SURFACE - TADAO ANDO - FEBRUARY 2015

TA DAO A N D O

152 ELIZABETH SPECIAL EDITION LEGENDS AT WORK

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GO BEYOND UTILITY THE FIRST-EVER LEXUS NX TURBO Any SUV can tackle your to-do list. But with its bold styling, 2.0-liter turbocharged engine, available Remote Touchpad and Qi 1 wireless device-charging tray, the NX also completes your wish list. Introducing the first-ever Lexus NX Turbo, NX Turbo F SPORT and NX Hybrid.

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Options shown. 1. Qi wireless charging may not be compatible with all mobile phones, MP3/WMA players and like models. Š2014 Lexus.

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HUDSON by PHILIPPE STARCK Acquired by MoMA. Designed for the Hudson Hotel.

Handcrafted in America from recycled aluminum.

Read more at emeco.net

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Inheritance.

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One of the most successful innovations to come out of the Black Forest.

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And a cuckoo clock.

The difference is Gaggenau.

In the Black Forest, some things never change.

Others have been evolving since 1683. Ever since our company was founded as a hammer and nail factory, innovation has become a tradition for us. Such as the new 400 series ovens, shown here with oven, combisteam oven and warming drawer – uniting cutting-edge technology with timeless design. With 330 years of history our products are just getting better and better.

For more information about Gaggenau and a list of our partners and showrooms please visit www.gaggenau-usa.com or call 877.442.4436.

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

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fritz hansen kartell bensen herman miller knoll flos vitra artek artifort foscarini moooi emeco moroso montis and more!

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LAS VEGAS

TOKYO

FREDSEGAL.COM

2014

2015

sPRING 2015

LET’S MEET UP.

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MELROSE

SANTA MONICA

LAX AIRPORT

1965

1985

2013

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CONTENTS

NO. 115

departments

14 Masthead Editor’s Letter 16 Contributors 18 34 Travel 36 Bar 38 Restaurant 40 Hotel 44 Retail 46 Transport

48 On Time 50 Gear 52 Auction 54 Art 56 Books 58 Material 60 Survey 78 Endorsement 192 Object

26

product

Styling: Justin Min Commentary: Craig Arend Photos: Victor Prado

PHOTOS: IDEAS IN DESIGN, JEN DESSINGER. PRODUCT, VICTOR PRADO. FASHION, BRUCE OWEN. GALLERY, FEDERICA CARLET. CULTURE CLUB, JAMES HARRIS.

80 fashion

Couture

Photos: Bruce Owen

Women’s and Men’s Commentary: Valerie Steele Photos: Kathy Lo

who’s on the cover? adao Ando is a very rare breed of T architect: Born in Osaka in 1941, the Pritzker Prize–winner is self-taught, and has built more than 200 projects around the world, including the Teatro Armani in Milan and the new Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

162 gallery

I talian brand Valextra opens a warm and welcoming Manhattan flagship, designed by architect Marco Costanzi.

20

ideas in design rtist Melvin Edwards unveils a A retrospective at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. Thomas Heatherwick distills a biomorphic design for Bombay Sapphire. Louis Vuitton revives a drool-worthy furniture project by the late Pierre Paulin.

173 culture club A photo portfolio of recent events in the Surface universe, including a special recap of happenings during last year’s Art Basel Miami Beach.

SURFACE

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Vision. Touch. Passion.

To learn more about our kitchen designs, please visit www.bulthaup.com Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Hamptons, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Santa Monica, Scottsdale, Toronto, Vancouver, Washington DC

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CONTENTS

142 m odern marvel

ur fourth annual look at the lives O and minds of some of design’s most accomplished creatives.

Phyllis Lambert remains one of the

fiercest stewards and visionaries shaping the field of architecture today.

116 c oncrete poetry

Architect Tadao Ando creates build-

146 viva vitra

A museum explores one of the world’s

ings full of spirit and soul through monumental gestures and materials.

126 m an of the house

Founded two decades ago by Nick Jones, Soho House continues its ascent as an arbiter of influence.

PHOTOS (CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT): DAVID GIRAL, FLORINE LEONIE, PAUL PLEWS, DELFINO SISTO LEGNANI, CYNTHIA LYNN, OGATA, JEFF GOLDBERG /ESTO.

114 legends at work

NO. 115

greatest furniture brands and honors a man who helped create its success.

152 technical spectacles

Ross Lovegrove remains a master of

experimental designs that seem years ahead of their time.

cover: Tadao Ando at his office in Osaka, Japan photographer: Ogata

134 m emphis calling

A new book featuring 1980s drawings

editor’s note: Surface’s editor-in-chief, Spencer Bailey, who interviews Tadao Ando on page 116, is a paid consultant for the 152 Elizabeth development in New York City, which Ando is designing. Prior to the interview, Bailey and Ando had never met or spoken to each other. Also, on page 128, Bailey interviews Nick Jones, the founder of Soho House, where he and Surface’s CEO, Marc Lotenberg, are members.

by Nathalie Du Pasquier arrives amidst a revival of Postmodernist style.

SURFACE

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IC LIGHTS

BY M I C H a e L a n a STa S S I a d e S

f Lo S .CoM

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MASTHEAD

S U R FAC E brand development

editorial and design

director Marc Lotenberg marc@surfacemag.com

editor-in-chief Spencer Bailey sbailey@surfacemag.com Instagram: @spencercbailey

marketing & advertising director Suzanne Mitchell smitchell@surfacemag.com advertising director (design & interiors) Adriana Gelves agelves@surfacemag.com advertising director (luxury & fashion) Laurel Nuzzo lnuzzo@surfacemag.com luxury director Julia Farah jfarah@surfacemag.com west coast account manager Jim Horan jim@accessmediala.com midwest account manager Ken Stubblefield ken@focusmm.net italian account manager Ferruccio Silvera info@silvera.it circulation manager David Renard david@muinc.com surface media llc chairman Eric Crown chief executive officer Marc Lotenberg controller Miles Bingham mbingham@surfacemag.com operations manager Taryn Watzman executive coordinator Laurie Sadove lsadove@surfacemag.com

creative direction NoĂŤ & Associates info@noeassociates.com senior editor Aileen Kwun akwun@surfacemag.com Instagram: @aileenkwun assistant editors Roxy Kirshenbaum rkirshenbaum@surfacemag.com Instagram: @roxylittlewing Hally Wolhandler hwolhandler@surfacemag.com Instagram: @hallyjet fashion editor Justin Min jmin@surfacemag.com Instagram: @justin.y.min

Surface magazine is published 10 times annually

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licensing

editor-at-large Dave Kim

Contact us for opportunities at: licensing@surfacemag.com

contributing editors David Basulto (ArchDaily), Marina Cashdan, Julia Cooke, Tomas Delos Reyes, Natasha Edwards, Ted Gushue (Supercompressor), Seamus Mullen, Nonie Niesewand, Evan Orensten (Cool Hunting), Ben Pundole (A Hotel Life), David Rockwell, Josh Rubin (Cool Hunting), Jonathan Schultz, Valerie Steele, Keith Strandberg, Ian Volner contributing photographers Grant Cornett, Adrian Gaut, Dean Kaufman, Mark Mahaney, Ogata, David Schulze, Yoshiaki Sekine interns Ayla Brewster, Sarah McLean

online surfacemag.com twitter.com/surfacemag facebook.com/surfacemag instagram.com/surfacemag international edition surfaceasiamag.com (Southeast Asia) All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or part without written permission is strictly prohibited.

Please keep Surface for your library.

When finished, recycle this issue or give it to a friend.

Printed in the U.S. with responsibly sourced paper, soy-based inks, and renewable energy.

SURFACE

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+1 347 826 6263 usa@expormim.com www.expormim.com

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K채bu outdoor collection designed by Javier Pastor

Nautica swing chair designed by MUT Design

Photographer: Manolo Yllera

Interiors from Spain

This past December, at the main branch of the New York Public Library, I attended a live talk featuring German photographer Thomas Struth (who, while not among the “legends” featured in this issue, could very well be). There, he told interviewer Paul Holdengräber something refreshing and poignant that has since stuck in my head: “Simplicity needs to be rescued and restored.” In the context of the above photograph, Struth’s well-known “Crosby Street, Soho, New York” (1974)—in my mind, one of his best works—the quote is chilling.

In the 40 years since Struth captured this image, currently on display in a solo exhibition of his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Feb. 19), New York and the world at large have morphed into what is, I think, both a better and more livable place, yet also, paradoxically, a messier and more ungainly one. Increasingly, we need to take time to honor creative figures like Struth—figures who help us cut through the noise; present new perspectives for seeing and experiencing; and in the process, impact thousands, if not millions, of people.

In choosing the feature subjects for our fourth annual Legends at Work issue, I’m inclined to ask: What makes someone a “legend?” The word is, yes, a cliché. But if used well, it can be a way of signifying—and paying homage to—a person who has gained renown not for celebrity’s sake, but rather for the significance and relevance of his or her work. Take this issue’s cover subject, Tadao Ando (page 116), whose meditative, quietly powerful buildings are instantly recognizable though never distracting, seamlessly integrated into their surroundings.

Or consider Memphis Group founding member Nathalie Du Pasquier (page 134), famous for her colorful, vivid prints and patterns that bring fresh dimensionality to surfaces. Or Ross Lovegrove (page 152), whose unfettered, psychedelic creativity bursts out of everything he designs, from 3D-printed jewelry to chairs for Bernhardt Design. Also in this year’s grouping: Soho House founder Nick Jones (page 128), activist and Canadian Centre for Architecture founder Phyllis Lambert (page 147), and Vitra chairman emeritus Rolf Fehlbaum (page 146).

Each of these creative leaders suggests that simplicity isn’t about being spare or minimal; it is, instead, about integrity, strength of mind and character, and one’s refusal to compromise his or her vision. I think Struth would agree.

— Spencer Bailey

PHOTO: COURTESY THOMAS STRUTH AND THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART.

Editor’s Letter

EDITOR'S LETTER

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Contributors

JOSH RUBIN Contributing editor Josh Rubin wears many hats: The founder and editor-in-chief of cultfavorite website Cool Hunting, he is also a photographer, interaction designer, and the owner of Largetail, a digital advertising network and studio. To Rubin, the collaboration between Surface and Cool Hunting on our recently launched Gear column (page 50) felt completely natural. “There’s such a great design angle to gear; I’m excited to share the background of things and brands that beautifully balance form and function,” he says, adding that he’s especially excited to be doing something tactile. “Almost everything we do is digital, and seeing words and pictures on the printed page is so satisfying.” A frequent conference speaker on the topic of how technology, creativity, and design shape the future of consumer behavior, Rubin also consults on content and design for companies such as Apple, Nike, BMW, and Google.

COLIN M. LENTON Philadelphia-based photographer Colin M. Lenton shot artist Alex Da Corte at his studio for this month’s Art column (page 54). “This is the second time I’ve been commissioned to do a portrait of Alex. I appreciate his laid-back sensibility,” Lenton says. At the shoot, the photographer was given one of the artist’s dyed dollar bills, which were strewn all over the studio when Lenton and his assistant arrived. “I plan to hang it up on my new studio wall when we open this month,” he says. “I photograph lots of interesting people for my job, and as cliché as it is, that’s always my favorite part. Meeting people like Alex and being exposed to all the cool and interesting things that they’re doing is what keeps me motivated.” In addition to his work as a commercial and editorial photographer, Lenton sits on the board of the Philadelphia chapter of the American Society of Media Photographers.

OGATA Ogata, a contributing photographer at Surface, shot architect and cover subject Tadao Ando (page 116) in Osaka for our annual Legends At Work issue. “To see him was amazing—he has inspired my life,” Ogata says. “His aura reminded me of a Titian painting, and he is so kind and funny. He also gave me a copy of his book.” In having Ando pose with his hand over his left eye, Ogata says he was inspired by Japanese Manga. “He can see what we can’t see, and he accepts facts in a way others don’t. For example, for him, a chair isn’t a chair, an apple isn’t an apple,” the photographer says. “By hiding an eye, he can see something we can’t see.” Ogata, who is self-taught (like Ando) and also shoots photos for fashion and advertising clients, prides himself on being able to bring out the personalities of even the most camera-shy subjects. Based in Tokyo, he plans to relocate to New York City this year.

JESSE SEEGERS “Coming from a more staid academic background, it’s exciting to write for a broader, more fashion-savvy audience,” Jesse Seegers says of writing this month’s Gallery column (page 162), for which he interviewed architect Marco Costanzi and industrial designer Martino Gamper about their respective collaborations with Italian brand Valextra, which just opened a store in New York’s Upper East Side. Seegers says he also shared conversation with the two about architecture, design, and fashion in 20th-century Milan: “The city then was rife with moments and collaborations that probably seemed so natural at the time, but in retrospect were amazing meetings of minds.” Seegers, who received a masters in architecture from Princeton, is currently starting a digital publishing platform for Columbia GSAPP. “There are a lot of challenges,” he says of the project, “but it’s very exciting to create something completely new and unknown.”

BRYN SMITH Brooklyn-based writer and graphic designer Bryn Smith wrote a feature profile of Vitra chairman emeritus Rolf Fehlbaum for this issue (page 146). “I was impressed by Rolf’s humility,” she says of meeting him. “He’s such a humble, inspiring figure.” The interview took place at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where “Vitra—Design, Architecture, Communication: A European Project with American Roots” is currently on view (through April 26). Smith was excited to see the many rare Vitra chairs featured: “Now I’m plotting a trip to Weil am Rhein, so I can see the Vitra campus firsthand,” she says. In addition to organizing a digital archive for Push Pin Studio’s Seymour Chwast, Smith is currently working on two books: a collection of profiles on legendary designers (co-authored with Surface senior editor Aileen Kwun), and another about the design studio Open. She has written for Print, Core77, Designers & Books, and L’ArcoBaleno, and teaches graphic design at RISD and Cooper Union.

SURFACE

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www.eco a l f.co m

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Ideas in Design

IDEAS IN DESIGN

The sculptor, whose retrospective “Five Decades” is currently on view at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas (through May 10), discusses his creative process from his Hudson Valley home.

INTERVIEW BY DAVE KIM PORTRAIT BY JEN DESSINGER Your sculptures often have titles with political themes. How have recent events such as the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, affected your work?

Ferguson is ordinary, normal America. I’m 77 years old. It’s been going on all my life, and it was going on all of my grandfather’s life. The variations are different, the times are different, but what’s new? That’s the way I see Ferguson.

How do politics impact you as an artist?

You’re born a human being first. That you become an artist is how you decide to live and work with the world. Politics are just a way that human beings grapple with the world. Politics are the populace and how they relate to one another in a more or less organized form. It’s not TV news.

So Ferguson is normal American life. Something like that goes on every day, though it doesn’t make the newspapers every day. People act like Ferguson is some new event. That means people are not using their abilities to see and grasp what’s going on in the world right in front of them.

You can say an event like that—if you’re my age and you’ve lived where I lived—is like Los Angeles in 1965, the revolution in Watts.

And in 1992, also in Los Angeles. Do you respond to uprisings such as these through your work?

People call my work protest, but I’ve never said that was what my work was. It’s abstract, it’s socially expressive. I don’t incident-react, generally.

Do you sketch out or diagram your ideas first, or is your process more improvisational?

Sketching is improvisational, too. Most people will reference jazz as improvisation. The difference between a large-scale orchestral work, where the parts are written out, and a jazz improvisation is the amount of time it takes between the thought and the execution. If you don’t have writing and paper in between, then that time is much shorter. That’s improvisation in jazz. But a work by Beethoven or Anton Webern—okay, they write it down, and it takes three days, three months, and the renting of a hall, and there it goes. But the concept and process is basically the same.

It’s just an extension of time and organization that makes the difference.

If you talk about my work and improvisation—well, I work with steel.

Some of the steel I use comes from objects that already have a history.

People will say, “This is a lock, this is a chain,” and this or that. But for me, the primary thing is that it’s steel, and therefore when you apply heat to it, you can fuse and change the parts. And the resulting object is the important thing, not so much the parts that it’s made out of.

Do you work on one piece at a time?

I don’t do anything one at a time, whether it’s thinking or reading. My world probably looks chaotic to people. I’m not a single-idea person.

There hasn’t been a retrospective of your work since 1993. What changes do you see when you look back on your more-than-50-year career?

My generation didn’t have the word “career.” It didn’t exist. You were gonna try to be an artist. You didn’t expect to have a one-man show till you SURFACE

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PHOTOS: TOP, JEN DESSINGER. BOTTOM, COURTESY 2015 MELVIN EDWARDS/ARTIST RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS).

Melvin Edwards

STUDIO VISIT

IDEAS IN DESIGN

were over 40. Students today expect to have one 40 minutes after class, and be right there on 26th Street with me. [Laughs] That’s the evolution of American culture.

How did you learn to work with metal?

First of all, I was a hotshot painter. Well, in my opinion. What do you call it: He’s a genius in his own mind? [Laughs] Anyway, I wasn’t interested significantly in sculpture. But in college—in 1959 or ’60—I saw a couple of graduate students welding: George Baker and Robert Bassler. George was teaching a night class, and I took it. He laid out six straight pieces of steel and showed me how to weld them. Then he said, “Don’t bug me ’cause I’m working on my graduate show.” And that was fine, because no aesthetics came with it. In other words, anything I thought about how the work should look was up to me.

But you were later drawn stylistically to the abstractions of the ’60s, no?

Abstraction is a process or concept; it’s not a style. But a lot of people think of it as a style. They think if they don’t recognize it, it must be abstract, which is just not true. A Jackson Pollock painting, once you’re familiar with it, is a familiar object. It’s like how a foreign language sounds like noise or cacophonous nothing because you don’t speak it. But once you know the language, then it’s full of information and poetry.

I grew up in the world of art that produced the conventions of what we call “modern art,” and so those languages are part of the information that I have. Hopefully I’ve managed to give my own spin on the appearance of the things I create, the concerns that are particular to me.

PHOTOS: TOP, JEN DESSINGER. BOTTOM, COURTESY 2015 MELVIN EDWARDS/ARTIST RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS).

Your work is sometimes compared to that of David Smith. Who were some of your influences?

They always say Smith and Anthony Caro, which isn’t true. And when I made kinetic sculpture, I didn’t want to make stuff like Calder. My idea of kinetics ultimately came out of remembering my grandmother’s rocking chair. Not a nice old lady sitting in a chair like Whistler’s, but simply the dynamics of how it rocked. If you look at the works of mine that have movement, that’s the principle.

David Smith came directly from industry into welding and sculpture.

I didn’t. I came through school, and was mostly self-taught. Smith and his industry processes are very good, and they show in his work. The stainless-steel pieces of mine—you see polished surfaces, and you say, “Oh, it’s David Smith.” Well, anybody that ever bought stainless steel knows the shitty way the surface looks. You’re gonna do something to it to change it. If you want to call it wiggles and waggles and Abstract Expressionism, okay.

I guess the media tends to classify artists. We like labels.

If you name something, you think you’ve pretty much done your job of identifying it. But a man falling in the water and a man diving in to set an Olympic record are quite different.

(BELOW, TOP TO BOTTOM) Edwards’s welding table in his Hudson Valley home studio. “Lo (for Locardia Ndandarika.” (1997).

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IDEAS IN DESIGN

B ombay Sapphire Distillery

ARCHITECTURE

Elegant curves and volumes have become signature traits in the work of London-based Heatherwick Studio. From an aluminum bench in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris to the U.K. Pavilion for the Shanghai World Expo, the firm’s work has also become known for its high-tech fabrication techniques. Nearly 10 years after principal Thomas Heatherwick received a prize from gin-maker Bombay Sapphire for his concept of a glass bridge, the brand approached the studio to design its first in-house production facility and visitor center, located in a former 18th-century paper mill in the south of England. Gin there is distilled in large copper stills—according to a recipe that dates to 1761— at one of two of the newly restored structures. Inspired by the British tradition of botanical glasshouses and the Crystal Palace, Heatherwick’s two biomorphic glass domes extrude from the historic buildings, landing in the company’s botanical gardens and waterway, where some herbs are grown. The design moves between two scales: a building and an industrial heat machine that, according to the project’s lead architect, Eliot Postma, “creates a directionality to the structure, with all of the mullions conjoining at this single point of connection, almost as if the glass is being blown from the still building and coming to rest in the river below.” —David Basulto, founder and editor-in-chief of the website ArchDaily

The majority of digital cameras are plagued by planned obsolescence, doomed to become here-today, gone-tomorrow artifacts. This makes sense to some degree, what with today’s ever-changing sensors and processors. But Hasselblad, long an industry leader, has continued to somehow avoid this trap. Continuing its 174 year-old tradition of making objects designed with permanence in mind, and working with Sony and Zeiss, Hasselblad has put longevity front and center with its latest release, the Stellar II. Though its technical specs—which include WiFi, NFC, 20.2 megapixels, and 1920-by-1080 pixel video—give it ammunition to be a leader in the field, the Stellar II’s chief raison d’être is its highquality, thoughtfully designed hardware. “With the Stellar II, we wanted to create an exceptional object of desire by combining a beautiful aesthetic with uncompromising performance,” says Anna Gudmundson, Hasselblad’s premium product manager. Made with a combination of metal and a variety of four different grip finishes—olive wood, walnut, paddock, and carbon fiber, which appeals to “more dynamic, high-tech savvy photography enthusiasts,” Gudmundson says—its design will stay relevant long after its inner workings are obsolete.

