SURFACE - DAVID ADJAYE - AUGUST 2015

DAV I D A DJAY E

ISSUE 120 AUGUST 2015 HOW IT'S MADE

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BROOM by PHILIPPE STARCK Made in America from 90% industrial waste.

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CARBON FROG designed by Piero Lissoni

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Favn Sofa, 2011 Jaime Hayon – Swan Chair, 1958 Arne Jacobsen – Made in Denmark by Fritz Hansen

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SURFACE

NO. 120

CONTENTS

departments

16 Masthead Editor’s Letter 18 20 Contributors 30 Select 40 Detail Know Now 42 44 Travel 46 Retail 48 Hotel 50 Bar

52 Restaurant 58 Art 60 Auction 62 Transport 64 Books 65 Material On Time 68 70 Gear 72 Endorsement 144 Object

32 product Styling: Justin Min Photos: Victor Prado

DAV I D A DJAY E

ISSUE 120 AUGUST 2015

taste he earthy exteriors of an intricately T built hotel in the Utah desert inform an interior designer.

By Amy Lau

who’s on the cover?

David Adjaye is a 48-year-old Ghanaian-British architect whose projects include the the new Sugar Hill social-housing complex in Upper Manhattan and the soon-to-open Aïshti Foundation building in Beirut.

His grandest commission yet, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, is scheduled to open in fall 2016.

122 gallery

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Roman & Williams designs a restaurant in Italy full of American gravitas for fashion label Replay.

ideas in design ong Kong–based designer Elaine H Ng Yan Ling explains her new interactive pieces for Swarovski.

A MoMA show takes a deep look at Frederick Kiesler’s Endless House project. A book explores succulents artistically reimagined by Kohei Oda and Adam Silverman.

130 culture club

A photo portfolio of recent events in the

Surface universe, including the opening of the Garage Museum in Moscow and the debut

edition of the Photo London fair.

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PHOTOS: IDEAS IN DESIGN, AMANDA KHO. PRODUCT, VICTOR PRADO. TASTE, COURTESY AMAN RESORTS. CULTURE CL UB, BILLY FARRELL/BFA.COM.

HOW IT'S MADE

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PHOTOS: IDEAS IN DESIGN, AMANDA KHO. PRODUCT, VICTOR PRADO. TASTE, COURTESY AMAN RESORTS. CULTURE CL UB, BILLY FARRELL/BFA.COM.

SURFACE

CONTENTS

76

how it’s made

106 kinetic force

Our deep dive into the creation of impactful products and projects produced by leading designers and brands

78 c limate moderator

Whether in Nigeria or Washington, D.C., architect David Adjaye articulates the social and cultural atmosphere of a place.

rgentine-born artist Julio Le Parc A reimagines his own masterpiece for a collection of Hermès scarves.

114 guiding light

After 10 years of running his own

business, lighting guru Jake Dyson joins the family company.

cover: David Adjaye at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. photographer: Nathan Perkel corrections:

94

s ound track A forward-thinking entrepreneur brings a dose of materiality and tactility to the world of high-end headphones.

In the May Watch Guide, a photo of a Tudor watch was incorrectly captioned as the Pelagos; the actual name of the watch shown is North Flag. The Tudor Fastrider Chrono was incorrectly named the Fastrider Chrono Scrambler.

Tudor’s website is tudorwatch.com, not tudor.com.

In the June/July issue, the cover image featured on the Table of Contents misspelled the surname of André Balazs as Balasz due to a design error. In the story on the hotelier, the name of interior designer Shawn Hausman was misspelled as Sean in one instance on page 113.

100 o bject lessons

New York brand development firm A rethinks back-to-school supplies for Staples, with a little help from kids.

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PHOTOS: HOW IT’S MADE, COURTESY DYSON. CLIMATE MODERATOR, NATHAN PERKEL. SOUND TRACK, CAIT OPPERMANN. OBJECT LESSONS, COURTESY ARULIDEN. KINETIC FORCE, TADZIO. GUIDING LIGHT, TOBY COULSON.

NO. 120

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MASTHEAD

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the sensor mirror see yourself in the best light

Editor’s Letter

EDITOR’S LETTER

In the media business these days, whether in print or online, it seems like nothing matters more than having an “exclusive”—typically meaning being the first to cover something. Rarely does this actually happen. Scoops like Vanity Fair recently had with Caitlyn Jenner are few and far between.

In the world of design, this game typically occurs with publications scrambling to feature a particular building or product before the others. That wasn’t necessarily our intention with this issue’s cover story, on Tanzanian-born architect David Adjaye and his most important project to date, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., but that’s what happened: We’re the first to run images from inside the monumental construction site (see pages 78–93). This won’t grab headlines the way Jenner’s recent cover did, but I’m sure you’ll come away moved by what Adjaye has to say about the globally relevant building and his work at large, as well as Nathan Perkel’s stunning photographs of its exterior.

In my mind, exclusiveness largely equals laziness. It means you’re producing something others can emulate. We eschew this approach here at Surface. Instead, we feel strongly that it’s not about getting it first but getting it right. (Timeliness helps, of course.) In this issue, stories on headphone maker Master & Dynamic (page 94) and lighting guru Jake Dyson (page 114) showcase this. And when we do happen to be first—our next issue will be the first time French businesswoman Delphine Arnault graces a magazine’s cover—that’s just by happy coincidence.

Depth, I think, is what’s causing so many platforms to pander for exclusives. Most utterly lack it, many just posting a press release with pretty photos and calling it a day. Information is everywhere, yet substance isn’t. To create quality requires research, reporting, analysis, and solid editing. It also requires constant innovation. With this issue—the 20th since the magazine’s overhaul two years ago—I’m pleased to introduce two new editors to the staff, Charles Curkin and Nate Storey, and a slew of new contributors, including Abby Ellin, Stan Parish, and Heidi Mitchell. In addition, it debuts our first Taste column in which we ask a prominent figure from the Surface universe to let us in on a personal obsession (on page 54, interior designer Amy Lau raves about the Amangiri hotel in Utah). More additions are on the way: In our September issue, look out for several new columns and sections, plus pumped-up fashion coverage. Rather than being exclusive, our aim is to be inclusive—to produce stories and images that engage our readers, and to do so in a way only Surface can. A world of inclusion rather than exclusion. Now there’s a thought.

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— Spencer Bailey SURFACE

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PHOTO: NATHAN PERKEL.

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Italia Collection Designed by Mauro Lipparini

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Contributors

ABBY ELLIN One of Surface’s newest contributors, Abby Ellin has made a name for herself identifying bizarre trends and writing about them for The New York Times. Her headlines say it all: “IV Drips Touted as Hangover Relief,” “Off the Drugs, Onto the Cupcakes,” “That Nose, That Chin, Those Lips,” to list a few. For Surface, she took on a topic completely alien to her: headphones. She was assigned a story about Master & Dynamic, a New York company that creates high-end audio gear (page 94). “I learned I really do care about good headphones,” she says. “It was my greatest discovery since Diet Coke.” In addition to being a regular contributor to the Times, she’s also the author of the award-winning book Teenage Waistland: A Former Fat Kid Weighs in on Living Large, Losing Weight, and How Parents Can (and Can’t) Help (Public Affairs). She’s currently working on her next release, about deception and duplicity. “It’s a feel-good story,” she says.

“Or not.”

HEIDI MITCHELL “I love talking to architects,” says Heidi Mitchell, another newcomer to Surface. “They have a unique vocabulary that requires my brain to sort of switch gears.” In this issue, she spoke to architect Linda Korndal of the Copenhagen-based outfit Norm, which recently completed work on a new Italian eatery that Mitchell wrote up for our Restaurant spotlight (page 52). “I love the idea of Norm taking the essence of Italian living and distilling it down for a Danish audience,”she says. Mitchell has been a journalist for more than two decades. She was previously on staff at Travel + Leisure, then editor-in-chief of Town & Country’s travel magazine before going freelance. Living between New York and Connecticut with her husband and three children, she writes a biweekly column for the Wall Street Journal and has in recent years ascended to the celestial planes of Anna Wintour’s office at Vogue, for whom she writes long-form political profiles.

Her most recent piece, which ran in the July issue, was on Marilyn Mosby, the Baltimore prosecutor who brought charges against the police for their involvement in the death of Freddie Gray.

CAIT OPPERMANN Photographer Cait Oppermann shot the Master & Dynamic feature story in the How It’s Made package. Though technical details might bore some, for Oppermann it was a treat: “I had a lot of fun listening to Jonathan talk about the headphones and all that goes into making them,” she says, adding that shooting the details around the office provided a “behind-the-scenes look at the raw materials and the care that goes into making a pair.” At the moment, Opperman is shooting for a number of editorial clients, as well as working on a personal project that looks at shopping malls across the country that are being torn down. Her work has appeared in Dwell, Fast Company, Metropolis, and Bloomberg Businessweek.

NATHAN PERKEL “I would like to publicly thank David for risking life and limb for this shoot,” jokes Nathan Perkel, whose portrait session with cover subject David Adjaye at the construction site of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture involved exploring the unfinished building and leaning over a few precarious railings. Perkel, who also sat in on the architect’s interview with Surface editor-in-chief Spencer Bailey (page 78), found it “amazing to hear where every design aspect came from,” adding that “the building is beautiful; it’s astounding to think of how many people this structure will influence.” Perkel does commercial shoots for numerous clients, including Louis Vuitton, Nike, and BMW. MIEKE TEN HAVE One more new addition to the Surface family, writer Mieke ten Have reported this month’s Up and Coming column (Ideas in Design, page 26). Her subject was young American designer and outspoken socks enthusiast Greg Papove, the mind behind, among other things, a bicycle ramp called the Whoopdeedoo. “I enjoyed interviewing a designer with such a socks fixation,” ten Have says. “I don’t really own socks, other than the ones my mother insists on giving me every Christmas.” Though protecting her feet against frostbite and sweat absorption aren’t all that important to ten Have, design most certainly is. Previously the home editor at Vogue, she was appointed design editor-at-large for Elle Decor and frequently contributes design stories to the Wall Street Journal’s Off Duty section. She is a native New Yorker and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and her adorable dog Hank.

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Bordano _ Dining Table, Arcole _ Chair, Liro_ Sideboard

Italia Collection Designed by Mauro Lipparini

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New York Flagship atelier 200 Lexington Avenue +1 (212) 696 0211 info@atelier-nyc.com

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Ideas in Design

IDEAS IN DESIGN

Elaine Ng Yan Ling

STUDIO VISIT

The 30-year-old Hong Kong–based designer discusses a recent commission from Swarovski and tells us what “naturology” is.

INTERVIEW BY NONIE NIESEWAND PORTRAIT BY AMANDA KHO You’re one of three winners chosen by Swarovski to launch the crystal maker’s Designers of the Future exhibition this summer at Design Miami in Basel, Switzerland. What makes the Sundew project you created for the brand tick?

Where did you get the inspiration?

A tiny carnivorous Drosera plant that lays out its tentacles and releases a sweet scent that lures in the insect. When the insect settles, the plant draws up its scented tendrils to curl over it and ingest it. The Drosera grows everywhere in the world except the Antarctic. The responsive, twisting lanternlike Sundew form uses fabric, fused with polymer glues and Swarovski crystals, in an adaptation of bio structures in nature. I call them “biomimetics,” also known as biomimicry.

This field seems to be the latest thing in science. How can you explain its future in the world of textiles, which for centuries—after tools for hunting and gathering—has remained the most basic of human needs?

It’s a new science that studies nature’s models, and then uses the designs and processes them to solve human patterns. Anything that shows how nature creates shapes and forms and colors—and when it responds, the kinetic side of biometrics—seeks sustainable solutions to human challenges. I want to explore further biomimicry design principles to find out how to improve life. In my studio, I’ve been studying lotus leaves to think about waterproofing textiles with a nanocoating. Lotus leaves are waxy, so studying the biological structures of the leaf—waxy on one side only—I explore the idea of going inside the molecular structures of the leaf.

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PHOTOS: AMANDA KHO.

Visitor participation. As a choreographer, I influence the part the audience plays. Combinations of three materials—the thread, Swarovski crystals, and hidden sensors—respond to their audience. Lifeless, they all just look like a tangle of pear-shaped threads on a pole, but speak to them, and they come alive. If you wolf-whistle at the orange feathers in a mop of threads, it shakes itself, fluffs up, gathers up its skirts as it moves up the pole, and at the top, it turns into a turban—or a dome, depending on your response.

I wanted to encourage conversation with each piece. With Facebook and Instagram, you always look down at your screen, you don’t really look at artwork, and I really want you to engage with the piece. Then it rewards you.

Ambient noise makes it move. One visitor even said to the pink-feathered piece, “I love you,” and it fluttered off. That one is the attention seeker, woven on bands of cane cut from my grandmother’s village in China. The next, printed on polymer threads, is a bit nosey, moving around to seek out its viewer, and the one of stainless steel fused with fiber and crystal is big and

bold. All three have individual characteristics quite like me, really. But the three pieces have the same idea, the same structure, twisting and turning in form, undeterred by the weight of the fabric, polymer, cane, or stainless steel. The crystal is integral to it, so that the drooping pear shape turns into an uplifting dome.

IDEAS IN DESIGN

Nanocoating particles are as small as dust and can be carcinogenic. I love research. I want to know why and why and why.

Last year, you founded your studio, The Fabrick Lab, in Hong Kong. Did you make the Sundew designs in your studio?

Yes, but with a lot of back up from the management in Asia of Swarovski.

Working with Swarovski was super easy. The key is the crystals; the fabric we developed can be used for the fashion industry and for furniture upholstery. It can be customized to any size and shape. The crystal is integrated into the fabric, which is cane in one, polymer in another, and stainless steel in the third. I applied different adhesive according to different material, but with the same crystal. The textiles aren’t woven; they’re hand-spun and laminated with crystals. Every single piece needed exactly the right amount of crystal for the look of it encrusted on the outside.

The weight of the crystals encrusted inside is dependent on the weight and the length of the fabric. There are two pieces of crystal at the core.

Turning crystals into structures that support the whole design, rather than just the application of sparkle, was critical to the project. A huge concern of mine was how to apply these crystals. I glued them all individually. It takes 20 hours to make one strand, and there are 32 strands in each Sundew. I learned to be a stronger person. Going to the Swarovski school in Wattens, in Austria, I was trained with tools for the application of polymers to crystals.

Back in the studio in Hong Kong, I added electronics, and later, scent.

The speed of motion triggered by these sensors is important. When the pieces move, there’s slowness about their folding up and unfolding. It’s not a static artwork. You don’t feel you’re missing out on a moment. There should be more slowness in life. We are missing the moment. Maybe that’s why I don’t think the Sundew project is useless. I stress-tested the threads, spinning them five times faster than they currently move and taking them up and down the poles on which they’re suspended. In the program, we had to slow it down by 75 percent; otherwise it whiplashes around so fast that it (TOP TO BOTTOM) Experiments with mounding agent such as resin and silicon and different pigment.

Natural dye used for the workshop series BioChrome.

PHOTOS: AMANDA KHO.

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IDEAS IN DESIGN

could spin out of control and make people dizzy. Now it just jumps and shivers.

Have you woven metal into textiles before?

Yes, copper thread, which dents easily, is used now in my project in a rural village in Guizhou called “Unfold: A Stitch in Time Saves Nine.” I’ve been working with rural handicraft weavers there for two years. The women traditionally weave household things of great beauty on their looms, but there is no commercial demand. Only about 10 percent of the women stay in the village to learn the handicraft. Either they find expression in a cultural form, or leave it behind in history. First, I bought nylon, which is slippery and fine, and introduced it as the weft across their coarse threads. I sat with them, weaving the first three lengths myself, and section by section drew the pattern and measured it on a one-to-one scale. Then I introduced copper to the weavers, whose burnished golden fabrics are wonderful. You know, when I show people pictures on my iPhone of these weavers in their remote village in rural China, they say, “What amazing ceremonial costumes they’re wearing!” But they’re not. That’s how they dress every day.

You call the Sundew pieces “artworks.” Does the project have any practical application?

Sundew could pop up in stores or hotels, even a museum. A lot of people think it’s a crowd puller. I would love more than anything for it to be an installation in a building. On a smaller scale, it could work domestically as a night-light. But it does have to be site-specific, as there is a lot of hidden installation work we have to do.

danger? What is your ambition?” I knew it mustn’t be like nectar, or have floral sweetness to it. Grasslands came to mind. I wanted it to be like the scent of winds across grasslands. There’s a bit of dampness in it, which changes as you progress, deepening, a bit more mossy, like a story on a timer, blown through the hidden fan in the platform floor below. It’s all about how the molecular sends triggers to the brain.

You received your master’s degree in design, in textiles futures, from Central Saint Martins in London. Have you always been interested in biomimicry?

My master’s degree show in 2010 was called “Naturology” and showed how nature and technology can work together. I used natural materials like wooden veneers laminated together that respond as they mature in peculiar ways to the warmth of the sun and humidity, pushing up into strange shapes, like fungi, on headdresses and bodily adornments. I did research into shape-memory alloys, normally used by orthodontists with intelligent, luxury fabrics like jacquard weaves that could respond to passing visitors, pushing up little bumps and nudges to respond to the sitter and cradle them.

I left my job as a senior color designer at Nokia more than two years ago.

I set up The Fabrick Lab in early 2013, and opened my studio in Hong Kong nearly one year ago. The second-best thing in my life after being chosen by Swarovski to be one of their “Designers of the Future” was being nominated to apply for a TED fellowship. TED contacted me and said they’d love to have me in a program. For it, I wrote about my passion for craft and electronics textiles and sciences. I talked about my “Naturology” program and the secret life of plants. It was titled: “Design as a Vehicle to Bridge Tradition and Sustainable Science: Applying Craft Skills to Modern Society.”

