Magazinespreads by Sarah Elizabeth Shine

a bold and

Beautiful

Volume 01 | Issue 03

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home

A CREATIVE HOME in the middle of nowhere Martin O’Neill’s recycled studio space.

4 Times Square

New York, NY 10036 (212) 286-9990 | letters@nestmag.com Owner & Founder Lara Hedberg Deam President & Publisher Michela Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Connor Abrams Editor-in-Chief Jeff Winters Creative Director Claudia Bruno Managing Editor Ann Wilson Spradlin Senior Editors Andrew Wagner, Sam Grawe Editor-at-Large Virginia Gardiner Editor Amara Holstein Associate Editor Amber Bravo Assistant Managing Editor Carleigh Bell Copy Editor Rachel Fudge Fact Checkers Madeline Kerr Senior Designer Brendan Callahan Design Production Manager Kathryn Hansen Designer Sarah Shine Marketing Art Director Gayle Chin Photo Editor Kate Stone Associate Photo Editor Aya Brackett Contributing Photo Editor Deborah Kozloff Hearey Senior Production Director Fran Fox Production Specialist Bill Lyons Production Coordinator Joy Pascual Operations Director Romi Jacques Accounting Manager Wanda Smith Consumer Marketing Director Laura MacArthur Simkins Subscriptions Manager Brian Karo Newsstand Consultant George Clark National Distribution Warner Publisher Services Partner Marketing Director Celine Bleu Events Manager Sita Bhaumik Marketing Coordinator Elizabeth Heinrich Advertising Operations Coordinator Fida Sleiman

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features

bold & beautiful An inspiring home for painter, Beth Warner. Kit Aarden

greek revival

Using the architecture you are given not as a hindrance, but as a frame. Matthew Baird

22 50

i could hardly show you how to get there...

nest | pg. 6 | MARCH 2015

A collaborative home between a creative couple with a focus on utilizing local artists to create unique pieces. Mirella Clemencigh

15 tips for living in small spaces How to utilize your small space to the fullest. Joanna Goddard

a pre-classical home

Using the architecture you are given to the utmost. Winchester Best

departments

nest abroad

A love affair with Paris that has inspired creativity throughout history. Get the inside scoop on where to find the best deals on one of a kind pieces.

2 1

work nest

An old junk shop turned Artists Studio.

the workspace is ripe for reinvention

Redefining the way that we work and the places we work in.

nest | pg. 8 | MARCH 2015

editorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s letter ABOUT THE COVER

CAT BASKER'S love of art fills her small studio apartment. She makes the most of her small amount of wall space by filling them with lovely sketches that have inspired her.

editor’s letter

peril of my job, as you might imagine, is a certain degree of house envy. Having spent nearly six years visiting and reporting on the homes we feature in Nest, I have gotten more used to it – though occasionally, the yearning for a modern home of my own does make me, if not green with envy, then a little blue. For I live in not a steel-and-glass box or urban loft but an apartment in a mansard-roofed Edwardian building know as The Westgate. This place is not a hindrance in any way, however, to my desire to live modern. The Westgate’s grand exterior and enviable views of both the Golden Gate Bridge and downtown San Francisco–not to mention salacious historical tidbits attached to it, like the rumor that the Mitchell brothers (of Behind the Green Door fame) filmed their early words in one of its apartments back in the 70’s–make it the perfect vessel for what I like to call modern on the inside. Architect Matthew Baird, whose interior renovation of a Greek Revival row house you’ll see on page 42, explains this concept perfectly: “For many years, there A peril of my job is a certain. was a sensibility that, if you were in an old degree of house envy. house, the cabinets you built had to look old, the materials you used had to be fatigued like stonewashed jeans. Americans are starting to be comfortable with putting something contemporary inside something that’s antique, in a way that’s been going on in Europe for centuries.”

Jeff Winters, Editor-in-Chief, Nest Magazine.