—Ethan Wolff-Mann, editor at the website Supercompressor

SURFACE

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PHOTOS: REATIL, COURTESY LALIQUE. LIMITED EDITION, COURTESY LOUIS VUITTON/J. OPPENHEIM.

Hasselblad Stellar II

PHOTOS: ARCHITECTURE, COURTESY IWAN BAAN. TECH, COURTESY HASSELBLAD.

TECH

IDEAS IN DESIGN

RETAIL

La Carafe Ettore Bugatti

Crystal company Lalique’s connection to high-performance automobiles stems as far back as 1906, when the brand created a trophy for the winner of the famous Targa Florio road-race in the mountains of Sicily. Eponymous founding designer René Lalique went on to design 30 celebrated glass mascots, each of which remains highly sought-after today. Adding to the company’s history of automobile collaborations is the new Ettore Bugatti Carafe, a crystal decanter that references the radiator grille design found on Bugatti’s cars. The objective in creating the intricately produced, numberededition pieces: to emulate the technical prowess of legendary Bugatti sports car designer and engineer Ettore Bugatti. Hand-blown within an iron mold, the vessel is entirely repolished before its hollow underside gets frosted. The stopper, made using the pressed technique, is also frosted and made via sandblasting and acid treatments. Says Lalique creative director Marc Larminaux: “This latest design revives designs of a prestigious past while being resolutely contemporary.” In other words, it’s befitting of both brands. —Roxy Kirshenbaum

“Playing with Shapes”

There’s no arguing that when French furniture and interior designer Pierre Paulin conceptualized a residential project for Herman Miller in 1972, he was ahead of his time. His idea: to manufacture industrial parts for open and empty residential spaces, allowing clients to add to their collection over time to fit the changing needs of work and living spaces. In the end, Herman Miller chose not to invest in the ambitious project, due to the first oil crisis, but thanks to Louis Vuitton, the collection has now been resurrected. “Twenty years ago, [the market was] more into interior decoration,” says Maia Paulin, Pierre’s surviving wife, who worked with him for 40 years. “I think today we’ve come to the idea where we move more easily and change things more easily.” In December, at a satellite Design Miami exhibition called “Playing With Shapes,” Louis Vuitton brought Paulin’s design to the public for the first time, showcasing a reproduction of La Maquette (the original of which is now owned by the Centre Pompidou in Paris), a proposal of a six-level modular personal living space with moveable furniture. Also featured in the presentation were sketches and models, as well as 18 pieces of furniture from Paulin’s original collection—all of which Maia and Louis Vuitton had manufactured. “I was so happy to know that Pierre had been creating for 60 years,” Maia says, “and that he still remains so contemporary.” —Roxy Kirshenbaum

PHOTOS: REATIL, COURTESY LALIQUE. LIMITED EDITION, COURTESY LOUIS VUITTON/J. OPPENHEIM.

PHOTOS: ARCHITECTURE, COURTESY IWAN BAAN. TECH, COURTESY HASSELBLAD.

LIMITED EDITION

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IDEAS IN DESIGN

“75 Gifts for 75 Years”

EXHIBIT

This is a celebratory year for one of the Midwest’s greatest cultural assets and institutions: Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, which commemorates its 75th anniversary as a public art center, although the institution’s origins can be traced back more than 125 years. The festivities kick off this month with the show “75 Gifts for 75 Years,” on display from Feb. 5 to Aug. 2. In creating the exhibition, the institution solicited 75 works from the private collections of donors. The response, it turned out, was rather remarkable. Says curator Siri Engberg: “Several hundred works have come in, ranging from historical pieces to exciting, emerging art.” The show features a mix of mediums—such as painting, sculpture, installation, and works on paper—and artists, including Willem de Kooning and Andy Warhol.

Engberg’s choice to arrange rooms by medium and historical eras effectively creates both a timeline and a series of connected stories, one example being a room devoted to the conceptual artistic developments of the late ’60s. The show is one of many milestone events, performances, and exhibitions taking place at the Walker this year; others include “Art at the Center: 75 Years of Walker Collections” (through Jan. 1, 2017) and “International Pop” (on view from April 11 to Sept.

6), the latter of which will travel to the Dallas Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “This is an unprecedented opportunity to see a large portion of our collection at one time,” Engberg says.

—Hannah Gottlieb-Graham

PHOTOS: EXHIBIT, COURTESY WALKER ART CENTER. BOOK, COURTESY SCHELTENS & ABBENES.

BOOK

“ Reproducing Scholten & Baijings”

Since founding their practice in Amsterdam 15 years ago, designers Stefan Scholten and Carole Baijings have produced a varied and prolific body of work—everything ranging from textiles to ceramics and furniture pieces for clients including Georg Jensen, Mini, and design company Hay. A new monograph, publishing this month, Reproducing Scholten & Baijings (Phaidon), states the ambitions that have guided the studio’s activities from the outset: “to design functional products, collaborate with the best professionals in the world, and create a balance between industrially produced series and experimental projects.”

Organized into three sections, the hardcover tome begins with a photo essay of the studio’s crisply designed creative workspace, and a conversation between curator Louise Schouwenberg and frequent collaborator Michael Maharam. A telling taxonomy marks the catalogue of projects, diagrams, and sketches comprising the majority of the book, including section titles “Woven Willow,” “Vegetables,” “Colour Wood,” and “Blocks & Grid.” All are indicative of the firm’s studious forays into colors, materiality, process, and technique—explorations stemming from poetic observations on function, handicraft, and the natural world. “Once you start unpeeling nature,” Baijings muses, “you see how refined the colours are.”

—Aileen Kwun

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Art Incubator

TRAVEL

The energetic yet laid-back vibe of San Francisco attracts a Parisian couple to open their first gallery in the U.S.

BY SPENCER BAILEY PORTRAIT BY JAYMS RAMIREZ

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PHOTOS: 01, COURTESY AUTODESK. 02, CHRIS DIAZ. 03, COURTESY BEN BLACKWELL. 04, PETER VAN DER PAS.

When third-generation art dealer Jules Maeght exchange between the two continents. In street culture, fashion, technology, and design. and his wife and business partner, Amélie, “Art in Motion,” which focused on kinetic art, For the Maeghts, who live in the Cole visited San Francisco from Paris about three works by three local contemporary artists— Valley neighborhood, all of the ideas bubyears ago, they felt entranced by the place. Kal Spelletich, Tracy Snelling, and Marshall bling up in the gallery seem to embody the “We loved the energy here, the innovation, and Elliott—were presented alongside those of dynamism of their new home city and state. thought that from a personal standpoint it was six European artists from the modernist Since moving in the summer of 2013, they’ve a very good fit for us,” Amélie says. The two avant-guarde movement, including Alexander found their own modern-day version of the had been looking to open a gallery in America, Calder and Vassily Kandinsky. Much like Wild West, a place of constant exploration and but rather than move to New York—perhaps the boisterous energy found in today’s San excitement. “We’re taking little trips and disa more logical or expected choice—they felt Francisco tech sector, the exhibition was a covering California and the magnificent state San Francisco was a better option for a fresh celebration of experimentation and pushing that it is,” Amélie says. “And from a business opportunity, both for work and for raising boundaries. The show also metaphorically point of view, we’re feeling very welcome. We their children, now ages 7 and 9. played off the history of the gallery’s location: have a lot of people coming by, and we’ve had This past fall, they opened the Jules Maeght Situated on Gough Street in the city’s Hayes very positive feedback. You know, we love Gallery, which joins Galerie Maeght, founded Valley neighborhood, just a short walk from Paris, we love our country, but the [economic] in Paris in 1945 by Jules’s grandparents, Aimé Twitter’s headquarters, the space formerly situation there is a bit difficult right now. It’s and Marguerite, and now run by his sister, housed a studio where famed polymath and refreshing to be in a very energetic place.”

Adds Boas: “There is, and always has been, Isabelle; a family print shop and publish- machine-maker Rube Goldberg once worked. ing house, also in Paris; and the Marguerite As with cultures and nationalities, mixing a strong sense of pioneering and groundbreakand Aimé Maeght Foundation, a museum in medias—“not only paintings, but etchings ing and thinking outside of the box—in litSt. Paul de Vence, France, which opened in and sculptures and videos and photos,” erature, design, technology, and the arts—in 1964. According to Natasha Boas, a French- Amélie says—will also be a focus for the San Francisco. The Jules Maeght Gallery is American independent curator based in San gallery. The next exhibition, “New Works: another of these energetic sites.”

Francisco and the organizer of the new gal- Pierre Roy Camille/Zio Zeigler,” on view The Maeghts plan to tap into this culture lery’s debut exhibition, “Art in Motion,” the from March 6 to April 30, once again brings and energy further. “We don’t have many congallery is the first-ever from Europe to make together two young artists from Europe and nections with the tech world yet, but we hope its home in San Francisco.

California—Camille is based in Paris, Ziegler to,” Amélie says, adding, “With all the differRather than just being a space for presenting in the Bay Area—and energetic, broad-based ent influences here, and the fact that you’re on European artists in America, though, Jules work. Camille and Zeigler, both of whom are the Pacific Ocean, you almost feel like you’re and Amélie aim to celebrate Bay Area artists, painters, play with color, line, and pattern, at the tip of the world.” too—and to create a sort of cross-cultural and their works draw upon various facets of

TRAVEL

LOCAL’S GUIDE TO SAN FRANCISCO

BY JULES AND AMELIE MAEGHT

01 The Autodesk Gallery, now six years old and run by one of the world’s biggest design software companies, was a refreshing discovery for Jules upon arriving in the city. At 16,500 square feet and with more than 20 exhibitions, the sprawling space, designed by Anderson Anderson Architecture and HOK, provides a look at Autodesk’s many applications and creations.

Current presentations range from an 8-and-a-halffoot-tall Lego dinosaur to a full-scale exterior model of Mercedes-Benz’s 2011 Biome concept car. 1 Market Street, No. 200; 415-356-0700; autodesk.com/gallery 02 Ben and Chris Ospital, the brother-and-sister team behind shop Modern Appealing Clothing (MAC), “go to Europe and all these different fashion fairs, and they have a really, really great selection of clothes,” says Amélie, who admires their worldly approach to fashion. In business for more than 30 years, MAC now has two San Francisco locations—one in Hayes Valley, the other in Dogpatch. Dries Van Noten, Comme des Garcons Homme Plus, Walter van Beirendonck, and Engineered Garments are among the designer brands available in the shops. 387 Grove Street; 415863-3011; modernappealingclothing.com

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PHOTOS: 01, COURTESY AUTODESK. 02, CHRIS DIAZ. 03, COURTESY BEN BLACKWELL. 04, PETER VAN DER PAS.

03 Under director Tom di Maria, who Amélie describes as an “exceptional man,” Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland provides studios, exhibition space, and representation for artists with disabilities.

Like Jules and Amélie’s gallery, the organization’s influence extends beyond the Bay Area: It has a showroom in Paris, and one of the artists it represents, Judith Scott (who passed away in 2005, and was born largely deaf, mute, and with Down syndrome), currently has a retrospective, “Bound and Unbound,” at the Brooklyn Museum (through March 29). 355 24th Street, Oakland; 510-836-2340; creativegrowth.org 04 “We like contemporary design, and especially stores that discover young designers,” Amélie says, “and we also like to mix things up.” Propeller Modern, among the couple’s favorite shops in the city, offers all of that. Items for sale include Moooi’s Narcissus sofa, Jonas Damon’s Open clock, and Jason Miller’s Modo chandelier. 555 Hayes Street; 415-701-7767; propellermodern.com

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BAR

Cocktail by Tomas Delos Reyes INSPIRED BY DANDELYAN There’s an effortless elegance to this space‚: It uses color to show personality and glamour in a playful way. The Altos Reposado provides a great platform, with base notes that easily extend through the rest of the ingredients; the Jasmine tea pulls from the soft, supple banquets and armchairs that line the bar.

Ginger syrup and cinnamon add spice, similar to the way Dandelyan’s lighting, metallic tables, and railings accent the overall look. The fig adds a lusciously sweet finish and a warm color to the drink.

11⁄2 oz.

3 ⁄4 oz.

1 ⁄2 oz.

1 ⁄2 oz.

1 pinch 1 ⁄2

Altos Reposado Tequila jasmine tea ginger syrup lime juice ground cinnamon fresh fig

Muddle fig in a shaker. Add the rest of the ingredients with ice. Shake vigorously. Double strain through a fine strainer into a coupe. Garnish with a lime twist.

Tom Dixon combines British and American style at a new hotel bar in London.

Dual Action

BY HALLY WOLHANDLER Designed by Tom Dixon and his firm, Design Research Studio, the newly opened Mondrian London hotel has a number of major draws, including its location on the Thames in the storied 1978 Sea Containers building and a new restaurant from chef and Surface contributing editor Seamus Mullen. Another is its ground-floor bar: A good hotel typically depends on an alluring cocktail spot, and the Mondrian’s, called Dandelyan, delivers the necessary moody drama.

In creating the space, Dixon took inspiration from what he felt was a common thread of the hotel’s founding: the relationship between the U.S. and the U.K. Warren Platner, the architect of the Sea Containers, was an American who did a number of projects in London. The Mondrian is a New York City hotel just now opening across the pond, and the hotel’s owner is a London native who went to school in the U.S. “The whole hotel was based on the idea of the culture clash between the USA and the U.K.—or rather, the ‘special relationship’ so beloved of politicians,” Tom Dixon says. “Where the restaurant was based on a New York diner, the bar is inspired by the members’ clubs of times gone by.”

The sumptuous space features a veined solidmarble bar that refers to the “golden age of formal drinking,” and the palette includes greens, pinks, and golds—a “clashing ’70s color palette” that nods to Warren Platner, according to Dixon.

Other materials include brass, velvet, leather, and a traditional herringbone-patterned oak floor.

Lights were carefully chosen with an eye toward old-school luxury. “The lighting throughout the bar was designed to create an intimate atmosphere,” Dixon says. This includes a mix of architectural elements, among them a backlit bar and large downlights in the ceiling, as well as floor and wall lights from the Tom Dixon Base range, all of which establish an understated glow.

The space was named for Ryan Chetiyawardana, the London-based bar owner also known as Mr. Lyan, who runs the space and created the cocktail menu. Although the bar looks out on the Thames, the drinks Chetiyawardana developed take inspiration from the flowers of the British countryside, with concoctions like the Dandelyan Sour, made from dandelion capillaire and garden bitters.

Harking back to an earlier time but incorporating unexpected twists, drinks such as these make a fitting complement to Design Research Studio’s old-meets-new inspiration.

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PHOTOS: COCKTAIL, LESLEY UNRUH. BAR, EMILY ANDREWS.

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

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A new restaurant near Harvard and MIT is as much an eatery as it is an incubator for ideas.

BY ROXY KIRSHENBAUM The world’s greatest ideas are rarely conceived in conventional, cubicle-filled office settings. That’s why when French designer Mathieu Lehanneur and American scientist and Harvard professor David Edwards set out to work together, they chose to create a restaurant that would serve not only food but also innovative conceptions.

Strategically located between the campuses of Harvard and MIT in Cambridge’s Kendall Square, the recently opened Café ArtScience is a hybrid café and scientific laboratory. Open to the public, the space is meant to attract scholars,

students, artists, and investors to brainstorm and share their perspectives. To aid in this effort, Lehanneur wanted to leave the floor plan as open as possible, without any walls acting as partitions, to facilitate a sense of flow and flexibility for various functions. Central to this concept is a large green velvet sofa that can accommodate 30 to 35 people. Unapparent at first glance, the sofa can be split into two to four parts to form small islands in different areas and “can change continuously during the week,” Lehanneur says.

A circular lecture hall sits in the middle of the space. Referred to as the “Honeycomb,” the hexagonally-shaped auditorium is filled with black slate tiles intended for written messages and comments. The reason for the beehive shape is metaphoric, referencing the collective intelligence of bees. “Innovation does not come from one people,” Lehanneur says. “It actually comes from many peoples together.” Playing with this idea resulted in a space devoted to meals as much as it is to conferences, artistic workshops, and other moments when people can gather to explore creative possibilities. Next to the main space that houses the restaurant, bar, and Honeycomb is an art gallery featuring diverse exhibitions.

The hexagonal motif continues with a green glass lighting fixture hanging above the cement WikiBar, which serves experimental cocktails.

At dinnertime, ambiance-invoking, cordless copper lamps from Australian brand Neoz are set on each table, then taken away for recharging during the day. The designer felt that maintaining a neutral color palette was important in creating a space in line with nature and its many variations of greens and grays. “We didn’t want to put in too many elements of decoration,” Lehanneur says. “We wanted a level of sophistication.”

The café’s forward-thinking design and atmosphere is showcased to passersby through large windows—which, according to Lehanneur, were one of the raw building’s foremost draws, along with its high ceilings. “I wanted to try and make people outside understand what was happening [inside], and what could happen,” Lehanneur says.

By positioning the café between two worldrenowned universities, the designer and scientist hoped to provide the backdrop to connect students from both institutions. “We intentionally put [the café] in the middle, as a kind of provocative way to force them to meet and make projects together,” he says. “This space will attract a mix of people.”

PHOTO: PHASE ONE PHOTOGRAPHY.

Common Ground

RESTAURANT

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RESTAURANT

Dish by Paul Liebrandt INSPIRED BY CAFÉ ARTSCIENCE PHOTO BY LESLEY UNRUH The simple idea for this dish was created in response to Café ArtScience’s play with textures and natural green colors. The velvety texture of raw scallop and artichoke juice, combined with the pop of the caviar and crisp shishito, make for a surprising and diverse mouthfeel. Similar to the look and rhythm of the design, achieved through silk, green, and white hues, and an airy space, this dish presents a pleasing, natural clarity.

Serves Four diver scallops small shishito peppers sunchokes Oscetra caviar small pepper leaves green pepper olive oil, to taste fleur de sel, to taste

Remove scallops from shells and wash in cold water.

Dry and set aside.

Peel the Jerusalem artichokes and juice the flesh.

Over medium heat, reduce the sunchoke juice until a syrupy texture is obtained. Strain the juice through a fine strainer and chill.

Lightly char the shishito peppers in half and season with the oil and a pinch of fleur de sel, to taste. Cut the scallop in two and lay on a large plate. Divide the caviar by four and spoon into the center. Place shishitos beside the scallop, then sauce with the Jerusalem artichoke syrup.

Garnish with the pepper leaves and pepper oil.

Enjoy.

Paul Liebrandt is the chef and partner of The Elm restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, at the McCarren Hotel & Pool. He is the author of the book To The Bone (Clarkson Potter).

PHOTO: PHASE ONE PHOTOGRAPHY.

4 8 1 lb.

1 tbsp.

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Process

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Mixing Board

HOTEL

In this column, we ask Ben Pundole, founder of the website A Hotel Life, to pick a new hotel that offers the best of hospitality design today.

BY HALLY WOLHANDLER

One of the hotel’s Loft rooms. All of its furniture was designed by Cathal McAteer, founder and creative director of U.K. clothing brand Folk.

The Flushing Meadows Hotel & Bar in Munich doesn’t contain all the typical parts of a hotel: It lacks a lobby, for example, and none of its rooms are identical. Designed by Sascha Arnold and Steffen Werner, of design studio Arnold/Werner and the hospitality group AJW, which runs the Flushing Meadows, the new hotel contains only 16 rooms—11 of which were designed in collaboration with German creatives from a number of industries. The hotel is in the Glockenbachviertel neighborhood, near the city’s Isar River. “It’s an area that is a little bit like Berlin,” Werner says.

“There are only young people. Freddie Mercury hung out here in the ’80s.” Located on the top two floors of an old industrial building that once housed the offices of German Telecom, the fourstory structure is notable for its high ceilings. “In Munich, buildings are generally not allowed to be very high,” Werner says. “So it’s a very special place. When the sun is going down, you can see the mountains and the Alps.”

Entry, Bar, and Restaurant Since the Flushing Meadows is a part of a larger complex, there isn’t a traditional lobby to mark the entrance. “Many people say they can’t find

it, but there’s a sign, and then you just take the elevator to the top floor,” Werner says. A small Carrara marble–outfitted reception desk off the elevator leads to the hotel’s bar, which is centered around a wood-burning stove fireplace. Inspired by natural materials, Werner and Arnold used teak, oak, and canvas paneling in the space, which they accentuated with velvet upholstery. Custom lighting designers PSLAB created a specialized lighting system for the bar, which also features an open south-facing rooftop. “When the sun comes down, you can go and have a drink outside,” Werner says. “It’s a hip place now—local Munich people come and mix with the hotel guests.”

Rooms The building’s almost-14-foot-high ceilings inspired the spare, airy room designs. “The ceilings are very high for Germany, and the rooms are very special because you can see the concrete wall everywhere,” Werner says. “We called them ‘Loft Studios’ because of the high ceilings.”

Eleven of the 16 rooms are Loft Studios; the remaining five are larger penthouse rooms on the upper level. What makes the Loft Studios unusual SURFACE

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PHOTO: COURTESY VOLA.

A Munich hotel designed with 11 consultants opens up to views of the Bavarian Alps.

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The Fiammi Collection by Thomas Cooper Studio luxelightandhome.com

HOTEL

is that Steffen and Werner designed them with 11 other parties. “We talked to these various famous German opinion leaders about their ideas. We asked them, if they had a hotel, what would they want it to be like,” Werner says of the process.

