Architect Michel Rojkind knows the value of being a team player

The illustrious architect brings his collaborative spirit and unique perspective to WeWork, with an eye toward building the future

Stephen Wallis

July 17, 2019

https://www.wework.com/ideas/architect-michel-rojkind-knows-the-value-of-being-a-team-player

Michel Rojkind is constantly looking to push boundaries. Over the past 15 years, his Mexico City firm, Rojkind Arquitectos, has earned a reputation for stylistically diverse projects that blend pragmatism and community engagement with adventurous forms and often inventive facades. 

It’s his outside-the-box mentality and collaborative spirit that helped land Rojkind his new post as The We Company’s senior VP of architecture, where he is tasked with heading up a growing number of large-scale building projects while also helping elevate its standing as a design-world thought leader. Rojkind is just the latest high-profile design talent hired by the company as cofounders Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey continue to push in new business directions, including an expanded real estate portfolio overseen by the recently launched ARK division, a private real estate investment arm. 

Bjarke Ingels, who joined The We Company in an advisory role of chief architect a year ago, was instrumental in recruiting Rojkind. The two are friends and occasional collaborators, and they’ll be working closely together on company projects. 

For Rojkind, operating within a corporate structure is a completely foreign—but welcome—challenge. “I’ve never worked for anybody in my life,” he says.

The first announced project Rojkind will lead is also his first building in the U.S.: a 200,000-square-foot development to be constructed in Bentonville, Arkansas, featuring coworking spaces, shops, and other components. Though few details have been released, the idea is “to do a building that is born from Bentonville,” says Rojkind. “We don’t want to come in and impose but instead say, ‘Let’s sit down, let’s see, let’s look at how you guys live.’ We have to propose architecture that adds value to communities, gives something in return.”

A similar approach and spirit defines most of Rojkind’s best-known work, such as his 2007 Nestlé Chocolate Museum in Toluca, outside Mexico City—a project that took less than six months to complete and brought him global recognition. Composed of twisting, folded origami-like spaces clad in scarlet-hued corrugated metal, the structure serves as a dynamic public gateway to Nestlé’s factory complex and quickly became a popular destination for families and schoolkids. More recently, his two-year-old Foro Boca concert hall, a brutalist cluster of windowless concrete volumes perched on a previously dilapidated waterfront in Boca del Río, Mexico, is not only a defining landmark for the town but a vibrant hub for diverse cultural programming that has spurred revitalization in the surrounding area.

“It feels like what I’ve been doing—creating architecture that is a catalyst for community—has been training for me to come to WeWork, a company that has always been about making environments where people can thrive,” says Rojkind, whose firm will continue to operate separately. “At WeWork, I can do it on a bigger level. I can have more impact. I don’t care if my name is there or not.”

Coming from a successful, ambitious architect like Rojkind, that last statement might seem unexpected. It certainly contrasts with the cult of individual creative genius that has long prevailed in the architecture field. But very little about Rojkind or his career path can be called conventional.

The youngest of four kids, he grew up mostly in Mexico City, though the family spent a few years in the New York City area in the seventies, when his father, a prominent liver specialist, took a position at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Rojkind believes he suffered from ADD (though he was never diagnosed), and says he channeled his hyperactivity in part by taking up the drums as a teenager—which, as it happened, would lead to a successful music career.

In the late-eighties and early-nineties, Rojkind recorded four albums and toured extensively with the popular Mexican band Aleks Syntek y la Gente Normal while simultaneously taking architecture classes at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. “A lot of my teachers told me, ‘I see your videos on MTV. Do you really think you’re going to be an architect?’” he recounts. “And I would say, ‘Don’t judge me because I’m in a band. Judge my capacity to do architecture and engage in projects in the right way.’”

Rojkind got his degree in 1994; within a few years, as he was feeling alienated by changes in the music business and Aleks Syntek’s shift toward more of a pop sensibility, he got his first commission to design a home. He decided to commit to architecture.

Particularly at first, some people in Mexico who knew him as a drummer resisted taking him seriously as an architect. To support his practice early on, he did renderings for other architects. Two prominent figures in Mexico’s architecture scene, Isaac Broid and Miquel Adrià, admired Rojkind’s work enough to bring him into a partnership that lasted three years. That period proved pivotal, as Rojkind found himself “sitting down with all of these bigger architects,” he says. “I was part of their conversations.”

In 2002, eager to push in new directions, Rojkind went back out on his own and founded Rojkind Arquitectos. Among his initial breakthrough projects was his 2003 PR34 House, a boldly contemporary extension to a 1960s residence that consisted of two interlocking, glass-fronted volumes wrapped in smooth steel shells with rounded edges and painted an electric red. The new headquarters he devised for the medical supplies company Falcon that same year featured a translucent exterior of asymmetrically gridded yellow glass, with openings at irregular intervals, revealing interior plantings and blurring distinctions between indoors and out. Both projects featured elements that would become Rojkind signatures: coupling digital design with local craftsmanship, and using facades to create visual dynamism and break up rigid conventional geometries.

“When people started seeing what I was designing, they were like, ‘Wow, we want to interview you because you have a different profile and see things differently from most architects,’” he says. Being in the music world and touring with his band opened his eyes to new cultures and communities and the role that architecture plays in the social experience of places.

It also taught him a lot about collaboration. While architects are traditionally reluctant to share work and ideas, it’s “super natural” for musicians, Rojkind says, to get together and “jam.” He says his mind-set has always been “I don’t want to be this architect who is siloed somewhere and doesn’t speak to anybody. The more people there are sitting around the table, the more interesting the projects get.”

Indeed, many projects in Rojkind’s portfolio have dual credits. Prominent examples include the Tori Tori sushi restaurants he created with designer Hector Esrawe, as well as the Cineteca Nacional and Liverpool department store projects he did with Gerardo Salinas, who worked as a partner in Rojkind Arquitectos between 2010 and 2014, helping to guide the firm through a period of rapid growth.

At WeWork, Rojkind says he expects collaboration to remain central to the company’s architectural projects. “We want to create a design platform where we can connect with different colleagues, collaborate, and have amazing buildings,” he says. 

Collaboration and exchange are, after all, at the heart of the WeWork ethos. The idea is that “WeWork becomes this lab of culture,” says Rojkind. “The conversations and connections people make have the most impact.”

What’s especially intriguing to Rojkind is the ability to gather, assess, and apply members’ feedback to future designs. “We’re paying attention to what people want and learning from that,” he says. He wants to use that information to rethink what buildings should be in the future. 

Eager to push the next boundary, Rojkind isn’t limiting his scope to the ARK-funded projects currently in development. “I’m not the type of person who can stand still at his desk and wait for stuff,” Rojkind says. “I’m going to figure out how to get clients and start working on projects now.”

Peaceable Kingdom

Developer and cultural impresario Alan Faena channels his signature exuberance into a seductively spare pied-à-terre.

By Stephen Wallis

Photographs by Floto + Warner

https://www.departures.com/lifestyle/home-design/alan-faena-home-design

Charismatic, slightly mysterious, and more than a little Gatsby-like, Argentine developer Alan Faena is a man everybody in the art and design worlds knows of, but whom far fewer—particularly outside his home country—truly know much about. He’s the instantly recognizable guy who dresses in all white and with sartorial flourishes that range from gaucho-inspired ensembles to theatrical capes and kimonos trimmed in gold. And hats, always hats. 

He’s also the mastermind behind high-profile residential-hotel-cultural developments in Buenos Aires and Miami Beach—realized in collaboration with star architects and designers and backed by his billionaire business partner Len Blavatnik. Miami’s $1.2 billion Faena District, spanning six blocks along a previously sleepy stretch of Mid-Beach, is anchored by the Faena Hotel, with flamboyantly chic interiors by Hollywood husband-and-wife duo Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin, a restaurant by Argentine grilling guru Francis Mallmann, and a cabaret. There’s also a lower-tier hotel called Casa Faena and an eye-catching condo building by Foster + Partners, as well as the Faena Forum cultural center and the Faena Bazaar retail complex, both designed by architect Rem Koolhaas’s firm OMA. It all adds up to what Faena has referred to as “a total artwork.” 

That self-assured, individualistic spirit comes through in his various homes—in Buenos Aires, Miami Beach, the Uruguayan beach town of José Ignacio, and, most recently, New York City, where Faena is spending more time these days. His two-bedroom apartment there, in a building by Foster + Partners in the heart of Chelsea, near the High Line, offers glorious, unimpeded views out over the Hudson River. 

“What I like about Foster and his team is that they create a traditional architecture I love,” says Faena. “I don’t like those buildings that can be very nice for pictures and renderings, but then you have to live with this kind of modern form that’s not very comfortable.” 

People familiar with Faena’s Miami home will no doubt be surprised by this apartment. Gone are the over-the-top colors and the riot of animal prints, the dense displays of art, crystals, and other objects. In these airy, modestly scaled spaces you find almost exclusively shades of white and warm golden accents. If, as Faena has said, his homes are temples, Miami is his Baroque cathedral and New York is his Zen monastic retreat. Faena began renovating the apartment not long after he separated from his wife, curator Ximena Caminos, with whom he has a nine-year-old son, Noa. 

Not that the apartment lacks glamour. It was conceived as an homage to 1970s New York style, with Halston as a specific reference point. Working with Manhattan designer Melissa Bowers, Faena installed silk-velvet-upholstered window seats throughout—perfect for stylish perching (“Alan is like a cat,” Bowers says)—laid down cozy wall-to-wall carpeting in the master bedroom and added mirrors to ceilings and walls. 

The goal was to amplify the light and views. “You have the sunset that’s spectacular on the water, and everything becomes gold and magenta with the reflections in the mirror,” says Faena. “I allow this space to become part of nature. It’s why we didn’t want to bring any art into the living room, so that nothing would take away that feeling, that purity of the amazing sunset.” 

Anchoring the living room is a sprawling, circular, very ’70s Milo Baughman sofa covered in a sumptuous velvet. It wraps around a biomorphic marble table, where a massive cluster of Bolivian crystals serves as an arresting centerpiece (Faena appreciates “their energy”); the effect is like a classic conversation pit. “Alan enjoys entertaining, and he loves to sit in big groups,” says Bowers, who worked for Faena on the Miami development and is very familiar with how he likes to live. “Everything is soft and low—it’s his aesthetic,” she says. 

In the master bedroom, they chose a carpeted platform bed, backed by a wall of mirrors, taking inspiration from the one slept in by Faye Dunaway’s fashion photographer character in the 1978 movie Eyes of Laura Mars. A vintage Danish chandelier in brass and amber glass hangs overhead, while most of another wall is occupied by a 1930s Japanese screen painted with a life-sized tiger standing in snow against a gleaming gold background. 