What kind of installation work is required?

A view of Sundew, the interactive installation using Swarovski crystal fabric fused with materials like stainless steel, polymer, and cane.

PHOTO: COURTESY DESIGN MIAMI.

Movement and scent. I wanted the experience to register with everyone who saw it. The sensors to make the crystals respond to sound are hidden in the platform on the floor. The scent is designed in London. Visiting a “nose,” as they call the perfumer, is like a mind-mapping session. I was asked, “What is the scent to be? Industrial? Like the flycatcher plant with a hint of

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exclusively at

IDEAS IN DESIGN

RETAIL

Moooi

When Moooi co-founders Marcel Wanders and Casper Vissers decided it was time to open the first stateside showroom for their Dutch design company, they enlisted Winka Dubbeldam, principal of the New York–based firm Archi-Tectonics, to realize the project. They wanted something big, bold, and befitting of the brand’s eclectic style. Together, they scouted a series of sites in Manhattan before selecting a location in the city’s NoMad neighborhood. “The landlord had completely gutted it,” Dubbeldam says of the warehouselike space, with “gigantically tall” ceilings and a raised mezzanine area (which was missing a staircase to access it). “We opened up more walls and found all this wonderful original brick, windows, and a skylight that weren’t being used,” she says. “There was a whole archaeological element to the process.” Filling the oversized expanse with pieces from Moooi’s lifestyle-inspired collection—“all the elements that you can put in a living room,” she says—combined with pecular vintage pieces created a surreal proportion shift. “We took the existing space and paired everything interesting we found with something extreme.” —Jordan Kushins

UP AND COMING

Greg Papove

PHOTOS: RETAIL, COURTESY MOOOI. UP AND COMING, CONRAD BROWN.

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PHOTOS: TECH, COURTESY BRAUN. LIMITED EDITION, FERNANDO LAZLO.

“Being a skateboarder is my biggest influence,” industrial designer Greg Papove says. “It requires you to see things in new ways, like architecture and function.” For the 31-year-old Vancouver native, best known for his sock-inspired furniture, a rebellious and perennial teenage pastime seems as fitting a career catalyst as any. A concrete (read: immovable) laptop holder with a Bauhausian silhouette and a wiry, large-scale sculptural object designed to save parking space are other representative designs in his wheelhouse. “The Dutch must have understood my sense of humor,” Papove says. (His collection “Socks and Furniture” was heavily influenced by his time studying at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in the Netherlands.) “At Canadian and American design schools, it’s all about ‘who is your consumer, who is your audience?’ Over there, you are free to create something simply because you think, ‘Well, that could be nice.’ It was very liberating,” he says. Setting socks aside, in May, Papove exhibited new work with his studio partner Claire Balderston (together, the duo forms Studio Medium) at Site Unseen Offsite in New York. Included in the debut was Halo, a columnlike table lamp encircled by a thin, geometric copper wheel, and the ABK table, a coffee table in a shade of blue that Papove compares to a Nike Elite LeBron James pair of socks, with niches to both hide and display objects. The introductions struck a less irreverent tone, while remaining insouciant in shade and form.

For Papove, delight in design is often found in the eye of the curious beholder: “I’m more interested in interacting with other people who are trying to figure out what you’re doing.” —Mieke ten Have

IDEAS IN DESIGN

LIMITED EDITION

Lina Bo Bardi

There are many under-recognized architects internationally who deserve a place at history’s table, and Lina Bo Bardi is certainly one of them. By now, the basics of her life and work are known. Born in Italy, she adopted Brazil as her homeland after moving there with her husband Pietro Maria Bardi in 1946. She was an architect of buildings both public and private, modern and traditional, but she was also an editor, illustrator, curator, teacher, and designer of furniture, stage sets, and costumes. While she has become more prominent since her death in 1992—Bo Bardi has been the focus of several recent exhibitions and books—the full complexity of her work has not been fully explored. A new collection of Bo Bardi furniture designs, reissued by São Paulo–based company Etel, captures something of her multifaceted, multicultural richness. “It’s really about bringing back the story of her life, how important her role in Brazil was, and her relationship to architecture and design,” says Lissa Carmona Tozzi, the CEO of Etel (her mother, Etel Carmona, is its founder). Carmona Tozzi and her team conducted a year of research to put the collection together, working closely with the Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi, which was founded in 1990 and operates out of the Bo Bardi–designed Casa de Vidro, the architect’s former home that was completed in 1951.

Four chairs are now available: Metal Tripod Chair (1948–51), MASP 7 de Abril Chair (1947), Chair with Brass Balls (1947–50), and Rocking Chair (1948). Carmona Tozzi insists that the collection is, above all, a narrative about Bo Bardi. “We don’t deal with pieces, we deal with stories,” she says. “The collection really reflects the designer’s personality and her legacy.” Etel will ultimately release a total of 12 pieces, all of which are meant to represent important aspects of both Bo Bardi’s work and the sophisticated materials and craftsmanship that Brazil champions. —Tiffany Lambert

Braun Series 9

In the age of the Apple Watch, it’s become trendy to rebel against technology, going back to basics by embracing things like vinyl records, film cameras, and straight razors. Comforting and effective as these old methods are, it’s hard not to be impressed by contemporary technology like Braun’s sleek Series 9 shaver. It may not be ritualistic, but it’s a rather efficient tool for those who prioritize speed, easy cleanup, and modern design. “Rooted in a history of premium German engineering, its iconic design combines the best features from past and present,” Dr. Miriam Rietzler, Braun’s head of global scientific communications, says.

The Series 9 is a handsome product, following Braun’s tradition of design driven by aesthetics rather than discreetness. “Series 9 is Braun’s most intuitive and stylish shaver,” she says, “as well as the world’s most efficient.”

A good thing, because no one wants to read a user manual at 6:30 in the morning. —Ethan Wolff-Mann, editor at the website Supercompressor

PHOTOS: TECH, COURTESY BRAUN. LIMITED EDITION, FERNANDO LAZLO.

PHOTOS: RETAIL, COURTESY MOOOI. UP AND COMING, CONRAD BROWN.

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IDEAS IN DESIGN

ARCHITECTURE

High Park

Monterrey, Mexico, has astonishing views of the Sierra Madre Oriental mountain range—hence its moniker, “City of Mountains.” Many of its recent residential projects, though, have been disconnected from the city’s impressive geography, taking the form of enclosed glass boxes with private ground levels. Michel Rojkind, the architect behind the new development High Park, saw the project as an opportunity to “bring back neighborhood life, where people can meet, and where the serendipity of the everyday life can activate the building.”

With community in mind, Rojkind created a tectonic structure with a series of differently sized, stone-clad layers that pile up unevenly to create a kind of mountain. The recesses of the layers generate covered terraces, spaces from which “neighbors will see each other—even if they don’t want to.”

The ground floor, shaded by the overhanging building, houses shops and restaurants. Creating this public plaza was one of the biggest challenges for Rojkind, who wanted the retail options to be available to everyone. “We fought to keep the building open to the city,” he says. “Not a plaza with a guard and controlled access, but where someone passing by can go and sit on a bench or walk his dog around.”

Rojkind invited five local designers to give the development’s apartments varied themes. “They designed them with styles ranging from contemporary to classic, to show that terraces and the views are great in any style,” he says. —David Basulto, founder and editor-in-chief of the website ArchDaily

EXHIBIT

“Endless House”

PHOTOS: ARCHITECTURE, JAIME NAVARRO. EXHIBIT, GEORGE BARROWS.

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PHOTOS: SHUJI YOSHIDA.

The single-family home might be the ultimate test for an architect. Its small scale provides an opportunity for unbridled artistic expression, and yet, since someone has to actually live there, functionality is paramount. Perhaps no one understood this better than AustrianAmerican architect Frederick Kiesler, who died 50 years ago this year, and whose unrealized Endless House project serves as a jumping-off point for a new show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, “Endless House: Intersections of Art and Architecture” (through March 6, 2016).

So fertile is the territory of the home, says the show’s curator Pedro Gadanho, that the exhibit includes not only the Kiesler project, with its organic and almost self-consuming design, but also plans and models drawn by other architects and interpretations of houses by artists.

Those of Louise Bourgeois and Laurie Simmons—the first sketchy, the other unconscionably solid—both rest on shapely female legs.

The works by architects offer a narrative of the home’s evolution since Kiesler, as seen through Rem Koolhaas’s balance of modernism with the needs of a paraplegic client, Diller and Scofidio’s filmic influences, and Frank Gehry’s attacks on the box shape. The exhibition culminates in a group of newly acquired work, including that of Smiljan Radic, who is, to Gadanho, “organic like Kiesler, but with references to modernism.”

—Dan Duray

IDEAS IN DESIGN

BOOK

“Grafted”

PHOTOS: SHUJI YOSHIDA.

PHOTOS: ARCHITECTURE, JAIME NAVARRO. EXHIBIT, GEORGE BARROWS.

No one seems quite sure how to describe the work of Kohei Oda. Owner of Qusamura, the avant-garde plant store in Hiroshima, Japan, Oda is usually tagged as a horticulturalist; in the introduction to Grafted (August Editions), Glenn Adamson, the director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, offers the term “plant sculptor.” It’s an inexact description of a method that has won Oda international acclaim: combine two living plants—often cacti rescued from the trash heaps of commercial nurseries—and “encourage them to weirdness,” to borrow a phrase from the novelist Robert Stone.

Grafted is a collection of quietly arresting photos that showcase Oda’s collaboration with Adam Silverman, the Los Angeles–based ceramicist whose work can be found everywhere from design museums to Heath Ceramics and the restaurant Trois Mec. “It was not the most obvious pairing,” writes Adamson. “A plant sculptor and a potter?” Well, actually, yes. In fact, a more obvious pairing is difficult to imagine. Oda’s cacti mash-ups have so much personality that you wouldn’t be surprised to hear them speak, while the surfaces of Silverman’s ceramics evoke everything from mold, to shrapnel, to salt flats and undiscovered planets. And while Oda and Silverman don’t speak the same language in the literal sense, the dialogue that emerges between the plants and pots in Grafted elevates the work of both men. The book’s most compelling moments occur when the camera zooms in for close-ups so extreme that you wonder, for an instant, whether you’re looking at a plant, a pot, or some combination of the two. It’s a study in contrasts but also in crisscrossed and confounded expectations; there are moments when Silverman’s layered glazing appears more organic than the multicolored, mutant plants. The two men found each other through the designer Tamotsu Yagi, whose daughter Ritsuko owns the Los Angeles gallery Chariots on Fire. “My instinct is to say yes to anything Tamotsu suggests,” Silverman admits in the introduction, “though a voice inside me was saying: my being a potted plant guy is not necessarily going to get me to the next level as an artist.” The voice inside him lied. —Stan Parish

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Crown Jewels

SELECT

Art Deco style. It’s a true representation of Baccarat’s heritage as the world’s preeminent maker of fine crystal. Better still, it can be worn as a tiara—fit for royalty, indeed. Louxor necklace, $23,000, baccarat.com —Justin Min

PHOTO: VICTOR PRADO.

For its 250th anniversary, crystal maker Baccarat reimagined its first ever jewelry collection— originally produced in 1933 under longtime creative director Georges Chevalier—with a five-edition set inspired by King Tut’s treasures.

Called Parure Louxor, the new pieces were created by Elie Top, the jewelry designer at French fashion house Lanvin. The collection’s necklace, which took an extraordinary 80 hours to compose, features vibrant red gems that are a nod to the brand’s trademark color and Chevalier’s

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lotus sofa - designed by manzoni & tapinassi space invaders coffee tables - designed by g. carollo showroom - two hundred lexington avenue, new york, ny 10016 +1 (212) 696 0211 www.atelier-nyc.com info@atelier-nyc.com

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PRODUCT

Rise Above New scupltural jewelry pieces float with élan atop refined stones and tiles from Porcelanosa.

Top: Brooch, Loewe. Bottom: Earrings, Aurélie Bidermann.

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Necklace, Carven.

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Necklace, Evfa Attling.

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PRODUCT

Top: Earring, J.W. Anderson. Bottom: Earrings, Marni.

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PRODUCT

With runway trends favoring black as the color du jour this fall, a solid black shoe is worth revisiting. This season, a heavier sole and perforated details refresh and modernize the classic option. (FROM LEFT) Hermès, Santoni, Church’s, Prada.

Top: Brooch, Prada. Bottom: Cuff, Christian Dior.

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Necklace, Stella McCartney.

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PRODUCT

ALL STONES AND TILES, PORCELANOSA.

Cuffs and ring, Jason Wu.

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PRODUCT

ALL STONES AND TILES, PORCELANOSA.

Bracelet, Eddie Borgo. Earrings, Balenciaga.

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The pattern of the above fall 2015 Valentino jacket coalesces elements of the Ballet Russes with the geometric oeuvre of Australian artist Esther Stewart. Wool and cashmere beaded jacket, $19,000, valentino.com SURFACE

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PHOTO: MICHAEL RYTERBAND.

Patterns of Abstraction

DETAIL

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10/07/2015 11:48

w

As West Coast states deal with water shortages, ersatz grass presents opportunities, but also plenty of questions.

In this column, we ask our special projects editor, Bettina Korek, founder of the Los Angeles–based independent arts organization For Your Art, to select something in the world that she believes you should be aware of at this particular moment.

BY BETTINA KOREK

Four squares of Synlawn’s artificial grass.

California is running dry. The pressure to save the state’s water is mounting. As residents and civic agencies explore water-saving strategies, a primary target has been one of America’s quintessential expanses: the lawn. According to the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD), the average residential customer uses about 60 percent of his water on out-door irrigation. Water agencies have offered residents as much as $4 per square foot to replace grass with drought-tolerant landscaping. Not surprisingly, the MWD has received applications for the removal of more than 21 million square feet of lawns.

This has sparked a debate around the adoption of turf-removal standards and the consequences of a lawn-free Los Angeles. Connected to this have been conversations about urban runoff, rainwater reuse, and tree preservation. In addi-tion to the financial and ecological consider-ations, there are also aesthetic ones: What should lawns be replaced with?

One option is Synlawn, an artificial-grass brand owned by Astroturf and based in Dalton, Georgia, that touts its natural look along with its construction from, in part, bio-based polymers and recyclable materials. According to Danna Freedman, president of Synlawn L.A., the product drains at “the same rate, if not better” than typical grasses, and Synlawn often collaborates with architects, gardeners, and clients to develop a plan that integrates both artificial grass and drought-friendly plants and rocks. It also allows families to keep their green spaces intact for recreation. Demand has been so high that two new showrooms have recently opened in the Los Angeles area.

Frances Anderton, the host of “DNA”—a popular program on Los Angeles radio station KCRW—has another suggestion. She has joined other media outlets in promoting gardens that incorporate succulents, cacti, and the like. And last year, San Diego assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, using the tagline “Brown is Beautiful,” introduced a bill that prevents homeowners associations from penalizing drought-conscious residents who forego grass for these types of low-water plantings. As Anderton says, “The bottom line is that we all, as a community, are starting to understand we’re part of a complex system, from the politics of water to the way we plant our gardens.”

Still, lawns provide hidden benefits that shouldn’t be forgotten. Landscape designer Mia Lehrer, a member of the Green L.A. Coalition, cautions against getting rid of grass entirely—it could impact oxygen and residual water available for trees, parkways, and parks. Instead, she advises cutting the size of one’s lawn and avoiding overwatering. Ivette Soler, another local landscape designer, agrees: “We just need to know how to use lawns wisely.” Soler advocates planning thoughtful mixes of hardscape and plantings. She discourages options such as artificial lawns, citing the use of petroleum-based products and the fact that trees often depend on a lawn’s water drainage for moisture.

So is Synlawn the much-needed solution to the state’s dwindling resources? Or is it perpetuating a love affair with the aesthetic of lawns that, in California at least, is no longer sustainable?

The answer isn’t necessarily clear. Perhaps we’ll just have to wait for the next new idea of what makes a landscape beautiful.

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PHOTO: MICHAEL RYTERBAND.

Lawn Spawn

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BY CHARLES CURKIN

Galit Gaon has a sunny disposition. She speaks Cor-Ten steel spirals enveloping box-shaped softly when describing her love of Tel Aviv, her concrete galleries, is a good introduction for voice rich in timbre. During her college years, visitors. “It looks like something you recognize, the Israeli city is where she called home. but you don’t know what it is,” Gaon says.

She is the chief curator of Design Museum “You actually breathe differently upon entering Holon, which, should anyone ask, is in Tel Aviv. the building.”

The Jerusalem-born Gaon is part of a “It’s recognized as a Tel Aviv museum,” Gaon says. Holon is technically four miles south, dynasty; her father was the first design curabut that’s walking distance for younger legs. tor at the Israel Museum. He exposed her to The Ron Arad–designed museum is currently his work at a very young age, in and out of the celebrating its fifth year with a series of special house. The family dinner table was a destinaexhibitions; among them is one of great socio- tion for designers like Ettore Sottsass and Issey logical heft for Gaon, “Urban Shade in Israel,” Miyake. Gaon remembers fondly listening in as they quarrelled and exchanged ideas. on view through Oct. 31.