“After many talks with them, we then decided how we’d make the design for them.” Among the personalities hired to consult on the studios were Austrian actress Birgit Minichmayr, surfer Quirin Rohleder, industrial designer Norbert Wangren, and hip-hop artist Michi Beck.

Werner and Arnold themselves designed the five penthouse studios—three of which feature private terraces with views of Munich and the Bavarian Alps. The designers created cohesion by using consistent materials, among them canvas and wood, as well as copper, Kvadrat fabrics, and furniture from the companies Thoney and ClassiCon. Works by Maximam Rodel, a Berlinbased artist, appear in each of these rooms. “It was a nice experience, because when you do a hotel you normally make one room,” Werner says.

“You do one, you see how it works, and then you make 200.” Designing a hotel in this singular way might have been hectic, but, “if there’s a problem, only one room has the problem,” Werner says.

“It’s a special project,” he adds. “We learned a lot.”

BEN PUNDOLE’S TAKE ON FLUSHING MEADOWS: The Flushing Meadows! If I were to use an emoji here, it would be the one of a smiley face bursting with laughter. The name of this hotel doesn’t necessarily reflect the original Flushing Meadows park, in Queens—doh!— which has been home to not one but two world fairs, though is still rather dumpy (sorry to say this, but it’s true). The new Flushing Meadows hotel in Munich is a much different affair. A cross between the genius of Ace Hotels and Frank Lloyd Wright with a smattering of Wes Anderson, I’m jealous of it. I now really want to go to Munich!

PHOTO: FANTOMAS.DE.

Actress Birgit Minichmayr’s spacious room was designed to be reminiscent of a historic French movie set.

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Image: The Armory Show 2015 Commissioned Artist, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Tape Echo (detail), 2013-2014.

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Snøhetta interprets the Norse tale of Yme for a new concept shop in Oslo.

BY HALLY WOLHANDLER

A view of Yme Universe through an 82-foot-long pine sculpture located at the main entrance. (OPPOSITE, TOP TO BOTTOM) The first floor of the store. The staircase leading up to the third floor.

Norwegian design firm Snøhetta has built its gets warmer.” Other materials that reflect the name since the late ’80s by bringing a singular icy world of Yme’s beginnings include crude touch to its forward-thinking, norm-defying concretes, white varnish on wood floors, mirarchitecture and design projects, whether a rors, glass, and neutral lighting. On the second group of positive energy houses or a plan for a floor, a wood floor is laid as a gradient: Set in library with a robotic book delivery system. The a natural finish at the second-floor entrance (it inspiration for one of the firm’s latest projects, is accessible through Paleet, the mall where the though, a new concept store in Oslo designed store is based), it darkens to black by the time around an ancient Norse myth, is rooted in the the floor reaches the staircase to the first floor.

Perhaps the most literal—and central—interpast, not the future.

Yme Universe, the new store, is located in a pretation of this myth is a large wooden wall historic building that now houses a number of representing what Ginnungagap looked like. retail offerings. Inspired by stores like Paris’s A sculptural piece Snøhetta designed of carved, Colette, Milan’s 10 Corso Como, and London’s 3D-milled pine that is set at the ground floor original Dover Street Market, Yme comprises entrance of the store, “it’s a quite prominent more than just high-end clothes, accessories, feature, and something that people always want and home furnishings. It also has an art gal- to touch,” Jaucis says. “It’s got this undulating lery, located in a space formerly taken up by surface.” The pine was digitally produced to a back staircase. “We replaced it with this sim- be purposefully choppy rather than smooth, plistic, crude steel staircase and used the area to making its origins unclear. “A lot of people display large-scale pieces of art,” says Rikard come in and don’t understand quite how it’s Jaucis, a designer for Snøhetta who worked on made—they think it’s hand carved, because it the project. “You can take the staircase out onto looks like it is, which is kind of interesting,” he this bridge, where there’s a landing for viewing says. It’s a fitting entrance for a store that aims the pieces.” On display at the moment is “The to draw shoppers into a mythical universe unlike Welfare Show” (2006), a piece by Norwegian- anything they’ve seen or experienced before.

Danish art duo Elmgreen and Dragset, but the works on view will frequently change. A café and a roof garden are in the works.

The store’s owners wanted the design of the space to take its inspiration from the Norse god Yme. As his story goes, he was created out of fire and ice and then killed by the gods Odin, Vilje, and Ve, who created the universe out of his body parts. “His bones became mountains and his blood became the sea,” Jaucis says. “That was basically our starting point. From there, we tried to interpret certain things and implement them in the bigger design idea.”

Since Yme was said to have lived in the icy swamp of Ginnungagap before his demise, Jaucis and other members of the Snøhetta team made the ground floor into “a kind of an interpretation of this cold icy climate from that part of the story,” Jaucis says. “Moving further up to the first and the second floor, the space progressively SURFACE

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PHOTOS: COURTESY SNOHETTA & KETIL JACOBSEN.

Icy Hot

RETAIL

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PHOTOS: COURTESY SNOHETTA & KETIL JACOBSEN.

RETAIL

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Empire State of Mind

TRANSPORT

Moving from Detroit to New York City, Cadillac’s business team gets a creative and cultural boost.

BY JONATHAN SCHULTZ PORTRAIT BY UNGANO & AGRIODIMAS

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PHOTOS: COURTESY CADILLAC.

Uwe Ellinghaus outside the company’s new lower Manhattan headquarters.

(OPPOSITE, TOP TO BOTTOM) The 2016 Cadillac ATS-V Coupe has an enlarged mesh pattern on the grille’s opening to allow more air intake. The 2016 CTS-V features a paddle-shift eight-speed automatic transmission.

“New York remains the American city that all proportions, where the more time you spend others are measured by,” Cadillac marketing with it, the more your eye catches,” Smith chief Uwe Ellinghaus says with a crisp German says—has also been slow to reach consumers.

Cadillac’s brand stewards know this, but are accent. “It is a master of reinvention.”

Ellinghaus is discussing the Big Apple in loath to discount or “de-content” vehicles— light of his employer’s decision to move its common practices among mainstream manuDetroit-based sales and marketing team to facturers—to close the gap. “In luxury, you Lower Manhattan. Set for completion in the cannot buy consideration,” says Ellinghaus, second quarter of 2015, the relocated office defending the decision not to slash prices. A will put Cadillac executives in a glass-encased 15-year veteran of BMW Group, Ellinghaus Soho aerie with 360-degree views—a world worked briefly as head of marketing for Montremoved from the historically hidebound cul- blanc before joining Cadillac in 2013.

New York is Cadillac’s base for honing a new ture of General Motors, the company’s parent.

Harnessing the qi of Manhattan to create glob- message, the substance of which is still under ally resonant brand messages falls to Ellinghaus tight wraps. “Don’t expect Elvis,” Ellinghaus and his team. “We thought, ‘If we really want says. “We don’t want to be everyone’s darling. to go global, isn’t New York the most natural But I believe there is a ‘Cool Americana’ out place in the world to plan that from?’” he says. there, and I want to penetrate it.”

Implicitly, Cadillac leadership trusts that The irony of Cadillac “going global” runs thick, as the carmaker’s tagline in its Atomic New York—with its freakish capacity to spark Age heyday was “The Standard of the World.” brainwaves, to weave disparate strands of elecToday, German and Asian brands have long tric ideas into metaphorical lightning bolts— since eroded Cadillac’s market and mind-share. will be the catalyst for progress. “I was at “We’re not in the consideration set of high- dinner in Brooklyn, at the River Café, a couple earning, highly educated consumers,” Elling- months ago,” Smith says. “It was raining, and haus says flatly. To get back there, Cadillac has everything was glowing. The lights hanging begun to regard itself a creator of “whisper” outside, the city across the water; it looked like products, an atelier trafficking in curiosity and a staged photo shoot.”

His companions at that venerable establishdesire. “Why do you drive a Cadillac? You need to be in the know,” says Andrew Smith, ment, perched in the shadow of the Brooklyn global head of exterior design. “When our Bridge? “Three or four other designers, just vehicles arrive, we want people to turn their sitting around talking about the city, fashion, luxury, design …” More than just a New York heads and wonder what it is.”

What Cadillacs have quietly become in the moment, it was no doubt a foreshadowing past decade are drivers’ cars, with on-road of the culture the Cadillac team hopes its big dynamics matching or surpassing those of their move will create. peers. Yet that message, echoed throughout the American motoring press, cannot sell so-called luxury on its own. The company’s emphasis on design—“I want Cadillac to live on fantastic

TRANSPORT

PHOTOS: COURTESY CADILLAC.

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Mondaine celebrates one of the world’s most ubiquitous typefaces with its latest collection.

BY KEITH W. STRANDBERG

Mondaine’s Helvetica No. 1 Light 38 mm, featuring a black face and stainless steel– brushed IP gold-plated case.

Nearly 30 years ago, Swiss watch brand Mondaine introduced the SBB Swiss Railways watch, recreating the design of the Swiss railway clocks and downsizing it into a timepiece.

Immediately embraced by watch lovers and art and design buffs for its clean aesthetic, the timepiece has since become an icon: London’s Design Museum and New York’s Museum of Modern Art have cited the clock—and, by extension, the watch—as an exemplar of 20thcentury design.

Last year, Mondaine endeavored to create a similarly memorable Swiss timepiece. Andre Bernheim, the CEO of Mondaine—and one of the owners of the brand, along with his brother Ronnie—assembled a blue-ribbon panel of Swiss professionals to help the company uncover a design that was quintessentially Swiss and that would stand the test of time.

After much discussion and back and forth, Mondaine followed the panel’s recommendation and developed a watch based on the Helvetica font. Introduced in 1957, Helvetica was created at the Haas Type Foundry near Basel, Switzerland. Originally named Neue Haas Grotesk, Helvetica—Latin for “Swiss”— was designed to be simple, discreet, and neutral.

In his book on fonts, Just My Type (Gotham), Simon Garfield writes that Helvetica “is a font

of such practicality—and, its adherents would suggest, such beauty—that it is both ubiquitous and something of a cult.”

“The designer of the font was actually its sales person, so he knew what the market wanted and what the graphic designers needed,” says Indra Kupferschmid, a professor at the University of the Arts Saarbrücken in Germany and an expert in typography. “The initial popularity of the font was due to the excellent marketing they did, getting all the important designers to use it, and they developed a lot of helpful tools to make it easier to work with Helvetica. It was a time when designers specified the font and the printers had to buy it. Helvetica has seen such a resurgence lately.

It’s really considered a hot font. Apple, for example, uses Helvetica extensively.”

Today, Helvetica is found just about everywhere. In 2007, filmmaker Gary Hustwit showcased its ubiquity in his documentary Helvetica, produced in collaboration with the late designer Massimo Vignelli. Vignelli, among many other things, was known for his frequent use and love of the typeface. Three years later, New York type designer Cyrus Highsmith tried to live a day without Helvetica, which proved to be a real challenge—he had to search long and hard for clothing without Helvetica SURFACE

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PHOTOS: LAUDERT GMBH + CO. KG.

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but it didn’t work. What did work out well was the number 1.”

The new Helvetica collection from Mondaine features three different versions: Light (26 and 38 mm), Regular (33 and 40 mm), and Bold (43 mm). There will be 15 models in the initial launch, including a choice of brushed, polished, PVD gold, or black plated-steel cases. For straps, customers can choose between leather, nylon, and Milanese mesh. “Helvetica gives us the chance to do watches for all sorts of people,” Bernheim says. “A font has light, regular, and bold. We can do thinner, lighter-looking, minimalized watches, and we can do regular for the broader population, and the bold, which gives us the opportunity to go into stronger statement watches. We can do variations of dials, plating, colors, and expressions.” Now that Mondaine has two Swiss icons in its portfolio, the brothers Bernheim are looking forward to seeing where Helvetica takes them.

Mondaine’s Helvetica No. 1 Bold 43 mm, with a white face and stainless steel brushed case.

PHOTOS: LAUDERT GMBH + CO. KG.

washing instructions on the labels, couldn’t take the subway, nor could he read The New York Times. Being so well-known and recognized made designing a watch with the font that much more daunting. “Once we decided on Helvetica, it was a real challenge to develop it,” Andre Bernheim says. “We use fonts, but we don’t live fonts like typographers and font people. We had to really dig into typography, so we talked with a lot of people—professors, writers, typographers, designers—to see what the font really means, what it stands for.

“Then we had to look for the right designer, someone who could translate the font into a watch, to get the spirit of a font which has been around for 57 years,” he adds. “The watch had to be modern, like the font still is today.

When we show the watches to people who are trained in graphic arts and design, they recognize Helvetica. They see the number 1 instantly.

When we show it to the normal consumer, we have to explain it much more, then they see it.”

The watch, which was designed by Martin Drechsel, incorporates the number 1 into the lugs, where the strap fits into the case. “The first idea and the most iconic letter was the lowercase ‘a,’ with the teardrop in the center of the ‘a,’ but it didn’t look great on the watch,” Bernheim says. “The number 7 is very typically Helvetica, so we tried that in a number of ways

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Canada-based brand 7mesh offers welcome outfitting solutions for extreme cyclists.

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

BY GRAHAM HIEMSTRA

A women’s 7mesh Resistance jacket .

Cyclists are often forced to choose between quick to remind that this is a new chapter for all aesthetics and performance when it comes to involved—one that will, with any luck, achieve sportswear. Rarely are the two found in a single a similar level of success in an entirely new space. item. Admittedly, brands like Rapha and Giro “We’re trying not to overplay the story too much,” do well to push design ahead without skimping Jordan says, “but it certainly validates what we’re on function, offering genuinely attractive apparel trying to do. We want to stand on our own two for urban cyclists. Their approaches to outerwear, feet and not rely on what we did in the past to however, tend to end at protecting against a light drive our future.” drizzle or accommodating for rides that ultimately This independent, clean-slate sentiment is end at home. So what exists for those enthusiasts echoed by Nachtigall, who is again in a familwho aren’t hampered by inclement weather, who iar position as lead designer—which extends, as pitch a tent at the end of their day, or who wear things tend to in start-up environments, to R&D, their gear for more than just the morning ride branding, and a little of everything else. While to the cafe? The answer might have been moot many other players in the technical soft-goods until now. 7mesh, a new cycling-specific technical space are quick to hump the trend of accentuating soft-goods company that’s set to deliver its first functional details like beefy coated zippers and line this month, could have the answer. outwardly taped seams, Nachtigall is slower to The British Columbia–based brand was jump on the bandwagon. founded by a modest team of industry veterans.

“A lot of people entering the game are really Chief among them are Tyler Jordan and Conroy pumping them up as a way to kind of be legitiNachtigall, former CEO and a design director at mate, and since that’s something that in many Arcteryx, respectively. Combined, the two spent cases we’ve invented, we don’t need to use that 28 years with Arcteryx, pushing it to a leading as a way to say ‘Hey, look how good we are,’” position in the industry; they were responsible Nachtigall says. “We want to make stuff that for launching the venerable Veilance division, people actually go out and use. So in many ways, which bridges the outdoor and urban markets I kind of try to dial back a lot of the functional with hyper-minimal technical apparel. Though visual cues and try to blend them in and just have it’s fun to reminisce, the entire 7mesh team is a nicely rounded product that does everything it’s SURFACE

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PHOTOS: COURTESY BRIAN GOLDSTONE.

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Though the seven-person team may not have the near-endless resources or wide-open audience they once did, the overall feeling among the tight-knit group is one of optimism and opportunity. “If you’re gonna start a business, you can do anything you want,” Jordan says. “It’s very much a creative blank slate where we’re free to get things right, and free to get things wrong.” It’s this freedom, combined with a collective passion for good design and enjoyment of the outdoors, that is driving 7mesh forward.

JOSH RUBIN’S TAKE ON 7MESH: Over the years there have been many brands, and the people behind them, that we’ve gotten to know pretty well at Cool Hunting. Watching their next moves is always exciting. It’s admirable that Tyler and Conroy stand on their own— independent of their Arcteryx background. But knowing what they’ve done, especially with the creation of Veilance, I’m sure they’ll take 7mesh far on their own merit.

The 7mesh team selecting colors for the brand’s F15 line at its office in Squamish, British Columbia.

PHOTOS: COURTESY BRIAN GOLDSTONE.

supposed to, but doesn’t look like it has a function—that the function is just kind of a built-in part of the jacket, let’s say.”

The brand’s first product, the Revelation jacket, falls firmly in line with the aforementioned approach. Its pockets are hidden along tight lines, all fabric joints are seam taped, and zippers are fully waterproof, though not conspicuously so.

The cut is equally considered, with longer sleeves and a slight tail to accommodate an aggressive riding position. Designed from removable hood to hem with a fast and light alpine-style approach in mind, all excess material is reduced or eliminated, making the Revelation an ideal companion for extended road-riding expeditions and backcountry biking. The jacket, which uses the Gore-Tex Pro fabric, offers “maximum protection,” Jordan says, and is engineered purely for cycling, though versatile enough to accommodate a range of conditions and activities.

As one might imagine, 7mesh’s target customer is on the more hardcore-athlete side of the spectrum, though they aren’t explicitly going after the professional-level racing market. Jordan and the team are instead more interested in outfitting dedicated enthusiasts who want attractive, functional gear that works for a range of segments within the cycling market. Their designs don’t discriminate; all disciplines are welcome. “In many ways, we just really try to respect people for what they do and provide them with equipment to do it,” Nachtigall says. “That’s really the approach that, as a group, we’ve always had, whether it was in the past or is with a future project.”

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A rare sculpture by 20thcentury Italian-American artist Harry Bertoia enters the market.

BY HALLY WOLHANDLER

Harry Bertoia, Untitled (1961), made of steel music wire, brass, and bronze.

Sculptures by De Wain Valentine and George ’50s he also developed a style of constructing Rickey, a painting by George Condo, and two very thin wires to create pieces with unusual Roy Lichtenstein lithographs are among the dimension. The 1961 untitled piece about to items going up for bid at a March 1 auction go to auction is an early example of such work. at Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA). “This is probably the most spectacular work Perhaps the most standout piece, though, is from that period,” Loughrey says. “Certainly a 1961 metallic sculpture by the Italian-born the most spectacular in private hands.”

American artist Harry Bertoia.

Loughrey has estimated the piece will bring Peter Loughrey, a specialist and director of between $250,000 and $350,00. A sculpture LAMA, learned about the piece from another of similar scale that came up at a Phillips client, who knew the sculpture’s owner, a auction in New York a year ago sold for a 90-year-old woman who had bought it in 1960 little more than $500,000. “I’ve always felt from Staempfli Gallery, which represented that it’s important to let the market decide how Bertoia at the time. She wanted to display it much these pieces are worth,” he says. “But I at her Richard Neutra–designed Connecticut think it’s likely that the market will react very home, which the family had commissioned strongly to this piece.” in 1959. “It was perfect for their living room,” That the work is untitled is typical of Bertoia.

Loughrey says. “So they acquired it, and it’s “He rarely titled works, and he never signed been sitting in the exact same place ever since.” them,” Loughrey says. “He and many of his Bertoia was a prolific sculptor, graphic artist, contemporaries really wanted to force you to painter, metalsmith, and designer—an unusual concentrate on the visual form and not come figure of American modernism unrivaled in up with titles that would ask the viewer to think range. A contemporary and friend of the likes of a different context.” He adds, “[Bertoia] was of Charles and Ray Eames and Florence Knoll, a very quiet, personal artist. He didn’t have a he produced designs in the ’40s for the furniture giant ego, and he didn’t really put himself out companies of both the former and the latter, there as a personality.” The work, like the man creating pieces like Knoll’s 1952 wire-lattice who created it, exudes a subtle power.

Diamond chair. In the latter part of the decade, he started over as a sculptor, focusing on the kind metalwork he practiced as a designer. The 1950s saw a number of commissions—the first from Eero Saarinen—for his architectural yet naturalistic pieces.

Though as a sculptor he is well-known for his “sounding sculptures,” which make noise in the wind when touched or struck, in the late SURFACE

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On Dec. 4 at the Soho Beach House in Miami, longtime friends and fellow artists Michael Chow and Julian Schnabel joined Surface editor-in-chief Spencer Bailey for an intimate conversation.

Lounging beachside on the club’s rooftop, friends, collectors, and other art and design influencers listened in as the two artists exchanged ideas. Chow and Schnabel discussed truth in art, their creative processes, and the value of disregarding utility.

“What we’re trying to do as artists is to ascend to a higher spiritual level,” said Chow, who’s featured on the magazine’s Dec./Jan. issue cover. “And every time you paint there is a chance of that.” (Photos: Getty Images)

Design Dialogues No. 13

Design Dialogues No. 13

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ART

With several recent, upcoming, and in-the-works shows, artist Alex Da Corte continues to rise.

BY MARINA CASHDAN PHOTOS BY COLIN M. LENTON

Alex Da Corte at his studio in Philadelphia.

(OPPOSITE) Materials and projects from the artist’s studio.