The second, more plainly furnished bedroom is for Noa, and it has also served as a space where Faena sings and writes Spanish-language love songs, a ritual he took up after his split from Caminos. Lately, however, he says his focus has been on work. And when he’s in New York, that means sitting in the small library off the living room.

Faena takes meetings around a François Bauchet felt-in-resin coffee table, beneath paintings by Argentine artists Pablo Siquier and Graciela Hasper and a portrait of Faena (in his signature all-white look) by Julian Schnabel. His major preoccupations in recent months have included Miami’s Faena Bazaar and, last December, the debut of the annual Faena Festival, a multi-venue program of installations and performances that represents “an alchemy of creative collaboration to elevate people,” he says. 

Never one to shy away from grand pronouncements or seductive self-mythologizing, Faena has also recently published a memoir, Alchemy & Creative Collaboration: Architecture, Design, Art (Rizzoli), in which he paints a portrait of himself as an unabashed original. Describing his work in Miami, he writes that he wasn’t just thinking big but “inventing a new kingdom or universe.” And he’s looking to take his magic touch elsewhere, promising announcements soon about new Faena developments in yet-to-be-disclosed locations. “I don’t see myself opening just a hotel, selling beds,” he says. “I will go only to places where we can continue making this magic, these creative collaborations. Every time Faena works in a city, we change it. We make it a better place.”

Sand Sea Sun Sky

An A-list design team ensures that it’s all about the spectacular oceanfront setting at an art-minded family’s Southampton retreat

By Stephen Wallis

May 9, 2019

https://www.galeriemagazine.com/summer-cocktails-2019/

When a Manhattan hedge-fund manager and his wife began looking for a weekend perch out in the Hamptons, they weren’t focused on a particular community. “We were really driven by, where can we find a special property?” says the husband. Then they discovered what could fairly be described as one of those won’t-come-along-again opportunities: an oceanfront site in Southampton bordered by protected dunes, ponds, and wetlands—meaning spectacular light and views that were guaranteed to remain unobstructed. Forever.

After tearing down the existing 1980s house, which failed to fully take advantage of the “magnificent dunescape setting,” as the husband puts it, the couple worked with a blue-chip team comprising the architecture firm Leroy Street Studio, interior designer Victoria Hagan, and Hollander Design Landscape Architects’ Edmund Hollander to create an 11,000-square-foot, five-bedroom home that is essentially just two levels (plus a basement), though it feels like more, thanks to offset floor planes and varying ceiling heights as well as the diversity of outdoor spaces. “It’s a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, and every square inch is thought out,” says the husband, noting that everything is calibrated to maximize connections to the natural splendor.

“The idea is that the house rises out of the dunes and is the same color but also has this transparency,” says Morgan Hare, a founding partner at Leroy Street Studio. “While most homes on the ocean tend to face one direction, this was an amazing opportunity to have cross views through the house with water on three sides.”

The clients issued a couple of basic directives at the start: They wanted a modern house that could accommodate their three adult children as well as friends, and they wanted it to be inverted, with the entertaining areas on top and the bedrooms—with the exception of the master suite—below. “They’re very family oriented, so having lots of common spaces was a priority,” Hare says. “And another big driver was the open views from the master bedroom.”

To add drama to that view, the architects placed the couple’s bedroom at the east-facing end of the house, cantilevered it out over the pool deck, and wrapped the space entirely in glass. “My biggest problem is that I’m so excited to see the sunrise every day that I don’t sleep long enough,” says the husband. “In the morning, you look out and see mist rising over the ponds and deer hopping through the dunes.”

When it came to materials, Leroy Street Studio opted for consistency throughout: gray-gold Palestinian limestone for the exterior and select interior walls, gray French limestone pavers for the entrance area and terraces, oak for most doors and floors, marble and onyx in the baths. For the furnishings, Hagan—who previously decorated the clients’ more traditional homes in Manhattan and Aspen, Colorado—kept things modern, muted, and comfortable. Sumptuous fabrics and plush carpets are a restrained mix of grays, creamy buffs, and sea blues. “Clearly, the palette was inspired by the beach, the nature,” she says. “And everything is very soft and tactile.”

Art also played a central role in the planning, as major pieces from the couple’s collection were designated from the outset to anchor specific spaces. Mounted opposite each other in the double-height entry hall are one of El Anatsui’s substantial wall hangings made with shimmering bottle caps, above the floating staircase, and a seven-foot-wide version of Andreas Gursky’s iconic, arrestingly minimal photograph of the Rhine River. It’s an impression-making welcome, with two dozen molded-glass pendant lights dangling overhead and sight lines all the way through the house, out to the grassy dunes. Also visible, on a small rear terrace, is a Maya Lin marble iceberg sculpture, which she made specifically for the spot. “It was the melting of the icebergs that created the moraines and dunescapes of the Hamptons,” explains the husband.

Upstairs, a massive inverted-V wall sculpture in royal blue by Ellsworth Kelly serves as a kind of visual bridge between the open living and dining areas, where you’ll also find works by Sean Scully and Louise Fishman. Just outside, the overhang that covers the dining terrace features a large cutout the family calls their “James Turrell moment,” a reference to the artist’s signature “Skyspace” installations. The opening features a system of louvers that can be variously angled or retracted completely—à la Turrell—for different levels of exposure.

The outdoor spaces are where you’ll most often find the family, whether enjoying a buffet lunch on the covered terrace, lounging next to the 50-foot infinity-edge pool, drinking sunset cocktails on the roof, or watching a movie by the fire on the screened porch, where sliding glass doors allow the space to be enclosed or almost entirely open depending on the weather. “One of the great things about this house is how it opens up to the terraces and how inside and outside kind of blur,” says Hollander, who describes the property as one of the most beautiful he’s ever worked on. “It’s like Mother Nature was at her greatest in creating this place. Our approach to the landscape was really about how we bring that nature right up to the building and pay respects to her.”

With the exception of a modest patch of lawn (which hosts a colorful Anthony Caro sculpture) out front, Hollander layered the perimeter of the house with hardy native species: seaside goldenrod, beach roses, bayberry, beach plum, and dune grasses on the ocean side; wetland shrubs, marsh grasses, and wildflowers such as hibiscus and ironweed in the pond-facing areas. Walkways leading to the pond and the beach are more meandering and lower to the ground than you typically find here. To comply with local codes, they’re also slatted to create openings for light and moisture to reach the plant life underneath. “We convinced the town to allow us do something that’s more sinuous and sexier and seems to float right in the dunes,” says Hollander.

The landscape architect also worked closely with Leroy Street Studio to create a partial green roof featuring grasses that echo “the feel of the dunes below,” he says. The residence also has solar panels installed above the master bedroom as well as a geothermal heating and cooling system. “It’s as green as you can make a house of this size,” notes Hare.

Though it was completed less than a year and a half ago—indeed, tweaks are still being made—the house feels as if it has been there much longer. “To say that about a contemporary home is interesting,” observes Hagan. “It just feels like it’s connected to the land.” 

Back to Nature

A Craftsman-style home in Portland, Ore., is reimagined as an ode to the Pacific Northwest

By Stephen Wallis

May 7, 2019

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/style/portland-home-renovation-craftsman.html

Like so many stories of creative inspiration, this one began with a shower. A broken shower, actually.

Several years ago, a couple in Portland, Ore., decided it was about time for some updates to their two-story Craftsman-style home, built in 1907. They and their two children had lived in the house for the better part of a decade, long enough for its awkward eccentricities to lose their charm and for renovation wish-list items to become imperatives — especially an out-of-commission upstairs bath that forced the family to share another one.

The homeowners had admired commercial spaces created by Jessica Helgerson, a Portland designer, so they invited her over to discuss a new bath and other upgrades they hoped to do, eventually. Right away, Ms. Helgerson identified opportunities for improvements in layout and flow that went well beyond a mere bathroom remodel. The 4,000-square-foot four-bedroom home had been “severely altered over the years,” the designer said. “At one point it was split into apartments.”

Though previous owners had restored the house to a single-family residence, a second staircase remained at the back that did little more than take up space. Ditto the phone booth at the top of the front stairs. And any decorative details had long ago been stripped away.

Ms. Helgerson and her team, including Mira Eng-Goetz, who served as the project’s lead designer, proposed a comprehensive makeover.

A couple of years passed before the owners agreed, and they eventually relocated to temporary quarters for 14 months during the renovations.

The first step was to remove the back staircase to make way for a new family room and an informal dining and project area downstairs, while expanding the children’s rooms above. The designers also reconfigured the kitchen, opening it up more to the dining room by replacing solid walls with double-sided glass cabinets, and created a generous master bath where a covered balcony had been.

Along the way, they added coffered ceilings, columns and ceiling rosettes. These and other architectural elements, Ms. Eng-Goetz said, helped “dress up a house that had lost a lot of its original charm and character.”

While the changes show respect for the home’s early 20th-century pedigree, this was not a restoration project, as no original plans or period photos exist.

“If a house has any sort of special renown, our office is apt to research it to death and really consider what that architect would have done, but this was not that,” said Ms. Helgerson, who is known for her stylishly thoughtful updates of historic spaces. “This house could be whatever it wants to be, and we felt quite free in that way, which was fun.”

The designers described what they created as an ode to the Pacific Northwest. That meant lots of rich wood, including Western walnut countertops and Oregon white oak floors; leafy wall patterns; and a lush, moody palette dominated by mossy greens and cloudy grays. (Notably, there are a few choice hits of pink, adding “a little bit of dawn or dusk,” as Ms. Helgerson put it.)

Located on a tree-lined block at the edge of Portland’s Northwest Alphabet district, the house isn’t far from 5,200-acre Forest Park, which is crisscrossed with hiking trails and home to firs, cedars, hemlocks and ferns. The family spends a lot of time in the park and embraced the décor as an extension of the natural surroundings.

The ultimate expression of that theme — and the home’s showstopping moment — comes in the kitchen. There, the walls are clad in hundreds of shimmering celadon tiles, hand-painted by Ms. Eng-Goetz with wispy, curling ferns that scroll across the space, even the integrated refrigerator.

“Sword ferns seemed like a perfect muse for this project,” she said. “I love their strong sculptural shapes, and I’ve certainly tromped through them many times while mushroom hunting in Oregon and Washington.”

Tiling the refrigerator was also a rare “feat of engineering,” Ms. Helgerson noted. “I feel like Mira’s ferns are the most beautiful thing our office has ever done, and I’m grateful to the clients for letting us do something so weird and wonderful.”

Botanical patterns also enliven the pink-hued powder room and the second-floor study, where the walls are papered in an exuberant Arts & Crafts floral print and the ceiling and moldings are painted dark sage green. Throughout the house, the furniture is lean and modern, with soft curving forms, monochrome upholstery — a Helgerson signature — and, again, plenty of wood. The lighting, mostly brass and contemporary in spirit, is by international design studios like Apparatus, Areti and Neri & Hu.