” ”

nest | pg. 11 | MARCH 2015

photo: Claudia Paterau

“

work nest

cut it out studio story by Jas Chi Ying Tang

Once a junk store, a little shop becomes the perfect studio for a collage artist Martin O’Neill.

nest | pg. 12 | MARCH 2015

t’s weird,” says Martin O’Neill, “to have a shop that is not actually a shop.” The 40-year-old collage illustrator has his creative studio overlooking the sea of England’s south coast, inside a 1930s building previously accommodating a shop. Yet despite the outside appearance of a commercial space, Cut It Out has been transformed on the inside. “When I am at work, people often come in and ask how much my things are or do you sell postcards and all sorts of peculiar questions.” However, filled with his archives and lifelong collections–including vintage ephemera, vinyl records, toys, books and old cameras–confusing Martin’s studio with a vintage shop is an easy mistake. “The shop used to be a junk shop,” Martin explains. One day when he and his wife went in and bought two chairs, they talked to the owner and found their new studio. Martin treats the shop, which he shares with his wife, Jackie Parsons, a fellow collage illustrator, primarily as a workspace. Yet with a shop window full of potential he sometimes cannot resist exhibiting his artwork, displaying curiosities and selling his personal belongings. He recently put two mirrors from his old house up for sale. Martin was born in northwest London to an Irish family. He was trained as a graphic designer in college but soon found his love for collage. “Whenever I look at something I imagine what else it can be,” He says. “Say, if I see some rusting metal on the side of a boat, I see it as a stormy sky, or an old cut-up breadboard in a junk shop–I see a scuffed canvas in a boxing ring or tire marks on a race track.” Over the years, Martin has maintained a fairly traditional approach to making collages. Not only have his cut-outs mostly stemmed from

“ For the most part,

scissors, glue and the photocopier have been my best friend.

”

photos by Jas Chi Ying Tang

“

cut it out studio

vintage printed materials and found objects, he has also kept his digital involvement to a minimum. He only uses a computer and printer to tweak sizes and scales. For the most part, scissors, glue and the photocopier have been his best friend. His use of old materials and traditional methods, combined with his modern vision of graphic composition, has helped shape his distinctive retro-yet-modern style. Typography is another eye-catcher in Martin’s art. In his studio he has numerous cabinet drawers dedicated solely to alphabetical cutouts. He recalls two childhood memories that may explain this. Growing up in the 1980s, he was fascinated by the emerging graffiti scene and spent a lot of time copying graffiti from “the then bible of graffiti: subway art. So, comparatively, school art lessons were boring,” he says. This fueled his desire to go to an art college. “My dad was a car mechanic,” he continues. “When I was 14, I got paid to paint signs on trucks. I once received 140 quid to paint an eight-foot woman in a bikini. I still remember the company’s name,” he laughs. “They were called The Bodywork Experts.”

Martin describes his collect-o-mania as “impulsive but habitual.” His granny’s old house in Ireland had a front room that no one was allowed to enter. “The parlor was full of beautiful things, antiques and heirlooms, books and tacky souvenirs,” he says. “It was like a tiny packed museum. As a child, I always wanted to go in and play with all the bits.” Looking at Martin’s studio now, it is clear that he has more than made up for his lost childhood. Clearly he also carries his granny’s hoarding gene. His collection is immense: model planes, toy ambulances, a girl’s “semierotic” love letters from the ‘70’s, a bunch of mid-century newspapers recovered from

under the floorboards of his house… the list could go on forever. “I really enjoy cutting things, out, releasing images from their old homes and placing them in a new context,” he explains. “I love to see the possibilities, the unknown.” For Martin, his passion for collage could not be simpler.

nest abroad

le désir of design Story by Kyra Shapurji

A love affair with Paris confirms its reputation as a movable feast — for design.

nest | pg. 16 | MARCH 2015

Paris, the city that has inspired authors, painters and all forms of creatives for centuries.

well-designed gardens in Paris from April through the summer are magnificent. In a city with so many tourist and cultural distractions, it’s easy for visiteurs to get sidetracked. To avoid sensory overload, we asked one of our design experts, Deno Ferraro, an architectural interior designer, to help us pick design stores not to be missed. During his most recent trip to Paris, Ferraro found himself meandering le Carré Rive Gauche, an area developed by the Association of Antique Dealers and Art Galleries back in the late ‘70s. The stores in the area carry furnishings dating from Renaissance to the 21st century. Ferraro offers a couple design stores outside of this perimeter because

photo collection: Chamade- Vintage French Photographs

aris will never shake its eternal slogan, “the city of love,” because Parisians are notoriously romantic. Beyond affairs of the heart, they revel in the romanticism of food, architecture, art and conversation. But for the design world, la ville d’amour is better known for introducing neo-classical and provincial décor to the rest of the world. Today, interior designers seek out Paris mostly for the small boutiques chock-full of unique items that can’t be found in showrooms here in the States. The best design stores in the French capital are often nestled along quaint streets and boast authentic historic facades. You don’t have to wait until spring to begin your French furnishings love affair. While winter may be considered “off season,” it’s generally the best time to find the cheapest flights or to begin planning for a spring awakening trip. The