It isn’t any wonder that Gaon chose the “Urban Shade,” the culmination of independent research conducted over three years, path she was born into. She was 5 years old is part of a national effort to bring awareness when her father began putting her to work. “I to an infrastructural dilemma: the city’s low was raised in the museum,” she recalls. “I was percentage of shaded public areas. “When working beside him, and it continued until he passed away 17 years ago.” you go around in Tel Aviv, it’s not dry,” she Gaon moved to Tel Aviv from Jerusalem says. “The humidity is annoying. There’s no place to hide. Because it’s a crowded city, it’s after time in the Israeli army. She remembers an island of heat.” She inveighs against the sun the city wasn’t very evolved, but that it was a ever-so-coolly before introducing the idea of place that fostered creativity. “It was just open covered walkways and gazebos. “When you for ideas. Jerusalem is very traditional, and if live in the Middle East,” she says, “you under- you wanted to do something new, you had to stand that pergolas are more important than go to Tel Aviv.”

Her adult career started in Tel Aviv. It was air conditioning.”

The exhibit is one of many that Gaon has her home for many years until she became a curated since assuming her post. It fits perfectly mother. “Having 25 exhibitions every year, it’s with her mission statement about design, which impossible to take care of my kids all the time,” she believes can have an impact on visitors to the she says in a rueful tone. Today Gaon lives with museum. She knows her métier well, but there’s her family in a suburb of the city. She says that only so much a curator can do. “A museum because of her hectic schedule, it’s where she isn’t about changing the visitors into designers,” needs to be for now, hopefully in the shade. she says. “It’s to teach them about design, to “The moment they graduate from high school,” show them they live in a design world.” The she says, “I’m going back to Tel Aviv.” museum building itself, a modern icon with its SURFACE

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01, COURTESY TALENTS DESIGN GALLERY. 02, COURTESY MANTA RAY. 03, COURTESY ASUFA. 04, COURTESY THE NORMAN TEL AVIV.

Tel Aviv is a city of high design and blistering sun.

Galit Gaon is combatting one with the other.

PHOTO: BEN KELMER.

Throwing Shade

TRAVEL

TRAVEL

INSIDE GUIDE TO TEL AVIV

BY GALIT GAON 01 Gaon believes the best place for design-minded visitors to shop is the high-end gallery Talents, owned by her brother Gal. Shameless plug? Maybe. But she swears it’s one of a kind in the city. “It’s not a gallery of handmade, crafty things,” she says. “They’re all well made.” Her brother invests heavily in designers, helping them to produce small collections and indivdual pieces like Ilan Pivko’s Strata, a table made of stacked stone slabs that are of drastically dissimilar proportions. For her, each of the gallery’s objects has a story, which is part of what makes them stand out. 3 Hagilboa Street; 972 3-685-0666; talentsdesign.com 02 For lunch, Gaon suggests Manta Ray, a seafood spot on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea that has a transporting vibe. “It’s like buying a ticket and going abroad,” she says. The beachside paradise provides her with an invaluable service that goes beyond a tasty dish. “You can relax and forget who annoys you,” she says. Almah Beach; 972 3-517-4773; mantaray.co.il

01, COURTESY TALENTS DESIGN GALLERY. 02, COURTESY MANTA RAY. 03, COURTESY ASUFA. 04, COURTESY THE NORMAN TEL AVIV.

PHOTO: BEN KELMER.

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03 Another favorite stop is Asufa, a store that deals in odd, humorous household items created exclusively

by Israeli designers. “It’s wonderful,” she says. “It’s a low-brow, crazy little store.” Products like a line of dogs made of wine corks and the Hippomark—which, like the name suggests, is a bookmark shaped like a hippopotamus—are reasonably priced and show the funny side of Israel. “There’s something about the sense of humor,” Gaon says. “You buy things because you fall in love with the idea, not because you need them.” Yehuda Margoza 8, Jaffa, Flea Market; 972-3-604-1405; asufadesign.com 04 Gaon cites the 50-room Norman Tel Aviv as one of the most popular places to stay, at least for a certain tribe. “It’s a very cool place,” she says, “more for young people, perhaps.” To design the hotel, which opened last year and is located in the White City district, architect Yoav Messer had to work with two extant Bauhausstyle buildings from the 1920s. “If you want to build a hotel in Tel Aviv, you have to put them in old buildings,” she says. 23-25 Nachmani Street; 972-3-543-5555; thenorman.com

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Connect Lore

RETAIL

BY HALLY WOLHANDLER

(THIS PAGE AND OPPOSITE) Interior views of the Modissa store in Zürich.

“The relation to the spirit of the building was missing,” architect and designer Matteo Thun says of the Modissa flagship in Zürich, the interior of which he recently gave a total redesign. “The building is a protected cultural heritage site, and it’s really elegant. We wanted to bring the sophistication inside.”

Modissa, a family-run Swiss department store with six locations in its home country, purveys brands like Opening Ceremony, Cappellini, Kenzo, and Christian Wijnants.

Positioned on Bahnhofstrasse in Zürich— “when it comes to shopping, Bahnhofstrasse is the vein of the city,” Thun says—the seven-story giant is housed in a ’70s industrial building with a compellingly curved, glass-and-steel shell. Thun, the principal of his firm Matteo Thun & Partners, worked with designer Benedetto Fasciana to recreate the grand space as a reflection of the building.

“The design of the store follows the building language,” Thun says. “The building has huge glass facades; we wanted to connect the exterior and the interior, keeping it stylistically consistent.” He connected the dots by bringing the original architectural materials inside, by way of custom-made bronze tubular display modules. “Modissa carries an interesting mix of young and established designers,” he says. “The modules allow

a specific atmosphere to be created for each one.”

The store’s signature windows bring natural light into the space, which Thun complemented with gray and black accents and a mixture of terrazzo tile and light-wood flooring— stark materials he warms with textured fabric walls. It gets a little cozier (and punchier) with furniture in muted pastel colors and bright design details, like ceramic glazed cactuses. “It was a great adventure, restyling the interior of a protected cultural heritage building,” Thun says. “We very much enjoyed finding solutions for an interior concept that honors the architecture—but at the same time allows the clothes to be the focus.”

PHOTOS: THOMAS PAGANI.

Matteo Thun mixes past and present at a newly refreshed Zürich department store.

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PHOTOS: THOMAS PAGANI.

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Estate of Grace

HOTEL

BY NATE STOREY

A room at La Fiermontina. (OPPOSITE, TOP TO BOTTOM) The hotel’s entrance. The plunge pool.

Puglia belongs to a global fraternity of coolkid refuges that stretches from Montauk to Tulum, Byron Bay to José Ignacio, and it’s not hard to see why. The region’s location on the sun-kissed heel of Italy’s boot, where the Adriatic Sea meets the Mediterranean, is one of the country’s last remaining hideaways untouched by invading tourist hordes and luxury fashion boutiques. La Fiermontina, a new urban masseria (farmhouse) on Piazza Scipione in the historic city of Lecce is owner Giacomo Fiermonte’s 10-year labor of love.

A Parisian of Italian extraction, Fiermonte stumbled upon the property in 2000. Something about it seemed so familiar to him. He saw restoring the building as an opportunity to pay homage to his late grandmother and uncle, who were both Puglia natives. He tasked local architect Antonio Annicchiarico, whose past clients include Oscar-winning film director Roberto Benigni and the Hermès family, and French design firm CharlesPhillipe and Christophe, to remake the 17thcentury compound into a contemporary art gallery-cum-hotel while still maintaining its Puglian character. “Giacomo invited us to discover Puglia and the city of Lecce,” Charles-Phillipe says. “We were instantly impregnated by the region.”

The result is a country-style estate that wouldn’t feel out of place in the bucolic pastures nearby. It’s a rarity in Lecce, which

is often referred to as the “Florence of the South” because of its narrow cobblestoned streets and Baroque architecture. “In those times, the rich families would come to build their mansions. We wanted to respect that tradition, so we interpreted the building as a family’s dwelling rather than a hotel,” Charles-Phillipe says. The spare interiors are fashioned with walls made of the region’s famous creamy limestone pietra Leccese, a common material used in the conical dry-stone huts found in rural areas outside of town, as well as traditional pietra di Trani floors and antiques from Fiermonte’s personal collection. Outside, the grounds are walled in by ancient stone and feel like an open-air museum: gnarled olive trees and a plunge pool punctuate a sculpture garden with an original bronze work by French artist Fernand Léger.

The terrace restaurant helmed by a young local chef serves housemade pasta and pasticceria leccese (custard pastries).

Guest Rooms Charles-Phillipe and Christophe knew when to enhance and when to leave well enough alone, letting the dramatic star-pinnacled ceilings and original architecture take center stage in the 16 rooms, which are thoughtfully appointed with minimalist Italian furniture, custom textiles, and fireplaces. “The archiSURFACE

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PHOTOS: CLAUDIO SABATINO.

A French collector honors his Italian roots at a discreet art-focused hotel in southern Italy.

HOTEL

tectural rigor, as opposed to Lecce’s Baroque buildings, gives the place a more contemporary edge,” Charles-Phillipe says. “Our choice fell on curved shapes with timeless colors.” The bathrooms are spacious with high wood-beamed ceilings, organic bath products, and freestanding tubs.

Lobby, Library, and Bar

PHOTOS: CLAUDIO SABATINO.

The public spaces are stocked with artworks that Fiermonte has amassed over the years. “We chose to give pride of place to the art exhibits rather than the décor,” says Charles-Phillipe. The lobby has a pair of Le Corbusier LC1 chairs, the French-Swiss architect’s first furniture design from the 1920s—“We chose them because they’re not as well known as his classics”—and an Utrecht armchair by Gerrit Rietveld. Modern Refolo benches, Ombra armchairs, and Mexique tables by Charlotte Perriand create the stylistic form of the library. In the dimly lit Enzo bar that was once a barn, film posters adorn the walls and Tobia Scarpa’s orblike Suspension Nictea lighting fixtures hang above the gold-paneled bar like, “jewels that follow the roundness of the stone vault,” as Charles-Phillipe puts it. “The family gave us sculptures, drawings and paintings, which we integrated because they represent the soul of the resort.”

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BAR

Cocktail by Tomas Delos Reyes INSPIRED BY TETCHAN I enjoyed working with the multiple personalities of the space and thought a frozen cocktail would speak to the frozen build of the bar area. Using Belvedere Wild Berry made sense, as it has a clean rye base but is packed with a fresh berry essence. Rambutan and banana liqueur give it a lush texture, while the yuzu citrus delivers a punch. The Campari adds a touch of color and a bitter balance. A rambutan garnish references the unusual wooly walls.

Belvedere Wild Berry Banane du Bresil Campari yuzu juice whole pieces of rambutan (three peeled and seeded)

Place three rambutans into the blender. Cut only the outer shell of last piece in half, then peel off half the shell and put aside. Add the rest of the ingredients to the blender and fill with 2.5 cups of ice. Blend until ice has reached a smooth texture. Pour into a highball glass and garnish with remaining piece of rambutan.

Hair Lair

Tomas Delos Reyes is a partner of the restaurant Jeepney in New York’s East Village.

A yakitori bar on the outskirts of Tokyo gets an avant-garde makeover.

Kuma and his team draped the room in multicolored ethernet cables—the wires that used to connect computers to the Internet before the advent of WiFi. Everything, from the walls to the tables and chairs, is covered in a rainbow of discarded strings, giving the dining room a mossy, tie-dyed complexion that blurs the edges of its

BY CHADNER NAVARRO form. Instead of sharp corners or straight lines, clusters of tangled tendrils define the shapes and In the Kichijoji suburb of Tokyo, Japanese archi- silhouettes of the space. tect Kengo Kuma has transformed a humble While the top level feels like a dreamscape, yakitori bar into a next-wave interpretation of a the first floor implements loud graphic design traditional street-food stall. Tetchan sits cheek to elements familiar to K-pop culture, the inefjowl with tiny shops and izakayas stacked against fable pan-Asian music craze. Set against a quasieach other on Harmonica Yokocho, an alleyway pornographic manga mural by artist Teruhiko that was once the site of a post–World War II Yumura, who helped pioneer the heta-uma black marke t and still has the lively mystique (unskillful but skillful) drawing style in the of 1940s Japan.

1970s, clear dining surfaces are made from melted For Kuma, who recently won an international acrylic byproducts and resemble blocks of ice. competition to design the new Saint-Denis Pleyel If it weren’t for the very red illustrations on the train station in Paris and is currently working on wall, one could almost call this floor minimalist the V&A Museum of Design Dundee in Scotland, —a direct juxtaposition to the explosion of color it’s not the first time he has given a high-concept on the floor above. twist to a straight-forward project. In 2011, he “We designed the bar from the material, not reimagined a Starbucks in the southern city of from the form or style,” Kuma says. “We always Fukuoka as an edgy, dramatically timbered café decide on material first and that determines the design.” that garnered much global attention.

Similarly, here Kuma has turned the expected venue for grilled skewered meats on its head.

Most yakitori bars are either no-fuss takeaway joints that offer little in the way of high design or your typical open-grill setup with lots of smoothed wood for seating. Tetchan is neither.

The two-story space is an eye-catching study in harnessing the aesthetic utility of recycled materials. When it comes to the creative reuse process, the second floor is especially revelatory: SURFACE

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PHOTOS: COCKTAIL, LESLEY UNRUH. BAR, ERIETA ATTALI.

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Quiet Riot

Italian dining comes with a functionalist Danish aesthetic at a new restaurant in Copenhagen.

BY HEIDI MITCHELL Close your eyes. Picture a family-friendly Italian restaurant. It’s loud and it’s boisterous. Now place that rowdy rendezvous spot in the center of Copenhagen, all tidy streets and pared-down design. It’s hard to imagine, right?

“We tried to see what was Italian through Scandinavian eyes,” says Linda Korndal, partner and head of architecture for the Danish design firm Norm, which in April completed Cofoco Italy, the second restaurant of a new everyday-Italian chain in Denmark. “Italians always seem to be enjoying life compared to us

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PHOTO: LESLEY UNRUH.

Danes. So we wanted to create a festive interior, but not the place where you would have your wedding.” To do that, Norm came up with four “values” that define Italian dining—warmth, temperament, familiarity, and celebration— and approached the interior with each of them in mind.

Known for a soft minimalism that pays homage to its Scandinavian heritage, Norm treaded gently while translating the architectural language between the two cultures.

“You would never say ‘fun and festive’ about the Scandi palette,” says Korndal with a laugh. “We give small hints rather than grand gestures, so as not to overdo it.” From the floor up to the ceiling, whispered details and subtle flourishes together sing a delicate Italian song. Rather than, say, Danish hardwood on every surface, black-and-white hexagonal tiles bring to mind casual New World trattorias. The region’s traditionally cool palette here has the heat turned up, with walls done in pale yellows and warm teal rather than that icy Nordic blue.

Because Cofoco Italy will expand to fit different markets and aims to attract a wide range of diners, this restaurant in the Danish capital’s Søborg neighborhood includes four different interpretations of Norm’s ScandiItalian aesthetic. The “niche” offers high tables with spindly metal barstools, jazzed up with teal cushions. In the “passage,” long benches in narrow spaces allow couples to cozy up to one another, love seat–style. “These are meant for a date night, or for people-scouting,” says Korndal. In the “courtyard,” filament-bulb chandeliers made by Norm’s co-founders hang above potted firs, giving the impression and openness of the outdoors—without the requisite chilliness.

In the dining room, leather-upholstered booths are primed for early birds grabbing a bite with their children. “I was thinking a lot about my kids when I made Cofoco Italy,” says Korndal, who explains that Danes don’t dine out with family on weekdays, though the restaurateur hopes to change this status quo.

“Cofoco has a democratic approach to children; we serve comfort food that isn’t challenging and all of the ceilings are acoustic, so the kids aren’t a nuisance.”

Norm was founded in 2008 by Jonas BjerrePoulsen and Kasper Rønn, who made a name for themselves with another Cofoco project, Höst. (Last year, the firm won Surface’s Endorsement Award for Furniture Design.)

“We try to refine everything we do and have a minimum of expression,” Korndal says.

“But without losing a poetic touch.” Taken in broad strokes, Cofoco may not look very Italian, but it certainly feels it; to Korndal, that’s an architect’s greatest responsibility—to be aware of what emotions to evoke. “When I was at the restaurant recently, there was a vibrant feeling,” she says with a touch of pride.

But then she dampens her self-praise with typical Danish stoicism: “It will be interesting to see how it will be when the buzz fades.”

PHOTO: JONAS BJERRE-POULSEN.

RESTAURANT

RESTAURANT

Dish by Seamus Mullen INSPIRED BY COFOCO ITALY Tosta Matrimonio I’m guessing “Mediterranean-by-way-of-Scandinavia” isn’t a frequently requested design direction, but judging by the look of Cocofo Italy, maybe it should be.

After seeing so much restaurant design that’s either over-the-top ornamental, or rustic and cobbled, it’s refreshing to see a space that is simple, elegant, and just feels good.

The shades of white and teal, and overall brightness of the space, take me to a beachy, seafoody place, which makes sense given the relationship both Denmark and Italy have to the sea. In keeping with the spirit of the décor that balances contrasting motifs, I thought of my tosta matrimonio: black and white anchovies, sheep’s milk cheese, and roasted tomato on a flax crisp, with a drizzle of balsamic vinegar. An ingredient relatively under-appreciated here in the States, anchovies have been a familiar pantry staple for centuries in countries all over the world, and one of my favorite types of fish. It should be yours, too, because they’re incredibly healthy—rich in protein, calcium, vitamin B, and omega-3s—and pack a whole lot of umami into a very small bite. I can’t tell you how many anchovy converts we’ve created at my restaurant because of this dish. The saltiness of the anchovies is cut through by the tomato’s sweetness, the creaminess of the sheep’s milk cheese, and a touch of acidity from the balsamic—proof that flavors from opposite sides of the spectrum can come together to create something great.