Because a four-story apartment building stands immediately next door, light and views are compromised, particularly at the center of the house, which is much deeper than it is wide. The designers used reflective surfaces, including smoked-mirror walls in the stairwell and a quartet of gold-leaf artworks by Yoshihiro Kitai in the dining room, to bounce light around the spaces. They also opted for sheer curtains to let light in while masking the view.

Though the children, now teenagers, spend an increasing amount of time in the basement (not part of the renovation), everyone enjoys piling onto the new family room’s U-shaped sofa. Built-in sofas like this are another Helgerson specialty, and she said her firm has learned to make them “more and more squishy and comfortable.”

Being enveloped by the plush cushions and throw pillows in verdant hues of soft velvet, within this forest-inspired home, the owners might almost imagine they’re lying on a bed of moss — one that is very stylish and exceptionally cozy.

The Wabi-Sabi World of Bosco Sodi

For this industrious, idiosyncratic artist, it’s all about materials, process, and embracing the unexpected

By Stephen Wallis

March 5, 2019

https://www.galeriemagazine.com/bosco-sodi-studio-visit/

When Hurricane Sandy barreled through New York City in 2012, few neighborhoods were hit as hard as Red Hook, on the Brooklyn waterfront. After the storm surge receded, the pier at the end of Van Brunt Street was stained scarlet, like the remnants of a brutal crime scene perhaps. And, indeed, the devastation that confronted the artists, nonprofits, and businesses occupying the pier’s 1860s brick-and-stone warehouses was horrible. Bosco Sodi, whose washed-away cache of pigments was responsible for the red residue, lost 18 of the process-intensive paintings he is best known for—their cracked and densely encrusted surfaces calling to mind lava fields or desert landscapes, often in vivid monochrome hues. A year’s worth of his work was gone.

“We were completely destroyed, so we had to renew totally,” recounts the Mexican-born Sodi, who made New York his base a decade ago and lives in Red Hook with his wife, Lucia Corredor, owner of the vintage-furniture store Decada in Mexico City, and their three children, Bosco, Mariana, and Alvaro. He says it took around four months to clean up and renovate the sprawling space, which features 25-foot-high stone walls topped by a trussed timber ceiling: “During that time, I wasn’t able to paint at all. Looking back, while it was obviously a disaster, it made me reflect and go more slowly, and that was ultimately a good thing.”

After a brief pause and reset, Sodi has maintained a remarkably busy, border-hopping art practice that stands out even in today’s globalized world. Represented by nine galleries, he maintains studios in three countries, each focused on specific aspects of his creative output. His New York and Barcelona spaces are devoted to painting. In Mexico City (his hometown), he transforms volcanic rocks into sculptural objects by coating them in eye-catching glazes—including a 17K-gold mixture—and firing them at extreme temperatures. And Puerto Escondido, on Mexico’s Oaxacan coast, is where he works with clay, hand-molding cubes and bricks to create the minimalist stacks he calls “Caryatids” and “Atlantes” in reference to the female and male figures that decorate support columns in classical architecture.

But Puerto Escondido is more than just another home and workspace. There, Sodi has collaborated with several celebrated architects, including Tadao Ando, Kengo Kuma, and Álvaro Siza, to design an expansive oceanfront compound that also functions as a nonprofit arts center. Named Casa Wabi—after the Japanese aesthetic philosophy wabi-sabi, which prizes imperfection, rusticity, and simplicity—the complex features residences for visiting artists, exhibition spaces, a ceramics-teaching workshop, gardens for native flora, a mobile library, and programs for nearby schools.

The subject of a new book, Casa Wabi, published by Rizzoli, the five-year-old center continues to evolve. “We’ve already hosted more than 240 artists, and we have worked with more than 16,000 kids in the community,” says Sodi. “But I wanted the foundation to be very wabi-sabi—very changeable and flexible—and we’re working on making our social programs even stronger.”

Sodi entrusts the day-to-day running of Casa Wabi to his sister Carla Sodi Ambrosi, as he spends the majority of his time in New York. Days in his Red Hook studio tend to start early, and not infrequently he is alone, stretching his canvases and blending the mixture of pigment, sawdust, glue, and water that he uses to make his paintings. “I like to work by myself—for me, it’s a very private moment,” says Sodi, before adding, “Sometimes I’ll let one of my kids help me.”

To start, he lays his canvases—typically several feet or more across—atop plastic buckets so that the work surface is about a foot and a half off the floor. Working quickly with only his hands, he mounds and smears and flings the mixture onto the canvas with an almost performative physicality. (Years’ worth of chromatic splatters encrust the studio floor, creating what is arguably the ultimate wabi-sabi painting.) While the works are left to dry—for three to five weeks—alchemy takes over, as their surfaces harden and crack in unpredictable ways that are influenced by factors such as temperature, humidity, and the pH of the water used.

“The work is about Bosco’s relationship to the materials,” says the artist’s studio manager, John Rohrer, who occupies an office at the front of the warehouse, where there’s a bar and vintage seating selected by Corredor for hosting visitors. “Everything he makes is an experimentation. He embraces all outcomes.”

Sodi’s latest paintings have taken a reflective—and muted—turn, brought on by a combination of factors, including the death of a beloved grandmother, which got him thinking more about his own life, getting older, and his family. He decided to create a series of paintings that combine areas of black and white as a way of addressing universal dualities: light and darkness, life and death, good and evil. The series, called “Genesis,” debuted in the fall at his Berlin gallery, Galerie Eigen + Art. Additional works are on view at a pair of exhibitions, at Blain|Southern in London and Galería Hilario Galguera in Mexico City, through late March and early April, respectively.

“This is the first time I’ve mixed two colors. I like the elegance of black and white,” says Sodi, adding with a laugh, “In the end, the hope is that the white, the good, will prevail.”

White will also be prominent in his next paintings project—to be exhibited at Kasmin Gallery in New York in 2020—conceived as an homage to Spain, where he began his career. One specific inspiration is a triptych of white Joan Miró paintings, Pintura Sobre Fondo Blanco para la Celda de un Solitario (I,II,III), each with a single line gently wavering across its surface. Sodi plans to render that simple gesture as “a scratch, as if it was a very free line,” he says.

Meanwhile, this spring will mark the official unveiling of Sodi’s monumental Atlantes pavilion at Casa Wabi. More than two years in the making, the land-art-scaled installation features 64 equally spaced, seven-foot-tall cubic structures, each composed of 1,600 clay bricks. “They look like they are holding up the sky,” the artist says of his Atlas-inspired cubes, noting that “they will change over time, as they get mold, turn green, and wildlife inhabits them.”

And Sodi has continued making clay bricks for new iterations of his Muro, which began as a public art installation for New York’s Washington Square Park in 2017 and has become the best-known work of his career. Standing more than 6 feet high and 26 feet across, the original wall was made of 1,600 bricks, which members of the public were invited to take away, slowly dismantling the structure.

It was a rare foray into politics for Sodi, who notes that the piece was not just about debates over immigration and border security but “a lot of walls that have to be broken down—economic, gender.” He has since reprised Muro in Brexit-edgy London, in Antwerp, and most recently in Tampa, Florida, in January. “Even though I’m not a political artist, at times like this I think artists have an obligation if they see an opportunity to make a political statement,” he says. “It’s now or never.”

Stepping outside Sodi’s studio onto the pier, you find yourself staring directly at the Statue of Liberty, rising majestically in New York Harbor. The power of that symbol of freedom—which once greeted waves of immigrants entering America through Ellis Island—isn’t lost on Sodi. “It is,” he says, “an important reminder.”

Fertile Desert

The story behind artist Hannsjörg Voth’s imposing magnum opus in the middle of the Moroccan desert, where photographer Annemarieke van Drimmelen shot model Kiki Willems for the fashion portfolio “Fantastic Voyage.”

By Stephen Wallis

December 2018/January 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-the-scenes-of-wsj-s-couture-photo-shoot-1544191284

THE MOROCCAN desert’s wide-open spaces and sheltering skies have long attracted dreamers and eccentrics. So it was with Hannsjörg Voth, a German artist known for grandly scaled sculptural works infused with existential and cosmic themes. Starting in the early 1980s, the Munich-based Voth spent 20 years creating his magnum opus, a trio of monumental edifices on the scorched Marha Plain in southeastern Morocco.

Drawing on a mix of mathematics, mythology, astronomy and ancient architecture, the structures include Himmelstreppe, a 52-foot-high triangular “stairway to heaven” that houses Voth’s sculpture of Icarus’s wings; the nautilus-shaped Goldene Spirale, based on the Fibonacci sequence, that sits over a well where the artist once installed a boat of pure gold; and Stadt des Orion, a citylike complex of observation towers patterned after its namesake constellation.

A rugged 90-minute drive from the oasis town of Erfoud, Voth’s works are defined by their remoteness. “When you’re out there you ask yourself, Why the hell, in the emptiness of a desert, do you have three very articulated, calculated architectural forms?” says Hans Brockmann, the German film producer (best known for The Usual Suspects) who now oversees the sites as founder of the Voth Maroc Aïn Nejma foundation. “It’s very strange.”

While the spiral is made of stone, the staircase and the Orion city were built using traditional rammed-earth construction, and initially Voth—now 78 and in declining health—was going to let the works disintegrate into the desert. “As death nears, apparently, we have a desire that something of us should stay,” says Brockmann, who also lives in Munich and first met the artist (“a pretty wild, difficult man”) in the ’90s through a mutual friend. Several years ago, after Brockmann started a Moroccan charity that’s building a school in an area near Voth’s projects, the artist reached out to him. “He said, ‘You’re down there. Take this—you have all the rights to it, and just make sure it’ll be taken care of,’ ” Brockmann explains. But rights to the sites themselves were sketchy at best. “It was nowhere land,” says Brockmann, “and it took me three and a half years to convince the government to make all of this legal.”

Thanks to the internet and social media, the works have become an increasingly popular destination. And while Voth remains something of a fringe figure in the international art world, his profile could rise with an exhibition slated for 2020 at Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne museum. There are plans for the show to offer a virtual-reality experience of ascending Voth’s Himmelstreppe and entering the chamber with the Icarus wings. “When you’re up there, on top of the staircase, you have this incredible view around you,” says Brockmann. “You are really tempted to fly away.”

The Other Giacometti

As a sibling, an assistant, a model, and a confidant, Diego Giacometti is inextricably bound to his older brother, sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Now that Diego’s furnishings have achieved acclaim in their own right—and commanded eye-opening prices at auction—it’s time to examine how each helped shape the other.

BY STEPHEN WALLIS

Esquire Big Black Book Fall/Winter 2018

Alberto Giacometti’s expressive, hauntingly gaunt figures are among the most iconic works of the past century. They’re also the most expensive sculptures on the planet; his Pointing Man sold for a record $141 million, in 2015, to the hedge-fund billionaire Steven Cohen. But in recent years, Alberto’s younger brother Diego has proved no slouch himself when it comes to fetching the kinds of prices that turn heads at blue-chip auction houses.