Thirty-four-year-old Alex Da Corte grew up & Dayan gallery’s New York location in a townbetween two extremes. Born in Camden, New house on Manhattan’s Upper East Side (from Feb. Jersey, the artist moved to Venezuela, where he 26 through April 11). There, the artist will recrelived until the age of 8, then later studied at the ate his grandmother’s home as a dollhouse. Da University of the Arts in Philadelphia. “I think Corte’s grandparents were dollhouse makers, and [this] made me quite sensitive to space, and how “they spent much of their time sourcing furniture different places can affect one’s psyche,” Da Corte and making miniatures for their small homes,” says. “The climate of different cultures and the he says. “In the spirit of them, I will borrow and memories of the houses I lived in have always make works, including other artists’ works, and haunted my work.” The artist has since remained fold them into this strange home.” in Philadelphia, where he has an airy studio in a Da Corte will create a similarly immersive former candy factory in the city’s northeast end. experience at Milan’s Gio Marconi gallery later in Over the past year—with shows at White the year, titled “Devil Town” (on view from April Cube, David Risley, Karl Kostyal, and most through May). For this show, he will explore “the recently a video commission co-created with fences of the suburbs and which side the devils are New York–based artist Jayson Musson at the on,” he says. Asked whether the artist intentioncity’s Institute of Contemporary Art—Da Corte’s ally or subconsciously explores dark or discomwork has become much talked about among cura- fiting themes in his work, he says: “My work tors and collectors. With his visually impactful, considers the entirety of the map, and there are often dark “object studies”—a term the artist parts that we would rather hide, which I choose prefers to “sculpture,” “installation,” “painting,” to expose and upend so as to better understand or “video”— Da Corte assembles his pieces them—even if they are unsettling psychological from everyday items purchased at dollar stores avenues.” Following his show at Gio Marconi, Da and supermarkets, such as Swiffers, shampoo, Corte will turn his focus to a forthcoming MASS stuffed animals, and acrylic fingernails. His art MoCA solo exhibition, set to open in March 2016. comes from things that typically play on themes like American culture, consumption, death, psychology, and personal history. His references span a wide variety, from Walt Disney and Jim Henson to forbearers Paul McCarthy and Claes Oldenburg.

This month, Da Corte opens “Die Hexe” (German for “witch,” or, as it translates more specifically, “death of symbols”) at Luxembourg SURFACE

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Books Michelangelo Pistoletto is a defining figure of Italy’s Arte Povera, a radical movement that, in the artist’s words, “reassessed the ideas that the achievements of capitalistic-industrial progress have no limits.” The Voice of

Pistoletto (Rizzoli Ex Libris) collects a series of interviews Alain Elkann conducted with the 82-year-old artist over a several-month period in 2012. The result is an unprecedented, firsthand account of Pistoletto’s childhood upbringing, adulthood, and career highs. Photographs are interspersed throughout the text, which includes frank and insightful musings on spirituality, his creative practice, formative historic moments, influential peers, and more.

Best known for smithing recyclable, inexpensive materials like paper tubes and plastic beer cartons into sophisticated, sustainable building designs, Pritzker Prize–winning architect Shigeru Ban has worked across a spectrum of contexts, from high-end luxury residential and cultural projects, to disaster-relief structures in the service of society. Humanitarian Architecture (Phaidon) collects a survey of the latter, including structures such as the

Paper Log House and Paper Partition System, for which various iterations have been constructed since 1995 and 1999, respectively; the Container Temporary Housing in Miyagi, Japan (2011); and the Cardboard Cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand (2013). Also included are texts by Michael Kimmelman, Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, and Brad Pitt.

Authored by collector-curator Murray Moss, Georg Jensen: Reflections (Rizzoli) commemorates the 110th anniversary of the Danish silvermaker. Jensen’s legacy for sculptural, sensuous forms and world-class craftsmanship has passed through generations, and the brand has since expanded to include jewelry, watches, and home and office wares in a range of precious metals. The handsome clothbound tome contains newly commissioned photographs, archival images, and essays by Moss and designer Marc Newson.

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PHOTO: LESLEY UNRUH.

For 30 years, driven by a passion for theater, David Rockwell has honed a craft of storytelling across architecture, interiors, set design, and beyond for a broad range of clients. His latest monograph, What If…? (Metropolis Books) frames his inquiry-driven process through imaginative questions that have been central to the development of 35 projects, including JetBlue’s terminal at JFK, stage designs for Broadway production Kinky Boots, and Shinola’s New York flagship.

“I think ‘What if…?’ as a proposition is the ultimate statement of optimism,” Rockwell writes. “To the extent that we can create possibility for our clients and for ourselves, it frees us from a rigid dogma or methodology.”

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Design Dialogues No. 14

Design Dialogues No. 14 Young creative leaders gathered at the Miami Beach Edition hotel on Dec. 4 to hear emerging British pop star FKA Twigs and L.A.-based artist Alex Israel discuss with curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist creative influences, as well as the importance of fearlessness in popular art and culture. The event was attended by notables including Klaus Biesenbach, Gavin Brown, China Chow, Jeffrey Deitch, Dev Hynes (Blood Orange), Kesh, Bettina Korek, Robert Pattinson, John Pawson, Julia Peyton-Jones, Almine Rech-Picasso, and Norman and Norah Stone, among others.

(Photos: Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images for Surface) 57

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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 LESLEY UNRUH

There are few material brands that boast name pressed ensures a secure seal. “Press-Lok is recognition as instant as Velcro’s—and even a unique solution in the industry because it fewer that can be identified by the sound they offers easy alignment that allows consumers make. The company’s signature textile fastener to fasten without precise line-up,” says Lenny relies on a “hook-and-loop” system, conceived Swart, strategic business unit manager packagin the 1940s by inventor George de Mestral ing for Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. This when he observed burrs catching on his cloth- feature translates to ease of use—no special ing and his dog’s fur. More than 60 years later, dexterity required. the company is still innovating, most recently Another similiarity Press-Lok shares with its with the release of Press-Lok, which produces Velcro forebears: sound. As the hooks fasten, a resealable fastener. they produce an audible cue. “Consumers can Unlike Velcro’s textile fasteners, Press-Lok be assured the package is closed by both touch is made entirely of plastic. Textile fasteners and sound,” Swart says.

Press-Lok has been incorporated into bags have acquired a multitude of uses over the decades, from clothing to military and medi- and pouch-style packaging for edible goods cal gear, but evolving needs have created new such as frozen fruit, rice, and sugar (“the clodemands. “The packaging industry basically sure performs extremely well with fine partold us that older hook-and-loop options ticulates and powders,” Swart says), as well would not meet all their needs,” says Chris as pet food and gardening supplies. Aside Lerra, senior business development manager from day-to-day use, Press-Lok’s benefits of packaging. “We evolved a textile-based fas- also reach beyond with a positive environtener into an all-plastic option in order to meet mental impact. “Because the closure is easy to industry requirements, and various food-safety use, it increases the likelihood that consumstandards.” ers will actually use the closure and keep the The solution wasn’t an exact replica in plastic, product fresh and in usable condition,” Lerra however. Press-Lok’s functionality is based on says. “This not only helps consumers minia slightly different mechanism: hook-to-hook. mize food waste, it also eliminates the need to Made of polyethylene resin, the fastener fea- repack the product into a separate plastic bag tures tiny microhooks that are “self-mating,” or container.” It’s possible that one day, Presswhich means that hooks on either side attach Lok will be as ubiquitous as the company’s to each other easily. One major advantage to namesake application. this system is that it doesn’t require perfect positioning, as a zipper does, for example. The hooks’ ability to fit together exactly when SURFACE

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Design Dialogues No. 14 (Cont.)

Design Dialogues No. 14 (Cont.)

Before and after the discussion at Design Dialogues No. 14, attendees viewed a four-day exhibition from Pratt Institute, curated by Peter Patchen, featuring digital artwork by Pratt students and recent graduates. The work was displayed on LG Electronics USA’s Ultra HD 4K and OLED TVs. Select pieces in the show were created for the LG’s 2014 “The Art of the Pixel” competition in which students from nine of the country’s top art schools were challenged to create cutting-edge digital artwork. Another of the event’s sponsors, Corzo Tequila, presented an art installation by New York–based designer and Pratt alumnus Alvaro Uribe (above), who took inspiration from architect Luis Barragán. (Photos: Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images for Surface) 59

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Shine and Dine

SURVEY

Lustrous cutting stations, storage setups, and cooking surfaces make up these top new kitchen designs.

BY AILEEN KWUN

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Premiering this year, Snaidero’s Code Evolution, designed by Michele Marcon, combines Oak Beton and Oslo Oak melamine to create an effect of cement and reclaimed wood that feels both industrial and rustic. snaidero-usa.com SURFACE

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Danish designer Mette Schelde deconstructs the kitchen into three components—cutting station, stove, and sink—with her prototype Et Køkken. Inspired by communal firepits, it’s made of oak, steel, and terrazzo.

Material surfaces of the Filolain kitchen by Euromobil are made with eco-friendly, nontoxic, water-based coatings. Side-partition shelving with yellow color accents give it a sleek and subtle punch.

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Stainless steel, Corian, and lacquered doors make up Poliform’s modular Phoenix kitchen. A wood countertop and interior shelving accents bring warmth to its streamlined, monochrome appearance. poliformusa.com SURFACE

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Porcelanosa’s Emotions kitchen collection pairs natural wood and lacquered, fingerprint-resistant laminates in 64 available finishes. Its doors are also cut with laser technology for seamless edges.

Heat-treated oak veneer cabinets, a stately table counter, and a white matte-lacquered island comprise GD Cucine’s Elite kitchen.

Large-capacity base cabinets make for ideal storage.

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Poggenpohl’s P7350 kitchen by Porsche Design Studio is marked with high-precision manufacturing techniques, including vertical brushed-aluminum trims that emphasize its elongated proportions. poggenpohl.com 65

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Dada’s classic Vela kitchen, newly updated with improved handles and mechanisms by Dante Bonuccelli, implements continuous white panels and slim doors measuring just 13 mm thick. dada_kitchens.com SURFACE

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Thick melamine-coated panels and upward folding doors make up Boffi’s On/Off ST suite, designed by Alberto Colonello. Powered by electronic controls, the discreet units open up to reveal worktop stations. boffi.com SURFACE

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Designed by Studio Marconato & Zappa, the Alumina kitchen for Comprex Cucine features finish-brushed aluminum honeycomb panels, available in a luscious palette of nickel, bronze, copper, and iron sand. comprex.it SURFACE

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Made of natural quartz, the Calacatta Nuvo

by Caesarstone presents a lush interpretation of Calacatta marble. Part of the Classico collection, the stone brings a stately elegance to the kitchen space. caesarstoneus.com SURFACE

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2014 Avant Guardian in Miami

2014 Avant Guardian in Miami Surface celebrated the winners of our 2014 Avant Guardian photography contest during Art Basel Miami Beach with a week-long exhibition of their works in the lobby bar at the Mondrian South Beach hotel.

(The event followed a showing of the exhibition at Neuehouse in New York in October and November.)

Guests enjoyed a reception on Dec. 5 with handcrafted cocktails by Mount Gay Rum. Among the attendees was Ernesto Roman (pictured, left center), one of this year’s winners and one of Mount Gay Rum’s “Original Spirits.” Special thanks to Offset, Splashlight, Mount Gay Rum, and Mondrian South Beach. The 2015 Avant Guardian competition launches soon on surfacemag.com. (Photos: Tomas Loewy)

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Scavolini’s Motus wall system can be customized with varying configurations. A free-standing island doubles as a table and features a solid-oak top alongside cabinet drawers and pull-out baskets. scavolini.us SURFACE

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Design Dialogues No. 15

PHOTOS: AMY MAISEL FOR JILLPHOTOGRAPHY.COM.

Design Dialogues No. 15 with 1stdibs On Dec. 10, in a raw space next to the Manhattan office of 1stdibs, Roman and Williams Buildings and Interiors founders Stephen Alesch and Robin Standefer joined Barneys New York creative director Dennis Freedman in conversation for the 15th edition of our Design Dialogues series, moderated by editor-in-chief Spencer Bailey. They discussed everything from the definition of “vintage,” to what they look for when collecting furniture pieces and objects, to the poetry inherent in quality design.

“Objects, to me, are sort of like people,” Standefer said. “They have characters and they tell a story.”

Special thanks to 1stdibs, Corzo, and Evian.

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Designed by Spanish studio MUT Design, the Float collection for Miras Editions consists of five furniture pieces for the kitchen: an island, a cupboard, a glass cabinet, a serving cart, and a room divider. miraseditions.com SURFACE

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SUBSCRIBE COMING IN MARCH: THE SPRING FASHION ISSUE FEATURING ROSITA MISSONI, JOSEPH ALTUZARRA, VIRGIL ABLOH, AND MORE.

Get a one-year subscription (10 issues) for only $60 via surfacemag.com or purchase the digital edition of Surface, available on the Apple App Store.

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ENDORSEMENT

Siddharth Kasliwal designs a contemporary collection for the company launched by his ancestors 163 years ago.

BY TIFFANY JOW PORTRAIT BY ANDREW MUSSON

prominently. Siddharth’s singular point of view also shines through: He has a penchant for pavéset diamonds and unconventional stone shapes, like cabochons and briolettes—all atypical of Indian jewelry conventions. The baubles can only be purchased by making an appointment with the designer himself.

Though the project was unveiled last October, the final piece wasn’t complete until this year.

Notoriously time-consuming with a high failure rate, plique-à-jour demands dogged determination. Designers create a weblike metal frame of strategically shaped cells, which are individually filled with a thin layer of liquid enamel. The piece is fired, and the process is repeated until the cells are full. Siddharth’s craftsmen toiled over the series for nearly a year; some worked on a single piece at a time. “One needs to be very careful to give it the right amount of heat,” he says. “Otherwise it breaks and you have to start all over.”

Unlike his father, who constantly sketched his ideas, Siddharth begins by repositioning gemstones on a tabletop until they form the requisite arrangement. For his first collection, he took pictures from his travels, many of architecture, to help articulate his vision to his craftsmen, and sourced the raw materials for each object. “I saw each one at least 60 times during every phase of the making process,” Siddharth says. “It’s not like sending in a rendering and seeing what comes out—I’m involved at every stage.”

Born in Jaipur, Siddharth has been immersed in the family business for as long as he can remember. “I didn’t have a normal childhood,” he says. “Most kids play with Legos. I grew up playing with gemstones my father had scattered around the house.” One summer, while home from boarding school, Siddharth spent three months helping his father prepare an exclusive collection to be sold at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Munnu The Gem Palace has since created three others for the institution.)

“That’s when I really started to understand the art of the craft,” he says. “It was hard not to be passionate about something my father was so passionate about.” By the time he finished college, Siddharth couldn’t think of an occupation he’d rather pursue.

Siddharth spends his time between New York and India. In his studio (formerly his father’s), he sits flanked by the stone workshop and goldsmiths and stone-setters, all of whom ask for his input constantly. “Many have been working for the Gem Palace for generations,” Siddharth says of his team. “Each of them is so proud of the fact that their father worked for the company.”

PHOTO: COURTESY MUNNU THE GEM PALACE.

Rose-cut and round-cut diamond Flower wide bangle. (OPPOSITE) Siddharth Kasliwal in his company’s studio on New York’s Upper East Side.

When Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II established Jaipur in 1727, he wanted to build an economic powerhouse. The founding ruler encouraged artisans to settle there, producing a flourishing commercial capital in medieval India. Among the creative practitioners invited were a family of stone dealers, the Kasliwals, whose descendants founded the Gem Palace in 1852. Originally court jewelers to the Mughal emperors and Indian royalty, the company remains the country’s preeminent jewelry house, known for its lavish, sui generis accessories and first-rate craftsmanship.

Today, the Gem Palace, still owned by the Kasliwal family, is an international jewelry destination in Jaipur. Since 2012, 30-year-old Siddharth Kasliwal has run its offshoot jewelry collection, Munnu The Gem Palace. His father, Munnu Kasliwal, who began the Munnu line, passed away that year. As a designer for Gem Palace, Munnu had an epic following—one that prompted him to start his own editions, largely so that devotees would know which pieces were designed solely by him—and he was responsible for introducing the jewels of Jaipur’s Gem Palace to the West. Near the end of his life, he experimented with plique-à-jour, an exacting technique developed during the Byzantine Empire that yields an alluring stained-glass effect.

“I remember a conversation where he said he wanted to do a plique-à-jour collection that was ‘Indian contemporary chic,’” Siddharth says. “I thought, ‘Why not start where my father left off, as an homage to him?’

Marking his design debut, Siddharth’s recently released seven-piece collection for Munnu The Gem Palace is a delicate, handsomely detailed assemblage of plique-à-jour, 18-karat yellow gold, and precious jewels. Lotus flowers and moonstones, both favored by Munnu, feature

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PHOTO: COURTESY MUNNU THE GEM PALACE.

Family Jewels

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Natural Habitats Distinctive fabrics and fine details elevate utilitarian forms in men’s workwear.

Neutral palettes bring artful subtlety to a preview of women’s spring looks.

Oscar de la Renta’s final collection features luscious gowns in spirited shapes.

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Since founding New York City–based gallery, showroom, and manufacturer Matter in 2003, Jamie Gray has carved an inimitable, distinctive niche for elevated, artful furniture, product, and lighting pieces by contemporary independent designers. In addition to producing and creatively directing his own in-house line, Matter-Made, Gray represents a roster of some of today’s best rising and international talents, including Bec Brittain, Hallgeir Homstvedt, and Bashko Trybek, among many others. From the company’s showroom in Manhattan and studio offices in Gowanus, Brooklyn—the latter of which appears on the following pages—Gray and his team are gearing up for this year’s New York Design Week in May. Among the number of projects they plan to debut are several Matter-Made lighting collections, as well as pieces by Philippe Malouin, Ana Kraš, and Henry Julier. Gray is also currently consulting on the satellite exhibition “Disruptive Design” (showing at Spring Studios during Design Week), at which he’ll also be exhibiting several more of Matter’s pieces.

—Aileen Kwun

PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRADFORD GREGORY STYLING BY JUSTIN MIN

MATTER

OF

HEART

FASHION

For our men’s and women’s fashion stories on the pages that follow, Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of the Museum at FIT, shares her thoughts on new pieces from leading designers.

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JACKET, MARNI. T-SHIRT, UNIQLO. HAT, JAMIE’S OWN.

Steele: “People who love Marni really are Marni-fanatics! Marni creative director Consuelo Castiglioni’s things are always a little bit quirky, whether it’s the color or the exact proportion of it, but it’s always wearable: It doesn’t try too hard. That T-shirt cuff is really a weird, amazing hybrid. I feel it’s really about the watch; it’s just made to frame or show something. It’s straight back to Beau Brummel!”

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SHIRT, NATURAL SELECTION. PANTS, HERMÈS. OPPOSITE: SHOES, TIM COPPENS FOR COMMON PROJECT.

Steele: “This is the anti-suit. You’re not wearing a suit: It’s just the work shirt, the pants, the sneakers‚. What could possibly be more dressed down? And yet, here, the look is elevated: It’s as if the workers have been valorized. It’s kind of perfectly anti–whitecollar, and suggests you’re a creative worker.”

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SUIT AND SHIRT, PAUL SMITH.

Steele: “The stretch satin siding is very nice. Everyone seems to be wanting sporty looks—I suppose, in a way, that’s one direction the suit’s going to go. I hope it’s not the only one, but I definitely see this being a trend that’s going to continue. I like the two fabric contrasts, because it’s subtle and gives a bit of stretch—an interesting way to make the suit jacket more flexible, and less like a suit. It’s a flattering look.”

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JACKET AND SHIRT, HERMÈS. OPPOSITE: POLO SHIRT, VALENTINO. HAT AND JEANS, JAMIE’S OWN. FOLLOWING SPREAD: CARDIGAN, PANTS, AND SANDALS, BURBERRY PRORSUM.

Steele: “The jacket is a variant on utilitarian workwear. It’s sort of like if Carhartt went way, way upscale. It’s a great look! Workwear is time-tested, comfortable, and in its own way, perfectly refined. The polo goes back to that surreal concept of luxury that says: ‘We’ll have simple clothes, but only in most perfect versions you could possibly have.’ ” SURFACE

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Feature subject: Jamie Gray, founder and creative director of Matter.

Grooming: Location: Matter’s Sierra Min studio usinginOribe Gowanus, and Nars.

Brooklyn.

Model: Fashion Dan Murphy, assistant: Soul Daniella Artist Management.

LeCointe.

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LIGHT

FASHION

The works of Danish contemporary artist Nina Beier often turn seemingly mundane or familiar objects and materials into monumental ones. Full of deeper meanings (and readings), they ask the viewer to look closely, and then look again. A graduate of London’s Royal College of Art, Beier currently maintains a studio in Brooklyn (pictured on the following pages). Largely practicing in installation art, her subtly striking pieces have included “Tragedy” (2011), for which a dog played dead on a Persian carpet; “Wedge” (2011), where a wedge shoe functioned as a door stop; and “Real Estate” (2013), comprising various headrests mounted on stone pillars. This year marks a breakout one for the 39-year-old artist, who has a show at Antwerp’s Objectif Exhibitions, opening on Feb. 14 and on view through April 11, as well as a U.S. solo show—her first—following on April 16 at New York’s Metro Pictures gallery (through May 23). Two more exhibitions featuring Beier’s work will open later this year, at Kunstverein Hamburg and the Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius. —Hally Wolhandler

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PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRADFORD GREGORY STYLING BY JUSTIN MIN

COAT, BOTTEGA VENETA. SHIRT AND PANTS, NINA'S OWN.