nest | pg. 18 | MARCH 2015

le désir of design

chances are you’ll wander “off the map,” so here’s a compendious list of design stores he’s fallen hard for in the city where l’amour touches everything. Ferraro’s first suggestion is 1 Alb Antiquités in le Carré Rive Gauche, a small, quirky boutique with an unusual selection of 20th century furniture, modern art and decorative objects. Ferraro was “quite take by the amazing set of rock crystal lamps from the 1970s by Ado Chale.” Next on his hit list is the treasure trove 2 Muriel Grateau, an accessory stop for la maison or les dames. Grateau, a fashion designer in Milan through the 90s, got bored with fashion shows and moved to Paris to start her own concept mixing fashion, accessories and “the art of entertaining.” Her

idea took off, and now the store houses her signature biscuit dish-ware line and over 100 shades of linen, offering a simple sensuality for the table. Don’t expect to find napkins; the only “rings” Grateau sells are in her detailed jewelry of raw sculpted black stone, carved in ancient patterns and embedded with gold, onyx, or black diamonds. Definitely a store with some très chic atmosphère. 3 Galerie Antonine Catzeflis is another one of Ferraro’s design must-sees. The slender gallery splits its space between

Paris is full of shops with items spanning throughout history that are one of a kind finds.

showing casing 2-D and 3-D art, and it’s the latter that Ferraro was most captivated with. He also was moved by Nicolas Cesbron’s work on permanent display and the gallery and was “taken aback by Cesbron’s lamps that mimicked all natural designs, yet old strong to function.” The same goes for Cesbron’s new and notable pieces of furniture, such as his wave-shaping wooden table top with

le désir of design

at this stop, Ferraro gushed: “Every piece is truly unique, from the chromed base of a lacquered wood veneer dining table to (Hervé’s) bull’s eye mirror wrapped with bronze organic vines.” It seems the mélange of jewelry and furniture is a trend in Paris because like Grateau, Van Der Straeten has his own jewelry collection of precious stones, metals and ceramics. It’s fortunate for the jewelry lovers that he hasn’t been able to shake his earlier days of designing runway jewelry for Lagerfeld and Lacroix. Last mention on the list is a modern store, 5 Silvera, which Ferraro described as being “reminiscent of Cappellini store.” It carries classics such as Saarinen, Platner and Prouvé, but what really caught our expert’s eye were the radical, post-modern pieces from newer designers. Silvera actually has five locations that include their showroom, Silvera Cuisines, Silvera Maisons and Silvera Université. Ferraro stopped by the latter and then came up with this furniture pairing from the store:

nest | pg. 20 | MARCH 2015

Life begins and ends along the river which contains an island. Paris began on this island which is crowned with the Cathedral, Notre Dame.

bronze bases. It’s easy to pass by the storefront, so don’t get too stuck in the typical tourist habit of looking down at the map. Back in le Carré Rive Gauche, Galerie Mougin should be a priority to stop in and see. It features contemporary artists who work with various metals including steel, copper and bronze. Ferraro says the gallery “takes a modern twist on classics” and mentioned how impressed he was with “a unique console table called ‘Anneau,’ envisioned by Laurence Montano.” Equally impressive was a “guéridon side table in metal which had dangerously wicked and pointy industrial feet yet retained its classic sense.” We’re partial to any interior that has loft-like qualities, so we especially loved Ferraro’s next design store pick, 4 Galerie Van Der Straeten. Its expansive showroom had Ferraro awed by the amount of space available in such a cramped city, and he couldn’t say enough about the craftsman himself, Hervé Van Der Staeten. After extensive time spent Paris has been completely rebuilt since its near destruction in World War II. From ashes rises beauty.

“the Arthur Table by Dirk Wynants together with the Smoke Chair by Maarten Baas would be brilliant.” Designers can count on either season, winter or spring, as a safe bet to preview the next season’s design trends. So whether you’re looking for the perfect antique chest, avant-garde lamp, or that sleek dish-ware set you’ve been dying for, the Parisian design community caters to everyone. It wouldn’t be the Parisian design scene without galleries that throw in delightfully unexpected objets d’art to view or enchanting onyx jewelry to wear while you lounge on that plush new sofa; the city’s design scene encompasses it all. That’s what’s distinct about l’amour, and especially “Parisian l’amour,” as Deno Ferraro found out, it hits you hard (and soft), right where your love for great design hurts.