Serves 2 to 3 as an appetizer or snack 4 4 1 4 2 4

boquerones (white anchovies) black anchovies very ripe tomato tablespoons sheep’s milk cheese teaspoons aged balsamic vinegar flaxseed crisps (recipe below)

For the flaxseed crisps 1 ⁄2 cup flax seeds, soaked in water for 20 minutes 1 ⁄3 cup water 1 ⁄2 cup quinoa, ground into flour 1 teaspoon kosher salt 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil 1 ⁄2 teaspoon baking powder

To make the flaxseed crisps Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

Mix ground quinoa with soaked flax seeds. Add olive oil, sea salt, and baking powder, and combine until you have a sticky dough.

Put parchment paper on a cookie sheet, then place the dough on the paper. Using the palm of your hand, flatten it into a disk. Place a second sheet of parchment paper on top of the dough and use a rolling pin to further spread out the dough until it’s a thin, even layer. Remove the top sheet of the paper. With a sharp knife, carefully cut the dough into approximately 2 by 4 inch rectangles.

Bake at 375 degrees for about 15 to 20 minutes, or until golden and crisp. Remove and let cool for 5 to 10 minutes before breaking into crackers. Set aside four crackers and store the rest in an airtight container.

To assemble Carefully spread the sheep’s milk cheese to cover each cracker.

Place two tomato slices on the cracker, followed by one boquerones, and one black anchovy.

Seamus Mullen is an award-winning New York–based chef; owner of Tertulia, El Colmado, and El Colmado Butchery; and culinary director of Sea Containers restaurant at Mondrian London. He is the author of the cookbook Hero Food.

PHOTO: LESLEY UNRUH.

PHOTO: JONAS BJERRE-POULSEN.

Drizzle with balsamic vinegar.

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Taste

TASTE

In this column, we ask a prominent figure from the Surface universe to let us in on a personal obsession.

BY AMY LAU

A room at Amangiri. (NEXT SPREAD) A landscape view of the resort.

Amangiri is a resort worth a pilgrimage. Located on a mesa in southern Utah’s Escalante National Monument near red canyons and large-scale rock formations known as the Grand Staircase, the hotel blends into its surroundings and takes references from local Native Americans and ranchers.

I’m really into vernacular architecture like this, having grown up in Arizona going to old pueblos—which my grandmother used to paint—with my father. It’s why I have a thing for cave houses, which I’ve stayed in all over the world. Geologically, they’re just fascinating. I love the idea of a sequestered village, a jewel-like area that is a part of the nature around it.

For Amangiri, the architects took the aggregate—the stone and cement from the surrounding area—and mixed it all together to make buildings that are the same color and density as the rocks around them, but polished so they glow. Everything is built on a very low, modern plane; it almost looks like a ruin within a landscape. The huge windows in the rooms frame the scenery. This part of Utah has the most beautiful sunrises and sunsets, and with everything being the same color, it really puts emphasis on those kind of natural nuances.

I love resorts that aren’t heavy handed, that really allow the outside to pull you in. The property has ingeniously integrated water features, including various pools and water pavilions. The swimming pool curves around an escapement of sandstone rock, giving the illusion that it’s melting into the desert. The sound of the water—that pulls you in, too.

That kind of dialogue is extraordinary.

The author is an interior designer based in New York City.

PHOTOS: AMAN RESORTS.

The earthy exteriors of a hotel in the Utah desert inform an interior designer.

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Charting New Territory

ART

Three years ago, the dealers behind five success, drawing foot traffic from international Copenhagen-based art galleries decided collectors in search of new talent (the 2014 edienough was enough. Denmark’s capital city tion saw the number of international collectors needed its own art fair. The Norse were garner- in attendance surpass the number of regional ing a lot of attention from the art world, Nordic collectors), as well as a local art-minded crowd. galleries were making the art-fair circuit, and “We get a lot of collectors coming to the fair in 2012, New York’s Armory Show dedicated from Holland, Germany, the U.K., Scandinavia, its Focus section to Nordic countries. “There Belgium. They’re attracted by Copenhagen as was a growing interest in artists and galleries a whole—the restaurants, the design—with a from the Nordic region,” says Jesper Elg, a focus on Chart,” Risley says.

What makes the fair different from most art founder of V1 Gallery and one of the gallerists behind Chart Art Fair. “It felt natural to fairs is its layout: There are no booth walls, create an ambitious platform for the art scene but instead one open, exhibition-style instalin Copenhagen.” lation. “Galleries work together to make the The city is home to some of the most impor- best presentation of the artists they represent,” tant museums and most striking architecture in Elg says, “so everybody is working together to the world, and it’s become a hotbed for a com- create one great exhibition instead of 28 indimunity of working artists—including Simon vidual booths.” This year, the fair is adding new Starling and Tal R—so a contemporary art programming, including Chart Performance, fair was perhaps an obvious next step. This a series of live performance pieces curated by context spurred Elg and the gallerists behind Francesca Gavin, and Chart Architecture, for Galleri Susanne Ottesen, Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, which students from three Nordic schools of Andersen’s Contemporary, and David Risley architecture have been invited to design seven Gallery to form a fair together. “The art scene pavilions that will house the pop-up restauhere is amazing for a city of this size,” says rants in the fair’s gastronomy section. “There David Risley, who moved his gallery from are so many good works [being] collected for a long weekend at Charlottenborg,” Elg says London to Copenhagen in 2009.

Less than a year after their first discussions, excitedly of this year’s edition. “It’s comparable in 2013, the debut edition of Chart opened. to how heavy metal fans feel about heading for Housed in a 17th-century palace, the Kunsthal a weekend at Rock-am-Ring.”

Charlottenborg, the show featured 28 contemporary art galleries from the region, each participating on an invite-only basis. Some lessons were learned in that first year: “ventilation is important when you have a lot of visitors in a beautiful palace from 1672,” Elg jokes—though for the most part, the fair was a

A gallery consortium builds an art fair showcasing Scandinavian culture.

BY MARINA CASHDAN PORTRAIT BY LEA MEILANDT

Gallerists Jesper Elg, left, and David Risley in Copenhagen.

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INTRODUCING WATCH JOURNAL’S TRAVEL ISSUE Now available on newsstands, the Travel issue of Watch Journal explores innovations in watch design with in-depth reporting and exclusive photography.

Featuring the new Ball Watch GMT timepiece, Jaeger-LeCoultre’s philanthropic efforts to preserve Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park, and the top pilot’s watches on the market.

Volume 18, N 5

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Tennis Great Stan Wawrinka. Golfing with Cristie Kerr.

You can find Watch Journal in private jet terminals, on newsstands, in watch boutiques, and at Barnes & Noble.

Subscribe: watchjournal.com/subscribe

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High prices for 20th-century art and design pioneer Isamu Noguchi’s work indicate his ever-growing influence.

BY GRANT JOHNSON

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PHOTOS: TOP, COURTESY SOTHEBY’S. BOTTOM, COURTESY WRIGHT.

Isamu Noguchi’s rare Cloud-form sofa (1948). (OPPOSITE, TOP TO BOTTOM) Noguchi’s Radio Nurse and Early Guardian Ear (1937). The designer’s Rudder dining suite for Herman Miller (1949).

Auctions, new publications, and exhibitions have made it clear: Isamu Noguchi is having a moment. One of the most significant sculptors of the 20th century, Noguchi (1904-1988) simultaneously pursued significant work as a designer. Familiar examples include his set designs for Martha Graham, his Akari paper lamps, and, of course, his signature coffee tables, which have even inspired a curiously named Tumblr feed (see: fuckyournoguchicoffeetable. tumblr.com).

In particular, the auction market has showcased his cultural currency. Recent highlights include a quartet of sales last December at Phillips in New York: his Rudder stool for Herman Miller (1949), for $161,000; a Cloud-form sofa and ottoman (1948), for $422,500; a Chess table (circa 1947-1949), for $242,500; and a Rudder stool (1944), for $47,500.

At the same sale, Noguchi’s first table design, the Goodyear (1939), garnered the most striking price of all: $4,450,500 (well beyond its $2-3 million estimate). Most recently owned by Cubism collector Ronald Lauder, the table was

reportedly bought by Alice Walton, founder of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas and an heir to the Walmart fortune.

The table, which was commissioned by former MoMA president A. Conger Goodyear for the living room of his Edward Durrell Stone home, captures a crucial pivot in Noguchi’s career­—as well as the greater currents of midcentury design.

“The table is historically important as a catalyst for the artist’s sculptural development,” says Alex Hemingway, New York director of design at Phillips. “The tables are sculptures, although of course their functionality sets them apart.

The Goodyear table directly relates to earlier set designs for Martha Graham as well as to his interlocking sculptures of the 1940s.”

Unlike many of his peers, Noguchi was not deterred by the divide between fine art and functional design, says Hayden Herrera, author of the new biography Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). “Noguchi had a sort of Japanese idea that art and design are not separate, that they are one and the same,” says Herrera, who has also published biographies of painters Frida Kahlo and Arshile Gorky. “He was constantly defending his design.” (An exhibition at New York’s Pace Gallery earlier this year, “Isamu Noguchi: Variations,” showcased his work across various materials and disciplines.)

Other pieces to receive impressive bids were the Measured Time clock and kitchen timer (1932)—which also sold at Phillips in December, for $11,250, and at Wright in June for

PHOTO: COURTESY PHILLIPS.

A Good Year

AUCTION

AUCTION

PHOTOS: TOP, COURTESY SOTHEBY’S. BOTTOM, COURTESY WRIGHT.

PHOTO: COURTESY PHILLIPS.

$23,750—and the Radio Nurse and Early Guardian Ear (1937), considered by many to be the world’s first baby monitor, which sold at Sotheby’s in June for $6,250. These lesser-known works, both noteworthy explorations in Bakelite plastic, are now recognized as Noguchi’s first design objects.

They returned to the public eye as part of “Isamu Noguchi, Patent Holder: Designing the World of Tomorrow,” a recent exhibition at the Noguchi Museum in New York that drew significantly on original research by art historian Deborah Goldberg, who suggests that the cross-disciplinary spirit of our own times might allow us to return to Noguchi with a perspective distinct from the prejudices of the past.

“Today, so many people in the art world or the fashion world move between disciplines,” Goldberg says. “But when Noguchi was doing it, it was really unprecedented. There were very few people out there who could work equally well in so many different mediums. I really see him as a pioneer for what we see everywhere today in terms of people moving between areas, from sculpture to fashion to painting to graphic art.”

A transnational figure that embraced openminded experimentation, Noguchi may conjure the spirit of the present as much as the past.

“Noguchi is a towering 20th-century figure due to his influence in a variety of disciplines—sculpture, design, ceramics, dance—and there should always be a robust market for his unique and limitededition works,” Hemingway says. “That said, there is only a market when these types of works appear, and that’s rare.”

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An anonymous car collector auctions off world-class selections from his portfolio.

BY JONATHAN SCHULTZ

2006 Bugatti Veyron. (OPPOSITE, TOP TO BOTTOM) 1993 Jaguar XJ220. 1971 Lamborghini Miura P400 SV by Bertone.

Steam to diesel. Wagon wheel to radial tire. her says. “Later examples of what we’d call Drum brakes to discs. Leather to Leather- supercars don’t have the McLaren’s simplicette. For all the innovations in passenger cars’ ity of line, curves, and sense of proportion.” history—remarkable and lamentable alike— With a pre-auction estimate of more than $12 some are more than moments; they are pivot million, however, the F1 LM will be too pricy points. Lucky is the person who ever experi- for most bidders. A consolation prize? “For someone who can’t afford an F1, the Jaguar ences these, luckier still the person who XJ220 may be more palatable,” he says, citowns them.

One such fortunate car owner, whose ing a car in the collection that once reigned as identity beyond his gender remains tightly the world’s fastest before being trounced by shrouded, is freeing 30 pieces from his the F1. “Still elegant, still British and of the painstakingly assembled reliquary. RM period.

“Then there’s the Lamborghini Miura Sotheby’s—the result of a February merger between Ontario-based auction house RM SV,” Kelleher says in a more reverential regand Sotheby’s—will be auctioning off the ister. “It’s a gorgeous car.” What made this so-called “Pinnacle Portfolio” on Aug. 13 circa-1966 design, by broad consensus the on California’s Monterey peninsula, the first supercar, so remarkable? “It was a time summertime epicenter of the global car col- of transition,” Kelleher says of the era that lecting “hobby”—if trading millions of dol- produced the Miura, which began as a design lars for rolling sculpture could ever be fairly study for Lamborghini by the Turin-based Stile Bertone. “You look at the Miura and described as such.

As the gavel falls on the final lot, Ian Kelle- pick up on certain cues. They’re unmistakher, managing director of RM Sotheby’s West able. You’re seeing a collision of different Coast division, foresees a shattered record— design movements, all in that one car.”

Kelleher then arrives at perhaps the most eclipsing the $65.9 million combined result achieved by Bonhams for a private collec- polarizing Portfolio lot, the car that in 2005 tion at Monterey in 2014. He singles out four trumped the F1 for speed, engineering, and designs that, while not necessarily the port- sheer wallet-exploding audacity, the Bugatti folio’s most valuable, could be considered its Veyron (the auction includes two different iterations). “It captures both sides of most significant.

“The McLaren certainly has the unique- the market: those that want to be seen in ness in the group,” Kelleher says of a 1998 it—who may have zero notion of, or interest F1, one of just two in the world built to “Le in, Bugatti beyond that car—and those who Mans Specification.” The Britain-built F1, regard it as a piece of history, who recognize which for just under a decade was the planet’s its significance.” Don’t count Kelleher among fastest production car, was not just an engine the car’s detractors. “The Veyron has always bolted to four wheels. “It has come to rep- struck me like a Hermès Birkin bag, in that resent an earlier time of supercar design, but it’s just the ultimate of its kind, the last word.” you would never say it looks dated,” Kelle- Start revving your checkbooks.

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PHOTOS: PATRICK ERNZEN.

Block Busters

TRANSPORT

PHOTOS: PATRICK ERNZEN.

TRANSPORT

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Books

BOOKS

The Future of the Skyscraper (Metropolis) is the first volume in Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s SOM Thinkers series, which, according to editor Philip Nobel’s introduction, “aims to look beyond the field of architecture” and bring in voices from “outside what is all too often an isolated subculture.” If accessibility is one of the ambitions of the series, the book’s bland, imageless design and unbroken blocks of text isn’t doing it any favors. But it does feature writers who aren’t your typical spinners of architecture jargon, including cyberpunk specialist Bruce Sterling, novelist and cultural critic Will Self, and LACMA director Michael Govan—all of them musing on the subject of tall buildings.

Few design careers have been as influential as that of Bruno Munari, who believed that the modern designer’s job was to “re-establish the long-lost contact between art and the public.” Munari’s Books (Princeton Architec-

tural Press), first published in English in 2008, covers just one aspect of his craft, but it’s still nearly 300 pages long. More than 60 publications have been culled from seven decades; many are spare designs with sans-serif typefaces, while others incorporate fabric, holes, and unconventional bindings. This edition adds a few works to the collection and omits others that evidently weren’t classifiable as books.

Maharam is a household name in the textile industry, but its website showcases, alongside the company’s products, a catalogue of narratives written by design-world dignitaries about all manner of cultural artifacts. Maharam Stories (Rizzoli) compiles 100 of these texts, which range from a brief history (by Harmen Liemburg) of Vlisco’s African wax prints to the soliloquy (imagined by Marian Bantjes) of a mannequin head. Irma Boom’s design for the book is curiously modest; it’s not a hardcover tome but a flimsy pamphlet stapled and folded into a thin cardstock cover.

From afar, the pages evoke a set of blueprints that a designer tucked under her arm while rushing to her next client meeting.

The story of many an industrial designer is a story of objects, and Keepsakes (Pointed Leaf Press) is just that: a personal history of the heirlooms, baubles, and projects of design maven Constantin Boym. Souvenirs have long been an important facet of Boym’s practice; the designer is renowned for his ironic take on the miniature landmarks sold at tourist shops. (His Buildings of Disaster series comprises tiny replicas of sites connected to violence and trauma.) In this “design memoir,” Boym reveals which mementos—from his travels, everyday life, and family history— mean most to him and continually inspire his practice.

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PHOTO: MICHAEL RYTERBAND.

BY DAVE KIM

Congratulations to the winners of Surface’s 15th annual Avant Guardian photography competition.

Lilian Day Thorpe, 23 New York lilianday.com

For more, vist surfacemag.com/avantguardian

Paul Jung, 30 New York pauljung.co.uk Jessica Richmond, 21 New York jessrichmond.com Kenneth Lavey, 22 New York kenlavey.com Hannah Olivia Nelson, 31 Oakland, California hannaholivianelson.com Tianxing Wang, 27 Chengdu, China ethandadawang.com Zhi Wei Hiu, 23 New York zhi-wei.co Jiaxi Yang, 25 New York jiaxiyang.com Matin Zad, 27 New York matinzad.com

PHOTO: PAUL JUNG.

Zhe Zhu, 22 New York zhezhu.net

Material

MATERIAL

In this column, we ask Material Connexion vice president Andrew Dent, Ph.D., to select one innovation that’s set to influence what designers will be using tomorrow.

BY CAROLYN STANLEY PHOTO BY MICHAEL RYTERBAND Not many textiles are as luxurious as velvet, with its heavy softness and subtle sheen that call to mind 17th century Baroque opulence.