Together, the Swiss-born Giacomettis are the most celebrated brothers in all of 20th-century art. And yet Diego spent most of his adult life in Alberto’s shadow, serving his brother’s idiosyncratic genius as a loyal assistant in a cramped, disheveled, barely heated Paris atelier. It wasn’t until after Alberto’s death, in January 1966, that Diego, then 63, fully dedicated himself to his own work. A craftsman at heart, he found his métier in furnishings and decorative objects, developing an original artistic language that echoed ancient Etruscan and Greek styles while incorporating sculptural elements drawn from nature. In what became his signature style, he embellished the arms of chairs, the legs and stretcher bars of tables, the frameworks of ceiling lanterns, and the finials of bookshelves with a captivating array of tree and leaf forms, as well as creatures including birds, stags, horses, dogs, cats, and frogs. The slender forms and hand-modeled surfaces of his exquisitely crafted pieces—usually in bronze—evinced unmistakable similarities to his brother’s brooding, attenuated sculptures, but the spirit was always lighter, even whimsical. Over the last 20 years of Diego’s life, his admirers included a coterie of Parisian tastemakers and cultural luminaries. In uential decorator Henri Samuel ordered pieces for clients such as Jean Seberg and Romain Gary. Film producer Raoul Lévy (And God Created Woman), art dealers and collectors Marguerite and Aimé Maeght, and couturier Hubert de Givenchy became devoted patrons. “If you were a wealthy person in Paris in the ’70s and ’80s, you needed to have a Diego Giacometti table in your house,” says Cécile Verdier, the former Paris-based cohead of design at Sotheby’s. “You had to—there was no question.”

That legacy continues to resonate with contemporary interior-design eminences like Jacques Grange and Juan Pablo Molyneux, who have used Diego’s pieces in their projects, while fashion designer Marc Jacobs installed a pair of Diego stools in his Manhattan townhouse. “His work can live with any category of other furniture—in a very classic or modern interior,” says Pauline De Smedt, head of design at Christie’s in Paris. “Plus, its poetry moves people. I don’t know how to say it in English—it’s like it is coming from your dreams.”

“He created something that nobody else had done, his own vocabulary, his own universe,” says Verdier, whose department last year sold a monumental Diego bookcase with bronze birds and trees, made for book publisher Marc Barbezat, for a record $6.3 million. “These sculptural elements add poetry and lightness, which for me is a key to his art.”

The bookcase sale is one in a string of escalating records at successful Diego Giacometti auctions, most notably the sensational $34.5 million sale of 30 works by Diego (and one by Alberto) from Givenchy’s Loire Valley château, staged by Chris- tie’s, in March 2017. Most pieces had been commissioned by Givenchy over a 20-year period, and thanks to avid interest from buyers across the globe, all 21 lots sold above expectations. Best in show was an octagonal table that went for $4.4 million, five times the high estimate. It featured an oak top and a sensuously hand-molded bronze base with slender, stylized figures—typifying the masculine elegance that is Diego’s hallmark.

Of course, even needle-moving prices like those at the Givenchy sale are well below the sums commanded by Alberto’s sculptures, which hold the top three spots for the most expensive sculptures ever sold at auction—all above $100 million. A more instructive comparison is to look at prices for Alberto’s decorative works. The current record, achieved earlier this year at Sotheby’s, is $9.9 million, for a 1952 bronze chandelier that Alberto designed with small sculptural elements, including one of his famous walking men. “In the same category, the market basically recognizes them in the same region of importance,” says De Smedt.

The lives and careers of the brothers were deeply intertwined from the time of their births, just a year apart in 1901 and 1902. They were raised in a small village in the Swiss Alps, where their father, Giovanni, a well-known painter, kept his studio door open to his children, according to Catherine Grenier, director of the Giacometti Foundation and author of a recently published biography of Alberto. “It was mostly Alberto who was making drawings, paintings, sculptures in the studio with his father,” she says, explaining that in those days Diego and his younger brother, Bruno, who later became an architect, “were not so interested.”

Alberto moved to Paris in 1922 at the encouragement of his parents to pursue a career as an artist. Driven and immensely talented, he quickly found himself at the center of the city’s art world. His first biographer, James Lord, claimed that no one doubted the significance of Alberto’s talent. Except, at times, Alberto. Confident and charismatic, he was also prone to bouts of melancholy and self-doubt.

While Alberto was an intellectual, Diego was an earthier type who took delight in the rhythms of the natural world. After a scattered start to his career, he moved in with his brother for a time in Paris, helping out in the studio. He took on that role formally in 1929 when Alberto asked him to be his assistant.

The brothers’ relationship was one of mutual support and dependence that lasted nearly four decades, with the pair spending countless hours working side by side in Alberto’s impossibly cluttered 250-square-foot studio at 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron, in Montparnasse. Among the most mythic artist studios of that era, the space has been meticulously re-created at the recently opened Giacometti Institute in Paris—complete with wall scribbles; paint-splattered tables littered with plaster models, brushes, and sculpting tools; and even Alberto’s makeshift bed in the corner. Simone de Beauvoir, a close friend of Alberto’s who also modeled for him, described the studio as “submerged in plaster.”

Diego, whose role expanded over the years, assisted Alberto with bases, supports, and molds for his sculptures; oversaw patinas for his bronzes; and coordinated with foundries, framers, and galleries. Most famously, he frequently sat as a model for his brother’s paintings and sculptures, such as the 1954 Grande Tête de Diego—an ax-like bronze portrait, accentuating Diego’s expansive forehead and sturdy jawline—which brought in $50 million at Sotheby’s five years ago.

Both men were passionately committed to the work and put in long hours, often eating little. But man, did they smoke a lot. Alberto reached 80 cigarettes a day, according to a letter written by his wife, Annette. (Diego never married but had a companion named Nelly, whom he lived with for 15 years.) Dealers and friends— including legendary names like Breton, Balthus, Picasso, Sartre, and Beckett—would drop by for visits. This was Paris’s heyday as the world’s art capital, with Montparnasse as the city’s avant-garde heart. Treated for stomach cancer in 1963, Alberto suffered from poor health in the final years of his life. He also grappled with increasing anxiety, perhaps fueled by the pressure of his success, and he had trouble finishing works. Along with Annette, Diego kept him on track and saved him from destroying works he deemed failures. According to Grenier, “Diego would tell him, ‘The work is perfect. Now you must stop.’ ” In the early ’60s, having begun to take on some of his own commissions, Diego moved into a studio around the corner from Alberto’s. Among his most important early clients were the Maeghts, the art dealers and collectors who enlisted Diego to create stair railings, lamps, tables, chandeliers, and more for multiple residences as well as for the Maeght Foundation in the south of France. Alberto’s death hit Diego hard, but it was also a creative awakening. He soon built up a steady stream of commissions that grew into a backlog. He often worked alone—though he did share his studio with a beloved cat—and some clients waited years for pieces from the charming perfectionist, whose precise casts and patinas were nothing short of an obsession. “He was a pretty romantic person,” says Verdier. “It’s not like he was a company, making 25 tables a day. He worked when he had inspiration.”
Each piece Diego made was basically a one-off. While he would recycle elements of existing tables and chairs, he was constantly reworking his models to add a new gure. “Each time, it was a unique piece, and that’s what everybody wants now,” says Bruno Jaubert, a specialist at the French auction house Artcu- rial. “Plus, now we see the creations of Diego in another way—not only as furniture but as sculpture. And it has changed the market for his work.”

Diego’s highest-profile commission was also the one that’s easiest to see in person today: a 50-piece group of seating, tables, and lighting for Paris’s Musée Picasso, which opened in the Hôtel Salé in 1985, just a few months after Diego’s death from a heart attack while he was recovering from cataract surgery. The museum commission helped boost his reputation (and prices), but almost im-mediately questions arose about fakes and unauthorized casts. Though he often signed his work “Diego,” or stamped it with his initials—to him, Giacometti would always be his brother’s name—he kept very few records and did not number his pieces. Investigations by French and U. S. authorities in the late ’80s and early ’90s revealed the existence of numerous fakes, including quite a few sold by major auction houses. “There is no record whatsoever of what he made, and there still isn’t any recognized authority, any committee, for Diego’s work, so it’s a totally blurred area,” says De Smedt. “The provenance is absolutely key.”

Despite the concerns over fakes, demand for Diego’s pieces is soaring—and increasingly global, thanks to growing interest from Asian buyers, according to Verdier, who notes that there was a surge of interest in Diego’s work following a major exhibition dedicated to Alberto in Shanghai in 2016. Indeed, many inexperienced buyers, unfamiliar with Diego, make the mistake of conflating the two brothers. “It was quite interesting to see, at the viewing for the Givenchy sale, a lot of people were quite unclear about the link between Diego and Alberto,” says De Smedt. “Were they father and son? Who made what?”

The latest opportunity to compare their work side by side comes in November, when De Smedt and the team at Christie’s will stage a special sale in New York of pieces by Alberto and Diego. Keeping in mind their considerable difference, De Smedt notes the undeniable links between the two. “It’s obvious in the touch, in the way that everything is so thin and elegant and the way that the material is worked,” she says. “You can almost feel their fingers going through the piece.”

Hollywood Sequel

After stepping down as the director of the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Jeffrey Deitch returns five years later at the helm of his own 15,000-square-foot gallery

By Stephen Wallis

Sept. 10, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-new-frank-gehry-designed-gallery-space-opens-in-l-a-1536588352

It’s not quite the next installment of Star Wars, but Jeffrey Deitch’s return to Los Angeles is, in art-world terms, a blockbuster event. Five years ago, Deitch stepped down as director of the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), amid a swirl of negative press and board resignations, and returned to New York to revive his career as an art dealer. Now he’s back, this time at the helm of the new 15,000-square- foot Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Hollywood. Renovated by architect Frank Gehry, the space offcially opens on September 29 with an exhibition of works by Ai Weiwei—highlighted by a sprawling installation of 6,000 traditional Chinese wooden stools.

“It was important to me to start with a great international artist, someone with whom I have a personal connection,” says Deitch, who notes that, along with concurrent exhibitions at the Marciano Art Foundation and the UTA Artist Space, this show marks the first major presentation of Ai’s work in L.A. “And I wanted to stage something truly spectacular that would just knock people out.” It’s a characteristically high-impact gesture for Deitch, 66, who’s had a remarkably varied career—from curator and writer to co-founder of Citibank’s art advisory (he has an M.B.A. from Harvard) to private dealer and gallerist to direc- tor of MOCA and, finally, back to being a gallerist.

