Ton
THE ROYAL‘It’s almost a cliché that rock and roll musicians go for the fantasy, the gothic’ says Tom, a musician and artist who moved to the Royal Victoria Patriotic Building in the late 1980s. The former asylum was in the process of...
Ton
A PIECE OF BRIGHT PINK IS A GIFT FROM GOD'Apart from the obvious things that look like a gorilla or a clown’s head, most of the figures are taken from antiquity and pre-history', says Rory McCormack, a fisherman who has been working off of Brighton beach for over 20 years. We are standing in the enclosure...
Tank
SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMYIn the final episode of season three of Selling Sunset, realtor and “gothic Barbie” Christine Quinn shows Karamo Brown from Queer Eye around a Richard Neutra house in Los Angeles. Selling Sunset is a reality television show that follows lives of the agents...
PIN—UP
CHASING THE VANISHING POINT“I find the term ‘glass artist’ frustrating,” says sculptor Miranda Keyes. “I think the binary nature of describing my work as ‘glass art’ ties in with a real ambivalence about the material. Glass isn’t taken seriously, maybe because it's so seductive.”
PIN—UP
EXHIBITIONS AS THEATRE, MATERIAL AS CHARACTER“This moment of calm is incredible,” says Joseph Grima, co-founder of Alcova Milano, sitting in the living room of Villa Bagatti Valsecchi, where a storm has temporarily lifted the crowds from the bustling exhibition. Since Grima co-founded...
PIN—UP
WET N WILD: FOUNTAINEERING WITH SOFT BAROQUEDomaine de Boisbuchet, the international research center for design and architecture, sits at the end of a long, winding country lane in southwest France. To get there, you pass a sign directing you towards “Trauma”, a riverside hamlet...
World of Interiors
Zeyrek Çinili HamamIn 2010, real estate company the Marmara Group bought the Zeyrek Çinili Hamam site planning to restore and open the hamam within three years, but “it became like an excavation as we discovered layers, and all these stories...
World of Interiors
PARAVENTI — FONDAZIONE PRADA‘Paraventi’, plural for ‘paravento’, describes an object that protects, and provides shelter from the wind. A folding screen that acts as a barrier, a room divider, a facade that invites intimacy while performing to those outside of its embrace...
World of Interiors
THE GHYCZY HOUSEOn an autumn evening in 1971, furniture and product designer Peter Ghyczy sat in the overgrown garden of an abandoned 16th century castle in the Netherlands. It had belonged to his wife, Barbara Ghyczy’s family for three centuries, but it was run down, with water leaking in, and sheep roaming through the garden...
PIN—UP
THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME“Paris is at the heart of a lot of artistic and intellectual thought; it has been for centuries. The history of museums, of making and showing artisanal crafts, is so potent here. To do something in the middle of the city, in the Jardin des Tuileries...
Aperture
ALICE RAWSTHORNDesign writer and critic Alice Rawsthorn has always counted László Moholy-Nagy as one of her heroes. Her book Design as an Attitude draws its title from Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion, where he argued for the connections between art and life, and how design and the profession of the designer “has to be transformed from..."
Source Type
A LIVING IMAGECecil B. DeMille’s 1923 film The Ten Commandments opens with the hazy image of a sphinx’s head. One of the Pharaoh's workers stands in front of it, possibly on the sphinx’s feet, whipping the people tasked with pulling the statue across the shot, from one side of the Pharaoh’s temple to the other.
Wallpaper
THE SPIRITS OF PAIMIOAino and Alvar Aalto’s “cathedral to health”, completed in 1933, was designed to provide the breathing space, support, and holistic care required to rehabilitate tuberculosis patients before the development of a medical treatment and cure...
Port
THE NORTH AMERICAN PAVILION“As in most exhibitions, it was a sequence of unplanned events that led to the show happening”, Alex Tieghi-Walker tells me from his apartment in New York, as he smokes a “calming” cigarette after a rude awakening from his building’s superintendent...
Port
COOKING SECTIONS: LEAVE ROOM FOR PUDDINGMuhallebici — pudding shops named after an Ottoman speciality of shredded chicken thickened with rice water, sprinkled in sugar and rose water — serve profiteroles, baklava, sütlaç (rice pudding, with a burnt top), and kaymak (a rolled, sour, clotted cream) throughout Istanbul. They are traditionally made with buffalo milk...
Maharam Stories
NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE'S TAROT GARDENIn Italy, near the coast where Tuscany meets Lazio, a gathering of sparkling mosaics protrudes through the treetops on the hills surrounding the village of Capalbio. A pink and blue sphinx with long hair, a crown, and kaleidoscopic breasts; a striped figure holding a pair of scales; and a silver-headed being with a second face...
Maharam Stories
Cinzia RuggeriStraddling fashion, architecture, interior and furniture design, performance, sculpture, and print, Italian designer Cinzia Ruggeri imbued her surrealist works with a playful, experimental, provocative energy infused with elegance and glamor. Whether presenting a mirror with arms that reach out in an embrace or a dress shaped like a flight of stairs...
Maharam Stories
CHARLOTTE PERRIAND'S LES ARCSLes Arcs, a ski resort in the Savoie region of France, mostly disappears into its surroundings. Hotels and apartments lean into and cantilever out from the mountainside. Building levels are staggered and clusters of chalets follow the contours of the slopes.