Concrete, on the other hand, produces an opposite effect; it’s hard, utilitarian, and austere. Tactility Factory, a Northern Ireland– based company founded by architect Ruth Morrow and textile designer Trish Belford, finds an unlikely harmony between the two with Velvet Infused Concrete. The duo drew on their respective areas of expertise to produce a dual-textured material that enhances interior spaces.

“Technically, there are huge challenges in what we do,” Morrow says. “It really

doesn’t make sense to put textiles into con- a need to be sensitively skilled.”

The resulting panels are then cast onto a crete really.” To overcome the seemingly incongruousness of the two materials, Mor- metal substrate through an embedding prorow and Belford developed a patented pro- cess and into one of 11 replicable designs. cess in which each component is specially While the specifics are proprietary, one engineered to bond to the other. The alka- major principle is that the textile is spread line nature of concrete creates an unfavor- across the entire expanse of the concrete, yet able environment for most textiles, so the only remains visible in select areas.

Once hardened, the surface receives a raw fabric—in this case, a composite of 28 percent polyester and 72 percent viscose—is stain-resistant coating. The resulting panels, actually deconstructed, the fibers tested for 10 to 15 millimeters in thickness and availresistance, and then reconstructed specifi- able in a range of sizes, are high in tensile strength and less harsh acoustically than cally for use with concrete.

An equal amount of attention is paid to concrete. Those qualities combined with a the other half of the equation: polymer- rich, nuanced aesthetic, make Velvet Infused modified concrete—what’s called a “face Concrete ideal for both residential and commix”—is tailored to interact with the textile mercial interiors—either as wall panels or to achieve the optimal bond and visual ef- smaller accent pieces.

And true to the company’s name, the feel fect. “We have to understand how the concrete element will work with the textiles so of the material is as important as anything it neither subsumes nor fails to bond to the else. “It’s quite difficult to stand beside our textiles,” Morrow says. “While some of our surfaces and not want to touch them,” Morsurfaces may look organic and eroded, in row says. “We call touching the velvet conreality they’re heavily controlled. So along crete surface the ‘ooh-ouch experience.’” with getting the chemistry right there’s also SURFACE

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COLLABORATION

Maison & Objet Americas Summit “Lean Urbanism: Making Small Possible” Summit at Maison & Objet Americas On May 12, at the inaugural Maison & Object Americas fair in Miami, Surface editor-in-chief Spencer Bailey interviewed architect and urbanist Andrés Duany, whose firm, Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, is based in Miami and Washington, D.C. The two discussed Duany’s Lean Urbanism project, which resulted in many quotable gems from Duany, including “Miami Beach is now full of dentists from New Jersey,” “Detroit is the coolest city in the United States right now,” and “The Miami Design District is going to be the coolest place on Earth, at least for a few years.”

(Photos: Top and left, Seth Browarnik. Right, Greg Sevaz) 67

A. Lange & Söhne’s latest timepiece boasts an unrivaled complication.

BY KEITH W. STRANDBERG

The A. Lange & Söhne Zeitwerk Minute Repeater, with a solid silver dial, rhodié with black rhodiumed German silver timebridge, and rhodiumed gold hands.

(OPPOSITE) The Lange manufacture caliber L043.5.

German watchmaker A. Lange & Söhne has a history that stretches back 170 years: It was founded in 1845 by Ferdinand Adolph Lange in the town of Glashütte near Dresden in Saxony, Germany. This history doesn’t mean the brand is afraid to do things differently, though. The latest timepiece from head watchmaker Anthony de Haas, the highly complicated Zeitwerk Minute Repeater, is proof of that.

A decimal minute repeater, the Zeitwerk is something few other manufactures have ever created. While most minute repeaters chime out hours, quarter-hours, and minutes, a decimal repeater chimes out hours, tens of minutes, and minutes. In the Zeitwerk’s design, an even rarer feature: a digital time display that corresponds with each chime. (Breguet, Arnold & Son, Seiko, and Kari Voutilainen have all released decimal minute repeaters with analog dials.) “It’s the perfect mix of traditional Lange elements in a modern approach,” de Haas says.

With the Zeitwerk, “you hear what you see.”

The Zeitwerk’s gongs are visible on the

lower part of the dial. The hours are struck on the left, the single minutes on the right. For the 10-minute counts, the hammers alternately strike the gongs, creating a double-tone sound.

Another key difference with the Zeitwerk: It uses a pusher instead of the slide typical of the minute repeaters made by other manufactures. “I’m not a fan of the slide, especially if you want to offer water resistance,” de Haas says. “We were able to use the normal power reserve of the barrel, therefore you have to be careful not to actuate the minute repeater if there’s not enough energy in the mainspring.

So we have integrated a little red dot on the power reserve that acts as a safety.”

The new timepiece is a logical follow-up to the brand’s 2011 Zeitwerk Striking Time, which sounds on hours and quarter hours, though not on demand, and the 2014 Grand Complication, which includes a minute repeater. To de Haas, a minute repeater is one of the most complicated movements a manufacture can make. “It requires highly skilled watchmakers and involves more components SURFACE

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PHOTOS: COURTESY A. LANGE & SOHNE.

Repeat Feat

ON TIME

ON TIME

PHOTOS: COURTESY A. LANGE & SOHNE.

than a tourbillon—and they all need to be carefully adjusted,” he says. “Integrating the minute repeater into the Zeitwerk configuration was the biggest challenge for us.”

A. Lange & Söhne’s latest release is part of a recent push to introduce especially complicated pieces, like the Tourbillon Pour le Mérite, the Grand Complication, and the Richard Lange Perpetual Calendar Terraluna.

“Complications are an area in which Lange has played a leading role ever since the launch of the first modern collection 20 years ago,” de Haas says. “I hope that 50 years from now, people say, ‘You set the right course.’”

To the master horologist, a timepiece is much more than an accessory. “A mechanical watch movement is a kind of microcosm, a precise summary of all relevant discoveries in the fields of mechanics, physics, astronomy, and metallurgy, “de Haas says. “It’s also a design statement that reflects the spirit of an entire style epoch and the mystery of time.”

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With ingenious knitting technology, a sportswear titan is primed for the next evolution of sneaker production.

In this column, Josh Rubin, founder of the website Cool Hunting, highlights top-quality outdoor clothing, products, and equipment.

BY DAVID GRAVER

In 2012, knitted goods met the world of high- has been used forever,” he says, adding that it’s performance athletic footwear when two indus- never the wrong time to bring back a genius idea try juggernauts introduced game-changing and build on it. innovations. Legacy sports gear company The product now touches many sports shoes, Adidas unveiled Primeknit, a now-universally from soccer and basketball to running and footembraced technology used to produce lines of ball. Carnes recalls that when the first samples higher-end sneakers and specialized sporting were produced, it was immediately apparent shoes that fit tightly while providing endur- that the applications of Primeknit could be ance and flexibility. The consumer response was used across a universal spectrum of Adidas’s enormous, as it was rare to see a knitted product product lines. capable of playing on the field at such a high level, This is all mere prelude to what Adidas can and the entire upper—the part of a shoe that achieve down the line. Primeknit shoes made covers the foot—was constructed without lining of carbon-fiber and Kevlar yarns, anyone? and reinforcement. (The other company, Nike, “The future developments will surprise people,” released the now-ubiquitous Flyknit.)

Carnes says. “We have new machinery and Adidas has a history in lightweight sneaker new techniques. This is about sustainability, construction, and it’s long employed digital tech- but also making a comfortable, breathable, and nology in its innovations. “We started specifically useful product.” working on the projects you know today in 2008,” says James Carnes, the brand’s vice president of global strategy. “Every Olympics we have JOSH RUBIN’S TAKE ON ADIDAS PRIMEKNIT: to start working on new initiatives. Primeknit The creative reinterpretation of an old innostarted just after the 2008 Beijing Olympics.” vation is always inspiring. In this case, simulAdidas launched its first modern knitted sneaker, taneously reducing manufacturing waste and Adizero, in a limited run of 2,012 pairs during creating a shoe upper that’s functional and the London Olympics three years ago. comfortable—simply by knitting—is a double Knitting and footwear isn’t a new concept by win. To me, the debate about who did it first any means. According to Carnes, he’s seen sam- is irrelevant; it’s about who does it best. At the ples that date as far back as 1904. “The process moment, I think Adidas is on fire.

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PHOTOS: COURTESY ADIDAS.

Knit Fit

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(TOP TO BOTTOM) A disassembled Adidas sneaker, showing its sparse layering. A close-up of the knitting.

(OPPOSITE) Adidas Ultra Boost sneaker.

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Madrid firm SelgasCano creates a whimsical plastic tunnel for the 15th edition of the Serpentine Pavilion.

BY IAN VOLNER PORTRAIT BY TOBY COULSON

Fourteen summers have come and gone, and compositions in a hybrid design vocabulary so much a deliberate statement as “absolutely a fourteen far-out, high-design pavilions have ever since their founding in 1998. “We finished natural choice,” no more or less contrived than graced the lawns of the Serpentine Galleries, school in ’92,” says Selgas, and in the interven- just using all black or all white. the tiny bastion of contemporary art in the ing two-plus decades “we’ve always tried to There certainly isn’t anything monochrome heart of London’s Kensington Gardens. The always experiment a little bit with every proj- about the firm’s Serpentine Pavilion (open program of temporary structures has become a ect—that’s our role.” through Oct. 18). Hewn from double-ply ETFE major fulcrum in the design world, an inflection Perhaps the most striking aspect of that ongo- fabric, the cruciform pavilion is a cathedral of point for both new and established practices ing experimentation is color: In projects like plastic, with strips and panels and mirrored looking to sharpen their global image. From their translucent orange facade for a London pockets of it in red, green, and blue throughout Oscar Niemeyer at 96 to then-41-year-old office block and their Factoría Joven skate park its expanding and contracting tunnels. At the Sou Fujimoto, the Serpentine Pavilions have in the Spanish town of Mérida, SelgasCano has center, a café-bar allows visitors to pause and afforded intriguing snapshots of some of the made a specialty of eye-popping hues, often marvel at the kaleidoscope surrounding them, most important architectural talents of our time. rendered in unusual materials like polyester, making a spectacle of the pavilion’s own process.

And now the focus has turned to designers fiberglass, and carbon panels. For their own “What we’re more focused on,” Selgas says, “is José Selgas and Lucía Cano, the husband-wife headquarters, completed in 2009 in the sub- how you develop and produce design with any team who together make up Madrid-based urbs of Madrid, the team fashioned a long see- material on the market”—especially portable, firm SelgasCano. The firm’s portmanteau title through tube touched with strips of yellow easily-manufactured ones like plastic. In the sounds like a multilingual pun—“salt gas can” and green—the effect looks like a something case of the Serpentine commission, the tight in Spanglish—and, if only by coincidence, it’s out of a science-fiction film directed by Pedro deadline—just six months—meant that this a name that resonates with their approach: Almodóvar. There does seem something dis- process was particularly hurried and improvisaearthy yet synthetic, industrial yet organic. tinctly, outlandishly Española about the firm’s tory. Which seems to be part of the spirit of the The duo has been serving up sometimes jarring preferred palette, though Selgas insists it isn’t pavilion as well, its ad-hoc charm standing in SURFACE

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Rainbow Rooms

sharp contrast to some of the more somber and minimal solutions of past pavilions.

Even as Selgas spoke, Cano was on site making a few final changes, applying the finishing touches by hand before the start of the pavilion’s four-month public engagement. With a high-profile project like this under its belt, SelgasCano seems poised for grander things. But Selgas insists that the modest, almost makeshift approach of their pavilion is one he’s keen to keep a part of the practice’s operational repertoire. (Perhaps this explains why the firm’s orange-colored website features a simple link to Google images of the firm’s work.)

With just 15 designers in their Madrid office, the firm is committed to a nimble, idealistic model of practice whose essence is all about forging a vital connection between architect and audience. “We prefer not to just make the recipes,” Selgas says, “but to cook the food.”

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José Selgas and Lucía Cano at the 2015 Serpentine Pavilion their firm designed. (FOLLOWING SPREAD) Views of the pavilion.

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PHOTO: NAARO.

PHOTOS: TOP, IWAN BAAN. BOTTOM, NAARO.

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PHOTO: NAARO.

PHOTOS: TOP, IWAN BAAN. BOTTOM, NAARO.

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How It’s Made Our deep dive into the creation of impactful products and projects produced by leading designers and brands.

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Climate Moderator

Whether in Nigeria or Washington, D.C., architect David Adjaye articulates the social and cultural atmosphere of a place.

(OPPOSITE) David Adjaye outside the nearly completed Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

INTERVIEW BY SPENCER BAILEY PORTRAITS BY NATHAN PERKEL

Six years ago, David Adjaye was awarded the project of a lifetime: to design the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.—likely the last building to be constructed on the National Mall.

Scheduled to open in fall 2016, the museum will be not just an architectural landmark, but also a social one, a roughly $360-million building with worldly implications. Situated on a five-acre site adjacent to the Washington Monument, the aluminum-clad structure both stands out and blends in, evoking the complex and often contrasting subjects that will be explored inside its walls.

Adjaye, whose firm of around 80 employees turns 15 this year, operates studios in London, New York, and Accra, Ghana.

An architect who deftly shifts between designing everything from high-end boutiques to

social-housing developments, the Tanzanian-born 48-yearold has become one of today’s most global-minded practitioners. Typically, he’s at work on 20 projects at any one time, from textiles and furniture to large-scale master plans.

Recent completions include the Roksanda Ilincic boutique in London’s Mayfair neighborhood; the concept shop Alara in Lagos, Nigeria; and the Sugar Hill housing complex in Upper Manhattan. This fall, his art complex for the Aïshti Foundation in Beirut will finish construction, and the Studio Museum of Harlem recently chose him as the architect of its new building, scheduled to break ground in 2017.

Adjaye is also the subject of a retrospective, “David Adjaye: Making Places,” at the Art Institute of Chicago from Sept.

19 to Jan. 3, 2016. Organized

by Zoë Ryan, curator of

architecture and design at the Art Institute, and Okwui Enwezor, director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, the show explores roughly 50 of his firm’s built projects, including collaborations with artist friends, such as Chris Ofili and Lorna Simpson. He’s also the curator of the exhibition “David Adjaye: Selects,” currently on view at New York’s Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (through Feb. 7, 2016), for which he picked several West African textiles from the museum’s collection to present as a “collective form.”

Surface recently met with Adjaye in a trailer next to the construction site of the Smithsonian building. We spoke with him about his firm’s ongoing evolution, how African culture informs his design work, and why projects in America have been transformative to his career. > SURFACE

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This year marks several milestones for you.

Fifteen years ago, you launched your firm, Adjaye Associates. Ten years ago, you won the commission to design the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. You’re embarking on the final year of construction for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. So much is coalescing. What does it all mean to you? How do you feel about this span of time and the architecture you’ve created during it?

What’s become clear in the 15 years—if you think about Elektra House, which was the first house I ever built, this mute monolithic form with a light back, and then you go back to the MCA Denver, this other monolithic form that’s somehow also luminous, and then you come to this [the Smithsonian], there’s a confidence that’s been built. What’s come out of it is that I’m now clear about what I want to do and how I want to do it, and this has been the most public stage that I could possibly do it on. But what has also happened to the practice is that it now has this commitment to public work. In the beginning, it was much more intuitive, and now I’m able to articulate what the strategic decisions are and how the results are made.

Do you think that sense of confidence gets reflected in your architecture?

Confidence allows you to become much more restrained. When you’re starting out, you tend to put in a lot of things, trying to show skills. I think as you mature in the business, honing in on one idea and doing it extremely well becomes satisfying. You see a much stronger singularity happening in the work, and a focus on something that becomes the driving force.

Well, just look at the skin of the [Smithsonian] building. It’s one of the most complex drawing, cartography, and casting processes you could make. This isn’t something you make on a computer, laser cut, and send out here.

These are handmade casts, digitally designed, using algorithms to develop the patterns. It’s a whole process to get to that level of texture—I call it texture; some people might call it “ornament,” but it’s texture. It’s performing environmentally, symbolically, and contextually.

Run me through the process of how a single panel for the building gets made.

Were these panels your starting point for the project?

Yeah.This motif is really important because it’s a very West African–Yoruban form. The form of the building started with two things: an Olowe of Ise sculpture and the Washington Monument. The angle is the same as the tip of the monument’s: 17 and a half degrees.

Between both we have something very powerful: the context and the cultural roots.

When you get to the ornament, you think about the freed slaves, the ironworkers of the South. The building is a narrative—it speaks about the museum. All of the form-making outside is absolutely analogous to the storytelling inside. I don’t know a single museum that does this. This project is reading history, reading Washington, reading the narrative of the African-American story, and making from that form.

Much of what kids in U.S. classrooms learn about African-American history has to do with slavery and the South, not Africa. But what this building seems to do through its architecture is start with this African past.

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PHOTO: ED REEVE.

Basically, they’re sand casts. The files are sent to the foundry. They’re turned into a timber or plastic former of some sort. It’s then put into the sand to make a negative. Then there’s molten aluminum poured into it. Sand casting is probably the oldest way of casting metal into shapes. Then it’s rubbed down and is finished with the bronze paint alloy that gets coated. It’s 30 or 40 coats. There are nine

panels of different densities. We spent a lot of time pixelating the panels. It’s a pixelated facade. When the lights are on, you’ll see silhouettes of people moving inside.

PHOTO: NATHAN PERKEL.

What are some of those “somethings”?

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What made you look back to Africa?