Steele: “With the really pale, bone-colored suede, seam details, and loose trench shape, this is really the kind of ultimate chic minimalism. It’s perfect to pair with the white T-shirt, and makes me wonder what it is about the concept of purity in fashion—how can you mix what’s essentially a sort of spiritual or philosophical idea with a particular style? There’s nothing in here that’s tasteless. It’s very sophisticated.”

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JACKET, OFF-WHITE C/O VIRGIL ABLOH.

Steele: “The idea of the white blazer evokes a kind of disco, Bianca-Jagger-on-an-elephant sort of feel. The strange, huge lapel is wonderful, extending all the way to the shoulder seam—it’s wearable street style, but also has a high fashion quotient, in that you have to be in-the-know to be onto that. With this boxy, asymmetrical silhouette, it’s a very cool look.”

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JACKET AND PANTS, CHRISTIAN DIOR.

Steele: “This is a new kind of flower for Raf Simons: much more subtle, less about flowers and the obvious feminine eroticism of them, and more about the concept of flower prints. With the subdued color and historicized details—the covered buttons, lace insets, and a sleeve silhouette that alludes to the 1860s—it’s like seeing something from through a dark glass, the way certain period films apply a faded, delicate filter.”

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SHIRT, MARC JACOBS.

Steele: “This piece is difficult to deconstruct. Purely, if you look at it as an object, it’s kind of referencing Saint Laurent’s safari shirts, and that late ’60s to early ’70s glamour, but with exaggerated details, as in the oversize buttons and cut-out holes. Marc’s so complicated! In a way, he’s like [John] Galliano, always mixing it up with a gazillion references—like an inkblot test, framed within an art context.”

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Feature subject: Nina Beier, artist. Location: Beier’s studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Makeup and hair: Kathleen Reel. Fashion assistant: Daniella LeCointe.

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As the late Oscar de La Renta took his final bow last September at his brand's S/S 2015 ready-to-wear show in New York City—with Daria Strokous on one arm and Karlie Kloss on the other—it was clear the 82-year-old was still full of fresh ideas, intimately connected with the needs of the women he designed for. He lived as he worked, never wavering from his practice. De la Renta was a peer and mentor to many of his clients, and that he dressed multiple generations was a testament to the timelessness of his eye. The lavish homes and gardens in which he entertained and reveled were indicators of his love for beauty and his commitment to the women who were his muses and clients. For his final season, the lightness and spirit of springtime were manifested in an array of gingham prints, midriff-baring tops, and soft candy pastels that were anything but saccharine. He is known for his outstanding eveningwear—the highlight to every Oscar show—and this season was no exception. Delicate floral embroideries and silver beading referenced de la Renta’s time at Balmain, yet displayed unmistakable originality, intricacy, and elegance.

With Peter Copping stepping in to helm the house with a debut collection this month, it’s safe to say the house is in great hands, though he certainly has some mighty big shoes to fill. —Justin Min

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PHOTOGRAPHY BY OWEN BRUCE STYLING BY JUSTIN MIN

COUTURE

All looks: Oscar de la Renta. Pale blue silk crepe gown with jeweled neckline.

Neoprene Louboutin fororganza Alexandre Previous spread:shoe, IvoryChristian silk gazaar gown with leafVauthier. embroidery.

Opposite: Neoprene jacket and culotte with Lesage embroidered Swarovski crystals. Necklace, Goossens for Alexandre Vauthier.

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Gold sequin bandeau top and feathered embroidered skirt.

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Key lime silk faille gown with degrade poppy embroidery.

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Ivory silk crepe gown with ostrich feather embroidery.

Hair: Yoichi Tomizawa at Art Department. Makeup: Colleen Runne using Nars Cosmetics.

Manicure: Casey Herman at Kate Ryan. Model: Brittany Burke at Women Management.

Neoprene shoe, Christian Louboutin for Alexandre Vauthier.

Photo assistant: Romek Rasenas.

Fashion Daniella Opposite: Neoprene jacket and culotte with Lesage embroidered Swarovski assistant: crystals. Necklace, Goossens LeCointe. for Alexandre Vauthier.

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Legends at Work Our fourth annual look at the lives and minds of some of design’s most accomplished creatives.

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LEGENDS AT WORK

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LEGENDS AT WORK

Concrete Poetry

(OPPOSITE) Tadao Ando at his firm’s office in Osaka, Japan.

Boxer-turned-architect Tadao Ando creates buildings full of spirit and soul through monumental gestures and materials.

INTERVIEW BY SPENCER BAILEY PORTRAIT BY OGATA

“Youth” is not typically the first word that comes to mind when discussing the buildings of Tadao Ando. Yet that is how the 73-year-old Japanese architect sees his work and the field in general: as an opportunity to positively impact and shape the way a child experiences the world. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that Ando views his surroundings in a childlike way, with endless curiosity and constant questioning. While his buildings are highly technical, with strong and resolute forms, they also affect visitors and inhabitants in deeply phenomenological ways. His structures are subtle and serene, yet those who visit them never, ever, forget them. There’s an exacting, hard-won aura to Ando’s work. A former professional boxer, Ando brings a

fighting nature to his projects, and it shows. His designs are both rigorously intellectual and emotional, each bearing a level of clarity and intricacy that could only have been achieved by him.

Growing up in row housing in a working-class neighborhood in Osaka, Ando was unable to afford a formal architecture education. Instead, he taught himself—an incredibly rare feat in the field. He visited buildings by Japanese architects, studying them closely, and absorbed books on the work of Western modernist architects such as Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn. He traveled to sites worldwide, from the Parthenon to the Pantheon.

Then, in 1973, starting with a house in Osaka, he began to build. Ando has since completed more than 200 projects

around the world, including a house on Vitra’s campus (1993); the Fabrica research center in Treviso, Italy (2000); the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis (completed in 2001 and currently being expanded); and a renovation of the Punta della Dogana in Venice (2009).

His firm’s latest project to open is the expansion of the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and its first in New York City—a sevenunit residential building in Manhattan’s Nolita neighborhood—is just starting construction. At the Clark last summer, Surface spoke with Ando through a translator about his life and work, after which he led us on a tour of the new building, pointing about with the enthusiasm of someone six or seven decades his junior. >

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LEGENDS AT WORK

Before becoming an architect, you were a boxer. Do you see a connection between boxing and architecture? Have you brought your experiences from the former into the latter?

To a certain degree you can say that. Clients always make demands, but if you always accept and follow them, then you can’t really create a building.

What was it about architecture that made you go into the field? Was there a building or architect that made you say, “This is what I want to do!”?

They say that age 15 is the critical year in life. It’s the most sensitive. I had a wonderful math teacher who really put everything he had into teaching math. The carpenters I saw who kept working frantically, even forgetting lunch, also moved me. I was very impressed by them. These two elements—math and carpentry—converse in architecture. That was my starting point. I could not go to university; I couldn’t even afford to go to an architectural trade school. The only option left was to study by myself. I had to think and act by myself.

One thing I decided to do was to read architecture books. I’m from Osaka, which is located about half an hour from Kyoto and Nara.

Every Sunday I made a point to go out and look and study the old buildings in the region.

One thing about architecture is that the more you look at good buildings, the more love you have for them. That’s how I was drawn into architecture.

PHOTOS: OGATA.

A model of the Clark Art Institute on a table in Ando’s firm’s office.

The reason I was involved in boxing stems from the fact that I was strapped economically when I was young. There was a professional gym in the neighborhood, and I was always watching the boxing ring. I thought the four rounds were actually feasible for me.

I knew I could actually make money doing it.

At the same time, giving up—which relates to boxing—is very important in life. There was a man known as Fighting Harada who frequently came to the gym I was training at.

He was once a world champion in flyweight class. [Editor’s note: The boxer in discussion, Masahiko Harada, is now the honorary chairman of the Japanese Professional Boxing Association.] I watched his sparring practice, and I thought, “That’s just impossible for me!” That’s when I started in architecture.

The connection between architecture and boxing—that’s your question. I think that for any work it’s about suspense. Anticipation is the key. In that sense, there’s a commonality between the two. The other commonality is the fact that nobody is there to help you in both boxing and architecture. In your work, you’re alone. You have to do it alone.

Do you ever view the architect-client relationship as a boxing match?

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You’ve previously mentioned influences including Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Louis Kahn. When did you discover these Western midcentury architects?

When I was 19, I found a book by Le Corbusier at a used bookstore. I really wanted that book, but it was very expensive. I would go back to that bookstore and make sure that the book was buried at the bottom of a pile of books.

Every time I would go back, the book would be on the top. I just repeated that process until I was finally able to afford it. That book introduced me to Le Corbusier. I decided I should travel to Europe and really see the buildings.

I wanted to see buildings in Japan and, at the same time, to see buildings overseas.

PHOTOS: OGATA.

What was it about Le Corbusier’s work that you found interesting?

For one thing, his drawings. Also, the framing of his spaces was completely different from what I had seen in Japan. It was very clear to me that Western architecture was very different from what we have in Japan. I had many friends who studied and went to university for architecture. Those friends told me that if I wanted to be a professional in architecture, then I had to go see with my own eyes the Pantheon in Rome and Parthenon in Greece.

That led me to travel. I decided I had to go to Europe, and when I was 24, I went. I visited the Pantheon and the Parthenon. But I didn’t know how to take the Parthenon. At

the Parthenon, you see only those columns. I was impressed by the space that the Pantheon had, but at the Parthenon, it’s just columns. I didn’t know how to understand them. I started from there.

Twentieth-century architects—all those architects you mentioned—are intellectuals. At that time, I felt I wanted to become an architect who designed buildings that embody passion and really impress the emotions in the hearts of people. Many architects describe me as a “fighting architect.” Jean Nouvel and Renzo Piano would say, “Don’t have any qualms with Ando! He’s a boxer!”

But I think architecture is about fighting in a different sense. You have to solidly stand your ground, recognizing where you are and under what conditions. You have to fight in a sort of psychological or spiritual manner.

Because I didn’t have any formal education, nobody would take me seriously. I was kind of eliminated or ignored by architects all over the world.

What changed? Why do you think people take you so seriously now? How did you prove yourself?

In 1982, I had my exhibition in Paris hosted by the city’s architectural institute [the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimonie]. Jean Nouvel and other famous architects came. That exhibition showed my work: There were concrete boxes, and inside was this void, spaces with no particular features or anything, just space itself. >

A model of Church on the Water in Tomamu, Japan (1988).

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PHOTO: OGATA.

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It was a space of nothingness in a concrete box, and was just about having an ordinary, quiet life. It seems that made a great impact on European people who visited the exhibition, because it was a rather spiritual or mental experience. It wasn’t known in Europe. To me, that kind of space is ordinary, because in Japan it’s just a room with one flower decorating the space, and that’s about it. Europe may have had that kind of space before, but at that time it was very unusual. It seems the people in Paris got a little bit uneasy or fearful of the concept.

Concrete is so central to your work. Was there a building or structure you saw while educating yourself that made you realize that concrete was the medium that would become a focus of your architecture?

For one thing, concrete is a ubiquitous, ordinary material. Anyone all over the world can buy it. It’s very accessible and easily available.

But I wanted to use that as a common material to create very unique architecture. It was about using everybody’s material in a way that nobody else had before. The second part is that historical Japanese buildings are made in concrete, so by using concrete, I wanted to actually continue the tradition, succeeding in the preservation of the country’s architectural DNA. Concrete was paramount in the architecture of Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, too.

Yes, I certainly had some influence from them.

Unlike so much concrete today, which is cheaply done, yours is very specific in its recipe and high quality. How do you take this ordinary material and make it something extraordinary?

Architecture is something I cannot accomplish myself. We need a site supervisor, a construction manager, concrete-forming carpenters, rebar arrangers, and so forth. If all these different people work under a single vision, I think it’s possible. That’s how we do it. It’s the same as a medical operation or surgery: You can’t make a mistake. In this case, no mistakes have been made. Even a single mistake, you have to redo it. In order to make sure there are no mistakes in the concrete preparation and actual forming of it, you need to know the overall planning of the project and its details, as well as the process of making the concrete.

PHOTO: OGATA.

How long did it take to develop “Ando concrete?” How did you come up with the recipe?

Maybe five years. I went back to the basics.

Concrete is made of steel bars, the water, the sand, and the aggregate. These elements, once mixed together, have to be in balance. For that you need the bars placed at equal distance.

And the mix shouldn’t be runny—it should be more viscous. If you know these basics, it’s possible.

A powerful response often overcomes visitors to your buildings. What it is about concrete that helps achieve this?

It’s not only concrete; it’s concrete and the surroundings. There’s always a tension between the two. How you create that tension is with a vision. By having that vision—and by remaining faithful to it—you get that attention and impact.

What do you think are the main elements involved in making your vision work?

Obviously, there’s vegetation, light, water, concrete …

When you create something, the essential part of creation is where you can actually maintain tension in the process. And also, of course, you need a team. Whenever I work in the U.S. or in Europe, the first thing I worry about is whether or not I can assemble a good team, and whether this team can maintain the will to work under one single purpose.

Much of your work early in your career was built in Japan, and from the late ’90s to the present, you’ve started working abroad pretty consistently and especially in America. What’s your relationship to the United States? When did you first visit?

What has been your response to America?

My first visit to the States occurred in 1967.

I would say that the 1950s was the time for the U.S. While America was on the top of the world, there was peace, because this American ideal of freedom prevailed. I believe strongly that when America was looking after the world, the world was in a very good place. But since then, it has changed. Many countries have emerged, and we now live in a really strange world. America embodies freedom, courage, bravery, and equality. I think these elements of American spirit were reflected in buildings of the 1950s, up to [Eero Saarinen’s] TWA Terminal [completed in 1962]. The Seagram Building [completed in 1958] really embodies what the 20th century was. [Editor’s note: For more on the Seagram, see our profile of Phyllis Lambert on page 142.] I believe urban living requires culture. In order to enjoy urban life, you need art and culture; you need the pleasure of eating out and other things. A typical example of that is New York. I really think that New York is the masterpiece of the 20th century. Andy Warhol was a symbol of this. I’d like to see the world going back to that spirit.

You’re now doing your first building in Manhattan: the 152 Elizabeth residences.

What’s your relationship with New York City? The city, like your work, is full of tension.

Art depends on how much tension you can build up and maintain. Actually, I’m working in architecture, an environment that has (OPPOSITE) A stairwell in Ando’s office, with a certain amount of animosity, so there is the Dream chair he designed for Danish always tension. > furniture company Carl Hansen & Søn.

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Isamu Noguchi died on December 30, 1988, and for about a period of 15 years, he lived in Japan and the States, but when he was in Japan, he was seen as an American, and when he was here in the States, he was seen as Japanese.

From the outside, he was a very successful, internationally renowned artist, but internally he must have had a lot of ambivalence and paradoxical mental fighting. At the same time, he used this tension as the source for his work.

Do you see New York as offering a source of energy for your own work?

To a certain degree, yes. New York has so many famous architects with buildings there: Richard Meier, Norman Foster, Frank Gehry.

These people are working side-by-side, very conscious of each other, trying not to be outdone.

Let’s expand on your relationship with America. You’ve designed homes in Chicago, Malibu, and New Mexico; the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; the Stone Hill Center; and now, the Clark Art Institute. Many of your projects here have been places for art. How do you view these projects within the context of your work, and what has it been like working on them?

Why do you think America has a propensity for big things?

The first reason is that there’s so much land.

We don’t have land like this in Japan. Each site is so small there. I feel these American architects must feel the same way. My guess is that— this is my belief—these architects are trying to recreate the spatial experience they had when they were young. That way future generations can also experience it as they did. The terrace at the new visitor’s center here [at the Clark Art Institute], when children come to this facility and look to the hill across the water, I hope they will remember unconsciously that moment for the rest of their lives.

You know the Punta della Dogana I did in Venice? It’s from the 15th century, but inside it’s a completely contemporary, modern space.

My wish is for many children to visit the building, so they’re surprised once inside. They’ll see that old things can be maintained and actually restored or changed to the modern world.

They will know that it’s important to preserve old things. They will also learn that history is something to be remembered. It’s actually very interesting to learn history, and to know that we leave planet earth as part of it.

This notion you’re discussing—of children

PHOTOS: JEFF GOLDBERG/ESTO, COURTESY THE CLARK ART INSTITUTE.

More than anything else, the projects in the United States are big! Our office often feels we’re so far away from the sites. They’re large projects with lots of difficulties. We strive for

the quality of a space. Using this ubiquitous or mundane material—concrete—we hope to make something wonderful out of it, something nobody else can do. We need physical toughness and mental tension.

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PHOTOS: JEFF GOLDBERG/ESTO, COURTESY THE CLARK ART INSTITUTE.

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PHOTOS: JEFF GOLDBERG/ESTO, COURTESY THE CLARK ART INSTITUTE.

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and architecture—is interesting. Did you have a moment as a young boy in which you had a profound experience with architecture?

I was born and raised in the downtown area of Osaka in a traditional residential area. I was living in row housing. It was a dark place with little light and high windows. In the dark interior, when you’d get some light, I really appreciated what little light we got. It was really beautiful. I would fill my cupped hands with the light coming into my living quarters.

That’s the kind of building I want to build: architecture that gives that feeling I had then.

Also, my house was just on the bank of the Yodo River, the biggest river in the Osaka region. Water was close to me. These two elements—light and water—lived with me and led me to creating things like the Church of the Light [completed in 1989] and the water feature of this [Clark] project.

PHOTOS: JEFF GOLDBERG/ESTO, COURTESY THE CLARK ART INSTITUTE.

Perhaps one could say that your entire career has been you reaching for light, for water, for land.

Well, yeah, you could say that. [Laughs] That’s certainly true. Fundamentally, my wish is to really create a space that remains with the young people who come to visit it.

The job I have as an architect is important.

But of course every site is different, and the conditions of each client are different. It’s impossible to recreate exactly the same thing each time. It is my strong belief that the space you have growing up is precious and important to who you are. When you look out a window, you usually think you’re looking out a window and that’s it, but no, you’re looking out the window and beyond. It’s like that with architecture: You’ll look at the next project you’ll do, but it’s not the ending point; you have to look beyond that. At the same time, you have to look back, because it’s your history and your past that’s making up you as a person right now. When I’m working on a project, I have to look beyond the project and at the same time the past of its site. Otherwise you can’t come up with good architecture.

You also can’t make architecture as business.

I believe architects have to have pride in themselves. We’re a bridge between the present and the past and beyond, to the future. This is the sense I attained when I saw Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute building for the first time. In those days, there was a magazine called Forum.

There was a special issue on Kahn’s Salk building under construction, and I was very much interested in it. I’m not sure how close I can get to what he did, but I will try.

is fading. I believe that he was a very religious person. I feel that his architecture represents a prayer.

(THIS PAGE AND OPPOSITE) The new Clark Art Institute, designed by Ando.

Renzo Piano once mentioned to me that he views his buildings as his children. Do you think about your buildings in similar terms?

Rather than the way he thinks about architecture—as his children—my wish is to have young people or anybody to experience space.

It’s my wish for my buildings to provide them a sense of their existence—that this is the place and time they’re living in right now.

It seems to me that you think about architecture as communication, as its own language and a way of talking to others.

Twenty-five years ago, when Renzo Piano was working on the Kansai International Airport, which is close to where I live, we used meet and talk a lot. Of course, I used Japanese for communication and he spoke Italian. I speak only Japanese. But you don’t really need language to communicate. You can express yourself in many ways. Bono of U2 just called me up shortly before he was going to the General Assembly at the United Nations to make a speech. He told me, “Well, Mr. Ando, since you don’t speak English, let me sing a song to you.” He sang a Beatles song. Even in that manner, I talked with Bono.

It’s basically the language of curiosity.

Yeah, we can converse in that spirit between ourselves.

Is this energetic spirit what you’d like to communicate to visitors to the Clark?

Yes, that’s my wish. That’s certainly what I hope to see.

Do you see yourself in some sense as a son of Louis Kahn?

[Laughs] I wouldn’t say that. But the Salk is great architecture. The building is best when the sun is setting. The Kimbell Art Museum is also great. Louis Kahn had a great vision and sense of light—especially when the light 125

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Man of the House Founded two decades ago by Nick Jones, Soho House continues its ascent as an arbiter of influence.

(OPPOSITE) Soho House founder Nick Jones at the new Soho House location in Chicago’s Fulton Market neighborhood.

BY SPENCER BAILEY PORTRAIT BY CYNTHIA LYNN

Since its start 20 years ago on Greek Street in London, the private members’ club Soho House has become an unofficial hangout for leading creatives and executives in the worlds of art, design, fashion, and media. There are now six locations in the U.K. (plus the Dean Street Townhouse hotel), five in North America (New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Toronto, and Chicago), and one in Berlin. The newest addition, in Istanbul, opens this spring. A Barcelona location is on the way, as are new spaces in the U.K. and New York. At the center of this bustling, inimitable enterprise is Nick Jones, its unassuming 51-year-old founder and CEO.

Unlike other prominent and influential real estate and hospitality entrepreneurs, such as Ian Schrager and André Balazs, Jones isn’t entirely synonymous with the brand he created. His is a quieter, perhaps humbler approach. But like them, he has built a company that offers more than just spaces for lounging, relaxing, eating, sleeping, drinking, and networking. Soho House is a cultural force, and Jones is the master of ceremonies, leading its direction across the board, from development and membership to menus and interior design. His approach to the business has been so successful that Soho House Group caught the attention of billionaire Ron

Burkle, whose investment fund, Yucaipa, purchased a major stake of it in 2012. (The New York Times reported Burkle’s buy was about $383 million for 60 percent of the company.)