I could hardly show you how to get there… story by Mirella Clemencigh photography by Delfino sisto Legnani

This open sun room shows their use of found tile that has been arranged into various patterns throughout the house.

A while ago I found myself in a hot stony desert; a place constantly beaten by a wind of sand. I was in a car with a friend who wanted to show me his house that had just been built. In the house there was only one, very thin man, working in the bathtub, cementing small tiles to the surface. He appeared to be very fragile. ‘Do you have enough water?’ I asked him, thinking he may be obsessed by water, like a mirage. Instead he answers, in French, that he is fine, he has everything he needs. Language difficulties in foreign countries can make life hard. That’s what I was having to deal with in Libya, speaking no Arabic, but French, yes I spoke French. This solitary man, named Mnauar is Algerian; from that day on he became part of our household, and remained with us for about

20 years as the factotum of our building work; gluing hundreds of meters of tiles, becoming our official translator of my requests to the local manual laborers, who were, at the time, entirely unprepared. In the early ‘90s buying things was virtually impossible. Almost all of the traders kept their shutters down, because there was nothing to sell. You couldn’t buy nails to hang a picture. You couldn’t buy spare parts for cars (which were often driven around without headlights), perhaps you couldn’t even buy spare parts for aircraft on internal flights. Nationalization was the first keyword, embargo the second, so that in addition to the food ‘donated’ by the regime, there was no other material necessity satisfied, no other form of consumption was allowed. There wasn’t even the shadow of a piece of furniture, and there were very few skilled artisans at

hand. ‘But I have heard,’ says Mnauar, enriching our perspectives, ‘That there is a landfill in the city where people dump furniture gathered from houses facing demolition and old hotels.’ One morning in May, at dawn, we arrived on site. We came back with a truck full of ‘carcasses’ springs, school desks, a faux 18th century console, an Empire Style coffee table and a filing cabinet filled with drawers. An unexpected haul of treasure. These were the first objects in our new house, mere flies against the imposing five meter tall walls, and denaturalized from their original function; the filing cabinet is transformed into a practical cutlery holder, a butcher’s glass case acts as a large closet where Adel collects all his fishing rods, several reels

of entangled nylon, hooks, lures and nets, waders wet-suits and life jacket. The house was designed by my husband-architect Adeland it has the flavor, heights and widths of the Fascist period, a period which has urbanized entire neighborhoods of cities such as Tripoli and Benghazi but also small rural townships in the Cyrenaica plateau. Adel has chosen local materials: the house is built with pure limestone blocks, which we acquired form a quarry in Derna, about 400 miles from home. It’s the same stone mosques are built from. To regulate and maintain a cool temperature indoors, the walls are double, with a cavity between them, which acts as an air chamber. There is no paint or varnish on the walls, the limestone blocks are exposed; only the corridors have a slight veil of color which alters in tone depending on the light of day. No

nest | pg. 24 | MARCH 2015

A combustion occurred, a conflagration between design pieces, artists and artisans of diverse knowledge and skill.

This Memphis style chair is dysfunctional and playful.

varnish, not even in the rooms where we laid parquet flooring, nor in the main living room area, where rough concrete harlequin tiles paint a faux rug. Yet in Libya, these tiles, also a local production, are usually employed on exteriors, so much so that the first few visitors to our new house found it peculiar and regrettable that there wasn’t a beautiful marble floor instead of the poor tiles that were considered appropriate only for the patio or backyard. I do not know whether to write ‘quote’, ‘copy’ or ‘suggestion’, but the fact is that certain pieces of furniture, certain corners of the house, are reminiscent, very reminiscent, of some great architectural and design master-pieces. See for example the wall cabinet in the kitchen, interpreted by Ibrahim, an artisan from Senegal, and inspired by a photo of an interior by Adolf Loos. Or in the bathroom,

perfectly, a form totally alien to him and extremely difficult to produce. The carpenter, Omran, willingly accepted the challenges we offered him, even if more often than not our collaborations ended in shrieks of disapproval. Local artisans deeply appreciated the possibility of executing works which had a markedly different taste to what they were accustomed to. A cut, a touch that excepted local rules, a taste of unknown cultures and bizarre ‘behaviors’. A combustion occurred, a conflagration between design pieces, artists and artisans of diverse knowledge and skill. The result is a cheerful hybrid, a kind of applause to the creative mind. Mariscal’s three-legged stool is one of the few authentic pieces, together with the sliding cabinet painted by Sergio Calatroni. I remember this stool made a great sensation at the beginning of the ‘80s because of its instability –it has three very crooked legs– and