It’s because what is really clear now is that evidence shows that 99 percent of the AfricanAmerican community comes from Western and Central Africa. A little bit from South Africa and Mauritius. Most of them are from Congo, Nigeria, Ghana, and Senegal. This area is where the 400,000 slaves who landed in America came from. They were the most important kingdoms—because there were kingdoms in that time, before the colonization of the continent. In our culture, we don’t talk about Africa before slavery.

What happened before the slave ships is too often ignored.

Yeah, there was a world before! They weren’t living in the trees. It was a whole civilization that was decimated in the conquest.

They’re just fragments now in museums. If you’re looking for evidence, you look for it

in artifacts. That story was really important to me.

You spent 11 years traveling to every country in Africa, the result of which was published in a book, African Metropolitan Architecture (Rizzoli). How did that inform what you ended up doing?

Traveling throughout Africa allowed me to get rid of any mythology I had about the continent. I’d traveled around it before that journey—I’d been to eight or so countries—and I thought, “I know Africa so well.” But there are 54 countries. It’s no joke. That taught me about the confidence of these regions. The idea of 54 countries is a modern construct; it was done in 1874. It’s an invention. Before that, the best way to understand the continent was through the geographic terrain.

Through that immersion, were you discovering a new world, a new side of Africa,

even a new side of yourself?

I was definitely discovering a new side of myself. It forced me to question some of my own assumptions—and some of the assumptions I’d been given through my parents. You debunk it. You realize our cultural formation is formed by our specific relationships to the soil of our place and what that place is about.

In the process of creating your design for this Smithsonian project, did you study African-American history?

Totally. I’m African-born, but was educated in Britain, so you may see me as a diaspora to the history of African Americans. But what you don’t realize is that that history— African-American history—is black cultural history. We all learn through that lens, because the struggles that were happening in America were the struggles for all of us. Even though it’s African American, it’s black culture. I call it “black modernity.”

An African visual language—seen in the textiles of your “Selects” show at the Cooper Hewitt—seems to permeate a lot of your projects, including the line of textiles you just did for Knoll.

I’ve started to realize, even with textiles, whether they’re from the jungle, the river, or the desert, there’s a clear narrative about how these things were being done. You see why the colors, patterns, and geometries exist. I wanted [the Cooper Hewitt show] to speak to that.

I’ve done this with furniture, artifacts, and now textiles. For me, it’s confirming what I already knew, but also giving me a lot of strength in my own design pursuits.

It’s a very democratic approach.

Let’s talk about the new Sugar Hill socialhousing complex you designed in Harlem.

That’s a project that really fits into this idea of seeking to create architecture that inspires and elevates. What’s interesting is that it’s a populist project, yet you brought to it the same sort of thoughtfulness and design integrity as you would to high-end residences. Grimshaw and Dattner’s Via Verde complex in the Bronx is similar in that sense. But very few of these kinds of buildings exist. > PHOTO: ED REEVE.

PHOTO: NATHAN PERKEL.

Our cities and our civilizations are so complicated. It behooves the architect to interpret that for people. Architecture, for me, is like literature. The buildings have to weave stories.

An architect has a social contract with society to explain the context you’re living in.

(OPPOSITE) Construction contiunes on the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The new Sugar Hill complex in Upper Manhattan.

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It’s a political project, but it’s also an architectural one. The construction of architecture is part of elevating and edifying communities.

Social housing, or poor peoples’ housing, was part of that big project, but has become very left out in this capitalism-obsessed world we live in. The whole idea of a housing project was initially about elevating the poor from the slums. It was about making dignified housing for people who had nothing.

What I love about the Sugar Hill group—Ellen Baxter’s Broadway Housing Communities—is that they’re committed to getting as many people off the street as they can, and to give them dignified living. It’s kind of crazy that this is not on the radar of architects. The kind of people who were getting those jobs, it was as if they were doing them a favor.

When I started, people were like, “Can you make it look like a classical building?”

I thought, “This is ridiculous. These people don’t want it mimicking something. They want their own dignity, and the architecture has to find the dignity.” That was the project: We have to find the dignity that’s specific—and that specificity empowers those people. Make it unique so that it’s a unique experience for the person there. This is why a young kid living there doesn’t think, “Oh, I’m living in a cheap version of your place.”

No, you want the rich kid going, “Shit, I could live here, too.”

Running an architectural practice, at least a financially sound one, is largely about having a balanced portfolio. Yes, there are certain hugely successful architects who are rather specialized—like David Chipperfield, who’s known for his cultural projects, or Peter Marino, for his retail work—but when you build a firm that

connects all of these circles, that’s when you’re running a healthy, sustainable office.

Ultimately, there’s the balanced portfolio, but more than that the greatest pleasure is public projects. For some people, it’s not. But for me, and for architects I’ve admired, the public project is the thing. You want more than 50 percent of your projects to be public—that’s the ideal. The problem is, there’s not that much public work. You have to find it. And you have to really fight for it.

What’s beautiful about that is, yes, there’s this Smithsonian project on the National Mall, which happens once every generation.

But there are small monuments every day, like Sugar Hill. These are public moments. One can make them monumental. It’s searching for that way in which you reemerge the public all the time. It’s asking, How do you reconstruct the public? >

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PHOTO: NATHAN PERKEL.

PHOTO: ED REEVE.

A concrete wall in the new Roksanda Ilincic boutique in London. (OPPOSITE) The exterior of the Smithsonian project.

PHOTO: NATHAN PERKEL.

PHOTO: ED REEVE.

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With Alara, yes, it’s a concept store, but it’s designed like a museum. I said, “We’re not gonna do a shop; it’s not gonna be about square footage. It’s gonna be about display, about engagement, about curiosity.” If you look at Nigeria right now, it’s starting to emerge and become a very powerful nation.

But it’s just starting out. We’ve created a little museum that just happens to be a store.

What about the Roksanda Ilincic space?

If you look at that store, it’s a little game about what you think luxury is. Essentially, it’s in Mayfair, the most expensive part of London, but it’s made out of everyday materials from the street. What looks like an incredible stonewall is made of typical London concrete pavement; I just sliced it and polished it. It’s not made in Italy. It’s made in some factory in Deptford. It’s the cheapest, shittiest thing. I love this idea of playing with peoples’ perception of luxury. The terrazzo floor makes you think the concrete wall is this lush material even though it’s actually not.

When I’m working in luxury environments, I like to question what values are. It’s like exercising the relationship between when you think something is actually special and something’s not. For me, that’s an important design trope. I’ve gotten quite good at it. I’ll do something to crappy plywood, and people will go, “Oh! What is that?” And I’m like, “It’s crappy plywood.” That’s important. That’s my way of saying, “Don’t underestimate the ordinary.” The ordinary can be made extraordinary, depending on how you frame it.

You have a long history of designing art galleries and artists’ private homes. How do you view the connection between art and architecture, and what’s it like to have artists as clients?

I went to art school. I loved my architecture professors, but I loved my contemporary art teachers even more. I just found a rigor and methodology in the way in which they analyzed what the contemporary could be and how you made it. I found that conversation was lacking in architecture. It was more about formal issues—this style versus that style— and, for me, those issues were redundant.

People always say I’ve done artists’ “houses.” I actually haven’t. I’ve done artists’ studios, which they live in. We call them houses because we don’t know what else to call them. [Laughs] This idea of working with artists has been a very clarifying game because an artist is somebody who’s very opinionated about what they want and

don’t want. My whole point is that if you can create something with somebody so strongly opinionated—and still get something authorial—it’s a great test. Artists’ houses are like creative little tests for me. Gallerists are very deferential to their artists. If an artist rejects you, the gallery is going to stay away. Then if the gallery stays well away from you, the institution might, too. It’s a layering system.

In a way, by being able to work with these two worlds, it’s allowed me to move into the museum world. Obviously, [the Smithsonian] is the most important museum project, but we have four other museums we’re working on.

Which are?

There’s Linda Pace’s foundation museum and Colgate University. There are two others you’ll find out about very soon. I can’t say yet. [Editor’s note: One of the projects, the design for the Studio Museum in Harlem, was announced about a month after this interview took place.]

One consistent thing I find fascinating about your buildings is this idea of rethinking the skin. Why do you think you have this focus on the facade? And why do you think so many architects and developers continue to build projects of little exterior distinction? It seems like many of your buildings are done from the outside in.

My buildings are actually from the inside out.

But they don’t follow the convention of how you express the inside and outside. What is interesting now is that the inside and outside is through the mediation of a “climate moderator.” That’s a Robert Smithson term I love.

It means that between the body and the world there’s a device working. It’s either measuring, tempering, framing, or allowing you to understand something about the world. Take the Smithsonian: Here, you see the volume of what I call the “treasure box” of this museum; you see the way light is hitting it; you see the system is tempering it before it hits the content. That, for me, is the moment of that articulation. If there’s one motif that’s recurring, it’s that. You might call it the skin, but once you go into all the projects, you see that it’s more—it’s this thickness, how you mediate the outside world in relationship to the body.

How do you bring atmosphere into your own life, and by reason of that, into your projects?

Atmosphere is critical. It has to do with the temperament that the building sets for you.

It creates something that shakes you out of the ordinary that you usually know. For me, that’s the beginning of the atmosphere. And the magic of the material composition adds to what I call the “color” of that atmosphere.

That’s the second part of this game. Once those two come into play, I think people sense it. No matter how functional you get, you can’t get away from atmosphere.

From the looks of your Instagram feed, you travel a lot. What’s the relationship between your experiences traveling and the work being produced?

They’re totally connected, like twins. I’ve always moved around. My sense of home is not a place; my sense of home is my family, wherever they are. I’m very much unit-based.

My creativity is stimulated by context. When I’m moving and seeing different things, that’s what’s energizing me. When I’m static and alone, I’m totally switched off. Actually, when I’m with my family, I don’t think about architecture at all. It’s really weird. It only comes when I start to move.

What do you think about when you don’t think about architecture? >

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PHOTOS: THIS PAGE, ED REEVE. NEXT SPREAD, HANS WILSHUT.

Tell me about your approach to the opposite end of this spectrum: high-end retail. These are still technically public projects, but they’re definitely serving a different social purpose than a museum or housing for the poor. You recently designed the concept shop Alara in Lagos, Nigeria, and the new Roksanda Ilincic boutique in London’s Mayfair neighborhood.

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PHOTOS: THIS PAGE, ED REEVE. NEXT SPREAD, HANS WILSHUT.

A view from the terrace at the Sugar Hill complex. (NEXT SPREAD) The new Adjaye-designed concept shop Alara in Lagos, Nigeria.

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My mind is blank. [Laughs] I become obsessed with other things, like my baby boy.

Your staff has grown significantly over the past few years. Has that changed your role in how you practice and manage your teams?

Fifteen years ago, I was drawing half the things I was building. Now I don’t really draw the things I’m building. But I sketch and conceptualize everything. My office is very much a single-studio authorship. That’s my capacity right now. If I can do it, we’ll do it; if I can’t, we won’t. What’s been amazing on the journey is that I have several people who have been with me all 15 years, some of them for 20 years, even before I started Adjaye Associates.

They’ve become very critical to allow me to be much more global. We talk, I give them the genesis of what I want to do—I even draw the details I want—and it comes back to me really quickly. I don’t need to know how to filter through somebody who doesn’t know how to communicate with me. They’ve become my filter. They’re very important to me. They’re my core. To anybody who wants to poach them from me: I’ll be really angry. It’s like you’re messing with my infrastructure. I have 80 on staff. A few of them are my generals.

What are some of the projects you’re currently at work on?

been seven, eight years by the time it’s finished. And I’m working on another project in Washington, D.C., right now that’s already had three years and is still evolving; it’s such a complicated project. When I do a chair or a textile range, that’s a year. Doing furniture is a way to explore ideas immediately. Doing sculpture is a way to explore at the next speed.

I always do these sculptural projects—when I’m asked to make a pavilion or an installation—as a way to test the scale between an object and architecture. They’re prototypes that can actually become buildings.

You recently designed a line of furniture with Italian brand Sawaya & Moroni. Why?

I love Sawaya & Moroni because they are great one-off furniture designers. I wanted to explore a finish that looks like slate—you apply it to metal, and when you touch it, you think it’s stone.

A new exhibition of your work showed at the Haus der Kunst in Germany earlier this year, and in September it will open at the Art Institute of Chicago. You’re friends with one of its curators, Okwui Enwezor, director of the Haus der Kunst. Is that how the exhibition came about? It’s a very major show to have as a mid-career architect.

PHOTO: COURTESY SAWAYA & MORONI.

PHOTO: NATHAN PERKEL.

It’s not to do with friendship at all. Zoë [Ryan at the Art Institute] has been tracking me for a I’m doing more furniture and design now; few years, since around that time she did the I just launched a line of textiles with Knoll. Jeanne Gang show [“Building: Inside Studio I’m working on installations. We’re doing Gang Architects” in 2012]. Almost directly, museums, cultural projects, education proj- when I was there for the opening, she said, ects, master planning. It has become very wide, “I want to do a show on you. Are you interand that’s stimulating to me, not because of ested?” So we started talking about it. Then the breadth, but because the projects have Okwui, who is somebody I’ve worked with different speeds. [The Smithsonian] will have and know, said he wanted to do a show. >

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Adjaye’s bronze Sniper dining table (2015) for Sawaya & Moroni.

(OPPOSITE) The exterior of the Smithsonian project next to the National Monument.

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I told them, “The two of you are saying You’re one of few architects of your statthe same thing to me. Can we join you two ure who’s young enough to have embraced together?” So I introduced them. What’s technology but old enough to know the preamazing about the Haus der Kunst is that it Internet world. Bjarke Ingels is another has the kinds of spaces you can’t find at any who comes to mind. You’re both particuother institution. I was able to prototype onelarly adept at Instagram. to-one buildings. We’re able to put full-scale buildings, fragments, and details inside a gal- I totally took to Instagram! [Laughs] lery, which is very important. It was really a collaboration between Zoë and Okwui— How does Instagram inform your practice?

Zoë’s design sensibility and Okwui’s art history trajectory.

I was always taking those photos. I have It’s really funny. Most architects have shows massive photo files. But a friend once said, at architectural institutions; I’ve never had one “Have you thought about sharing them?” At at an architectural institution. I only have the first I was like, “No, no, they’re mine.” Then art museums calling me. I don’t know what I just thought I’d see. I posted a couple, and I that really means. Either the architects really couldn’t believe the reaction. I suddenly realhate me or I don’t know what it is. I don’t ized that I could communicate my ideas more care. [Laughs] What’s nice is after Chicago directly, without print media. it’s going to travel to other venues in Europe and the U.S. on a full tour.

Instagram is like your personal “climate You’ve got a lot of projects happening in U.S. How do you view your relationship to this country and the opportunities you’ve had here?

moderator.”

[Laughs] Gorgeous! Climate moderation.

I love it!

America has been amazing to me. My career has really evolved because of my engagement with America. I’m super grateful. I love this place. In fact, I love it so much I married an American. [Laughs] How much are you actually in the studio?

I’m in the studio when I need to be. I’m not the kind of architect who has a nine-to-five life behind a desk. I gave that up about six years ago. I move through sites, and I communicate through technology to my teams.

Then when we’re building something, I go to the studio for sessions.

Usually when it’s with the concepts, I’m alone. I just book time to be alone and develop.

What’s interesting is that I feel like I’m alone when I’m working, but I’m using technology with my team to communicate.

Adjaye on the second floor inside of the Smithsonian building.

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Sound Track

A forward-thinking entrepreneur introduces a strong dose of materiality and tactility to the world of high-end headphones.

(OPPOSITE) Jonathan Levine, founder and CEO of Master & Dynamic, at the company’s New York headquarters.

BY ABBY ELLIN PORTRAIT BY CAIT OPPERMANN

Some fathers bond with their sons by taking them to a baseball game or hiking the Appalachian Trail. Jonathan Levine built a recording studio in his 5,000-square-foot Midtown Manhattan workspace.

It’s not as random as it sounds: Levine’s 20-year-old son, Robert, began deejaying at 13, and producing music at 16, and he needed a place to practice his trade. Dad wanted to spend time with him. Levine figured that if he built it, Robert and his younger son, Justin, would come. And they did.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the turntable: Jonathan, a serial entrepreneur who had experience in the LED lighting and automotive markets, fell in love with the recording industry. A design aficionado who collects old bicycles, cameras, machine parts, and watches, he was inspired by a pair of 1940s headphones he saw in a museum.

“I wanted to be an architect as a child,” says Levine, who looks younger than his 53 years. “I saw the market becoming cheaper and cheaper. I thought I could create something unique. This was my way of coming back to that.”

Come back he did. In the summer of 2014, he launched Master & Dynamic, a brand of sleek, elegant headphones that are so beautifully crafted they’re works of art in themselves—they even come with a stand to exhibit them. They can be found in Apple stores, Bergdorf Goodman, Selfridges in London, and Colette in Paris. Last year, the brand collaborated with luxury fashion label 95

Proenza Schouler on a limited-edition line.

The company now has 24 employees.

“I was intent on creating a durable product, something that would be collected on eBay in 50 years,” Levine says. “No one’s made headphones like this. They use pleather, plastic.

We use leather, forged aluminum, stainless steel. We think of our headphones as modern thinking caps. It’s like a fine instrument.”

He’s not kidding. Their motto? “Sound tools for creative minds.”

The product’s form and function work hand in hand. Each one consists of a forged aluminum body, with stainless-steel components in high-strain areas. The metals are anodized or PVD coated, not painted. An inline microphone is kept separate from the volume-control remote to increase clarity, reduce noise, and eliminate the need to hold the remote to one’s mouth while speaking on the phone. (There are two jacks, so you can share an iPod with a friend and listen à deux.)