At Deitch Projects, the New York gallery he ran from 1996 to 2010, the program mixed together up-and-coming talents, neglected establishment figures, graffiti artists, fashion designers, experimental filmmakers and all manner of performance acts. In his pinstripe suits and round-frame buffalo-horn glasses, Deitch himself was easy to spot at show openings.

“I always saw Jeffrey as sort of a pied piper, an impresario who brought people to contemporary art,” says Maria Bell, a writer, producer and lifetime MOCA board member. Bell has long supported Deitch, even after he ran afoul of more conservative sensibilities with populist shows of street art and Dennis Hopper photographs. She argues that Deitch’s tenure at MOCA—which recently named MoMA curator and PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach its latest director—was actually “a superdynamic time that people in L.A. look back on a bit wistfully.”

Deitch, who plans for now to keep his New York galleries, insists his return to L.A. is not about redemption. Nor is it, he says, even a return. He still has his art-packed Los Feliz home, once owned by Cary Grant and Randolph Scott. His relationships with L.A. artists, collectors and museums go back to the ’70s and ’80s. He even considered opening a Melrose Avenue gallery a decade ago, but the space just wasn’t right.

This time around, Deitch says, he found “the exact right kind of building in the exact right location,” a former lighting-rental warehouse on North Orange Drive. Not far from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Marciano, it’s also close to galleries such as Regen Projects, Kohn, Gavlak and the recently opened outpost of Tanya Bonakdar, the latest New York gallery to get in on L.A.’s humming contemporary art scene.

Then he landed his ideal architect, Gehry, whom he calls “arguably the most significant person in visual culture in Los Angeles of the past 50 years.” Deitch recounts how, 20 years earlier, Gehry turned down his request to do his Wooster Street gallery in New York.

“I volunteered this time,” says the architect. “I knew that given the right kind of space, Jeffrey was going to soar with it. And I really wanted to do that, because I like him. I like his spirit. He goes to street art and places other dealers don’t.”

The most significant architectural work involved removing a mezzanine level, inserting additional skylights and putting in a level concrete floor. “We created a wide-open space where you can build partitions quickly,” says Gehry. “Nothing is precious, so if you have to knock a hole in a wall, you can.”

The program will be geared toward museum-quality exhibitions and solo presentations of major artists who don’t often show in L.A. “While sometimes his infatuation with the new gets the better of him, Jeffrey understands the laying on of hands, of art as a continuity,” says artist David Salle, who has known Deitch since the ’70s. “Few people make such interesting connections between works of art, past and present.”

For Deitch, the new gallery marks a return to the spotlight in a city he loves. “I’ve always wanted to provide platforms where you can have a discourse between artists, intellectuals, writers,” he says. “That’s what we hope to do here in Los Angeles.”

Welcome to the Robot Age

Cutting costs, saving time, and eliminating waste, the 3-D-printed house has officially arrived

Posted September 26, 2018

Text by Stephen Wallis

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/3-d-printed-houses-are-here-and-in-high-demand

For the past several years, talk of 3-D printing revolutionizing the way we build has been mostly just that—talk. But the promise of printing a habitable house, on demand, in virtually any location, is becoming a reality. Around the globe, teams of architects, engineers, and entrepreneurs have developed robotic arms capable of producing walls for a small home in as little as 24 hours, with essentially zero waste and for a fraction of traditional construction costs. Competing to develop the top technology, industry players are now engaged in a space race of sorts—literally so, in some cases, with NASA funding research for printing habitats beyond our planet.

Of more immediate, earthly interest was the recent unveiling of two of the first-ever homes to be printed on-site. At Austin’s South by Southwest festival this past March, the San Francisco–based nonprofit New Story presented a 350-square-foot prototype of the low-cost homes it hopes to build across the developing world. Just a month later, during Milan’s Design Week, architect Massimiliano Locatelli debuted a 1,100-square-foot residence of a decidedly more luxurious sort, with elegantly plastered interior walls, brass details, and stylish furnishings. These two projects—using similar technologies in which robotic arms extrude layers of a concrete mixture that harden into solid walls—represent opposing ends of the spectrum for this industry’s potential.

“There are over a billion people without adequate shelter,” says New Story cofounder Brett Hagler. “It’s a massive deficit, and traditional construction methods are not enough to make a dent. But 3-D printing promises significant decreases in cost and build time.” To date, New Story has completed close to 1,000 conventional houses in Bolivia, El Salvador, Mexico, and Haiti—where it is currently building a community with support from AD—with each home requiring around $7,000 and two weeks to finish. Using a 3-D printer developed with the company Icon, Hagler expects to reduce those numbers to $4,000 and just a couple of days. The charity’s first large-scale printed project will be 100 homes in El Salvador, slated for completion next year.

“We will be able to put a lot of creativity into the design based on a family’s current situation and their future dreams,” Hagler notes of the homes’ flexible layouts, which are determined by customizable CAD files. “We’re trying to have better aesthetics—something that’s too often ignored when it comes to the world’s poorest families.”

It’s precisely the aesthetics and creative potential that inspired Locatelli, cofounder of the firm CLS Architetti, to erect his 3-D-printed house in Piazza Cesare Beccaria. As he explains, the project was all about embracing the textures of 3-D-printed forms and “exploring the beauty of the new language.”

Realized in collaboration with concrete specialists Ital­cementi, the engineering firm Arup, and the Dutch mobile 3-D-printer maker CyBe Construction, the house took about a week to create, with production lasting roughly 48 hours. Consisting of four rounded volumes (living area, bedroom, kitchen, bath), all topped by a roof garden, “the shape was completely free compared to traditional architecture,” says Locatelli. “Go ahead, try to make a curved house with bricks or stone—it’s so complicated. With this you really can create new shapes.”

Locatelli says he has received numerous inquiries, including commissions for 100 homes near Washington, D.C., and a 10,000-square-foot house on Sardinia. And the owner of a Lake Como villa who had hired him to build a guesthouse switched gears after seeing the project in Milan. “He said, ‘I’m not going to build in stone anymore. I want the 3-D-printed house,’” recounts the architect, who is working with Arup on how to print multilevel structures—something that has never been done. “The relationship between architect and client is going to change so much,” says Locatelli. “Probably the architect is going to become a shrink, more or less, helping give shape to the client’s dreams.”

Are They Buildings or Gardens? The New ‘Green’ Architecture

Buildings are sprouting greenery, especially in Asia—not just living walls or rooftop meadows but whole façades draped with plants and terraces overflowing with vegetation.

Stephen Wallis

05.12.18 9:54 PM ET

https://www.thedailybeast.com/are-they-buildings-or-gardens-the-new-green-architecture

Spend a little time on websites devoted to what’s new and next in global architecture, and you might notice a surprising abundance of greenery on buildings. Not just a living wall here or a rooftop meadow there but entire façades draped with plants and terraces overflowing with lush vegetation.

These days, more and more architects—including such celebrated names as Thomas Heatherwick, Kengo Kuma, Pritzker Prize winner Jean Nouvel, and the firm MVRDV—are designing structures that would put the mythic Hanging Gardens of Babylon to shame.

High-rise towers are being reimagined as vertical forests, while some visionaries are contemplating future cities where virtually all buildings would be arrayed with plants, trees, and other flora.

It’s all an extension of the decades-old movement promoting environmentally sensitive, sustainable, and socially conscious architecture—a movement made more urgent by climate change and explosive population growth.

Increasingly, architects and developers are embracing the benefits of using extensive vegetation on buildings, ranging from energy-saving thermal insulation and solar shading to mitigating air pollution, increasing urban biodiversity, and enhancing quality of life by bringing nature into places that are often proverbial concrete jungles.

“Trees and green spaces have been disappearing from our cities for decades, and this has taken a big environmental toll, from worsening air quality to extreme urban heat islands with no plants to help absorb that heat and cool the air,” Mun Summ Wong, co-founding director of the Singapore-based firm WOHA, told The Daily Beast. “We’re also losing community spaces. So much can be gained from re-greening cities—not just on an environmental level but on a social one.”

Among WOHA’s best-known projects is the five-year-old Parkroyal on Pickering, a hotel and office complex in Singapore that’s raised up on stilts with lush gardens all around its base.

The most distinctive feature, however, is the series of huge, curvaceous, and seriously eye-catching garden terraces that are dramatically cantilevered between the blocks of hotel guest rooms.

The firm took a quite different approach to the nearby Oasia Hotel Downtown, a 30-story mixed-use tower wrapped in a striking red-mesh lattice that hosts 21 different species of tropical vines, creating, as WOHA has put it, a “perforated, permeable, furry, verdant tower of green.”

The building features open-air gardens on multiple levels that serve as communal spaces, permit cross-ventilation, and enhance light and views.

All of these things contribute to a “biophilic effect, which is the positive impact that green environments have on our psyche and general well-being,” WOHA’s other co-founder, Richard Hassell, told The Daily Beast.

Hassell added that the benefits of such factors are harder to measure than things like a building’s reduced energy and water consumption or its effects on biodiversity (both the Parkroyal and Oasia properties have seen an increase in species of birds, butterflies, and other small animals like lizards).

It’s no wonder that so many of the new vegetation-clad buildings are popping up in places with warm, often tropical climates (better for growing a wide variety of plants), especially in Asia, where runaway development in exploding megacities has often obliterated most traces of nature.

Vietnamese architect Vo Trong Nghia, known for his innovative and arresting use of traditional bamboo, typically incorporates extensive vegetation into his designs.

His most spectacularly lush projects include the Atlas Hotel in Hoi An and the nearby Naman the Babylon resort, as well as the under-construction FPT University in Ho Chi Minh City, where he is based.

The new campus was conceived as gently undulating, densely forested hills wrapped around a central garden courtyard, with trees and plants providing an almost seamless canopy that extends across the structure’s rooftops and many balconies.

In Shanghai, British designer Thomas Heatherwick drew on similarly topographic allusions for his 1000 Trees development, now being built on a riverfront site next to the city’s M50 arts district.

The sprawling, 75-acre complex of residences, shops, offices, and schools takes the form of two tree-covered mountains. The sloping concrete structures are supported by several hundred columns that extend to the surface and hold large planters filled with trees and shrubs.

Slated for completion later this year, Heatherwick’s verdant peaks rising among Shanghai skyscrapers are already a social media sensation.

Indeed, environmental and social benefits aside, vegetation can lend architecture major visual impact, making it a hit with the cool-hunting crowd. The most compelling projects not only gain a sense of organic vitality but can also take on a fantastical, almost surreal quality.

That is certainly true of most proposals conjured up by Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut, a self-proclaimed “archibiotect” whose boldly futuristic designs include a proposal for a 132-story, dragonfly-shaped urban farm for New York City.

In Taipei, Callebaut is behind the soon-to-be-completed Tao Zhu Yin Yuan residential complex, inspired by the double-helix structure of DNA. A pair of wings, containing 42 apartments, twist vigorously around a central cylinder, enhancing light and views and creating open balconies, from which the foliage of trees, shrubs, and plants—some 20,000 in total—will cascade.

