly height while he was in graduate school at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan in the late ’80s. He became painfully aware of the function of denial in our culture, and the extent of people’s unwillingness to see. “Watching my friends die played a big part in my perspective,” he says. “In those moments, you have a choice to be in denial with them or to be present, to be the one to say, ‘This is happening.’ You have to make a decision to go through that process with them, to pick up their parents at the airport, to clean to get their apartments ready for their parents to stay. And then you have to say goodbye, and then they’re gone, and you’re packing up their belongings to send to their families. And then you’re just left there in an empty apartment, not knowing what to feel.” In a single year, he lost five friends and confronted his own mortality waiting for his test results. “Just — choosing not to be in denial in any circumstance,” he says.

A detail of Cave’s 2019 “Augment” installation, made from inflatable lawn ornaments. Opposite: “Arm Peace,” part of a series of sculptures created for Cave’s 2018 solo show, “If a Tree Falls,” at Jack Shainman Gallery.

unflappable resilience does not erase the moments lived through, even as we are eternally stupid or everlastingly optimistic, so ready to be inside, among, a part of the games.” The individual body has a memory, and so do collective bodies, retaining a longer and longer list of names — Eric Garner on Staten Island, Michael Brown in Missouri, Trayvon Martin in Florida and so many more innocent black people who have suffered violence and death at the hands of police — within it. But that day in 1992, hurrying back to his studio with a cart full of twigs and setting out to build a sculpture from them, Cave had no idea that the result would be a garment. “At first, it didn’t occur to me that I could wear it; I wasn’t thinking about it.” When he finally did put it on and moved around, it made a sound. “And that was the beginning,” he says. “The sound was a way of alarming others to my presence. The suit became a suit of armor where I hid my identity. It was something ‘other.’ It was an answer to all of these things I had been thinking about: What do I do to protect my spirit in spite of all that’s happening around me?” Throughout the Soundsuits’ countless iterations, Cave has tinkered with their proportions, thinking

about the shapes of power, constructing forms that recall a pope’s miter or the head of a missile. Some of them are 10 feet tall. But no matter their variations, these Soundsuit designs have always felt personal and unique, as if only Cave himself could have invented them. And yet he is also aware of how the pain he is addressing in these works is also written into our culture: There is a long lineage of casual cruelty that has shaped Cave’s art. His 2014 installation at Jack Shainman Gallery, To watch Nick Cave discuss “Made by Whites for Whites,” was inspired by an his favorite piece of artwork, undated ceramic container Cave found in a flea visit tmagazine.com. market that, when pulled off the shelf, revealed itself to be the cartoonishly painted disembodied head of a black man. “Spittoon,” read the label. Renting a cargo bay, Cave toured the country in search of the most racially charged memorabilia he could find. The centerpiece of the show, “Sacrifice,” features a bronze cast of Cave’s own hands and arms, holding another severed head, this one part of an old whacka-mole type carnival game — simultaneously lending compassion to the object while implicating its beholder. Look, Cave is saying. If

on race and violence and history but won’t extend that thinking any further, to his or her own cultural inheritance and privilege?” “They may provide the context, but it doesn’t go further. They’re not providing any point of view or perspective, or sense of what they’re receiving from this engagement. I just think it’s how we exist in society,” he replies. Is art alone enough to shake us from our complacency? Two decades into a new millennium, these questions have fresh urgency: By turning away from stricken neighborhoods and underfunded schools, we’ve perpetuated the conditions of inequality and violence, effectively devaluing our own people. We’ve dimmed the very kind of 20th-century American dreaming that led so many of us, including Cave, to a life filled with possibility. Whether or not this can be reversed depends on our being able to look without judgment and walk without blinders, he believes. It means reassessing our own roles in the public theater. It means choosing not to be in denial or giving in to despair. It means seeing beyond the self to something greater. “I just want everything to be fabulous,” he tells me, as we part ways for the afternoon. “I want it to be beautiful, even when the subject is hard. Honey, the question is, how do you want to exist in the world, and how are you going to do the work?”

The man famous for bringing a light touch to the heaviest of themes is, finally, stripping away the merry trappings and embracing the sheer weight of now.