Speaking with Jones is a pleasant, unfettered affair. The man is refreshingly genuine and says and does whatever is in his head and gut—most likely a result of the many insights, intuitions, and inhibitions he has picked up throughout his rich life, which includes an impressively frenetic travel schedule. Surface met up with him at the restaurant at Soho House New York last fall to discuss how design informs his life and work, and his next steps for the business. >

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This year marks two decades since you started Soho House. How do you view the company’s evolution looking back?

With surprise. When I set up Soho House, I never dreamed that it would end up being in many cities around the world and with the membership it’s got. I’ve been lucky.

Your work at Soho House, in my mind, has really been about designing across various platforms, from the membership to the architecture. Do you consider yourself a designer or, at the very least, a design thinker?

I was never trained to be a designer. I never went to college to study design. I’ve always tried to create environments that I would feel comfortable in and like to hang out in—which are comfy, friendly, unpretentious. I’ve done it based on what I think I would like, and I’ve hoped other people would like the same thing.

How did you go about creating the interiors of the first Soho House? How has the brand’s design approach morphed?

The original Soho House location has held up well over 20 years and will be refurbished at some point this year. In a way, that one designed itself. It was stripped all back. The reason it was called Soho House was because it was literally a house in Soho. It was an early Georgian building with lots of little rooms that are a bit like a rabbit run. As soon as people went inside, they felt comfortable and at ease.

When we went onto creating the next houses, we didn’t say we had to keep designing Georgian houses just because that’s what we did the first time around. We always look at the building and city we’re in and pay respect to that.

Tell me about the Chicago location, one of the newest and a king-size affair.

The Chicago space is great. It was a beautiful warehouse built in the early 1900s. Soho House just fit in it like a glove. When you find a building where there are plenty of windows, hotel rooms work. That building had real soul as soon as I walked into it. Usually, it takes me less than five minutes to decide whether a building is right.

How do you ultimately decide on a city, neighborhood, or building?

(OPPOSITE) The lobby bar at the new Soho House in Chicago. A room at the Chicago location.

To be honest, a lot of it has been luck. I’d love to think that we choose areas we knew were going to be popular. When I went to Shoreditch for the first time, I lived in London and didn’t really know where Shoreditch was.

I went because I liked the guy who was showing me the area. I didn’t want to be rude and say no, which is the policy I always have. You never know what you’re going to find, and as soon as I went into the building in Shoreditch, I said yes to it. Even before thinking about the

area. It had such soul.

In Chicago, we looked at other sites before going to the Fulton Market neighborhood.

The first site we looked at—and we would have probably gone with if other things had gone our way—was in the Gold Coast area, which in hindsight is totally the wrong place to put a Soho House. We didn’t go there not because we sat down and made some shrewd decision about it. We didn’t go there because I don’t think we got the commission to do what we wanted to do there. We were forced not to go there. It was the right decision in the end, though, because we ended up with this fabulous building in what we feel is really the right area.

You’ve worked with many architects and designers over the years, and you now have an in-house design team and a design director. Once you have these spaces, how do you go about the design process?

We’ve worked with some great designers: Ilse Crawford, Martin Brudnizki, Alex Michaelis, Tom Dixon. I’ve obviously learned a lot from them. But at the same time, we always knew internally the sort of spaces we wanted to create, and a lot of the time we were directing other people to where we wanted to be.

Eventually, we thought it was easier to go inhouse. This has worked very well given the way I work. I’m a nightmare to work with when on a schedule, because I think design is a bit of a process, and I can’t decide everything two years out. As you fill the space, things change.

In fact, this morning we were just about starting the build on our new site on Ludlow Street [on the Lower East Side in Manhattan], and I wanted to have just one more look at it.

This was at, like, 7:30 this morning, and we changed a lot of it around already. You look at it and you go, “Why didn’t we do that before?”

It’s just how it works: Because we’re internal, they’re busily drawing up Ludlow now. It doesn’t cost us any more money, because we haven’t started building it yet. We’ll end up with what I hope will be a better flow and a better product as a result.

How would you describe the ethos behind Soho House’s aesthetic? A New York Times article once described it as “Royal-Geographical-Society-meets-Dwellmagazine.”

Whatever that means. [Laughs] What’s your mindset when it comes to design and Soho House?

My mindset is we want to keep evolving our design. We don’t want it to be the same all the time. It’s easy to find a way of designing something and sticking with it because people seem to like it. Ludlow House will be very different from Soho House [New York] in its design because the building is very different; we want to put different furniture in it and different SURFACE

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finishes on it. How I describe it is: Whenever I walk into a completed Soho House when no one’s in there, I want it to have lots of atmosphere. I don’t want to have to rely on it being full before it starts having a nice feel. The key, I think, is that people have got to feel confident and comfortable and not awkward in the space.

Wouldn’t you also say that part of what makes Soho House special is its selective membership process?

You’re dead right. You add the layers.

Designers layer—you add layers of art. A very interesting layer we spend a lot of time on is our art collection. It’s also the people who come in. We have a selection process on how people can get in. That’s an important part of what we’re trying to create. Then, on top of it, there are the people who work here, the food on the plates, the style of glass the drinks come in. It’s all layered up to hopefully create an experience that makes people say, “Yeah, I really like that, I’m going to come back.”

We’ve been in New York for 11 years now, and it’s as popular as it’s ever been. It hasn’t always been this way. We’ve had moments where it’s been really quite bad—when those layers have all gone wrong.

How did you fix those layers?

We had to look at our membership and which members were fitting into what we first set up the club to be.

So you had to refresh the membership just as you would reupholster an old sofa?

It’s like when you go through your wardrobe and say, “Okay, well, that might not be good.

I might not have worn that last year, but next year I will, so I’ll keep it.” We cleaned out the wardrobe, and then we refurbished and looked at our spaces and how people wanted to use them. It’s been a process.

Let’s discuss your thoughts on the hospitality industry. In what ways do you see the service realm of Soho House changing?

I think we’re in a really good position generally. From where the world was 25 years ago to where it is now—there are some really brilliant operators out there now, some really young people who have come into the industry who 20 or 25 years ago wouldn’t have due to its limitations then. I remember when I was coming into the industry, which was more than 30 years ago. It was at the bottom of the job spectrum. But I loved doing it anyway. I do this because nothing gives me more joy than what we deliver as a company: a comfortable bed to sleep in, a great shower, a great treatment, or something good to eat or drink.

I think hospitality is a really good industry to go into. No technology is going to take over it; you can’t find a computer program that’s gonna feed people or provide a bed for them.

Eating and drinking and sleeping are going to be around for a long time.

There were days [early in my career] that were incredibly hard work. You’d be working 80 to 90 hours a week. The conditions weren’t good. But the industry has changed a lot. It’s a much better industry to be working in—there are many more talented people coming into the field. People in hospitality are much more passionate and knowledgeable about food, for example, than they used to be. These are young kids who are obsessed with food and opening their own restaurants. It’s a very exciting time ahead for us.

What do you think about the future of the members’ club business? We’re now seeing it enter the office-space arena with Neuehouse, which currently has a New York location and is soon to open spaces in L.A. and London.

People have been entering this space for a long time. When we entered the space, we weren’t the first people to do so. These clubs had been around for decades. I think we were the first to do it in one city, and then take it to another city. There will always be others trying to do the same thing. I wish them all the best of luck.

It’s great to see. At least it tells me what I’m doing is not a bad idea after all.

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Is adding office spaces part of your plan for the future of Soho House?

We’re very much looking at that. A lot of people already use Soho House as their office space, but we’ll be adding guaranteed work spaces with desks. This is something we’re working on. There’s a demand for it.

Do you see the membership model entering other sectors of business? What are the growth opportunities?

I think people are always looking at what other people are doing. I know I certainly am.

I think people look at the membership model, what we do, and think, “That’s not a bad idea!”

We’re 20 years into it, but even now I wouldn’t want to open more than one or possibly two or three clubs per year.

What’s next for Soho House?

We’re doing something called Soho Farmhouse in the U.K. We’ve got Babington House, which is in the country—it’s a farmhouse around cabins. It’s very exciting, because this is a new idea for me. We’ve got a Barcelona location under construction; we’ve got Ludlow House in New York under construction. We’re closing another deal in L.A. There’s a potential building in Amsterdam, another in Madrid.

We’re very clearly looking at the Far East at the moment. There will be more all over.

Why haven’t you gone to Asia yet?

To be honest, we haven’t found the right building. I’ve been over enough times. We’ve missed out on a few buildings. We need to get into Asia. It’s as simple as that.

Most of your projects are renovations of previously existing structures. Would you consider doing a building from scratch?

Definitely. Just because we’re going through a phase of going into buildings built a century or more ago, we’re more than happy to go into a new building.

Do you think you could ever open a house with a clean, more modern design than those that currently exist?

Yes. At our place in West Hollywood, that’s a late ’60s glass office building. When you drive in and go up the elevator, you could be anywhere. You go “wow” because usually you don’t see L.A. from a height. Everyone sees New York from a height, but you don’t see L.A. from a height. Our space there has a 360-panoramic view of L.A. We wanted to bring a lot of the outside in—there are palm-tree patterns on the sofas, greens and blues—because the sky is so blue there all the time. > (THIS PAGE AND OPPOSITE) Rooms at the new Soho House in Istanbul.

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Who are some designers or hospitality veterans who have formed your appreciation for and understanding of design?

Of the current breed, I think André Balazs is fantastic. He’s a genius for what he’s done with the Chiltern Firehouse in London. I’ve always respected enormously what Ian Schrager has done—and is still doing. In the U.K., we’ve got Terence Conran. What he’s done with the restaurant scene there is incredibly impressive.

What Keith McNally does with restaurants is genius. Even though I don’t know them all personally or well, even in our industry, we’re very respectful of other people who do this kind of work, because we know what a pain in the ass it is. [Laughs] We pay homage to anyone who does it well.

Martin Brudnizki designed your house.

What is it about his work that you’re so attracted to—and, for that matter, Ilse Crawford’s?

To be honest, Martin did a lot of the layouts in our house, but it was actually Kirsty [Young, a Scottish television and radio presenter], my wife, who did our house. I think Martin’s incredibly talented. And Ilse, again, she’s great.

She’s a bit off the wall and thinks outside of the box. She’s usually a few years ahead of most people.

What’s good now is we’re getting very talented young designers coming to work for us.

They’re showing me a thing or two.

What input do you have on the design process?

We have a lot of in-house people who used to work at firms run by some of these bigname designers. I go through everything they choose, including a bit of furniture. This is very important. It’s just like choosing every menu in the restaurants.

What’s an average week for you? What did you do this week?

This week I flew to New York yesterday; tomorrow, I go to Chicago; Wednesday, I go to Miami; Thursday, I go to L.A.; and Friday, I fly back to London. Last week I was in Istanbul and Barcelona, and I had a day at our Farmhouse. I’m always visiting the projects.

Barcelona and Istanbul—why did you decide on those two cities for the next houses?

Istanbul is a gateway to the East. It’s a crossroads to Europe. It’s exciting. The city’s full of energy. I just fell in love with it.

Barcelona has always been a city I’ve been in love with. I love the people there. I love the action. I love the design. It’s a beautiful city.

It’s got fabulous food, and it’s on the sea— Barcelona is one of the great cities on the sea.

In Istanbul, you’re partnering with real estate developer Serdar Bilgili. How do SURFACE

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you choose partners when creating new houses?

Serdar already had the building. He’s been a great partner. It’s a very important relationship, and it includes the partnership we’ve got with the locals. We would never want to go into Istanbul and employ a builder and do it ourselves. If we did that, we would be liquidized like hummus. Doing it with Serdar, we’ve done it right.

So how do you pick your partners?

Dating and marrying are two very different things. So far, we’ve been very, very lucky. The marriage has been good with every partner we’ve had, and we work hard at our relationships. They’re very important for what we’re trying to bring to our members.

Are there any American cities you’re currently looking to expand to?

course at each of them, seeing what’s going on, trying to get some ideas, trying to get inspired.

What was going through your mind when you opened the first Soho House?

Survival.

Did you ever imagine the world that the first location would spawn?

No, I never imagined this. In a way, I still think I’m lucky. I’m lucky because I get up in the morning and love what I do. I’m lucky because I work with great people who make it possible.

I’m lucky because we’re creating new places that people are going to have fun at and enjoy.

In a way, you’re designing the company’s destiny and defining it with every detail.

I love making a place where people feel they want to be.

I’m very interested in San Francisco, which is an obvious one, and I’m flirting with Nashville and Boston. We’re constantly looking at other opportunities. America has been very good to Soho House. We’d like to carry on growing here.

Soho House began as a British-based brand, but it has since become global. What triggered the international expansion?

Yes, the heritage is English, but as a company we employ 75 different nationalities. Because I travel a lot, it means I get to see cities and what’s happening in them. One of my favorite nights is getting in a car, going around to eight restaurants in New York, and having one

A room at the new Chicago location.

(OPPOSITE) The rooftop pool at Soho House Chicago.

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Memphis Calling

(OPPOSITE) Du Pasquier at her studio in Milan, Italy.

A new book featuring 1980s drawings

by Memphis Group founding member Nathalie Du Pasquier arrives amidst a revival of Postmodernist style.

BY AILEEN KWUN PORTRAIT BY DELFINO SISTO LEGNANI

According to Laver’s Law—outlined by offshoot between British designer Sebastian fashion historian James Laver in his 1937 Wrong and Danish furniture company Hay, book Taste and Fashion—the popularity of featured a collection of her textile patterns Nathalie Du Pasquier’s Memphis-era illus- on a range of seating and cushion designs; trations in recent years, 20 to 30 years after also that year, she released a rug design with their creation, would classify the body of the French brand La Chance. Resurgence of work somewhere between “ridiculous” and the aesthetic’s popularity among younger “amusing.” It’s a humorous assessment that generations might be attributed, in part, to Du Pasquier herself might find, well, ridicu- the Victoria & Albert Museum’s 2012 show lous and amusing. Less debatable than the “Postmodernism: Style and Subversion: prophetic authority of Laver’s observations, 1970–1990,” the first sweeping survey to however, is the visibility of Du Pasquier’s focus on the movement’s far-reaching influearly work in recent years, which has expe- ences, Memphis included. The combination rienced somewhat of a moment in the current of events has built a somewhat of a perfect zeitgeist of visual culture. Though it’s been storm for the release of Du Pasquier’s new decades since the Milan-based painter and book, Don’t Take These Drawings Seriously: sculptor has focused her creative energies on 1981–1987, which comes out this month illustration and design, the world, it seems, from PowerHouse Books.

“It doesn’t feel so strange, because I’m not is just catching up—or at least its younger a completely different person!” Du Pasquier generations are.

Early last year, Du Pasquier, 57, collabo- says, on revisiting her earlier works. “I have rated with clothing manufacturer American been painting in the meantime, so my ideas Apparel on a special collection of dresses, about design haven’t really evolved. In fact, accessories, and unisex separates featuring when many of these collaborations began, I patterns in the style of her years with the positioned myself at the end of the ’80s, so it Memphis Group, of which she was a found- wasn’t really going back—it was just that my ing member. Just a few months prior, in the design work was continuing on.” fall of 2013, Wrong For Hay, a collaborative Bursting with discordant palettes,

offbeat shapes, and ethno-infused patterns, Du Pasquier’s illustrations have long helped characterize the aesthetic of Memphis, even as her works would extend beyond the design collective’s notoriously short-lived existence. Founded in 1981 by a group of young and independent designers with Ettore Sottsass at the helm, in a span of seven years the group would be heralded as revolutionary, irreverent, and brilliant; among its members were Peter Shire, Alessandro Mendini, Paola Navone, and Matteo Thun, as well as international designers such as Shiro Kuramata, Hans Hollein, and Michael Graves. Heralded by Sottsass as “the New International Style,” the group’s rebellious experimentations across furniture, objects, textiles, drawings, and writings—powered by visual irony, pop culture, and the belief of design as a vehicle for cultural criticism— proved to successfully upset the applecart of Modernism’s austere reign, however momentary. At the height of its fame, Chanel’s Karl Lagerfeld was among the group’s most enthusiastic collectors, filling his Monte Carlo apartment with Memphis designs. Just like movements before them, however, they too would dissolve. >

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Drawings from Du Pasquier’s new book, published by PowerHouse Books.

(FOLLOWING TWO SPREADS) Du Pasquier’s current workspace in Milan.

Disillusioned by its steroidal rise to celebrity, Sottsass abandoned Memphis in 1985; its remaining members would disband by the decade’s end. Following an unfavorable spell in as the 1990s and early aughts (one reporter characterized it as “a shotgun wedding between Bauhaus and Fisher-Price”), it’s clear the pendulum of popular taste has begun to swing back into the stylings of the Memphis Group.

“It was by chance I became involved in Memphis from the first year,” Du Pasquier says. “I was the girlfriend of George Sowden, who had been invited to take part.

I was just beginning to design textiles and generously, even though he himself had designed many beautiful textiles, he proposed I work on surface designs for his pieces. It was a great opportunity, and I was very lucky when it the group decided they would be produced for this first collection. That was, for me, the beginning of an important part of my life.”

As a high-school graduate, Du Pasquier lived abroad for a year in West Africa —a formative stay that she’s often said has taken the place of a university experience.

“It was the first year I was away from family and obligations, the first year I was earning my own money; the first year I was an adult!” she says. “Of course, I was not one, but it was great to spend that year in a completely different culture. I started to understand a few things, and discovered many: about human beings, about nature, about life.”

Living in Gabon, she worked odd jobs— as a server in a nightclub, and later, as a cashier at a restaurant, all while absorbing the colorful surroundings of the region that would continue to inspire her illustrations.

Among the widely varying designs produced by Memphis, Du Pasquier’s vibrant patterns brought pulsating dimensionality and color to textiles and asymmetric, plasticlaminate surfaces. Also working with cult Italian youth label Fiorucci, as well as clients overseas in Japan, Du Pasquier’s imaginative illustrations spanned retrofuturistic concepts for jewelry, electronics, products, interiors, and entire cityscapes.

Now married to Sowden, Du Pasquier resides in Milan, where, working from her sunlit studio in an industrial building at the city’s center, she has reoriented her creative energies toward painting and construction (the latter a term she prefers to “sculpture”) since the dissolution of Memphis. “My current projects are a mixture of things quickly springing from my brain and left ripening and finished in an intuition, sometimes in a very different context,” she says, of a practice she’s grown to love. “In this moment I tend to follow several things at the same time.”

Though the days of drawing and illustration are now behind her, she feels the differences between art and design have become increasingly blurred. “Today, artists tend to work like designers, producing multiples, having their works made by a third person.

They need to find sponsors, money, to spend time in communication. And designers create things they tend to build themselves; nowadays, they’re like artists, or rock stars,” she says. “Who cares about the difference? With the Internet, nobody would know if you were a dog!”

Du Pasquier’s aesthetic has evolved and matured toward the meditative—still-life paintings with flattened planes of color and more muted tones—yet the mark of her earlier work remains subtly interwoven throughout, with skewed perspectives and abstracted shapes abandoning any heavyhanded notions of self-seriousness. Years later, she is the same person, after all. “To do the [PowerHouse] book, I have gone through many forgotten drawings, and it was enjoyable and interesting to see the amount of things I had been doing,” Du Pasquier says. “All these elements are like an alphabet, and I don’t need to find so many new ones. It is a question of how I compose them.”

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PHOTOS: DELFINO SISTO LEGNANI.

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PHOTOS: DELFINO SISTO LEGNANI.

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Modern Marvel

Heralded as “Joan of Architecture,” Phyllis Lambert remains one of the fiercest stewards and visionaries shaping the field today.

(OPPOSITE) Phyllis Lambert at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal.

BY AILEEN KWUN PORTRAIT BY DAVID GIRAL

On the evening of Sept. 7, 2014, an army of art handlers stirred about 375 Park Avenue in Manhattan, the site of the Seagram Building, Mies van der Rohe’s swan song of bronze and glass. “Le Tricorne,” a 19-foot-square Picasso tapestry which had been installed in the building’s ground-floor Four Seasons restaurant since its opening in 1958, was undergoing surgical removal through long hours of the night. Controversy had swelled the operation for several months preceding. Visible at streetlevel, the tapestry was considered by many to be an integral, site-specific piece; others dismissed it as a minor work in the artist’s oeuvre.

Beloved or not, it was one of few fixtures not legally protected under the restaurant’s 1989 landmark designation by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.

As such, it was ruled after months of public debate that the artwork could rightfully be removed at the discretion of the building’s owner, real estate developer and art collector Aby Rosen.

Among those who argued the decision would compromise the site’s historic integrity was the Canadian architect, writer, curator, and activist Phyllis Lambert. Lambert, 88, is also the daughter of the late Samuel Bronfman, magnate, founder and onetime president of multibillion dollar spirits company Distillers Corporation Seagrams Limited, for which the building was first erected. “It’s just so shocking; there was no legal standing on it that could be brought to bear,” says Lambert, who had purchased the artwork for the space herself. “The owner decided he wanted not to have that there—I won’t discuss at length what he said about it, or anything else. He said he loves art, but that it was a ‘rag.’ If you love art, you can’t say something like that.”