“This is a prototype of a carbon-absorbing green building that can fight against global warming,” Callebaut told The Daily Beast, “while the balconies include gardens for vegetables and medicinal plants for the inhabitants.”

For Jean Nouvel, trees and plants are, among other things, a way to break down—dematerialize—the conventionally stark forms of modern architecture, and many of his latest buildings incorporate elaborate vegetation.

The French architect has worked frequently over the years with pioneering botanist Patrick Blanc, and their recent collaborations include the much-lauded One Central Park residences in Sydney and the Le Nouvel KLCC towers in Kuala Lumpur, a pair of condo buildings covered with spectacular top-to-bottom vertical gardens composed of nearly 250 different plants.

“Sometimes we use special systems for vegetal walls, for the integration of vegetation into the buildings themselves, but for me the vegetation is an architectural material,” Nouvel said. “I never think that landscape is on one side and the building on the other—it’s part of the same concept.”

Among Nouvel’s forthcoming projects is the 22-story Rosewood residential and hotel tower slated to open next year as part of a redevelopment project called Cidade Matarazzo in the heart of São Paulo.

The building, envisioned as a new icon for the city, features a distinctive asymmetrical façade of layered lattice panels through which a profusion of trees and plants will protrude, almost as if the adjacent gardens and park had invaded the building.

That’s the effect envisioned by Nouvel, who has described the project as “inventing the hanging gardens of São Paulo, with luxuriant greenery and outrageously stunning views.”

The idea of creating a lush urban oasis also defines projects such as the Dutch firm MVRDV’s showstopping Valley development now under construction in Amsterdam.

The mixed-use complex is composed of three jagged peaks of varying heights, with unassuming glass walls at the street-facing base giving way to almost chaotically stacked stone volumes, planted terraces, and gardens (masterminded by renowned garden designer Piet Oudolf) on the interior and upper levels.

Promising to be equally spectacular is the proposed 1 Hotel conceived by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma for a site on Paris’ Left Bank. On the exterior, overlapping wooden and metal panels will create a pixelating effect, with vegetation spilling out between them.

An interior courtyard garden will sit at the rear of the U-shaped building, overlooked by private balconies arrayed with more plants and trees. Kuma’s firm has colorfully described the project as “a green lung for the city.”

If Italian architect Stefano Boeri had his way, cities themselves would serve as green lungs for the planet.

A vocal advocate for principles spelled out in his manifesto Vertical Foresting (you can check out his TED talk here), Boeri first realized his vision with a pair of influential high-rises in Milan, completed in 2014. Covered in a combined 700 trees and 20,000 plants, the towers serve as a model that Boeri is adapting for projects in a number of other cities.

He has even devised a masterplan for a new 30,000-resident sustainable—and, yes, vegetation-covered—community, dubbed Liuzhou Forest City, in southern China.

According to Boeri’s firm, the city will be home to some 40,000 trees and almost one million plants, whose impact will include absorbing almost 10,000 tons of CO2 and 57 tons of pollutants per year, while producing approximately 900 tons of oxygen.

Whether or not Boeri’s Liuzhou project will become a model for sustainable cities of the future remains to be seen. In the meantime, it must be said: The renderings are pretty cool.

Pierre Yovanovitch Transforms a Brussels Townhouse for Major Collectors

Philippe Austruy and Valérie Bach’s stunning residence boasts minimalist interiors and monumental works of art

August 23, 2018

By Stephen Wallis

http://www.galeriemagazine.com/pierre-yovanovitch-philippe-austruy-brussels-belgium/

It all began, charmingly enough, with a roller-skating rink. Several years ago, Philippe Austruy and his wife, Valérie Bach, were searching for the right designer to complete their conversion of Brussels’s historic Patinoire Royale, built in 1877 as one of Europe’s first skating halls, into an art gallery. Based on a recommendation from no less than the former French culture minister Jean-Jacques Aillagon, the couple hired Pierre Yovanovitch, the Paris design star celebrated for his sensuous, artisanal, luxuriously minimal interiors. Unveiled in 2015, the Patinoire Royale–Galerie Valérie Bach is a spectacular, 30,000-square-foot showcase for international modern and contemporary art.

So when Austruy, a health-care entrepreneur, vineyard owner, and real estate investor, found himself looking for a designer to take over the renovation of the couple’s early-20th-century Brussels home partway through the project, he knew where to turn. “Pierre won me over with his aesthetic intelligence, clarity of vision, intuition for volumes and materials, and his attention to detail,” Austruy explains.

Brussels architect Guy Melviez had already completed the major structural work on the five-story townhouse, retaining the circa-1910 façade and basic layout of the front rooms while demolishing the entire back. He reimagined the rear of the home as a series of glazed cubic volumes and cantilevered terraces arranged around a small interior garden and a concrete elevator shaft encircled by a blackened-steel staircase.

“Many of the Brussels mansions from that period aren’t very convenient for modern living,” says Yovanovitch. “We basically restructured the interior according to the clients’ lifestyle.” That meant flexible spaces in which the couple could host large parties, as well as multiple rooms for quiet relaxation with their daughter.

The primary entertaining spaces are the light-filled L-shaped living room and the adjacent gallery-like bar and dining area, all part of the new construction. As you move around the living room, ceiling heights shift, rising to a dramatic 60 feet. To offset the room’s rigorous expanses of glass, steel, and concrete, Yovanovitch designed a massive solid-chestnut circular sofa that gives a warm, organic hug to the inviting seating area, which includes a pair of 1960s Danish chairs and a sculptural ceramic cocktail table commissioned from Armelle Benoit. Everything rests on a plush carpet with a graphic, asymmetrical patchwork pattern. For Yovanovitch, the mix is key. “I don’t like a total look—I always want some eclecticism,” he says. “I look to combine things in a way that is unexpected.”

Artwork plays a central role throughout the house, with a monumental Gilbert & George painting dominating the living room’s largest wall and a Robert Rauschenberg junk-metal assemblage sprawling across the floor below. Given the couple’s sizable collection—part of which is displayed at Austruy’s Provençal winery, Commanderie de Peyrassol—there was plenty to work with. “The hanging process is something I do by trial and error until I’ve got something I like,” says Yovanovitch, who turned a small mezzanine above the living room into a mini–exhibition space by pairing a jazzy Simon Hantaï abstraction with a paint-encrusted piano by Bertrand Lavier.

In the bar area, another Lavier work, a neon wall piece, casts a glow of purple, pink, and green on the bronze-top bar, which Yovanovitch clad with panels of rippling silver-hued cast glass. It’s one of numerous custom-made pieces that reflect the designer’s commitment to the handcrafted and artisanal. “Craftsmanship in my work is important,” he says, “because it gives a warmth and a human touch.”

That aspect of Yovanovitch’s work is evident in the family room, an original space at the front of the house that serves as a cozy retreat for “a quiet dinner when it’s just the family or maybe a glass of wine with a friend,” says the designer, who used rich, dark wood for the floor and the curved bookshelves flanking the stained-glass window. For his part, Austruy sees this room as the heart of the home. “It is a total reflection of Pierre’s work in that it is simple and beautiful, yet feels completely unique,” says Austruy, who subsequently hired Yovanovitch for the recent revamp of a 19th-century guesthouse at his Quinta da Côrte winery in Portugal.

The master suite also features an array of rarefied touches, like the ultimate luxuriously minimal vanity for her and the striking cylindrical terrazzo dressing room for him, plus the bathroom floor’s irregular pattern of creamy-white and richly veined gray varieties of marble. “I like to create a contrast between materials that have different textures,” explains Yovanovitch.

Nowhere does the designer’s use of distinctive materials make a bigger impact than in the basement-level spa, which features an indoor-outdoor swimming pool, whirlpool bath, and hammam, all clad entirely in Vals stone. Inspired by Peter Zumthor’s famous thermal-baths complex in the Swiss Alps, it’s a gesture that manages to be simultaneously restrained, refined, and utterly arresting. In other words, signature Yovanovitch.

Jean Royère’s Polar Bear Furniture

The French designer’s ultra-cozy sofa and chairs might be the only thing that can keep you calm.

By Stephen Wallis

April 15, 2019

https://www.townandcountrymag.com/style/home-decor/a27103657/polar-bear-sofa-jean-royere/

Blame it on gyrating markets, extreme weather, and hyperpartisan politics. In these vexing times comfy, cocooning furniture is having a moment. As part of her 2019 forecast, interiors trendwatcher Michelle Ogundehin noted that “in this acutely digital age, as physical, sensory beings we have a primal need to surround ourselves with surfaces that thrill our fingertips or tempt our toes.” Tactile comfort, more than ever, is in.

For the collecting cognoscenti, when it comes to make-you-want-to-melt-into-them furnishings, nothing tops the Ours Polaire (French for polar bear) sofa and armchair conceived by French designer Jean Royère in the late 1940s. Elegantly rounded and incomparably cushy, these zaftig icons were upholstered in a soft woolen velvet reminiscent of plush toy fabric. “The Ours Polaire furnishings are an alcove, a nest,” says Emiliano Salci, one half of the Milan-based interiors duo Dimore Studio. “They even transmit visual comfort to a room. They are timeless.”

Highly sought after today by tastemakers and collectors around the globe, Polar Bear sofas and pairs of chairs can command more than half a million dollars at auction or from a top dealer. Jennifer Aniston, Ellen DeGeneres, and Larry Gagosian have acquired pieces, as has Kanye West, who once tweeted that his Polar Bear sofa “is my favorite piece of furniture we own.”

Part of the brilliance of Royère’s design is how he made the minimalist pieces look almost structureless, entirely covering the skeletons—created using traditional wood-bending techniques—in layers of synthetic foam.

“Only the large circular feet underneath are visible,” notes Paris dealer Patrick Seguin, a leading Royère authority who collaborated with fellow dealer Jacques Lacoste on a 2013 monograph on the designer. “The Ours Polaire pieces are emblematic of Royère’s spirit of absolutely free creativity and reflect a true elegance without any kind of ostentation.”

It all began in 1947, when Royère, who left a career in banking at 29 to devote himself to interiors, was renovating an apartment for his mother on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris. For that project he created some of his first biomorphic designs, including the sofa he originally called Boule (Ball) and later renamed Ours Polaire. “The model attracted a limited clientele initially,” Seguin says. “However, its innovative design enjoyed success during the 1950s, when free-form designs and Royère’s soft, round lines triumphed.”

From the late ’40s through the ’50s Royère’s profile grew internationally, particularly in the Middle East, where he opened showrooms in Cairo, Beirut, and Tehran before expanding to Lima and São Paulo. This period saw him develop some of his most famous designs: the Egg and Elephant chairs, the Puddle and Sphere tables, various iterations of the Persian and Vine lights. Sophisticated yet whimsical, his creations, which often reference the natural world, exude refinement without veering into preciousness.