PETA might not be thrilled with the headbands, which come in creamy brown, black, or dark blue—the exterior surface is constructed from grain cowhide and lined with a soft lambskin. The ear pads are memory foam, wrapped in lambskin, which makes them extra comfortable. The woven cables use oxygen-free copper to ensure purer sound and reduced noise. There are two reasons for this. “We use these materials because they feel better,” says chief product officer Drew Briggs, who spent 10 years at Bose before joining the Master & Dynamic

team. “They look better. But they also function better.”

He points to the ear cushions. Most people think their design is fairly straightforward: They have to be comfortable against your head, and that’s pretty much it. In reality, though, “it’s a huge part of the acoustics, because how it fits around your ear affects how well the sound can be tuned,” Briggs says. “Getting it right can be very tricky.”

Lambskin also makes for a better product.

Since it’s more durable than plastic, it ages well. “It gets softer and interacts with your body very well. Plastic does the opposite.”

Master & Dynamic offers different headphone models: the “on-ear” MH30, which retails for $349, and the over-the-ear, ovalshaped MH40, which sells for $399. There are also earbuds with an aluminum body and silicone ear tips, which come in black or gunmetal, and a silver or black boom mic .

If starting an audio-accessory brand was Levine’s ploy to hang out with his sons (he freely admits that he is not a musician), the music and audio industries have embraced the brand. “We get a lot of support from music producers,” Levine says, adding that up-and-comers like Flosstradamus, C.Z., Maluca , Ian Isiah, and Haleek Maul have all recorded in the studio.

Has such quick success gone to Levine’s own, uh, headphones? He laughs. “Anybody who has huge product success and service success has to put blinders on,” he says. “I’m always looking for the next great thing.”

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A lounge area at Master & Dynamic’s 5,000-square-foot Midtown Manhattan office. (NEXT SPREAD) Detail shots from inside the company headquarters.

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Object Lessons

A New York brand development firm rethinks back-to-school supplies for Staples, with a little help from kids.

(OPPOSITE) Rinat Aruh, left, and Johan Liden at their firm’s Manhattan headquarters. (NEXT SPREAD) Products from the Tools at Schools project with Staples. (FOLLOWING SPREAD) Mood boards created by middle schoolers and Aruliden for the project, seen in the firm’s office.

BY CHARLES CURKIN PORTRAIT BY MONIKA MERVA

Aruliden, a product-design firm in New York—perhaps channeling a punk-rock spirit of sorts—believes youngsters have a lot to bring to the table. Founded in 2006 by Rinat Aruh, 39 (mother of two), and Johan Liden, 42 (no children), the studio has made its name creating and rethinking products for blue-chip companies like Motorola, BMW, and Panasonic. For years, what has set them apart—and what might be their secret weapon—is the unlikely team of design advisors they look to for help: schoolchildren.

No one understands the problems kids face more than the kids themselves, and as Liden points out, “We get ruined as we get older.” Who better, then, to help Aruliden create an affordable line of back-to-school products for American office-supplies behemoth Staples? “It’s giving the kids an opportunity to design products, addressing real needs that they have,” Aruh explains in the sunlit conference room of the firm’s Flatiron headquarters.

Aruliden worked with 46 students from M.S. 18 in Brooklyn and the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta to rethink the accessories they use every day at school. “We forced them to do what we do every day: put together a mood board and pitch their big ideas,” Liden says. “We put shape and form to it; we interpret their vision.”

The fruits of the kids’ creative labor is a cache of practical new-age tools with a fauvist color scheme and Staples branding, 101

including a padded backpack with remov- kids involved, but making sure the magic can able modular pouches that reduce the be repeated year after year. In many ways, weight kids have to carry around all day and the program is about introducing a new a portable desk with a cushioned writing subject to the classroom curriculum: design. surface that allows homework to be done “For us to make this work,” he says, “we have practically anywhere. to teach the teachers to repeat the process.

The Staples project is an extension of a Progress means schools can do this indepennonprofit initiative that Aruh and Liden dently of us.” co-founded called Tools at Schools, which Will these kids be the leaders of tomorworks to partner big brands with schools row? They have a chance, Aruliden believes, to bring the idea of design into classrooms. if we listen. As the youth return to school Their notion is that introducing design to from summer break with the new Staples children—helping them understand its uni- gear they helped design, Aruliden’s message versal importance in solving everyday prob- to them will be one of empowerment. As lems—is not only empowering, but teaches the classic Bad Brains punk anthem “At the them to think critically. “It’s not to create Movies” sums it up: designers,” Aruh says, but rather to find solutions. “What’s the problem, and how No matter what they say, Never give in! are we going to solve it?”

The children Aruliden works with are Never give in! not from wealthy backgrounds, which is important to note. The increasingly bleak statistics listed by the National Center for Education on floundering literacy rates in middle schools across the country correlate to the statistics on household income. “The fact that your fate is dictated by your zip code—I have a big problem with that,” Aruh says. The firm knows they’re making a difference, because they’ve seen it—and they will continue to build upon the foundation they’ve laid.

Teachers play as a big a role as the students, according to Liden. It’s not just about getting

PHOTO: COURTESY ARULIDEN.

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Kinetic Force

Argentine-born artist Julio Le Parc reimagines his own masterpiece for a collection of Hermès scarves.

(OPPOSITE) Hermès creative director Pierre-Alexis Dumas, left, with Julio Le Parc at the Museum der Kulturen in Basel earlier this summer.

BY NONIE NIESEWAND PORTRAIT BY TADZIO

In 1937, the year Hermès launched its scarf business, Julio Le Parc was just a 9-year-old boy in Mendoza, Argentina. In his teens, Le Parc moved to Buenos Aires, where he attended the National School of Fine Arts.

Later, he went on to gain renown for his experimental works involving kinetics and light. A founding member of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel collaborative in Paris from 1960 to ’68, he won the Grand Prize in Painting at the Venice Biennale in 1966. Now 86 years old and based in the Paris suburb of Cachan, the sculptor and painter has brought his artwork to a new medium: the silk scarf.

During the Art Basel fair in Switzerland in June, Hermès creative director Pierre-Alexis Dumas revealed the fourth edition of the brand’s Editeur project at the Museum der Kulturen. Following collaborations with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in 2008 (posthumously), Daniel Buren in 2010, and Hiroshi Sugimoto in 2012, Dumas enlisted Le Parc to take on the latest Èditeur iteration. For it, Le Parc played with the square of his famous abstract painting “La Longue Marche”(1974–75) on silk, adding a new level of layering and complexity to the work. Le Parc’s rainbow of swerving and swirling bands gains a vibrant sense of energy and movement.

“On paper, like my original artwork, you only see one side,” Le Parc says. “Now this silk version is colored on both sides. Put a light behind it, and it will give you the effect of a 107

stained-glass window. Put it on the table, and you can crumple it, match the patterns, play with and make all sorts of combinations. Now the viewer takes part in the activity. That’s something else to consider: their participation in making their own special effects.”

Just how to translate Le Parc’s large kinetic art pieces onto a silk square is the sort of challenge Dumas revels in. He started the Editeur collection with intensely colored squares

by Josef Albers, followed by the minimalist abstractions of Buren and luminous horizons of Sugimoto. “All are very different, all address the experience of colour, ” Dumas says of the four aritsts. “Silk is our medium, and as masters of weaving, it pushes us to the limit. To get that washed and diffused light in a gradation of colors for Sugimoto, for example, we had to ink-jet print the silk scarves in Lyon.

For Julio Le Parc, we silk-screened them.”

Fourteen screens were made in each of the colors of the rainbow. The work’s title and Le Parc’s signature comprised a 15th screen. The colors are true to nature because of the way silk reflects light.

Dumas came across “La Longue Marche” at a 2013 solo show at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris—Le Parc’s first major exhibition in France since the 1980s. “I thought, ‘How exciting,’ as well as, ‘What good material for silk-screening,’ because of the finesse of his lines, and the limited number of 14 colors within his register—which is good for printing,

as colors don’t overlap,” Dumas says.

The two first met at the artist’s workshop around the time of the Palais de Tokyo show.

It was reported that their initial meeting was un coup de foudre—a bolt of lightning.

“A coup de foudre, you say?” Le Parc says, surprised. “Did you not fall in love with him immediately, too? [Dumas] was very sympathique.” So sensitive, in fact, that the artist agreed to let Hermès put “La Longue Marche” on backgrounds colored differently from his original work, changing viewers’ perceptions of the piece yet again.

Says Dumas: “I see this artwork as a metaphor of life in movement. It has a wonderful abstract force. It’s very emotive for me—it’s more than an individual experience of life with its twists and turns. It is a great journey that goes on for infinity.”

And who is the buyer for one or several of the 60 scarves (at 7,000 euros each)? “We’re not marketing it.” Dumas says. “We offer visual arts, presenting our skills with the artist during Art Basel in this wonderful museum of culture.

I consider this presentation to be an extension of the work of Julio Le Parc, for anyone who likes abstract art, for the sheer pleasure of owning a piece.”

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concepts. (NEXT SPREAD) A frame for printing the scarves. The scarves being printed. (FOLLOWING SPREAD) The finished scarves on display in Basel.

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(TOP TO BOTTOM) Le Parc with print-outs of his designs. Le Parc going over the design coloring. (OPPOSITE) Bali Barret, the women’s universe artistic director at Hermès, reviewing

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Guiding Light

(OPPOSITE) Jake Dyson in his lighting company’s London studio.

After 10 years of running his own business, lighting guru Jake Dyson joins the family company.

INTERVIEW BY SPENCER BAILEY PORTRAIT BY TOBY COULSON

Earlier this year, the Dyson empire of vacuum cleaners, fans, and heaters introduced another vertical to its business: lighting. This followed the company’s announcement last fall that it plans to launch 100 new products in four new categories over the next four years. And it isn’t just any lighting—Dyson acquired the LED firm of founder Sir James’s son Jacob (known as Jake), who has run his own brand for the past decade. Jake recently met with Surface at Soho House in New York to speak about rejoining the family business—he was appointed to the board in 2013, and will now run Jake Dyson Lighting within the Dyson umbrella—and where he thinks LED technology is headed.

I’ve always loved lights. I studied product design, and I just realized that lighting is what makes me run. But it really irritated me that all the big, prestigious Italian lighting companies weren’t innovative. They were just making these pretty objects robbed of quality of light.

The first light I ever did was a motorized up light. I wanted to give people the flexibility to adjust the angles of light going up, and it just started from there. I kept seeing other opportunities. But I got away from motors, which are problematic in lights—after a couple years they start making whirring noises. Around 2009 people started talking about halogen incandescent lights, because of the Carbon Trust issues. I started looking at LEDs and taking other lighting products apart, and when I did that, I realized that no one was cooling the LEDs, no one was thinking long-term, no one was making them last. I thought it was ridiculous, because LEDs can last forever. I wanted to support that technology.

For the last 10 years, I had my own lighting and manufacturing business. Until three months ago, it was completely independent of Dyson. I started with a couple other design engineers, and over the last two years, it has 115

grown to about 15 people in London. The thing that made it grow were the CSYS and Ariel projects.

We noticed that people just weren’t doing LEDs right. LEDs never have lifetimes of 50,000 hours. We have 180,000 hours with our lights. You have to cool the LEDs, and that’s the trick. We do that really well using a heat-pipe technology—that’s what’s inside the armor of the light. The heat just shoots straight out of the LEDs in about two seconds. Normally, in LED products, the case temperature of the LED chip is about 120 to 140 degrees centigrade, but we’re running this at 55 degrees centigrade, because the heat just radiates off. I worked with a company in China that does microprocessor-cooling units for computers; they make about five million of these things a month. The same company does all the cooling units for Apple. They developed this heat-pipe assembly with me. On the Ariel, which I’ll talk to you about in a minute, we’ve got six heat pipes.

If you stop someone in the street and say, “What do you think of LED technology?”

They say, “Oh God, it’s really shit, LEDs give off really bad blue light.” But they’ve gotten a lot better in the color—ours have a wonderful warm light mimicking incandescent light.

The problem with all other LED lights on the market is that they’re not managed properly and firmly. If you have multiple light fixtures that are LED, the color changes. The colors shift because heat damages the LEDs. Also, you lose light output—in some cases, within just six months, and in other cases, after about four years. With these products, you won’t see that happen for about 40 years.

The heat pipes we use were originally used in satellites, because in space it’s minus-200 degrees in the shade and 200-plus degrees in the sun. They had to calibrate the temperature across the instruments working in the satellite.

The way they work is that there’s one drop of water inside, and it’s a vacuum. It’s an evacuated tube, like in outer space. That water boils at a very low temperature because it’s in a vacuum; it turns into steam and shoots down to the coolant, taking the heat with it.

We also just looked at desk lights all together and picked out what we saw as all the problems with them. One of them is that after a while the pivots and springs in the head wear out. We call it “droop.” So our lights don’t have droop. With the CSYS, we incorporated this gliding system so that whenever you let go, it stays where it is and is counterbalanced. It rotates round and round and round. You can’t see where the light’s coming from because we set the LEDs up into cones.

It gives off a very wide and powerful pool of light. I launched this around 2012, and it’s now sold in 27 countries and by more than 450 dealers. We’re also supplying it to big contract projects as well. It’s expensive— the desk is $650, the floor $899. But it’s a one-stop purchase.

Over the last year, we decided to do a highpower suspension lamp for offices, because I thought offices have ghastly ceiling panels, really awful, sort of bleached out light. I wanted to design a light that cast a huge rectangle of light over really big office tables or boardroom tables. We have one of the most powerful LED chips on the market in there; it gives out 9,000 lumens. It’s hard to explain how bright that is when I can’t turn it on. It could probably light up half a tennis court. If you hung these high above a tennis court, you could play tennis under them.

We named the project Ariel for two reasons: One, because it looks like an aerial, and two, because it was named after the first British satellite launched into space—which also used heat pipes. The down light and the up light are coming on the market in October,

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is moving fast, and it’s highly likely that you will have the power of light from the technologies—maybe LED, maybe something else— that will light up an entire room from just one lamp. Lighting is most likely to be the backbone of the Internet of Things. Everyone’s talking about things like wearables giving you feedback. It’s going crazy. But the one product that has to be in every single room, in a commercial building or a home, is a light. You can’t do anything in the dark.

IMAGE: COURTESY DYSON.

and using all of that brilliant talent to get what you want—that’s what he’s so good at.

He’s got a lot of respect for me, too. I come up with ideas, he comes up with ideas, and we’ll sit there sketching. We don’t always think the same thing. He might get it wrong sometimes; I might get it wrong other times. We both think technically. We’re both self-taught engineers. I’ve been using mills and lathes since the age of 14.

The Eameses and Corbusiers of this world—that’s what we’re doing with lighting: Build pieces that last a lifetime. The reason they’re so sculptured and engineered is to stay away from fashion. It’s all about technology and function. Our lights look great because of that, but they’re also timeless. I would like to think it’s not about having 4,000 products in a catalogue. It’s about having 10 or 15 products that cover every single required area of lighting.

What we’ve done with the thermal protection of the LEDs will serve us very well moving forward. Currently, we save eight watts of electricity out of 100 because of cooling; on the new chips, we save 20 watts out of 100. As the years roll forward, we’ll be saving more electricity while getting more light output.

I believe that in eight years there won’t be any light bulbs. I think the future is in light fixtures, not bulbs, because lighting technology

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but we’ve been showing it around the world.

Foster + Partners has it in their office and boardrooms in London, and there are a couple hanging in Grimshaw Architects’ office here in New York.

What we’ve done is design lenses to focus all of the light exactly where you need it. You can also trim the light to the shape of the table. The idea is that we light up your surface. The light doesn’t get in your eyes because it’s coming down at an angle. It’s a bit like a projector on a vast table. Now no one else can use these LED chips without serious fan cooling; very few companies are actually using them. We’re able to do it because of this heat-sinking. We’ve got one in the CSYS, six in the Ariel.

The last four, five years, Dyson has been very keen on me getting back and involved. It’s a family-owned business. I’m the only person in the family that’s doing the same thing. I’ve been doing it all on my own for 10 years: I learned how to manufacture, design products, market them, sell them. I see my father every day when I’m at the office, if he’s there, because we design together with groups of engineers at the round tables all day long. It’s furious. It’s very fast-paced. It’s amazing, the influence he has over these engineers and the respect they have for him. He’s got an incredible eye. He’s very focused and knows exactly what’s going on. You can’t do it all yourself.

The trick is managing all of those engineers

PHOTO: TOBY COULSON.

IMAGE: COURTESY DYSON.

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Hot and cool beakers of water, used to help demonstrate the effectiveness of the cooling technology in Jake Dyson’s products. (OPPOSITE) Dyson’s Ariel light.

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Sketches at the Jake Dyson Lighting workshop, used to help plan prototype milling. A workbench and tool storage at the studio.

(OPPOSITE) The CSYS light.

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Gallery Roman & Williams designs a restaurant in Italy full of American gravitas for fashion label Replay.

Interview by Spencer Bailey

Gallery

GALLERY

Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch, partners of the New York–based design firm Roman and Williams, recently completed the new Replay the Stage restaurant and Octavias bar in Milan. Here, the duo—whose projects range from New York’s Boom Boom Room and Brasserie 44 to the new Chicago Athletic Association Hotel—speak about the second-floor space situated atop Italian fashion brand Replay’s store in the city’s Piazza Gae Aulenti development.

Standefer: This was about that juxtaposition of high and low. Stephen and I had previously mostly done the high and the low in separate projects. We haven’t really done that in the same project, where you experience this kind of refined glamorous space, and then you see the invasion of a quite industrial moment.