where there is a kind of marked sympathy for a famous work of Le Corbusier; a mosaic coated chaise lounge, from an interior of Ville Savoye in Poissy. Effore Sattsass, is also frequently quoted and appears in various corners of the house under the guise of cabinets and bookshelves. At that time Mnauar and I were touring around depressing neighborhoods lined with closed shops in search for artisans. Under the colonnade of Shara Omar Mukhtar (the anti-colonial hero) we found an upholsterer named Ibrahim, very slow at covering armchairs and sofas – it took him a year to upholster a bed– yet uniquely skilled in refining them with a cord edging. Abu-Khalil the blacksmith, acquainted with building Libyan-style wrought iron gates, was able to copy André Dubreuil’s Spine Chair (1986)

nest | pg. 25 | MARCH 2015

Furnishings are made of pieces found in the near by junkyard given a second chance at life .

nest | pg. 26 | MARCH 2015

Using the already established architecture and natural stone, they brought out the most in their desert home through use of brightly colored and mix-and-match tile work, furnishings and plaster.

it irritated the ‘conformists’, and ridiculed its task. I loved it so much that I showed a picture of it to Sottsass while he was preparing his first Memphis collection. ‘Call Mariscal, tell him to come to Milan tomorrow,’ he said. We waited anxiously for him at the restaurant La Torre di Pisa, but he never came. He had missed the plane, although he did not miss the opportunity. He was eventually feature in the first Memphis collection with his cart on wheels which appears to glide away; usable to sit still, just like Mariscal. What else to say about this house lost on the other shore of the sea? It landed in a garden where wild olives, pomegranates, date-palms, almonds, thorny cacti and centenary walls of prickly pear trees grown without much care. We have planted apricots, plums and some preach trees next to our four wells that are protected by ancient stone and iron constructions, sprouting windmills to draw water and irrigate the land. Now abandoned, rusty and precariously hanging in the air, the windmills have become nests for mourning doves. On hot nights the Indian jasmine and the bougainvillea fill the air with sugary, breathtaking scent. A small ‘troop’ of red geraniums has regrown ever season for

more than twenty years, despite the dogs trampling it over and over again, sleeping on it when they sensed it’s been watered in the summer days that are too hot and muggy. Sometimes I see a small pack of turtles beneath the leaves, and when the moon is out, a hedgehog or two. This paragraph has been added to give length to the article. Everyone loves an architecture show about houses because all that is required of someone looking at a house is, as Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space, “the ability to transcend our memories of all the houses in which we have found shelter [and] all the houses we have dreamed we live in” — beginning, of course, with the house we first lived in. Although visitors may appreciate the solo exhibition of a major architect, they are not usually as intimately involved in the thought processes behind the design of a concert hall, for example, and are likely to give up on reading detailed drawings. But presented with the plan of a house, people immediately walk through it in their imaginations. And architects’ models of houses spark, as doll houses do, a level of fantasy that makes it possible to experience the physical sensation of being in a new and yet familiar space. I would carry this house with me everywhere, as snails do. It feels good to live in this three hectare silence, but I could hardly even show you the way to get there.

nest | pg. 27 | MARCH 2015

I would carry this house with me everywhere, as snails do. It feels good to live in this three hectare silence, but I could hardly even show you the way to get there.

Bold photos and story by Kit Aarden

Beautiful

nest | pg. 30 | MARCH 2015

When architecture enters the realm of museum display, it generally arrives small, smoothand flat. Drawings, photographs, computer images, videoand scale models are the usual media; however well they communicate information (and however beautiful they are), they can only approximate such phenomena as materiality, soundand inhabitable space. For people not trained in the codes of architectural representation—most of the museum-going public—comprehension, too, tends to be approximate. In the last fifteen years or so, installation architecture has come to offer an alternative: the construction within a gallery of temporary, full-scale architecture that creates spaces, programsand experiences. The best of this work not only occupies but also affects its surroundings, exposing something of the conventions of museum and gallery display and revealing latent possibilities of the space it inhabits.