Because everything Royère produced was made to order, quantities were limited. Clients could commission an individual Polar Bear sofa or pair of armchairs, or they could get them together as a set. According to Seguin, between 1947 and 1967 only around 150 sets were made, plus another 150 sofas and 150 pairs of chairs. (Unlike other iconic Midcentury styles, there has never been an authorized re-edition.)

Royère died in 1981, having stopped designing a decade earlier. He left the bulk of his archives to Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs, which staged a reputation-burnishing 1999 exhibition that coincided with surging collector interest in midcentury French designers.

Royère prices took a notable upward turn a decade ago, says Florent Jeanniard, the European head of design for Sotheby’s, which set an auction record for Royère last May, when a sideboard with a star-dappled marquetry design fetched $1.8 million. “The demand is really global, with collectors now coming from Asia as well as the U.S. and Europe,” Jeanniard says. “Royère’s furniture has a combination of seriousness and joy that appeals to today’s taste.”

With the Polar Bear pieces, the challenge is finding them. “It has become very difficult to source a set from the original owners, and collectors who already possess these pieces very rarely sell them,” says Seguin, who sold a set a few years ago that he says would be worth $1.2 million today.

Decades on, many of the Polar Bear pieces—which Royère produced in
several colors—have been reupholstered, often in fabrics mimicking the originals. One of the vintage hues is an eye-catching yellow not far from what happens to be Ogundehin’s pick for this year’s trendiest color: mustard. About a year and a half ago a pair of Polar Bear armchairs covered in a supersoft fabric somewhere between classic Grey Poupon and French’s sold at Christie’s for just a hair under $1 million. It was a giant price for two chairs, but for utter on-trend comfort perfection—it’s hard to put a price tag on that.

This story appears in the April 2019 issue of Town & Country.

Mix to the Max

Hubert Zandberg’s London apartment is an exercise in aesthetic exuberance showcasing his diverse collections and passion for putting it all on display

By Stephen Wallis

December 3, 2018

http://www.galeriemagazine.com/art-design-industry-news-november-30/

Go ahead and cue the clichés: More is more, or taking it up a notch, too much is never enough. Because it’s all true when it comes to Hubert Zandberg, the aesthetically voracious, insatiably acquisitive South African–born designer whose latest London apartment is a re­fined study in ­fill-it-to-the-brim exuberance. While his client projects—whether a historic Paris hôtel particulier, a Tuscan villa, or a penthouse in Moscow—span a wide stylistic range, his own homes consistently betray the soul of a dyed-in-the-wool maximalist.

“I did really slightly overdo this place,” Zandberg says of his two-bedroom apartment, located in a recently constructed building near his office in Notting Hill. “I thought I could push the boundaries in terms of sheer quantity of items.”

At just 850 square feet, it’s much smaller than his previous London residence, a historic fi­ve-level former canal keeper’s house, where displays of art, decorative objects, natural history items, taxidermy, and assorted curios lent the space a distinctive cabinet-of-curiosities vibe. While quite a few pieces made the move to his new home, Zandberg was eager to live with recent acquisitions that had been in storage and let contemporary art really take center stage. “I had a need for something a little bit fresher and wanted to force a change,” explains the designer, who also bought a second apartment in London’s East End that will serve as more of a weekend base—“my country place,” as he puts it.

Inside the Notting Hill home, the visual barrage begins in the entrance hall, where dozens of black-and-white artworks, including photographs by Guido Mocafi­co, George Dureau, and Peter Hugo, are arranged floor to ceiling in a dense salon-style installation. Adding to the arresting effect is vivid yellow wall paint inspired by the canary-colored stairwell at 10 Downing Street, only “slightly updated with a bit more acid, a bit more green,” Zandberg says. He compares the space’s initial impact with that of a busy pattern on a fabric. “It becomes an overall concept,” he says, “but then you can start to peel away the layers and engage with individual pieces.”

When in London, Zandberg tends to buy art from a few preferred galleries—including Maureen Paley and Carl Freedman—and he’s a familiar face on Portobello Road on Saturdays and on Columbia Road and around Shoreditch on Sundays. He also makes frequent trips to his favorite hunting grounds in Paris, Berlin, and Cape Town, where he keeps what he calls “lock-up-and-go apartments.” Zandberg jokes: “Some people have a sex life. I have a shipper who’s on speed dial.”

Given his passion for art and objets, it’s tempting to say that Zandberg designs with a collector’s mentality. But it’s equally true that he collects with a designer’s mentality. “I often collect with a bigger narrative in my mind,” he says. “It’s the combinations of items and the dialogues between them that most interest me.”

In the apartment’s L-shaped living area, Zandberg deployed an open bookshelf as a divider to help create three distinct spaces, each with its own feel and interplay of pieces. Outside the small and minimally used kitchen (“the oven is mostly for Champagne storage,” Zandberg admits), he composed a sitting area where a bamboo daybed and a Brutalist mosaic-top cocktail table are joined by a vintage Brazilian rosewood armchair and a 1960s geometric bar cabinet.

Rounding out the eclectic mix of accoutrements are a wall-mounted Paul Evans mirrored cabinet, a tribal mask from Liberia, and photographs by Edgar Martins and Wolfgang Tillmans, an artist of special importance to Zandberg. “I adore Wolfgang’s work—he really captures the zeitgeist,” says the designer, whose social circle overlapped with the artist’s when they were both starting out in London. “When I look at a picture by him, that’s my time. ­Those are the pictures of my life.”­

There’s also a small dining area—where the table is as likely to be arrayed with art objects as it is with plates of food—and a lounge-like space outfitted with what Zandberg describes as “midcentury, almost gentleman’s clubby paneling” and “furnishings that are a bit masculine.” Th­is is where he spends most of his time, on the 1970s Knoll sofa or in the Eames lounger, reading or watching TV, perhaps enjoying a cocktail from the vintage bar trolley in the corner. “I love retro barware—the playfulness and kitschiness of it—as well as the juxtaposition of high and low art,” he says. “It’s about not taking things too seriously.”

Even in the bedroom and dressing room, where the mood is a bit more restrained, Zandberg inserted hits of eccentricity and whimsy. Next to the overscale canopy bed, the dashing refinement of a Tommi Parzinger horn mirror and a Sergio Rodrigues rosewood table is balanced by the idiosyncratic expressiveness of a hand-molded vase by Johannes Nagel, one of the ceramic artists, along with Sebastian Stöhrer, who count among Zandberg’s latest obsessions. In the dressing room, he devoted an entire wall to artwork depicting women like Courtney Love and Faye Dunaway. Zandberg calls it his “wall of girls—portraits of strong women that I just thought would be fun to hang together.”

With this apartment, what Zandberg wants to avoid at all costs is the sameness and suffocating tastefulness of so many interiors. “­The pieces may be stunning and you love everything in it, but why does it not sing? Why is it not capturing you, not filling you with joy?” For this anything-but-ordinary designer, with his ready embrace of kitsch, contradiction, and cliché, it’s how you put it all together that really matters.

Modernist Masterpiece in Palm Springs

The luxe Southern California retreat perfectly reflects the subtle palette of the surrounding desert landscape

By Stephen Wallis

Summer 2018

http://www.galeriemagazine.com/marmol-radziner-designs-a-stunning-estate-in-palm-springs

The Los Angeles architecture firm Marmol Radziner is no stranger to working in the desert, whether restoring midcentury icons like the Kaufmann House in Palm Springs or building original, modernist-inspired takes on indoor-outdoor living in Scottsdale, Las Vegas, and various points across California’s Coachella Valley. One of the firm’s strengths is the artfulness with which it inserts architecture into natural surroundings. For a recent project in La Quinta, south of Palm Springs, the challenge was less about integrating a home into the desert landscape than it was integrating a desert landscape into the home.

When an Aspen-based couple—semi-retired businesspeople involved in a variety of philanthropic pursuits—approached Marmol Radziner about creating a residence in a new private development in La Quinta six years ago, they certainly weren’t looking for a conventional mega-mansion. “If you had ever told me that I’d own a house on a golf course in Palm Springs,” the wife remarks, “I would have said, ‘Clearly you haven’t met me.’”

The brief from the clients was straightforward but hardly simple to execute. “They wanted a home with main spaces large enough for entertaining, but also to have their zone of living still feel compact,” says Ron Radziner, who heads the firm with Leo Marmol. The homeowners, who are enthusiastic collectors, also requested some walls for large-scale artworks (a nearly 18-foot-wide Michael Chow painting required a living room wall to be extended by six inches) as well as a strong connection between the interior and exterior.

They got all that and more with Marmol Radziner’s design, which is anchored by a 6,500-square-foot structure containing double-height entertaining spaces, a large master suite, and a guest room. There is continuous flow from the kitchen into the dining and living areas, with sliding glass doors opening directly onto the terrace and offering glorious views of the San Jacinto Mountains. Across a courtyard, a guesthouse features two additional bedrooms.

The architecture has many of the firm’s signatures: striking rectilinear forms, abundant glass exposures, generous overhangs for shading, asymmetrical ceiling heights, and overlapping planes that create visual dynamism. But for all its cool, modernist bravado, this is also a house with a softer, subtler side.

Sophie Harvey, an architect and designer in Aspen and New York City, collaborated on the interior finishes and oversaw the furnishings, instinctively gravitating “toward neutrals and earth tones while keeping everything warm,” she says. “This is a very modern house, but there’s nothing cold about it when you’re inside.” Responding to the owners’ taste for “a little luxe,” Harvey prioritized comfort in the mix of contemporary and vintage pieces, while deploying “really yummy silk rugs” and lining entire walls with creamy leather behind the platform beds. “We wanted it to have a luxurious feel but in a simple, understated way.”

The choice of materials—limestone floors, teak ceilings, bleached-walnut millwork, concrete countertops in the kitchen, travertine in the baths—was about channeling the faded, dusty hues of the desert. “Even the plaster color of the building itself,” says Radziner, “is a gray, slightly greenish tone that blends with the landscape.”

That connection to the desert is reinforced by the striking landscaped courtyard spaces, which are ingeniously woven into and around the house. The masterminds behind the meticulously crafted gardens were Jody Rhone and Tom Pritchard, principals of Madderlake Designs, who drew inspiration from, among other things, a temple garden in Kyoto. “The home is built on a flat piece of sand, without a shred of contour, elevation, or green—it was a blank slate,” Pritchard recalls. “We sought to use native desert elements to tell a story and create a context that the house could belong to.”