Though the building formally left her family’s hands in 1980, Lambert, never one to shy in the face of adversity, has continued to influence the Seagram site in the more than half-century that has followed its completion. First involved in the site’s construction from 1954 to ’58, she consulted on its upkeep as director of maintenance until 2005, helping to pen many of the complex landmarking guidelines herself; in 2013, she published Building Seagram (Yale University Press), an extensive firsthand account of the construction process and various historical contexts that have contributed to its canonical standing and significance. Equal parts memoir and historical text, the book has quickly become seminal primary source material for architectural history, drawing upon extensive archival documents and photographs.

Her enduring stewardship and promotion of the International Style exemplar is, in large part, why Rem Koolhaas and his jury selected Lambert for the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale last year. “Not as an architect, but as a client and a custodian, Phyllis Lambert has made a huge contribution to architecture … Without her participation, one of the few realizations in the 20th century of perfection on earth—the Seagram Building in New York—would not have happened,” Koolhaas cited.

Initially trained in sculpture by the brother of an observant nurse who discovered her talents in childhood, Lambert began her architectural career at the more mature though still rather green age of 27, when she assumed the director of planning role for the Seagram Building. Though the project was commissioned and funded by her father, the annals of architectural history have long—and rightfully—acknowledged

Lambert as the driving force in shaping the project through its realization.

Learning that Bronfman was considering an uninspired scheme proposed by architects Pereira & Luckman, Lambert—at the time pursuing an artist’s life in Paris, at a distance from her domineering father—found the plan so “horrifying” that she set about penning him an eightpage, single-spaced letter. “This letter starts with one word repeated very emphatically: NO NO NO NO NO. You will forgive me if sometimes I use rather strong terms and sound angry, but I am very disturbed to find nothing whatsoever commendable in this preliminary-as-it-may-beplan for a Seagram’s building,” she writes, urging her father to instead “put up a building which expresses the best of the society in which you live, and at the same time your hopes for the betterment of this society.”

As the story goes, Lambert’s mother requested she return to New York, to see what she could do. With several semesters’ worth of graduate coursework in architectural history, yet scarcely any exposure to professional practice, Lambert would assume the role of commissioner, director of planning, and hence “client” on behalf of Seagram’s, in effect spearheading one of the most enduring masterpieces of the midcentury modern period. Fearlessly tackling a charged, six-week period of consultations and studio visits with a string of venerable figures that included architecture critic Lewis Mumford, MoMA founding director Alfred Barr, visits to the studios and built projects of I.M. Pei, Eero Saarinen, Louis Kahn, and Walter Gropius, among others, she was led to Philip Johnson, who went on to design the Seagram offices’ interior, the Four Seasons restaurant, and with Richard Kelly, the building’s lighting. >

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At the conclusion of her intensive research, “I chose Mies [van der Rohe] to be the architect of the building and recognized that if I didn’t stay to make sure that it happened, then it wouldn’t have,” says Lambert, with a sort of matter-offact guilelessness. At the time of its completion, the building’s skin-and-bones structure and public plaza set back from the street made for a bold statement about architecture’s civic role.

“Young people don’t know what they should not do. I had no inhibitions about anything. And I think people have too many inhibitions—we have to really look at what is important, what is significant.” In Johnson’s famous words, despite Lambert’s lack of architectural know-how and experience, “just her presence kept everyone from hanky-panky.”

The verve of Lambert’s convictions has served to enrich architectural history in more ways than one. In the years following the Seagram Building’s completion and critical reception, she went on to complete graduate studies in architecture at Yale and the Illinois Institute of Technology, also working a summer stint for van der Rohe, with whom she had developed a close professional relationship. Though she has designed several projects, the Seagram Building has remained core to her legacy and self-identification: “I consider I was born when I built this

building,” she once said in an interview with The New York Times. Today, reflecting back on the project, now with decades of perspective, she adds, “Architecture both shapes and is shaped by society. There can be no question about it.

Architecture is a public concern, and I wanted to help people think about it.”

Since returning to her hometown of Montreal in 1973, where locals (and a biographical 2007 documentary film) revere her as “Joan of Architecture” for her role in local preservation efforts, Lambert continues to advise and oversee one of the world’s preeminent institutions for study and exhibitions on architecture, the Canadian Center for Architecture—which she founded in 1979—and remains busy with various writing and research projects as well as active involvements in urban planning and social housing.

“You just do what you’re doing, and you don’t pay any attention to any of that stuff,” she says, on the lifetime of triumphs and subsequent obstacles that have kept her motivated to this day. “When you’re in it, you’re in it—you’re doing what you believe needs to be done.”

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PHOTO: EZRA STOLLER/ESTO, COURTESY CANADIAN CENTER FOR ARCHITECTURE.

Philip Johnson, Mies van der Rohe, and Lambert (left to right) in New York in 1955, seated in front of an image of the model for the Seagram Building. (OPPOSITE) The Seagram Building on Park Avenue in Manhattan, as photographed by Ezra Stoller in 1958.

PHOTO: UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL, COURTESY CANADIAN CENTER FOR ARCHITECTURE.

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PHOTO: EZRA STOLLER/ESTO, COURTESY CANADIAN CENTER FOR ARCHITECTURE.

PHOTO: UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL, COURTESY CANADIAN CENTER FOR ARCHITECTURE.

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Viva Vitra

A Philadelphia museum explores one of the world’s greatest furniture brands and honors a man who helped pave the way for its success.

(OPPOSITE) Rolf Fehlbaum at Vitra’s Frank Gehry–designed headquarters in Birsfelden, Switzerland.

BY BRYN SMITH PORTRAIT BY LARS PETTER PETTERSEN

The day before the exhibition “Vitra—Design, Architecture, Communication: A European Project with American Roots” opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rolf Fehlbaum, chairman emeritus of the family-owned Swiss company on display, was in the gallery making final adjustments to the placement of each and every chair. Though Fehlbaum, 73, stepped down from Vitra’s day-to-day operations in 2005 after nearly 30 years as CEO, his influence continues. “You can never leave a project like [Vitra] completely,” he says. The exhibition (on view through April 26) is a celebration of his deep commitment, highlighting the diversity of partnerships nurtured during his tenure and the reach of Vitra as an ambassador of quality design.

Founded in 1950 by Fehlbaum’s parents, Willi and Erika, Vitra gained a foothold in the furniture market after acquiring the rights to produce and distribute Herman Miller designs by George Nelson and Charles and Ray Eames in Europe. For Rolf, then 16 years old, this development also marked a formative introduction to the family business as a translator for his father, who didn’t speak a word of English. “I learned from the very beginning that designers are authors with their own

agendas,” he says. “The art of design man- opportunity arose to ask British architect agement is to create a considerable overlap Nicholas Grimshaw to design the site’s unified between the project of the company and the master plan. Years later, after a chance meetproject of the designer—to nudge your world ing with Frank Gehry at Claes Oldenburg’s in the direction of theirs.” studio, Fehlbaum realized the site could Fehlbaum has perfected this talent, manag- benefit from more diversity, and the vision ing the ups and downs inherent in the design of multiple architects. “When two architecprocess not with an iron fist but with mutual tures meet, there are contradictions, and tenrespect. That his working relationships with sions between the buildings,” Fehlbaum says. designers often develop into lifelong friend- “The site becomes alive.” Since that juncture, ships should come as no surprise, and for the Vitra campus, located in Weil am Rhein, Fehlbaum, it’s the signal of successful collabo- Germany, near Basel, has itself become an ration. Chairs still form the heart of Project unmatched architectural destination. Among Vitra, from classics like the Panton (1967)— the commissioned projects there are buildings revolutionary for its time—to newer pieces by Tadao Ando (see page 116 for our profile like Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec’s 100-per- of him), Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron, cent recyclable Vegetal (2008). Fehlbaum’s Frank Gehry, and Álvaro Siza. greatest contribution may be his efforts to Equally fortuitous was the time when propel Vitra beyond its origins as a producer a confused visitor to the campus sat in and of office furniture into a multidisciplinary cracked an Alvar Aalto chair. On display juggernaut with projects encompassing every- from Fehlbaum’s personal collection, the thing from architecture and industrial design act provided the impetus for creating a more to publications and exhibitions. formal museum setting. When the time came When pressed, he is quick to downplay for new headquarters in Birsfelden, a small any personal foresight, attributing these town just across the Swiss border, Fehlbaum developments instead to a rare combination asked Gehry to tack on “a little shed” at Weil of misfortune and luck. When a fire burned am Rhein to house his stockpile of design down much of Vitra’s factory in 1981, the objects by the likes of Alexander Girard,

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Jean Prouvé, Nelson, and the Eameses—all Fehlbaum maintains the missionary zeal of pieces Fehlbaum collected in order to better modernists before him, and that edict is clear understand and preserve the field’s history. in the exhibition. “A design company has that The museum now pays for itself through a strange belief that you can change the world a combination of sponsorships, public pro- little,” he says. “We are deeply influenced by gramming, and traveling exhibitions, with what surrounds us. Every object, every space more than 100,000 visitors per year. “Did we has a message, and every single project is an need a museum?” Fehlbaum asks. “Of course opportunity to do something great.”

As Vitra moves onto the next chapter with not. But are we a better company because we his niece, Nora, at the helm, Fehlbaum mainhave a museum? I think so.”

For Kathryn Bloom Hiesinger, a cura- tains there is “no next” for him. But this is hard tor and co-organizer of “Vitra—Design, to believe. Last year, the company acquired Architecture, Communication,” Fehlbaum’s Artek, the renowned design firm founded in unwavering commitment to quality is what 1935 by Alvar Aalto and his wife, Aino, as sets him apart. “I wanted to recognize what he well as art promoter Maire Gullichsen and art has done as a patron,” she says. “Not only for historian Nils-Gustav Hahl. Though Vitra his own company, but for the history of archi- has never been interested in buying another tecture and design.” In that spirit, Fehlbaum entity, an exception was made for Artek, is the recipient of the 2014 Collab Design largely because it too was a project and also Excellence Award, bestowed annually by the because Fehlbaum has admittedly been “in museum. love with Aalto” for decades. The goal is to Walking through the exhibition, it’s impos- keep the two as wayward companions and sible not to be struck by the sheer number to see what develops—yet another example of important works brought to fruition of Fehlbaum’s curious and adaptable nature. under Fehlbaum’s watch—either as a part of “I just tried to make the work interesting for Vitra Edition, the experimental laboratory myself in the hope that it would be interesting he started in 1987, or through the normal to others,” he says of his career. Even today, mechanics of industrial production. The Fehlbaum remains far from predictable. nickel-plated mesh of Shiro Kuramata’s How High the Moon armchair (1986) is somehow enhanced when played against the velvety pop of a Verner Panton Heart Cone chair. There is no single note or solo vision on display.

Unafraid to lead by instinct and emotion,

PHOTOS: JASON WIERZBICKI.

Chair (2007) by Naoto Fukasawa and Well Tempered chair (1986) by Ron Arad, displayed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (OPPOSITE) Additional pieces on view at the exhibit: From left to right, Chair/ Chair (1987-90) by Richard Artschwager, How High the Moon armchair (1986) by Shiro Kuramata, Wiggle chair (1972/2005)

by Frank Gehry, Greene Street armchair (1984) by Gaetano Pesce, Red Beaver armchair and ottoman (1986) by Frank Gehry, and Ply-Chair (1988) by Jasper Morrison (hanging on wall). Wooden dolls (1963) designed by Alexander Girard.

(FOLLOWING SPREAD, CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT) VItra Slide Tower (2014) by Carsten Höller. Vitra Design Museum (1989) by Frank Gehry. VitraHaus (2010) by Herzog & de Meuron.

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PHOTOS: TOP, THOMAS DIX. BOTTOM, MARC EGGIMANN.

PHOTO: JULIEN LANOO.

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PHOTOS: TOP, THOMAS DIX. BOTTOM, MARC EGGIMANN.

PHOTO: JULIEN LANOO.

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Technical Spectacles

(OPPOSITE) Ross Lovegrove at his studio in London with a prototype of his Anne chair for Bernhardt Design.

Readying for a major Centre Pompidou retrospective in 2016, Ross Lovegrove remains a master of experimental designs that seem years ahead of their time.

INTERVIEW BY SPENCER BAILEY PORTRAIT BY PAUL PLEWS

To call Ross Lovegrove an industrial designer isn’t really accurate. Perhaps a more suitable title is “amalgamator.”

His two-story studio, located in London’s Notting Hill neighborhood, feels more like a mad scientist’s lair than a designer’s workshop. It is not clean and pristine. Objects are scattered about—on tables, on shelves, in corners, in a display box—and Lovegrove wouldn’t have it any other way. He dreams big. Really big. He prefers things messy, the way the world is. He’s an experimenter. On the surface, it may appear Lovegrove is simply a designer of forwardthinking objects, and that’s certainly true—throughout his 30-plus-year career he has

created refreshingly novel products and designs for brands including Swarovski, Sony, Motorola, and Renault.

He is first and foremost a designer, but his work more often than not extends into fields like art, architecture, science, and technology.

At 56, Lovegrove has made his name through experimental, organically shaped creations that suggest—and often lead the way toward— the future. Though an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2016 will showcase and contextualize this thinking, his work has embodied it since the start. His master’s project for London’s Royal College of Arts, called the Disc camera and created in

1983, looked 10 years ahead of its time. So did his 2001 Go chair for Bernhardt Design, made with a lightweight magnesium powder-coated frame.

So does Lovegrove’s latest release for Bernhardt, the Anne, created for the company’s 125th anniversary; made of American walnut and his second-ever wood seat (following the Bone for Ceccotti), it’s a subtler affair than much of his work, but still shows that wood can still be used in new ways. Last fall, during the London Design Festival, Surface stopped by the Welshborn designer’s studio to discuss his multifaceted practice, his ongoing relationship with America, and why he feels his time to shine is now. >

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About 20 years ago. After sleeping on some guy’s floor for quite some time under some pretty bad conditions, I found an old warehouse here in Notting Hill. It used to be a tannery, and then it was a fashion warehouse.

When I bought it, I was living next door. You couldn’t come to this mews; it was absolutely a no-go. There were prostitutes—you couldn’t get a taxi here if you tried. I know Anish Kapoor wanted to buy the space: Two weeks after I moved in, Anish offered me double for it. It was a pretty nondescript low-level brick building that was built through bomb damage after the war.

As a studio, it’s great. I love London, but I don’t appreciate nostalgia. I don’t want to live and work in an antique shop; I want to live and work in a really modern, organic environment.

Every day here you get inspired.

So you see your space as an organism that’s constantly changing?

Lovegrove’s Ty Nant water bottle (2002).

You mentioned Brancusi’s studio, as well as Tony Cragg and Henry Moore. Where do you see this line between art and design?

Well, somebody like Marc Newson would always say, “It’s not art; it’s industrial design.”

But yeah, it is art, and certainly what Marc creates has an art form embedded in it. You can’t tell me that Jeff Koons doesn’t have design in his art. You can’t tell me that Damien Hirst doesn’t. Cragg does, to some degree. Kapoor has a kind of balance in some of his pieces, which if they were translated into [design] objects would be very, very beautiful.

Design has a sense of order to it and a sense of the premeditated. It has a commercial dimension. But I do get tired of people saying that design is more commercial than art, because at the moment, sorry, it seems the other way around to me. To find that balance—so that design with art in it has something to say—really lifts your spirits. It creates an unusual, unknown dimension that draws you to it, the wonder of why.

Science and technology also plays a role in this conversation. How do you view these realms in your own work?

It’s nice that you raise this because I don’t employ designers. I have top parametric architectural model makers. I have car designers.

I have yacht designers. I have people who understand oceanography, ecology, nature, and digital imaging. Within that realm, the conversations we have embrace biology, science, the concept of evolutionary forces, the Darwinian nature of how things evolve.

If you look at scientific processes or models, it’s about soul searching. They always say that the act of going into space is the most conflicting idea for humanity, ever. They say because men are staring into space, they want to go there. There’s the emotional, psychological, instinctive will to go. But then when you pass it through science, the scientists say, “Are you crazy? We’re not designed for that!” But then the will pushes the scientists to design something that gets us up there, and then the view from space changes our view of humanity. It’s fantastic, the full circle of that engagement, don’t you think?

The way we build things, how we wear devices, how we scan the mind—I’d like to be involved in the three-dimensional emergence of that relationship with human beings. Now is my time. I can talk about the past as much as you want, but I don’t wake up every morning and think, “Oh, look what I did!” Somebody has to spearhead this beautiful new age. I don’t mean this in the hippie way, because that just drags it back; I mean something sensual and feminine. I’d never design a Hummer as long as I live. I’d like to design a biological car that floats and feels womblike. I think people want these things. You can’t buy that which does SURFACE

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PHOTO: COURTESY BERNHARDT DESIGN.

Everything you see here I did. It’s not for display—this is how we work. The space is constantly changing through 3D-printed models, new limited editions I’m having built, objects.

It’s like a living organism, yeah.

When I go to people’s studios sometimes and they’re dry as a bone, I couldn’t imagine working there. If you go to Brancusi’s studio in Paris outside the Pompidou, it’s a reconstruction, but it’s such a beautiful space—there’s an aura about it. I always thought, “Wow, what an amazing place to be, just to have your sculptural design around you.”

I’ve always been somebody who loves form and is totally engaged with it from a sculptural point of view, in the British realm—by which I mean people like Tony Cragg and Henry Moore. The thing is, if you take “design,” the word means to resonate something. It’s not a question of function only, although that’s incredibly relevant these days, even more relevant relative to environmental and ecological issues. Where my mind is set right now—and you’ll feel it in the studio—is that everything I’ve been preaching for 20 to 30 years is starting to come my way: organic essentialism, organic design, new materials, appropriation and research, lightness, dematerialization, 3-D printing, the incredible three-dimensional, fourth-dimensional realm that you get in architecture, fashion, design, automotive, across the board. We aren’t going back to this rather staid minimalism. What you have to understand is that minimalism without meaning is just cheap, and if you look at how things are made, it’s a hell of an investment to be able to create form. It’s very easy to produce form that’s uncomfortable or imbalanced.

If you put together everything I just talked about, you get some beauty. You get a form that is so emotionally sincere—like nature, which is a very universal language. I’m not in the game of popular culture. I just don’t like that mulch of society. It’s not because I don’t

care about it; it’s just that I think individualism is everything. Rarity, uniqueness, individualism is a luxury these days.

PHOTO: JOHN ROSS.

Let’s begin with your studio. When did you move into this space?

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not exist, so if the Googles and Facebooks and Apples—all the big money-generating machines, the Teslas of this world and so on—start having a dialogue with people like me, we’ve got a really great chance to go into a biological age.

So Google should hire you?

PHOTO: COURTESY BERNHARDT DESIGN.

PHOTO: JOHN ROSS.

If you look at the Google Self-Driving Car, my car on a stick—which I did about 15 years ago—absolutely predicted that. It’s still a better solution than what I see out there, so I’d love to get across the table with these guys, with Larry Page, and say, “Larry, what do you think? You’ve got the money, I’ve got the willingness, I’ve put my own effort into this. Why don’t we have a go?”

Let’s talk about your time at Frog Design in the ’80s. You worked on the Sony Walkman and early Apple computers. What was that experience like?

In my lovely naïve way, I was invited to work for Frog Design, which at the time was made up of eight people—I was number eight actually. They had the best client list: Apple, Sony, Louis Vuitton. They took me on because I thought in a different way. They hired me a year before I finished at the Royal College, which if you think about it now is an amazing thing. It was a really incredible moment for me.

When I started working there, the Walkman as we knew it had been established. But with Hartmut Esslinger, Frog was reworking and rethinking it. I realized at that time that the cassette we had then was well-packaged, and why would you put packaging around packaging? I was brought in to Frog Design, I think, to disrupt and to look at things in a new way.

It was a really important moment because the Walkman was obviously the equivalent of what we talk about today with iPods and iPhones and iWatches. If you compare those within a 30-year space in time, it’s really sensational what happened in the quality.

I remember going to [Ettore] Sottsass’s studio, and I said I was going to be leaving Frog Design. They said, “Are you crazy?” But remember my work is more biological. It has always been that way. I absolutely don’t begin with a movement or a known trend.

What happened next?

When I left college in ’83, I went straight to Frog Design and spent a year or so there. I was then headhunted by Knoll to go work in Paris. I went for half the money [I was making at Frog]. I lived in a seventh-floor walkup with a fold-down bed. I ate food from Monoprix past its sell-by date because I had nothing. It was a two-and-a-half-hour trip each way to the factory every day. Boy, was that a sacrifice. But I also had the Atelier de Nîmes studio with Philippe Starck, Jean Nouvel, Martine

Anne chair for Bernhardt Design (2014).

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Bedin, and Gérard Barrau. I was 26 or so. It was amazing.

I was working across cultural companies like Knoll. I understand completely why a Barcelona chair is the way it is. I was basically working within the archives of Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer. And I was with Carl Gustav Magnusson, who was the director of design for Knoll at that time. He is a great man, really gave me opportunities. I met everybody through Knoll. I had dinner in L.A. with Sottsass and Richard Meier. They really liked me because I was young and the only in-house designer. On the side, I started moonlighting for luxury companies. I understood the French way with fashion and luxury. There was nobody filling that gap at the time.

Which companies?

Oh, Dior, Hermès, Louis Vuitton, all the greats. I proposed the first transparent bag with a leather handle, and they said, “Oh, you must be joking.” Of course, they later made it.