Fabrications, an ambitious, three-venue exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohioand the Museum of Modern Art in New York, aims to use installation to draw a diverse audience into a serious, immediate encounter with contemporary architecture. Organized by the three museums’ curators of architecture—Aaron Betsky, Mark Robbinsand Terence Riley, respectively—the show presents twelve installations (four at each venue) that, according to its press materials, “offer an immediate experience of architecture while revealing and addressing ideas about current architectural production, new materialsand making space.” Many of the pieces provide opportunities for direct physical contact; among the twelve projects you’re invited to sit, climb, hide, lay down, pulland gently drop (while bemused museum guards do their best to remain impassive).

Tiny collections of objects line Beth’s walls in her combination dining room and study.

Most also strive for immediacy by exposing or exaggerating their tectonic gestures, acting as a kind of large-print version for those not accustomed to reading architecture closely. But if the installations get the “immediate” experience right, they’re not all as successful at dealing with the capacity of architecture to mediate: fewer than half of the projects present themselves as devices for reinterpreting and rearranging architectural space. It’s hard to know why this is; maybe it’s because most of the architects in the show are more used to building big than thinking about museum installation. But why fabricate an interesting architectural object for a show without also making an interesting claim about its setting, about the institutional and spatial conditions of its display? Across the three venues—the sculpture garden at the museum and the galleries of the Wexner—three basic strategies are used to make the installations “immediate”; they

nest | pg. 32 | MARCH 2015

might be called mimetic, interactiveand interventionist approachesand the projects divide up neatly into four per category. The mimetic works present small if nonetheless full-scale buildings or building parts that take a fairly uncritical stance to the constraints of museum display. Patkau Architects’ Petite Maison de Weekend, revisited, at the beautifully installed the site, is a complete wooden cottage for two. Well crafted, if didactic in its demonstration of “sustainable” construction, it presents such features as a deep storage wall, photovoltaic roof, composting toiletand rain-collection system; after the exhibition, it is meant to be relocated and to serve as a prototype for other such houses. Coker Architects followed a

There is something to look at in every corner of Beth's home. Every room has a unique color palette that is vibrant and inviting.

I just love things. I.” “ love to be surrounded.” with the things I love..” I love color, and I love .” knickknacks. It makes .” me feel more creative..” It makes me smile.” similar strategy, also at the Wexner: the firm built a passageway-cum-porch of different woods, cables, window screen, cast concrete, tree stumps, blue glass bottlesand other materials drawn from the vernacular architecture of the rural South; it will be attached to a home in Alabama after the exhibition ends. Given these architects’ interest in reusing their objects elsewhere, it’s not surprising that the installations remain aloof from the museum. The Somatic Body, Kennedy & Violich Architecture’s installation at the museum (where each of the show’s architects worked on each of its pieces at a different stage; the architect or firm that produced final working drawings for a piece is identified here as its author), presents a wall in the process of delamination and eruption, a tumbling swell of gypsum board, plywood, lathand wire. Positioned near the entry, it has an interesting annunciatory presence but misses the chance to reorganize passage into the gallery; worse, the pseudo-sculptural stacks of drywall end up offering a banal display of common building materials. Munkenbeck and Marshall Architects built a structure that recalls Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona pavilion above the garden’s reflecting pool. In a setting so infused with the spirit of Mies (the garden was designed, after the master, by Philip Johnson), this little hut intelligently and ironically captures his aesthetic in condensed formand brings an intimate architectural scale into the garden, but otherwise doesn’t do much apart from showcasing two gorgeous hanging panels of woven steel.

other materials; as people walk along its surface, they reach a point where their weight causes the floor to slightly drop. Both pieces subvert our expectations of architectural surfaces, but fail to get at the political dimension that Betsky suggests. At museum, Ten Arquitectos with Guy Nordenson removed a portion of the venerable garden’s marble paving and inserted a wooden ramp/seat assembly in the rubble facing Auguste Rodin’s Monument to Balzac. Visitors descend through the ground plane, sit in the chairand look up to a lean, cantilevered glass canopy inscribed with an unidentified fragment of art historical writing. The reference is so obscureand its presentation

nest | pg. 33 | MARCH 2015

The four interactive installations focus on the demonstration of physical forces. With Dancing Bleachers, Eric Owen Moss draped wishbone-like pieces of steel over the Wexner Center’s beams; these gigantic, limp-looking forms were originally meant to be climbed so people could reach viewing platforms some 20 feet above the gallery, but institutional anxieties prevailedand the hands-on elements (treads and rails) are vestigial. Still, the piece has an undeniably exciting presence and carries muscle enough to confront the idiosyncratic spaces and ornamental structure of Peter Eisenman’s architecture. Two museum installations practically insist on physical interaction, but don’t go far enough in uncovering what Betsky, in