Through the porthole over here by the bar there’s a real story. There’s a narrative about the authenticity of deconstruction. You’re seeing how things are made, seeing something from the inside out.

Replay wanted us to help reinvent their physical world.

We were thinking of using denim. But then we were like, “You know, maybe it’s more interesting to play with the idea of process and deconstruction, and how to see inside a dream and then come outside of it.” We were getting into the question of: What’s the next generation of the conversation about authenticity? At first, we were gonna make the restaurant something that was, in a way, a little earthier. But with the store, there was such a big footprint. It had such a strong American aesthetic, so we decided to push against it.

Alesch: We grew up in the stage environment [as Hollywood set designers], and the stairwell leading up to the restaurant is a little bit of a tribute to that for us.

Standefer: When Stephen says we “grew up,” he means not as children, but our professional lives.

Alesch: In our 20s to late 30s, we were in the sound stage

maybe six days a week. We were in a black stage, building little dream boxes with our crew, 150 people hanging out. There’s something kind of raw and beautiful about those black boxes. The sound installation, lights, and of course Cameron Diaz coming through, hanging out with you for a little bit, cruising into this beautiful set. We would do these gorgeous sets and be like, “Holy fuck, where am I? This is nicer than my house, nicer than the last club I went to.” Then you’d go back to this black space where the director’s hanging out. There’s something really magical about that. We tried to communicate that weird world here.

Standefer: Film is part of Replay’s DNA. When they talked about their mission, you could see that so much of it was all about film. Look at their new ads: They had David Sims shoot them with motorcycles and sexy Westernness. How do you interpret that? They were talking about Easy Rider references. We were like, “How cool this is!”

This Italian brand that from the beginning embraced

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Americana has basically reappropriated it and made this billion-dollar company. Now they’re coming to Americans saying, “Speak this language and give us a background in Hollywood.”

designer, how chic!” But it rarely goes the other way. We had to really come to terms with our value. When you’re all of a sudden sitting in Italy, you’re like, “Oh, I have to talk a language that’s European.” But no!

Alesch: Coincidentally, we had the same fascination with Cinecittà and Fellini as they had with Hollywood. In Rome, there’s a beautiful, old, forgotten film world there with beautiful stages and sets. They were like, “Yeah whatever, Cinecittà …” They were like, “Hollywood! Arizona!””

Alesch: To be honest, we’re not coming as Americans and doing what I call “deZign” with a capital Z. We’re not trying to talk with an accent, to be “deZigners.” [Laughs]

Standefer: They were like, “John Wayne! The desert!”

We were like, “Italian cinema!” The dialogue was so interesting.

With this project, we hit a personal breakthrough.

American designers are actually not often hired in Europe, and now we’re also doing a project in Paris. It’s a huge gift. Just being hired and embraced by Europe is very unusual. I mean, Americans are always hiring Europeans. They’re like, “Oh, I have a French interior

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Standefer: This is the first time Replay has done a restaurant. They have a lot of other retail stores, of course, but the restaurant was a new thing for them. We really had to help them as collaborators but also leaders. We had to decide on what the environment was.

First we had to learn about their product. One of our connections to it is that they’re really devoted to making things. They’re still so interested in every element of the stitching and the way all the pieces are put together.

So we said, “Okay, that’s what we love to do with wood and leather, so let’s give them that, and let’s also do

something that in Italy is funny or ironic.” This restaurant is a bit of what the American Dream feels like in Italy. This is our romantic dream. It’s indulgent.

Alesch: It’s simple. We indulged in their dream for the shop downstairs, and in exchange for us feeding them that, we indulged in our dream upstairs. That was the interplay between the client and us. Of course, we didn’t want to make another American set. That’d be too Ralph Lauren, too cliché.

Standefer: We want visitors to have this weird journey.

We started to play around with details. The details have a little bit of an energy of transportation. I wouldn’t say boats are referenced specifically, but I think there are references of movement. Part of that, for us, was helping create a sense of aspiration.

Alesch: If there was a wooden spaceship, what would it look like? We were actually talking the other day about

GALLERY this: In the history of science fiction or literature, has there ever been a wood planet in the future, where there’s miles of tall trees and some advanced creature that only built flying saucers out of wood? That’s where we would live. [Laughs] It’d be so advanced; the wood wouldn’t even burn, because it’s in the future. There’s always this fantasy of synthetics, but I think our fantasy of the future has always been a nature thing, like Super Nature. For whatever reason, we never really embraced synthetic culture—that’s our hippie upbringing. We’re kind of scared of Corian and plastics. We work with leather and brass and wood.

People always say we’re nostalgic. Strangers never understand us because we’re never looking back. We’re not nostalgic.

Standefer: We’re really not. We’re not sentimental.

Alesch: We really have always mined the past. We just want a little bit of that now. How come there’s none of that anymore? I just want to grab some of the craft, texture, and quality of the past.

Standefer: It’s the thing of no time. There’s no past or future. I don’t even want to have to explain that.

Alesch: When we spent those 10 years early in our careers on the sound stage, sometimes I thought the sound stage was like Plato’s cave. It was this black room where you remember telling these stories with people. You’re creating this world. People watch this movie and they watch the story unfold. Moviemaking is really like studying the shadows in the Platonic cave. When we came out of that cave into the real world, I guess we were at almost a vengeance because of that strange decade of 30 films we worked on. Ironically enough, in an environment you’re fabricating and making, I would say it gives you a real clarity about authenticity. In reality, this sounds pretentious, but you become a little bit of a seer from that time you spend inside this incubation box.

If you’re in prison for 10 or 20 years, and then you go to the beach, you must be having a ridiculous experience. The other person who’s never left the beach is like, “What’s up, man?” And you’re just tripping out like a lunatic. That’s kind of what happened to us, I think.

Standefer: How things keep their value—we were trying to play with that with this project, and in a way find our own way of coming to Europe: What do we want to say about our own creativity and our own brand? How do we want to represent Replay? We’ve always had a certain amount of interest in physical context: What kind of experience do we want people to have here?

Alesch: In the restaurant, we wanted people to lose themselves a little bit, to really play the role, to indulge. That’s why you see the white banquettes. It’s not meant to be this kind of earnest moment of authenticity. It’s just to lose yourself, get loaded, have fun, peacock a little bit.

I think we’ve always had a fascination with that. As earnest as we are, we still have a little recklessness in us. We like spaces that support that. We’re not trying to be so perfect and good. To loosen up—that’s the real goal. We hope the operation nurtures that, pushes that, and let’s that happen.

This space is like a good song. It’s not like a throwaway song, a Britney Spears “Toxic” song or something. A good song is something you’ve gotta listen to three or four times, and then it becomes really meaningful. I think the space requires multiple visits to figure out. Maybe you’re a little intimidated at first or overwhelmed.

Standefer: People have been like, “What is this? Why is this restaurant upstairs in the store?” It’s okay if there are all the questions—that’s part of the concept. You discover it. You don’t have to get an audio guide, like when you’re at a museum, to go through it. There doesn’t have to be a whole explanation. But we do want it to be seductive. We want people to be in a weird glam respite.

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Culture Club A photo portfolio of recent events in the Surface universe, including the Noguchi Museum’s 30th anniversary celebration.

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Culture Club Garage Museum Opening On June 10, the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art celebrated the opening of its new Rem Koolhaas– designed building in Gorky Park. Museum officials invited 500 guests from around the world to view exhibitions and performances. Delfina Delettrez Fendi, Arianna Huffington, Karlie Kloss, Sean MacPherson, Klaus Biesenbach, Michael Govan, Elizabeth Diller, Charles Renfro, and David Zwirner were among those in attendance. Artists exhibited included Yayoi Kusama, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Július Koller. Koolhaas is pictured here with museum founder Dasha Zhukova.

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CULTURE CLUB Opening of Icon Bay Sculpture Garden June 26 marked the opening of the waterfront Icon Bay Park in Miami. Aimed at connecting real estate development with public art initiatives, Icon Bay will open in conjunction with a luxury condo development of the same name. The park will be filled with works by the winners of the Young Arts Sculpture Competition from the National Young Arts Foundation and the Related Group; the sculpture garden will include works by artists of varying styles and nationalities, including Franco and Lautaro Cuttica (pictured, left to right).

(Photo: Lana Barkin)

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CULTURE CLUB Miu Miu Opening in the Miami Design District (LEFT) On April 30, Miu Miu celebrated (in partnership with ArtBinder) the opening of its new store in the Miami Design District with a cocktail reception inside the new space. Drinks were followed by a seated dinner at the nearby Cypress Room with guests including Natalie Joos, Andi Potamkin, Marvin Ross Friedman (pictured, with Adrienne Bon Haes), and Meg Sharpe.

(Photo: Getty Images)

The New York Edition and Frieze Opening Parties (TOP RIGHT) To announce its launch, Ian Schrager’s New York Edition hotel hosted a week of events featuring a celebrity guest list from the art and fashion worlds. W magazine editor Stefano Tonchi joined Schrager for an opening party that also doubled as a celebration for the magazine’s annual Art Issue.

Later in the week, fashion label Maiyet hosted a cocktail party with Milk Made and Conscious Commerce to celebrate the upcoming weekend of the Frieze Art Fair. Guests throughout the week included Leonardo DiCaprio, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Barbara Bush, Olivia Wilde, Richard Armstrong, and Yigal Azrouël. (Photo: bfanyc.com)

Alex Katz Collaboration Party (BOTTOM RIGHT) On May 13, Barneys New York hosted a celebration for its collaboration with Art Production Fund and renowned artist Alex Katz (pictured, with Dennis Freedman) at the Barneys flagship store. Cocktails were shared at the private party while the artist signed copies of the book he published especially for the collection, which comprises home goods and accessories. The line features Katz’s iconic line drawings joined by a 60-foot mural on display in all four of the store’s Madison Avenue windows. (Photo: David X Prutting/bfanyc.com)

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CULTURE CLUB Standard Talks Poetry Reading at the Standard East Village On June 2, the Standard East Village hosted a poetry reading as part of its ongoing series Standard Talks.

Curated by the hotel, this program explores an array of topics, including art, design, fashion, music, and technology. The most recent event included readings by Cleo Wade, Hettie Jones, and Andrew Durbin.

Wade, a multimedia artist, crafts poetry and provides cross-industry creative and art direction. Brooklynborn poet and prose writer Jones was a prominent figure of the beat scene, as well as the spouse of acclaimed poet LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. Durbin is an author and the curator of the New Agendas reading series at Macie Gransion. Pictured here are Francesco Clemente and Stacey Bendet. (Photo: Max Lakner/bfa.com)

2015 CFDA Fashion Awards On June 1, the Council of Fashion Designers of America and Swarovski celebrated the honorees and winners of the CFDA Fashion Awards at Lincoln Center. Hosted by comedian James Corden, the awards honored designers including Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Betsey Johnson, and Tom Ford; Kanye West (pictured, right) presented Pharrell Williams (pictured, left) with the Fashion Icon Award.

Attendees included Chelsea Clinton, Kim Kardashian West, Karlie Kloss, Nina Garcia, and Zac Posen.

(Photo: Neil Rasmus/bfa.com)

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Club Monaco Presentation On April 22, Club Monaco presented its 2015 women’s and men’s collections alongside an assortment of food and cocktails prepared by famed chef Mads Refslund and mixologist Søren Krogh. The event, hosted at an Upper East Side townhome, was transformed to reflect the look, feel, and style of Club Monaco stores.

Guests included Patrizio Bertelli (pictured on the left, with Damien Hirst), Leandra Medine, Hilary Rhoda, Kate Foley, and Chelsea Leyland. (Photo: bfanyc.com) SURFACE

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CULTURE CLUB Private Dinner at Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel On July 16 at Art Basel Switzerland, Tina Brown, Richard Chang, and Daphne Guinness hosted a dinner along with Credit Suisse at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, followed by cocktails and a conversation, led by Brown, with artist Tino Sehgal.

Attendees included André Balazs, Gavin Brown, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Marian Goodman, Andreas Gursky, Maja Hoffmann, Sydney Picasso, Alessandro Possati, and Andrea Rosen. Pictured here is art collector and developer Robbie Antonio (left, with another guest).

(Photo: David Biedert Photography)

Photo London Inaugural Exhibition Photo London at Somerset House opened to the public on May 21 for a four-day fair, attracting more than 20,000 visitors to the inaugural exhibition. Photo London includes 70 international galleries, three commissioned exhibitions, two installations, a talks program featuring more than 50 photographers and curators, and three new award platforms—making it the single largest exhibition ever to grace Somerset House. Seventy international galleries showed more than 2,000 photographs in total. On May 20, London mayor Boris Johnson (pictured here with Fariba Farshad) officiated the opening of the fair with an evening reception for guests including Daniel Craig, Lily Allen, Bianca Jagger, Simon Schama, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Martin Roth.

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CULTURE CLUB Inspiration Gala The Foundation for AIDS Research, in partnership with Harry Winston and Mac Viva Glam, held its sixth annual Inspiration Gala on June 17 in New York City.

Andy Cohen and Miley Cyrus were both recognized at the event for their efforts in fighting AIDS. The evening included the presentation of the awards, an auction, a street style–themed menswear runway show, and a performance by Mary J. Blige. Guests raised more than $100,000 for the foundation. Attendeees included foundation chairman Kenneth Cole, Laverne Cox, Anderson Cooper, Alexander Wang (pictured, left), Abbey Lee Kershaw (pictured, right), and Heidi Klum.

(Photo: Kevin Tachman)

NEW MUSEUM GALA

Noguchi Museum 30th Anniversary Celebration At the 30th anniversary celebration of the Noguchi Museum, Jasper Morrison and Yoshio Taniguchi received the second annual Isamu Noguchi Award.

The award, presented by the U.N. Ambassador to Japan Motohide Yoshikawa, is reserved for those that exemplify the same commitment to innovation, global consciousness, and Japanese/American exchange that Noguchi embraced. Morrison (pictured, right) works to merge art and industry while creating pieces that make a difference; Noguchi served as a mentor to Taniguchi (pictured, left) for most of his life and career.

(Photo: David X Prutting/bfa.com)

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CULTURE CLUB The Glass House Summer Party Architects, artists, designers, and other creative types set out for Connecticut for this year’s fundraising summer party at Philip Johnson’s Glass House. The event raised $400,000—a record—for supporting projects at the site, which is part of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Games like croquet and ping-pong, along with a set by deejays Timo + Alan and a performance by the band Lucky Dragons, provided entertainment for guests who also enjoyed champagne from Taittinger and picnic baskets by Campagna. A silent auction from Paddle 8 featured work by the likes of Annie Leibovitz, Georg Jensen, Kasper Sonne, and John Chamberlain. Pictured here are designers (and relatives) Yigal Azrouël and Dror Benshetrit.

(Photo: Samantha Nandez/bfa.com)

MoMA PS1 Annual Gala This year’s MoMA PS1 benefit gala honored artists Cindy Sherman and Mickalene Thomas, along with Volkswagen chairman Martin Winterkorn. Guests included Klaus Biesenbach, Yoko Ono, and Thelma Golden. The gala benefits MoMA PS1’s annual exhibition fund; in conjunction with the gala, the museum announced an expanded two-year partnership with Volkwagen that will support new initiatives such as a MoMA PS1 VW Fellows program for young art professionals. (Photo: Courtesy Volkswagen)

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CULTURE CLUB Storm Art King Center Summer Solstice Celebration The Storm King Art Center’s fourth annual Summer Solstice Celebration took place on their grounds in Hudson Valley on June 20. Guests explored the exhibits and indulged in cocktails and hors d’oeuvres before they sat down to a family-style dinner. On view were sculptures and fountains by Lynda Benglis and outdoor pieces by Luke Stettner. Guests included Shelley Boris, Frankie Boue, Roberta and Steve Denning, Peter Coffin, David Collens, Doug and Mike Starn, John Stern (pictured), Nicholas Weist, and Kristof Wickman.

(Photo: Noa Griffel/bfa.com)

Opening of Robert Irwin “Excursus: Homage to the Square” The Dia Art Foundation’s Dia: Beacon Spring Benefit on May 31 marked the return of Robert Irwin’s “Excursus: Homage to the Square” to public view, 17 years after its premiere. The work, displayed in chambers lit by natural and fluorescent light, bridges Irwin’s artistic and architectural capabilities. Guests included the artist himself, George Condo (pictured, left, with Nathalie de Gunzburg), Carl Andre, Rafael de Cárdenas, Richard Chang, Billy Cotton, Steven Holl, and Stephen Glass.

The benefit included a morning reception, a seated lunch, and a special children’s program. All proceeds benefitted Dia:Beacon’s exhibitions and public and educational programming. (Photo: Courtesy of Dia Art Foundation)

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Designer Jonathan Olivares teamed up with manufacturer Zahner to develop an aluminum bench anyone can create in endless iterations using an app.

THE ALUMINUM BENCH BY THE NUMBERS:

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Height of the bench (in inches) Machines used to make the bench Average weight (in pounds) of the bench per linear foot Minutes it takes to design a bench using ShopFloor® (the platform on which the app runs) Year aluminum was discovered Year Zahner was founded Engineers and fabricators who helped make the bench Months it took to make the app (found at shopfloorapp.com/bench) Inches in diameter of the smaller iteration of the circular bench Bench prototypes developed Distance in miles between Zahner’s Kansas City factory and Chicago’s Volume Gallery, where the bench debuted this summer Square feet of Zahner’s factory

PHOTO: COURTESY OF VOLUME GALLERY.

Bench Stretch

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by Anaïs W. | apple.com/worldgallery

©2015 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.