I’m always ahead of my time, to my detriment.

In the early ’90s, you finally went out on your own.

How do you see this experience at Apple within the context of your work and the current state of design in general?

I know people say about me, “Oh boy, he’s lost it.” But at the end of the day if you look at the work that I do, I believe in it. I think it’s only a matter of time before others do, too.

I get a lot of people calling me these days. I

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PHOTO: YAMAGIWA, COURTESY ROSS LOVEGROVE.

PHOTO: JOHN ROSS.

Foliates collection of 18-karat gold 3D-printed jewelry for Louisa Guinness Gallery (2013).

That was a big risk because I don’t have any family money. But I had a great bandwidth of connectivity through people who really knew me in the U.S. I was back and forth to Apple. I’d go blasting up and down to Cupertino in an old Morgan. I looked like that guy [Christopher Lloyd’s character, Emmett “Doc” Brown] from Back to the Future. My hair was everywhere. I remember going to Apple’s headquarters, and there was a picture of the Queen in the reception—I think they had 17 designers and 16 of them were British. It was a really emergent culture, and because I’d had the experience prior to that with Frog Design—albeit not as a primary role—I met [Steve] Jobs, got my head down, did my work. Later I had the opportunity to work on something that didn’t cut it, but ultimately became an iPad.

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think what happened to Marc [Newson] recently being hired by Apple—there are all these other companies out there that want that. Who do you go to? Who are these star industrial designers who actually understand how things are made? There aren’t many of us. Naoto Fukasawa. Konstantin Grcic. Yves Béhar. What I do here is not prescriptive, of course, and I know the way I talk is a little bit biblical. But at the end of the day I believe it.

I think it’s just a matter of time. I really think it’s gonna come. The next decade will be really fascinating. I’m in my prime. I’m fit. I’m up. I have everything in place.

PHOTO: YAMAGIWA, COURTESY ROSS LOVEGROVE.

PHOTO: JOHN ROSS.

Another American brand you’ve worked with is Bernhardt Design. How did that collaboration come about?

Well, Bernhardt is such a lovely story. I met Jerry [Helling, the company’s president and creative director] in 1999. He’s always all in black, with a perma-tan, good-looking; he likes Europe and is a very spirited man. From the moment we met, I immediately liked him, and we really hit it off.

At that time, my studio was under the Westway motorway. It was at the bottom of Portobello—as rough as it gets—and I was a bit embarrassed about the place. We were having this studio redone, so I moved there for three years. When trucks went past, the image on your computer went like that [Lovegrove shakes his hands vigorously] through magnetic forces. It was unreal. All day long, trains outside within five meters of my window, every minute, going into Paddington.

While there I did a project for Japan Airlines, the Ty Nant water bottle, the Go chair [for Bernhardt], and some other things.

Three of my iconic products I did in this condition. Jerry was the only client I ever let visit me there. Jerry said, “Look, would you like to do a stackable aluminum chair?” I told him great. I actually didn’t look up Bernhardt

before working on the project. I just liked Jerry. Off we jolly well went on this idea of a stackable aluminum chair.

We decided instead of aluminum to do the chair in magnesium. Nobody had ever done a chair in magnesium. So I called Peter Schreyer, head of Audi design, and he gave me these contacts for magnesium in the automotive world. We developed the whole chair through Nuremberg. [Editor’s note: Intermet, a Missouri-based automotive components casting company, produced it.] We did the first wireframe drawings—it took a long time, and they were beautiful. I made the model for it in my workshop under the motorway. I did things by hand in those days. We made this chair, a full-size foam model, and when we measured it—I think we were three millimeters off on symmetry. It was that good. I didn’t even make it with a ruler.

Only later did I realize what Bernhardt was mostly doing: wood furniture. If I had seen the company’s catalogue, I wouldn’t have worked for them. It was a kind of wonderful exclusion and distance that gave rise to this. I remember when we launched the chair in New York [at a Nicole Farhi boutique on East 60th Street]. We had 10 of them on these huge marble blocks.

The architect Greg Lynn was on the stairs. I never knew Greg before that. I thought, “Oh, great, I’ll meet Greg Lynn finally.” That’s how he and I became great friends—through this chair. Leading parametric architectural schools now often use the chair to study form. Patrik Schumacher [who teaches at Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and is a director at Zaha Hadid Architects] uses it as a tutorial example. It’s become a bit of an icon.

Most recently, you created the Anne chair for Bernhardt.

I started to realize that what was going on with Jerry: The work we were doing was really

System X lighting for Yamagiwa (2008).

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reviving an old spirit of America, things that Knoll and Herman Miller were not doing­—the form, the ergonomics, the human factor. Jerry was supporting something really smart, and I was doing my thing. Eventually, Jerry started to work with other designers. Which I have no problem with. I think that’s important. I lost a bit of momentum with Bernhardt. I don’t know why, but that’s just the way it went.

Then Jerry came back recently and said, “It’s our 125th anniversary. Would you do something?” I said yes. We worked with the computer to create the Anne chair; it’s superdigital. The chair is not easy to build. This chair is me, with my kind of organic dream, saying, “This is what I want!” Which is a nightmare in production. The work I do has immense value because not that many people can produce organic design.

Go chair for Bernhardt Design (2001).

(OPPOSITE) Diatom chair for Moroso (2014).

Much of your work seems about convincing people that your ideas aren’t only realizable but also necessary. How do you convince them?

Being older helps. Being a bit more relaxed about it, in an American way, I think is very important. You don’t show you’re desperate.

You go with the flow. And now I’ve got a track record. If you deliver a good legal argument, like a good lawyer—with the right points in place—people generally follow it. That’s the professional way of explaining it. In an unprofessional way, everywhere I go, I flatter these engineers and tell them to give it a go.

The great thing is, nobody can copy this stuff, and in an age of copying—especially in China—we have to push the boundaries, go beyond and protect whatever it is we’re doing with a high level of innovation. You can’t copy the Go chair. You can’t copy my bamboo bike.

You can’t copy my Ty Nant water bottle.

So being a designer is really about making non-reproducible things?

That’s what clients want. I form a philosophical bond with clients who want what I say, what I do, in the Sottsass/Hemingway sense.

It’s interesting you mention Hemingway, who was very exacting with his words.

Would you say communication is key to your design process?

Definitely. Most designers don’t communicate! No offense to some, but they’ve got nothing to say. I don’t see it enough. If you’re going to take a risk, you’ve got to stand up there and give it a go.

A lot of it may have to do with the public not truly understanding what an industrial designer actually does.

When I meet people at dinner parties, they say, “What do you do?” When I say industrial designer, they often think I’ll fix their car.

Perhaps this explains why your designs are so out of the box and rather psychedelic: You’re showcasing new ways of thinking about design and form.

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PHOTO: COURTESY MOROSO.

PHOTO: JOHN ROSS.

Yeah, well, I’m not going to go to Burning Man anytime soon and do the drugs and let my hair down. But I think there’s something to it. I know my approach is a risk. I don’t expect everyone to buy into it.

PHOTO: COURTESY MOROSO.

PHOTO: JOHN ROSS.

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Gallery & Culture Club Italian brand Valextra opens a warm Manhattan flagship, designed by architect Marco Costanzi.

A photo portfolio of recent events in the Surface universe, including a special Art Basel Miami Beach recap.

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Gallery

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London-based designer Martino Gamper talks about his designs for Italian luxury accessories brand Valextra, and Italian architect Marco Costanzi discusses Milanese design influences for the brand’s first New York flagship, which recently opened on Madison Avenue.

Martino Gamper: I first met the Valextra team at “Design is a State of Mind,” the exhibition I curated at London’s Serpentine Galleries last spring, but when Valextra first contacted me, I had already known of the brand for many years. I’d walked past the shop and vitrines in Milan on Via Manzoni, looking in, thinking, “Ah, maybe one day,” but I always felt like I was too young to design a bag. Though I work with leather—it’s a material I really love—I’d never done a bag before. I asked if I could go to the factory and see how things are made, all the labor and love that is put into each bag.

The lines on the edges are made of ink. The technique is very complicated—there’s a little brush, and you have to apply the lacquer seven times to create the “costa” piping on the edges of the leather. I saw all the different materials and colors, and really felt it was so monochrome in a way, so I wanted to bring in some more color. At the same time, I didn’t want to redesign the bag because I thought I wasn’t quite ready yet. It’s interesting to take something that already exists and work on it, and to try to work within that condition.

There are several products we’ve developed, and we’re going to try to develop others. There will be a similar motif, and similar colors, but we’ll also try to work with more masculine colors as well, and see what we can do for a more contemporary, younger audience.

It’s also something that Valextra and I are playing with now: We can do custom bags within our color range.

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I said to Valextra that I’m very interested in establishing a relationship in which we can continuously create, rather than having to create this one thing that’s going to be a classic, because you don’t really design a classic: A classic becomes that way because people believe in it, and buy it—then it becomes a classic over time. You can’t design a classic: it’s impossible. You need time to define it. It’s an ongoing conversation with the company that I find very exciting.

Marco Costanzi: With this store, we chose the most Milanese materials and furniture pieces possible. The stone you see everywhere is Ceppo di Gré, a stone from the region between Bergamo and Brescia that you normally find in Milan. It’s very common, but still has that fresh look of Milan, of Bocconi University. It’s also something very monumental, but I try to balance it perfectly with

the Paonazzo marble, leather, and brass. Then we have this Chinese paper on the wall, which is something very rich and special.

This project was difficult because the original store in Milan was designed by the very important architect Pierluigi Cerri. In New York, the chairs were designed

by Luigi Caccia Dominioni, a very important Milanese architect. The door handles are by Giò Ponti, and the lighting is by Viabizzuno. It was important to have a concept that would be very modern, but not too rich, because we wanted the bags themselves to have the capacity to breathe, to speak their own language.

—As told to Jesse Seegers

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Pratt Institute’s 2014 Legends Gala At the Mandarin Oriental in New York on Nov. 20, more than 350 guests attended Pratt Institute’s 2014 Legends Gala. Providing funds for Pratt scholarships, the occasion raised $700,000 in advance and an additional $60,000 in pledges at the event. Chaired

by Judith and Bruce M. Newman and Jane and David Walentas, the gala honored style icon and designer Iris Apfel, Paper magazine co-founder and editorin-chief Kim Hastreiter, and designer David Yurman.

Nigerian fashion designer Duro Olowu presented the 2014 Legends Award to Apfel; the other two were presented their awards by Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi and Sainsbury Center for Visual Arts director Paul Greenhalgh, respectively. Notable guests included Architectural Digest editor-in-chief Margaret Russell (pictured, with Apfel); public radio program Studio 360 co-creator Kurt Andersen and his wife, novelist and journalist Anne Kreamer; and Elle Décor editor-in-chief Michael Boodro.

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CULTURE CLUB Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum On Nov. 20, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Hugo Boss named New York–based artist Paul Chan as the recipient of the 2014 Hugo Boss Prize.

Hosted by Guggenheim Museum director Richard Armstrong along with Hugo Boss artistic director Jason Wu (pictured, with actress Natasha Poly), the winner was selected by an international jury comprising museum curators and directors. Chan’s work will be displayed in a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim this spring. Celebrating the award recipient and finalists were Kate Bosworth and Michael Polish, Margot Robbie, Joshua Jackson, Scott Eastwood, Nicola Peltz, Hannah Herzsprung, Katharina Schuttler, Valeria Bilello, Mina Cvetkovic, and Charlie Siem. (Photo: David X Prutting/bfanyc.com)

Brooks Brothers and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital In the spirit of the holiday season, Brooks Brothers transformed its Rodeo Drive store in Los Angeles into a winter wonderland for a family-friendly celebration in honor of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

On Dec. 13, brand CEO Claudio Del Vecchio, Patricia Clarkson, Tony Danza, Josh Lucas, Alessandro Nivola, Vincent Piazza, and Marlo Thomas, among others, enjoyed live performances and other festive activities.

Here, Zac Posen sits on Santa’s lap for the occasion.

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CULTURE CLUB Neuehouse London Reveal The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge paid a special visit to Neuehouse’s New York space on Dec. 9 to attend the announcement of its London location, opening in late 2015. The occasion marked the royal couple’s first official visit to the city. In attendance were a wide range of British-born, New York–based creative talents. British ambassador to the United States Sir Peter Westmacott made the event’s opening remarks to an audience that included Neuehouse partner James O’Reilly (pictured, middle, with the Duke and Duchess and Neuehouse founders Joshua Abram and Alan Murray), Glenda Bailey, Georgina Chapman and Harvey Weinstein, Rebecca Eaton, Alexander Gilkes, Misha Nonoo, and Jenna Lyons.

(Photo: Getty)

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CULTURE CLUB Barneys New York Holiday Window Unveiling On Nov. 13, Barneys New York showed off its new Baz Dazzled windows, transformed into a wonderland for the holiday season. A collaboration with Baz Luhrmann (pictured, with Stilt Lady) and his designer wife, Catherine Martin, the windows presented an enchanted urban environment with metallic colors and luxurious textures. Together with Barneys New York creative director Dennis Freedman and his team, the unveiling attracted Richard and Lisa Perry, Amy Sacco, Dakota Fanning, designer Aurelie Bidermann, singer Estelle, and actress Victoria Justice. A capella group Pentatonix performed at the event. (Photo: Neil Rasmus/bfanyc.com)

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CULTURE CLUB: ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH Art Basel Miami Beach Opening Night On Dec. 3, in celebration of Art Basel Miami Beach’s opening night, Tommy Hilfiger, Jeffrey Deitch, and V magazine hosted a private event at the Raleigh South Beach Hotel with a special performance by Miley Cyrus.

Joining the vivacious singer onstage was Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips (pictured, with Cyrus). Cyrus, who donned a silver metallic, Cleopatra-inspired wig and bright turquoise eye shadow, sang covers of songs by artists like Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, and Johnny Cash. Sponsors of the event included Dom PĂŠrignon, Golden Lady, MAC Cosmetics, and Samsung. Among the notable attendees were Jeremy Scott, Scout Willis, Anthony Shriver, Douglas Booth, Romero Britto, and Leigh Lezark. (Photo: Billy Farrell/bfanyc.com)

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CULTURE CLUB: ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH Artsy Dance Party The Moore Building in Miami’s Design District was the scene for the Artsy Dance Party on Dec. 3 featuring Shen Wei and Theophilus London. The event was hosted by Artsy CEO Carter Cleveland, Wendi Murdoch, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, and art collector and editor Dasha Zhukova. Silas and Celia Chou supported the event. Guests included Jemima Kirke, Ivanka Trump, Lauren Remington Platt, and Laura de Gunzburg. Pictured are Egyptian Lover and fashion photographer Nicky Ottav. (Photo: Ben Rosser/ bfanyc.com)

Dom Pérignon’s “Metamorphosis” On Dec. 4, Dom Pérignon held its annual Miami Art Basel dinner and after-party, dubbed “Metamorphosis.”

The intimate dinner, hosted by Aby Rosen and Samantha Boardman Rosen, took place at The Dutch and was followed by a party at Wall. At the latter, hosted by Alex Dellal, Stavros Niarchos, and Vito Schnabel, Alexandra Richards and D.J. Jus-Ske performed while guests experienced the brand’s limitededition collaboration with Dutch designer Iris van Herpen. Pictured are Larry Gagosian and Wiz Khalifa.

(Photo: Neil Rasmus/bfanyc.com) SURFACE

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CULTURE CLUB: ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH Visionaire 64 Art John Baldessari Platinum Edition Launch Party Art book publisher Visionaire and conceptual artist John Baldessari celebrated their partnership for the company’s 64th installment, Visionaire Art John Baldessari, on Dec. 4 at the Miami Beach Edition hotel.

For the platinum edition of the book, Baldessari called on 30 contemporary celebrities and personalities to send him selfies and then embossed the images with his signature shapes and colors. Attendees included China Chow (pictured), James Kaliardos, Marilyn Minter, Mickalene Thomas, and Charlotte Sarkozy.

(Photo: Benjamin Lozovsky/bfanyc.com)

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CULTURE CLUB: ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH One Thousand Museum Groundbreaking World-renowned architect Zaha Hadid began construction on the One Thousand Museum—her firm’s first residential skyscraper in the Western world. The groundbreaking took place on Dec. 5. Hadid was joined by longtime business partner Patrik Schumacher and the project’s lead designer, Chris Lepine. A day before the groundbreaking, a cocktail party celebrated the new project and showcased a live painting demonstration

by Miami artist Jona Cerwinske, the first of a series called “Art + Architecture.” Among the attendees were Miami commissioner Marc Sarnoff (pictured, opposite right, with Hadid), developers Gregg Covin and Louis Birdman, and Miami Mayor Tomás Regalado.

(Photo: World Red Eye)

Gucci and Spinello Projects Present “Smell the Magic” On Dec. 1 in Miami’s Design District, Gucci and Spinello projects hosted a private cocktail receptiondisplaying “Smell the Magic,” a pop-up solo exhibition

by Kris Knight. The Toronto-based artist was present at the opening (pictured, right, with Michael Chow), which coincided with the release of his first published catalogue. Gucci’s collaboration with Knight began in January 2014, when Gucci’s then creative director Frida Giannini referenced the artist’s paintings in the brand’s A/W 2014 collection. (Photo: Joe Schildhorn/ bfanyc.com) 185

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CULTURE CLUB: ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH Swarovski Design Miami Dinner On Dec. 2, Swarovski honored MacArthur fellow and Chicago-based architect Jeanne Gang with an intimate dinner at Cecconi’s at the Soho Beach House in Miami Beach for her firm’s Design Miami “Thinning Ice” installation. Emmy Award–winning photographer and filmmaker James Balog was also celebrated for his collaboration with Swarovski and Gang on the project. More than 100 guests were invited for canapés and cocktails followed by a formal seated dinner. D.J. Alex Merrell wore crystalized Swarovski headphones while he played music. Those in attendance were Jeanne Gang (pictured, left, with Nadja Swarovski), Surface contributing editor Marina Cashdan, Athena Calderone, Julie Macklowe, Rodman Primack, and Patricia Urquiola. (Photo: Angela Pham/bfanyc.com)

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CULTURE CLUB: ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH The Institute of Contemporary Art A special presentation on Dec. 1 by Dacra CEO Craig Robins (pictured, left, with artist Paula Crown) announced the permanent location of the new Institute of Contemporary Art in the Miami Design District. The press conference discussed details of the 37,500-square-foot building, to be designed by Spanish firm Aranguren & Gallegos Arquitectos. In addition to the building’s land, a 15,000-square-foot adjacent space will be devoted to a sculpture garden, a project funded by Irma and Norman Braman. The institution’s new location is expected to open in December 2016. (Photo: Rodrigo Gaya for World Red Eye)

The Miami Beach Edition Launch On Dec. 2, hotelier and real estate developer Ian Schrager (left) and W magazine editor-in-chief Stefano Tonchi (right) fêted the launch of the Miami Beach Edition hotel. The evening’s festivities took full advantage of the new hotel’s public spaces. Dinner took place in the Matador Room, followed by a performance by Dev Hynes (Blood Orange). Among those in attendance were Surface contributing editor Ben Pundole, Marriott International president and CEO Arne Sorenson, Linda Evangelista, Toni Garrn, Ann Dexter-Jones, Lola Schnabel, Marina Abramovic, David Maupin, and Rachel Lehmann. (Photo: Joe Schildhorn/bfanyc.com) SURFACE

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CULTURE CLUB: ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH Design Curio at Design Miami For “Uncertain Surfaces”—one of the most dynamic installations presented at the Design Miami fair last December—Minneapolis-based design studio RO/LU, in collaboration with Various Projects, created the booth of New York’s Patrick Parrish Gallery. The series comprised a dining table, four stools, a closed cabinet, and two life-size steel figures, one standing and one kneeling. The booth was part of the fair’s new Design Curio exhibition platform that features comprehensive environments of objects, textures, artifacts, and ideas, offering focused narratives from designers, curators, innovators, and gallerists. (Photo: James Harris)

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OBJECT

Against the Grain

THE COUNTING THE RICE TABLE BY THE NUMBERS:

30 Counting the Rice tables produced to give shape to an exercise created by Marina Abramovićc of the same name 6 The minimum number of hours Abramovicć suggests performers sit at these tables separating and counting grains of rice and lentils, in order to explore their physical and psychological limits and transform an everyday action into a meditative ritual 100,000 Price in Swiss Francs (CHF) fetched for the first table at auction last September to raise funds for the Marina Abramovićc Institute, a platform for immaterial art and long durational works in art, dance, theater, film, music, opera, science, nature, and technology 82 Length of the table, in centimeters 130 Width, in centimeters 110 Height, in centimeters 450 Weight, in kilograms 430 Chainstay length, in millimeters 112 Hours needed by Moroso artisans to cast and handproduce a single bench in cement 200 Hours required to realize the mold for the bench in concrete 23 Artists, including Abramovićc, with whom Patrizia Moroso has collaborated over the course of her 30-year career as art director of her family’s furniture brand

PHOTO: COURTESY GIANNI ANTONIALI/IKON.

Designed by Daniel Libeskind for Moroso in collaboration with artist Marina Abramovic, the Counting the Rice table is made of high-performance cement that appears as if folded.

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Š Peter Adams / Offset

When I hit a wall I try to take a step back to get a fresh perspective on the situation.

Things almost always look different from ten thousand feet. — Will Griggs, Founder of Cantora, producer & storyteller

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