his curatorial statement, rightly calls the museum’s “protective skin”—the ways it relies on its apparent physical “neutrality” (white walls, silence, concealed building and security systemsand so on) to veil its own interpretive practices and modes of spatial control. The Body in Action, by Hodgetts and Fung Design Associates, gathers air from the museum’s ventilation system into an enormous sailcloth “lung” that feeds into a bowed wooden mouthpiece; handles invite visitors to open the mouth and feel the rush of air. The Body in Equipoise, by Rob Wellington Quigley, is a kind of gangplank made of wood, cables, pink stretch wrap, bungee cord, steel tubesand

nest | pg. 34 | MARCH 2015

& so indirect, that you can’t tell if it has been invoked ironically, respectfully, or gratuitously; meanwhile, the power and immediacy of the excavation gets undermined. It is the four installations that pose genuinely interesting arguments about conditions of architectural exhibition and museum display along with more “immediate” aspects of construction and experience. At museum, Office erected a stair-like structure of perforated, folded sheet steel that leaps, from stiletto feet, beyond the garden’s northern wall, suggesting the interpenetration of museum garden and urban fabric. Despite the fact that it risks misreading as a none-too-handsome sculpture, it nonetheless makes a strong urban gesture, both within the garden and when seen from 54th Street. Along part of the glass curtain wall on the opposite side of the garden, Smith-Miller and Hawkinson constructed a quiet but pointed

space inspires.” “ My my work. It’s like.” my little sanctuary.”

Above: Beth’s bedroom and collection of books. Right: Beth works in her at home studio surrounded by the things that inspire her most. Her work draws from her own personal interests as well as what her client is looking for.

critique of the wall’s way of framing and separating garden and museum. Among other elements, a folded plane of plywood steps up from the garden floor, meets the glassand then continues inside, effectively bringing the outdoors in. Also outside, a large black panel attached to steel columns blocks the garden view and reinforces the windows’ mirror effect. Reflected images and abstract forms crisscross the glass boundary, entangling viewer and viewed in a nuanced spectral play. The other interventionist projects actually introduce new programsand both would make welcome permanent museum installations. At the Wexner, Stanley Saitowitz intensified a rather bland space that has been used as an informal seating area and passageway with Virtual Reading Room, a lovely ensemble of clear acrylic benches, reading lecterns,

shelves and horizontal planes suspended from cables. The work not only adds architectural definition with subtle optical and acoustic effects, but also offers people the chance to sit and read—a rare accommodation in museum galleries. With The Body in Repose, Kuth Ranieri replaced a perimeter wall at museum with a sexy new skin; its layers of industrial felt have been clamped, clipped, tatooedand cut to make little invaginated nooks at the edge of the gallery where you can sit or lie down. From this wonderful position of interior exteriority—you are simultaneously inside and outside the gallery, suspended in a layer of interstitial space—other things become apparent: the messy innards of the building wall, the fact that people usually stand in museumsand the enormous potential of the gallery wall freed from the institutional imperatives of the smooth white plane. To the extent that Fabrications can legitimize and promote installation as a form of architectural practice, it marks a significant moment in the development of contemporary architecture. The show demonstrates a broad range of innovative formal strategies and materials while, at its best, showing us—even the novices among us—something of how architecture can change our relationship to the world. Despite the uneven results of the first experiment, an ongoing, periodic forum conceived along these lines could move inventive architectural thinking beyond the design community to a broader, influentialand potentially interested public. As a model for future events, then, Fabrications promises something great: a chance for contemporary architecture to reveal–and stretch–itself.

nest | pg. 35 | MARCH 2015

photos and story by Joanna Goddard

tips

1 Treat the whole dang city like it’s your living room. We sit on the church steps across the street for weekend lunches and after-dinner treats. And if there›s a public park in this city, chances are that we›ve picnicked in it or strolled through it. A few numbers to help you understand why: Central Park: 843 acres; Prospect Park: 585 acres; Brooklyn Bridge Park: 85 acres; The High Line: 6.73 acres; Our apartment: 0.005509 acres. Overall advice: Approach your tiny apartment joyfully. I get more notes than I could ever answer from people who are nervous about an upcoming move to a tinier place. Here’s the one bit of advice I can offer universally: See it as an exciting challenge and not as an impending nightmare. It is what it is!