we’re ever going to move past this hatred, we have to acknowledge what it is that produced it. “It’s not that Nick doesn’t have a dark side,” Denise Markonish, the senior curator and managing director of exhibitions at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Mass., tells me. Markonish approached Cave in 2013 about planning an exhibition for the museum’s largest gallery. “He wants to seduce you and punch you in the gut.” The result, the artist’s most ambitious seduction to date, was his 2016 show, “Until,” a twist on the legal principle of innocence until guilt is proven. For it, Cave transformed the football-field-size room into a sinister wonderland, featuring a vast crystal cloudscape suspended 18 feet into the air made up of miles of crystals, thousands of ceramic birds, 13 gilded pigs and a fiberglass crocodile covered in large marbles. Accessible by ladder, the top of the cloud was studded with cast-iron lawn jockeys, all of them holding dream catchers. It’s an apt and deeply unsettling vision of today’s America, land of injustice and consumer plenty, distracted from yet haunted by all of the things it would prefer not to see. While they were sourcing the materials for the show, Markonish tells me, they realized how expensive crystals are, and one of the curators, Alexandra Foradas, called Cave to ask if some of them could be acrylic. “He said, ‘Oh, absolutely, 75 percent can be acrylic but the remaining 50 percent should be glass.’ She said, ‘Nick, that’s 125 percent,’ and without pausing he said, ‘Exactly.’ ” After the show, Markonish asked Cave and Faust to create a graphic expression of the exhibition, which resulted in a tattoo on the inside of her index finger that reads “125%.” “Of course, at that point, it wasn’t about his use of material,” she says, “but about his dedication and generosity. It was his idea to open up his exhibition to people from the community, to performers or for discussions about the difficult things he wants to talk about in his work.” One of those themes is the gun violence that has ravaged many black communities; Chicago, Cave’s home of three decades, had more shooting victims (2,948) in 2018 than Los Angeles (1,008) and New York (897) combined, largely concentrated in a handful of neighborhoods on the South and West Sides. (Cave had hoped to open Facility on Chicago’s racially diverse West Side, only to run into intransigent zoning laws; he wants to find a permanent home there for “Until” and has art projects planned with the area’s high schools.) Cave’s most recent gallery show, “If a Tree Falls,” which featured sculptural installations and opened at Jack Shainman Gallery in fall 2018, strikes a more somber, elegiac note than his previous work, juxtaposing body parts in bronze monochrome, including casts of his own arms emerging from the gallery walls, holding delicate flower bouquets, which suggest a sense of renewal, of hope and metamorphosis. He’s now working on a new series of bronze sculptures, which include casts of his own hands, topped with cast tree branches, birds and flowers, the first of which is meant to debut at Miami’s Art Basel in December. The sculptures will be on a much bigger scale — a human form made larger than life with embellishment, not unlike the Soundsuits in approach but with a new sense of gravity and monumentality (they are intended to be shown outdoors). The man famous for bringing a light touch to the heaviest of themes is, finally, stripping away the merry trappings and embracing the sheer weight of now. When I ask Cave how he feels about the critical reception of his work — he is one of that select group of artists, like Jeff Koons or David Hockney, who is celebrated by both high art and popular culture — he tells me that he stopped reading his shows’ reviews, but not because he’s afraid of being misunderstood or underappreciated; instead, he seems to be objecting to a kind of critical passivity. “What I find peculiar is that no one really wants to get in there and talk about what’s behind it all,” he says. “It’s not that I haven’t put it out there. And I don’t know why.” I push him to clarify: “Do you mean that a white reviewer of your show might explain that the work provides commentary

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By Ligaya Mishan Photograph by Guido Castagnoli Styled by Mary Lennox

THE GROU

SAY THE WORD “GRASS” and you picture not a lone blade but a mass undulation. It is for all practical purposes uncountable, a tease of the infinite. More than 10,000 species compose Poaceae, the family of grass, and together they cover around 40 percent of the earth’s lands (outside of Greenland and Antarctica). Traders and settlers venturing into the American interior in the 18th century took the French word for meadow — prairie, from the Latin pratum — to name the vast expanse that met them, bare of trees, holding up nothing but sky. Even a modern suburban lawn, mowed into submission and confined to an angular patch, is a grasp at space, an attempt to reconjure the great wide open. The Midwestern architecture critic Donald Hoffmann described the American plains as “nature’s eloquent way of making freedom visible.” From those austere horizontals came Frank Lloyd Wright’s early 20th-century Prairie vernacular: houses built close to the ground with banks of windows to let the outside in; free-flowing floor plans largely unbroken by walls. At the same time, the Danish immigrant Jens Jensen championed a corresponding Prairie School in landscape design, planting gardens and parks with sweeps of native grass — a canvas for the wind to write messages on, and just as quickly erase them. The longing for lost pastures persists even in the grimy heart of Manhattan, where millions of tourists each year walk the High Line, whose graffitied elevated train tracks have been paved over and seeded with the likes of Cheyenne Sky red switch grass, its flared tips dark as wine; fountaining Atlas fescue; and big bluestem, tough and upright, whose roots can run 12 feet deep. Joints in the concrete purposefully invite the encroachment of wild grass: nature reclaiming space once ceded to the city. But the High Line — whose gardens are the work of the acclaimed Dutch landscape architect Piet Oudolf — isn’t wild. Its carefully composed dishevelment summons emotion precisely because of its distance from the prairie; even as we admire it, we know that we’ve lost something. Our grasslands, whether called prairie, steppe, savanna or cerrado, are the backbone of our ecosystem, their plunging roots leaching nutrients into the soil and keeping it from washing away in floods, their blades feeding wildlife. Today, they are under threat, with millions of acres converted to crops each year, overgrazed and at the mercy of climate change.

A tableau of foraged local Phragmites australis, Miscanthus sinensis, dried darnel ryegrass and wild pheasants, arranged by Ruby Barber, the owner of the Berlin floral design studio Mary Lennox.