Maharam Stories
A HOUSE BUILT OUT OF CARPETSIn The Principle of Cladding, one of many polemics by Adolf Loos, the Austrian architect defined the profession’s task as “providing a warm and liveable space”. One evolving from the tradition of the coverings of early built structures — made from animal skins or textiles. “Carpets are warm and liveable”...
Maharam Stories
BETTY WOODMANBetty Woodman’s first foray into ceramics was a high school pottery class, which set off a career-long relationship with clay, moving from the potential of functional pottery — “the cup you drink from… can change your life!” — to the abstracted vessels of her later work.
Maharam Stories
MARC CAMILLE CHAIMOWICZ'S MISE-EN-SCÈNEIn 2018, after almost 40 years of living and working there, Marc Camille Chaimowicz moved out of his south London flat. Set on the top floor of Hayes Court, it was decorated in his own wallpapers, with lamps, room dividers, and curtains made or adapted in the same way that Chaimowicz builds up environments...
Elephant
IMITATION AND AMBIGUITYShanzhai Lyric had intended on “tracing the pathway of a shanzhai T-shirt”, with visits to informal markets in South China, and the Museum of Counterfeiting in Paris, but as was the theme of 2020, “all our plans were cancelled”. Founded by Ming Lin and Alexandra Tarkovsky in 2015, their research practice started...
Emergent
"ARE THEY ALL EQUALLY REPULSIVE?"'While New York was cool, Chicago was hot', is the short answer Suellen Rocca regularly gave to the question of the difference between New York’s Pop and Chicago’s Imagism. While Pop Art was deadpan, the work of the Chicago Imagists...
Emergent
FOLLOWING A FUNCTIONAL IDEA IS FINEIn 2019, at a New York museum building due renovation, Gaetano Pesce performed a chair. Pesce and a group of collaborators worked among an installation of his Brooklyn studio, transplanted for the first exhibition at Salon 94’s new space, after moving from its long-time set-up
Emergent
MARIE ANTOINETTE IN A HIGH-RISE APARTMENT“Ornament, function, unlikely colour palettes, impulsive design choices, and juxtapositions of elements from contrasting eras and cultures all come together to create a kind of folk architecture. It’s fresh...
This is Badland
MAKING SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHINGOn Istanbul’s Golden Horn, balık ekmek or ‘fish bread’ has been sold since the 1800s. A piece of grilled whitefish (typically mackerel) is served in white bread, with white onion, parsley, pul biber, salt and lemon juice, which, more recently, has often stood in squeezy bottles on low, plastic tables, beside grand, decorated boats...
Chateau International: Récit
Eau!The ‘dancing’ fountain was first described by Hero of Alexandria, a mathematician and engineer from Roman Egypt: “A bird made to whistle by flowing water. A trumpet sounded by flowing water. Birds made to sing and be silent alternately by flowing water.”
The Plant
OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMBIn 2012, at San Diego’s annual Fourth of July ‘Big Bay Boom’, all the fireworks went off at once. What was meant to be an 18 minute display, was over in 15 seconds; the rockets, fountains, brocade crowns, strobes and comets launching...
Schloss Hollenegg for Design
The Will to Bloom“I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately”, wrote Henry David Thoreau in his 1854 book, Walden. His life at the cabin by Walden Pond is often romanticised and celebrated as a thoughtful, honourable choice. He abandoned the stresses of productivity, social pressures and the shallow obsession with the accumulation of stuff
PIN—UP
Thriving, Puckering, Adoring, Warping, Glowing, Scorching: Soft Baroque’s Sun CityTanning salons — Eternal Summer, Brazil Bronze, Healthy Glow, Sun City — and their offerings — sprays and sun-bed sessions in shades of ‘Exotic Dancer’, ‘WASP Housewife’, ‘Skinny Tan’, or ‘Chocolate Brown’ (“great for body builders and ballroom dancers!”) — rose in popularity through the 1970s and 80s
Chateau International
Dope and Diamonds: A Lana Del Rey ReaderLana is variously lethargic and confrontational, vulgar yet deeply sensitive. Her contradictions are rehearsed and precise. She also represents a nuanced, vulnerable and flawed femininity rarely explored in contemporary pop, exposing the emptiness and hypocrisy of sloganistic corporate feminism...
Occasional Table: Distributed
Life is Good and Good For You in New YorkIt’s dry with a dash of satire – knowing and sarcastic, without losing the magic of the unreal. Gossip Girl embraced the truth of our never really leaving high school, and festooned it with the perks of adulthood...
This is Badland
In an elegant beach-front settingBODRUM - An archaeology of street media; signage, translation and interpretation; architectural simulation; design vernaculars and improvisations.
Port
The flexible radicality of the CamaleondaCamaleonda is a portmanteau of camaleonte, meaning chameleon, and onda, meaning wave; two bodies that shift and change according to the conditions of their environment. The Camaleonda sofa...
Port
Formal Poetry: Commemorating Carlo Scarpa’s Brion CemeteryGiuseppe Brion, the founder of Brionvega – the electronics company famous for the Cubo television – died in 1968. His wife Onorina, wanting to memorialise her husband, extended the family plot at the local cemetery...
Maharam Stories
A State of National ReclineEero Saarinen had been experimenting with the idea of conversation pits for a few years when he received a commission from industrialist J. Irwin Miller to design a family home in Columbus, Indiana, in 1953...
Port
Anti-Morality Tales: Famous Artists from Chicago at Milan’s Fondazione PradaArtist and curator Don Baum had been teaching at Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Center for close to a decade when he started exhibiting the work of under-represented Chicago artists. It was the early 1960s and...