for living in small spaces ERIN BOYLE OF READING MY TEA LEAVES AND GARDENISTA and her husband live together in seriously small quarters—a 240-square-foot studio, to be exact. She agreed to share her surprising tips about how to make it work and not drive each other crazy… Erin’s story: When my then-fiancé-now-husband James and I moved into a 240-square-foot apartment in Brooklyn Heights, we negotiated a six-month lease because we weren’t sure we’d be able to make it in such cramped quarters. Our apartment is a studio with a ship’s ladder to a sleeping loft, plus one tiny bathroom. Two and a half years later, we’re still in our very humble abode, and gearing up for a whole new adventure coming in 2014: a very tiny addition to the family headed our way this June.

Maximize your windows. Drape your windows in a way that allows for maximum light—I’d go for the bright white curtains—and try hanging a mirror nearby to reflect light into the room. Remembering to clean the windows helps, too!

3 Remove closet doors. Closet doors that swing into a room take up considerable floor space. Take the doors off and ask your landlord to store them. Hang a simple curtain from a suspension rod to hide the inside of your closet instead.

4 Keep closets organized. Our old wooden hangers are, admittedly, wide and bulky; these huggable hangers would probably do the trick much better.

Choose simple furniture. We’ve found that furniture with simple and spare lines makes a tiny apartment feel roomier. Our couch is the tiny Elton Settee and it fits perfectly in our “living room.”

nest | pg. 38 | MARCH 2015

Play a romantic song. In the heat of an argument, you and your partner may both crave space—but in a small apartment, there’s nowhere to go. Here’s a trick: Play a love song. Emotional distance from the fight is more important than physical distance. It’s really hard to keep your blood boiling when you’re listening to a song you love, with the person you love, about love. It’s like putting on a lullaby to soothe a crying baby.

Give yourself permission to say no to overnight guests. Our apartment has just enough space for one guest to sleep on the floor, head wedged between the ladder to the loft where we sleep and our love-seat, feet reaching nearly into the bathroom. It›s okay to explain that you don’t have the space to accommodate overnight guests.

Streamline your music collection. Tragic though it might be, tiny apartments likely don’t have space for the entire vinyl discography of The Beatles. Swallow your pride and go digital. We’re total radio junkies so we have a Tivoli radio, which also plays the music from our iPhones.

9 Invest in beautiful cleaning supplies. No broom closet to be seen? Swap the plastic broom and dustpan for something pretty and you won’t mind looking at them hanging from a hook or propped in the corner. Brook Farm General Store is my go-to stop for fancy brushes and dust pan, and we buy Common Good dish washing liquid and cleaning spray in bulk.

Tiny things matter, too. Move into a tiny apartment and expect an onslaught of tiny gifts. Try to spread the message to friends that tiny things can be as difficult to store as large things. Ask for comestibles instead.

14 Embrace under-the-bed storage. My sister manages to live in a 390-square-foot apartment with a baby and a husband and keep nothing under the bed. In case you’re not blessed with similar minimalist super powers, use the space under your bed to keep winter clothes, extra blankets and that guitar you haul out three times a year. Muji’s soft storage boxes have been a godsend for us.

Use quick-drying towels. We›re linen towel converts. Our tiny bathroom doesn’t get much ventilation, but linen towels dry so quickly that there’s no musty smell to contend with. We recently upgraded to these pretty linen chambray towels from Fog Linen.

Use an absorbent hand towel as a bath mat. There are very few bathmats on the market that fit in a truly tiny bathroom. We use a quick-drying hand towel instead. These white Hammam Hand Towels are absorbent enough to keep the floor from getting soaked and just the right size for the tiny bit of floor space we have. Bonus: they’re easier to drag to the laundromat!

Unpack suitcases right away. In our tiny apartment, an unpacked bag causes stubbed toes and violent bouts of cursing. Even if we return home from vacation in the wee hours of the morning, the first thing I do is to unpack my bag. There’s nothing more delicious than waking up in my own trusty bed knowing that everything’s just where it should be.

Keep bedding simple. We used to have a bright floral quilt, but it made our tiny loft feel tinier. We also experimented with darker sheets but returned to crisp whites. Simple bedding is easier on the eye and makes the apartment look bigger. We love our Brahms Mount Ticking Stripe Blanket.

nest | pg. 39 | MARCH 2015

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