AS IF IN RESPONSE, a number of floral designers are bringing grass, eternally a backdrop, to the fore. The Parisian florist Miyoko Yasumoto, of Une Maison Dans les Arbres in Aubervilliers, takes an explicitly nostalgic approach, harking back to childhood rambles in the outdoors, when “we were animists, connected to Mother Earth and accomplices of each wonder,” she said. From the fields around her family’s farm in southwestern France, she gathers purple-tinged stems of meadow fescue, bristly panicled setaria and Stipa pennata with ghostly white streamers.

These humble grasses offer an alternative to industrially produced flowers, which Yasumoto sees as emblems of “a time of overconsumption,” devolving from ’60s flower power to materialistic “flowerporn.” To Morgane Illes of Atelier Prairies in Provence and Paris, the commercialization of flowers has also created a false pecking order, separating them from grass, their natural companion. The power of grass is precisely that it’s “not luxurious,” she said, but accessible to all, a steady, unbowed presence. Taken out of the context of the meadow, grasses still testify to the linear passage of time, an idea that is prevalent in the work of Silka Rittson-Thomas, the owner of the TukTuk Flower Studio in Mayfair. Her grasses, sourced primarily from her garden in the Cotswolds, trace the arc of the seasons: delicate in spring, abundant in summer and dried in fall. Encoded in these silhouettes is the memory of movement — grass never appears wholly still. “The least draft will lift their heads or shake their tails,” said Melissa Richardson of JamJar Flowers in Southeast London. She sometimes focuses on one type at a time, be it Stipa gigantea, which “turns to pure gold in the afternoon light,” or any of the grasses “whose names I hardly know, that I have simply gathered from the hedgerows.” Like Yasumoto, who draws from the Japanese principles of ikebana, in which grass is as important as flowers, the London florist Alex Nutting rejects the idea of hierarchy. At Aesme, in Shepherd’s Bush, she and her sister, Jess Lister, interweave ornamental grasses from their cutting garden — puffball bunny tails, fluffy pampas grass begging to be stroked like a feather boa — with foraged blue-green cocksfoot, common bent with its blushing haze and velvety Yorkshire fog, which thrives in drainage ditches. These might be paired in early summer with garden roses, arranged as a meeting of equals, and later added to lighten the brooding heaviness of drowsy-headed dahlias and chrysanthemums. In Berlin, the florist Ruby Barber of Mary Lennox often forsakes conventional flowers entirely, preferring the unexpected textures of cascading miscanthus or Briza media, which shivers. But she rejects the orthodoxy of using only native plants, granting herself the freedom to mix gathered grasses with waxy anthuriums and voluptuous orchids, in a surreal gesture, or to use a single anchoring stalk to “bring an opulent arrangement back down to earth,” she said. Embedded in each arrangement is the story of how grass lives and fades, from its silkiness when first cut to the deepening and then fading of color and the slow curl and fray of the leaves. The color brown, so long disdained in floral designs, is now ascendant. “Some of my chicest clients favor decay over anything else,” Barber said. A spray of drying grass is death looked in the eye — something honest and unflinching in a prevaricating world.

UND BENEATH

OF A KIND Irene Neuwirth’s Animal Art

IRENE NEUWIRTH, the Los Angeles jewelry designer, was introduced to Creative Growth — the Oakland, Calif.-based studio for artists with disabilities — in 2016, when she purchased a terra-cotta whale and walrus by an artist named Larry Randolph. A year later, she attended the nonprofit’s annual fashion-show fund-raiser. “Artists show their creations on a runway,” she explains. “It was one of the most joyous experiences.” Since then, Neuwirth, 43, has amassed a 30-piece collection of animal figurines by Creative Growth members. “The work is so whimsical, and I’ve loved the natural world my entire life,” says Neuwirth, who’s also an avid horse rider. They’re displayed in the Venice Beach bungalow she shares with her partner, the producer and writer Phil Lord, and their two Labradoodles. “I bought these pieces because I love them, not for charity,” she says. Last spring, Neuwirth opened a shop in Brentwood with the Charlotte, N.C.-based fashion boutique Capitol, where she sells her famously colorful one-of-a-kind gold-and-gemstone jewels. — John Wogan Illustrations by Aurore de la Morinerie

Earthenware whale, 2016, by Larry Randolph. “This was my first purchase from Creative Growth. I was remodeling my house at the time, and it felt like the perfect amount of whimsy during a rather serious construction project. I always looked forward to seeing it.”

Earthenware panda, 2016, by Theresa Lambert. “I’m embarrassed to say that I bought this for my best friend but then fell in love with it and haven’t been able to part with him.”

Earthenware ducks, 2013, by Terri Bowden. “When I was growing up, we had ceramic chickens in our kitchen. This is my grown-up version.”

64 T QATAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE

Earthenware unicorn, 2018, by Theresa Lambert. “Anything unicorn I see, I have to get! I practically tackled someone for this at the fund-raiser last year.”

Wooden bird, 2016, by Ron Veasey. “These wooden birds were the most recent pieces I collected this year. They’ve made my guest bathroom come to life.”

Earthenware swans, 2017, by Heather Edgar. “The Venice Canals, where I live, are full of ducks, but every now and again, there’s a swan. This is a little reminder of that.”

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