To realize their vision, the designers doggedly tracked down perfectly craggy olive trees and handpicked granite boulders from a farmer’s fields some 60 miles away. “We spent days going around on ATVs and tagging different clusters,” says Pritchard. “No one in Palm Springs had ever seen anyone do something like this.” Ultimately, they trucked some 430 tons of rocks to the house, painstakingly reassembling them in the precise configurations in which they’d been discovered. “It was a struggle, but finding the right boulders was key to realizing the concept that we had,” Rhone says. “They are like characters in a story.”

The story of this house was the work of multiple authors whose collaborative efforts produced extraordinary results. “Leo Marmol summed it up best,” the wife recounts. “He told me, ‘You hired the A team, and they all gave you their A game.’ And it’s true.”

A New, 8,000-Square-Foot Art and Design Mecca to Open in Tribeca

After 20 years in business, Manhattan design gallery R & Company founders Zesty Meyers and Evan Snyderman look to the future with an expansive new space

By Stephen Wallis

March 7, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-new-8-000-square-foot-art-and-design-mecca-opens-in-tribeca-1520445139

IT WAS THE FIND of a lifetime, even for a pair of enterprising New York design dealers who made their reputation shining light on the overlooked and underappreciated. The 8,000-square-foot, three-story space that Zesty Meyers and Evan Snyderman found in a 19th-century cast-iron building, just a block north of their influential Tribeca gallery, R & Company, was the perfect setting for the new space they were envisioning. “When we got our first look inside, it just blew our minds,” says Snyderman, who spotted the for-sale sign on a lunchtime stroll. Meyers agrees: “Right away, we knew it was something we’d never find again.”

This year marks R & Company’s 20th anniversary, and to celebrate the milestone, Meyers and Snyderman are expanding dramatically. The new location, opening this spring, will allow the partners to better showcase the diversity of their roster, which ranges from historic designers such as Verner Panton, Greta Magnusson Grossman and Sérgio Rodrigues, to later-career talents like Renate Müller and Wendell Castle (who died earlier this year), to younger, boundary-pushing artists like Thaddeus Wolfe, Katie Stout and the Haas Brothers. At the same time, Snyderman and Meyers often collaborate on shows with architects, collectors and other tastemakers—like the presentation last fall of French interiors star Pierre Yovanovitch’s furniture—only now they’ll have much more square footage to play with.

In addition to the street level, which has 16-foot ceilings and fluted cast-iron columns, the space has two downstairs floors, the lower featuring brick columns standing directly on Manhattan schist. The coup de théâtre comes at the rear: a three-story atrium backed by a 40-foot-high wall of windows.

For the renovations, Meyers and Snyderman tapped one of their past collaborators, architect Kulapat Yantrasast, whose Los Angeles–based firm, wHY Design, is known for its work with cultural institutions. “I knew they weren’t looking for another beautiful showroom but something with a complex identity,” says Yantrasast.

On the street level, which is devoted mostly to exhibition space, Yantrasast devised movable walls that can be configured “to present multiple shows with multiple artists at the same time,” the architect explains. The middle floor houses offices and a library for the gallery’s extensive archives, while the bottom level is “the surprise floor,” as the architect puts it, “because it goes deep into the earth and will feature immersive installations.” The first of those installations will be glass artist Jeff Zimmerman’s massive Vine chandelier, his largest work to date, set to fill the entire atrium. It’s just one of the pieces created for the 20th-anniversary exhibition that will inaugurate the new space.

The goal is for the gallery “to be a place for the design world to come together,” says Meyers. “We want to have a new level of programming that goes well beyond selling something.” The current space, meanwhile, will remain open, serving as a showroom for inventory and less-formal installations of new work.

It’s a long way from the days of the B Team, the glass-blowing and performance group Meyers founded in the ’90s and Snyderman later joined. Soon after, they started a sideline in vintage furnishings, stalking estate, yard and garage sales and selling their finds at the Chelsea flea market. “It was the magic moment when midcentury stuff was starting to hit the market,” Meyers recalls.

Trips to northern Europe and, later, Brazil yielded containers full of then-affordable modern treasures that they shipped back to their Brooklyn warehouse. In November 1997, the pair opened their gallery, originally called R20th Century, in Williamsburg and then moved to Tribeca in 2000. From the outset, their approach combined eye-catching presentation with serious research, whether they were showing midcentury Brazilian masters—they almost single-handedly made Sérgio Rodrigues and Joaquim Tenreiro into market stars—or offbeat contemporary work.

The gallery’s early years coincided with the maturation of the design market, reflected in the emergence of fairs like Design Miami, with Meyers and Snyderman playing a prominent role. “Evan and Zesty are true leaders in the movement that made limited-edition contemporary design collectible, putting it side by side with historical work,” says Craig Robins, the Miami-based collector and chairman of Design Miami. “There are very few galleries that are as strong and dynamic in both categories.”

Lately Meyers and Snyderman have started taking cues from art galleries as well. This month, R & Company is exhibiting for the first time at the Armory Show, one of New York’s top contemporary and modern art fairs. “We’re at the crossroads of all these worlds coming together—fine art, design, craft,” says Snyderman. “We can be at the forefront of that.”

Why Does This Chair Cost $30,000?

Pierre Jeanneret’s Chandigarh furniture was slowly being lost to the scrap heap. Today, it’s coveted by collectors around the globe.

BY STEPHEN WALLIS

Esquire Big Black Book Spring/Summer 2018

https://classic.esquire.com/article/2018/1/1/why-does-this-chair-cost-30000

You know the chairs. You’ve seen them in trendspotting style magazines and on cool design sites. Maybe you’ve even spied them arrayed around Kourtney’s dining table on Keeping Up with the Kardashians. (Hey, no judgments.) They’re the midcentury armchairs with the tapered wood legs that form a distinctive inverted-V shape. There are a number of variations—some with caned seats and backs, others with upholstered cushions—but all are marked by an unmistakable, sublimely simple presence. Still not clicking? Well, it’s definitely clicking with design enthusiasts, who shell out thousands, even tens of thousands, for the iconic chairs that the Swiss-born architect Pierre Jeanneret created in the 1950s and early ’60s for Chandigarh, the new, built-from-scratch capital of India’s Punjab region.

Jeanneret didn’t just design chairs, of course. His cousin and collaborator was Le Corbusier, the legendary architect behind the overall plan for Chandigarh, envisioned as the crown jewel of Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s post-independence initiative to build a series of progressive, forward-looking cities as symbols of the new modern nation. While Le Corbusier based himself in Paris, Jeanneret relocated to India for a decade and a half, during which he served as the man on the ground, overseeing all aspects of the massive Chandigarh project as well as designing a number of buildings himself. But arguably his most tangible legacy is the remarkable array of furnishings he masterminded for the complex.

“Chandigarh was such an extraordinarily poetic but also major, major project with intellectual, social, political components,” says François Laffanour, the owner of Galerie Downtown in Paris and a leading dealer of Jeanneret’s and Le Corbusier’s works. “It was something completely new in terms of urbanism. And Jeanneret’s furniture, which is a little bit rustic and simple, was exactly right for Le Corbusier’s architecture.”

A devout pragmatist, Jeanneret emphasized functionality and practical materials, using teak and Indian rosewood for their durability and moisture resistance and incorporating traditional, inexpensive rattan caning into many pieces. Adamant about involving the local community, he enlisted Chandigarh craftsmen to produce chairs, sofas, benches, stools, tables, desks, bookshelves, cabinets, and more. In today’s parlance, you might almost call it woke. “The thinking behind the furniture was totally original in the 1950s,” says Laffanour, “but it seems very current with where we are today—socially conscious, ecological, made with simple materials but also strong and comfortable. It was made in the country, by Indians, with the wood of the country, and not something imported from Europe.”

Everything Jeanneret created was conceived to complement the spirit and ideals of the architecture. “References to the facades of different buildings can be seen in desks and bookcases,” notes Patrick Seguin, another top Paris dealer, “cleverly reinforcing the harmony and the relationship between the two.” Much of the seating features legs in the signature inverted-V form that calls to mind an architect’s drawing compass.

These days, a search for Pierre Jeanneret on the high-end decorative-arts site 1stdibs turns up dozens of pieces he created for Chandigarh, from $5,000 office armchairs to $25,000 desks to $60,000 pairs of the so-called Kangaroo chairs, strikingly angled low seats designed for ergonomically stylish lounging in government officials’ private residences. The furnishings have also become staples of blue-chip design auctions. Last summer at Bonhams, a periodicals rack went for $102,500. At a Wright auction in October, a pair of upholstered lounge chairs fetched $179,000. In December, Sotheby’s sold a daybed clad in an eye-catching brown-and-white hide for $87,500.

That’s serious cash for furnishings that, 15 years ago, were often treated like little more than trash. In Chandigarh, Jeanneret’s aging pieces were routinely discarded, sold to cabinetmakers as scrap for a few rupees, or even burned as firewood. Literal heaps of the now-treasured V-leg chairs could be found on the grounds of the university and on the roof of the High Court. The turnaround can be largely credited to a group of enterprising Paris dealers who began making trips to Chandigarh in the late ’90s, buying up cast-off pieces, mostly from government-sanctioned sales, to restore, exhibit, and place with clients in Europe and America. “We acquired furniture that was in disrepair and not being used,” says Éric Touchaleaume, the first of those early pioneers, who was joined by Laffanour, Seguin, and Philippe Jousse. “The pieces were often in bad condition, but fortunately teak is very strong and easy to restore.”

While the efforts of those dealers have been portrayed by some as unsavory opportunism, there is no denying the crucial role they played in preserving an important, imperiled chapter in modern design. They staged some of the first exhibitions and published some of the first books on the furniture of Chandigarh. In the process, they made Jeanneret a star, drawing him out from the long shadow cast by Le Corbusier and into the 21st century. Previously, most collectors had known Jeanneret mainly for the suite of tubular steel furniture he created with Charlotte Perriand (who was for a time his lover) and Le Corbusier in the 1920s.

But Jeanneret’s inclination was always toward wood. And the furnishings he created for Chandigarh, with their marriage of pared-down architectural forms and rich organic materials, are particularly well suited to contemporary interiors. It’s no wonder that architect-designers like Joseph Dirand and Vincent Van Duysen, two of today’s top masters of luxurious, supremely minimalist spaces, are avid collectors of Jeanneret’s work and frequently deploy it in projects for clients. “Pierre Jeanneret’s chairs express a sense of craft through the materials and a sense of intuition through their form,” remarks Van Duysen. “The open-weave, graphic treatment of rattan he often used and the V-shaped legs are a very recognizable, strong statement of timeless design.”

Or, as Laffanour puts it, “when you look at Pierre Jeanneret’s wood furniture, you can see the patina, you can see the time on it, and there is something romantic in the way that it’s not totally perfect. In a minimal, very clean, very white environment, pieces by Jeanneret look like works of art, and they bring an element of human touch that breaks up the pristine perfection.”

Naturally, Jeanneret’s meteoric rise in the global design scene did not escape the notice of Indian officials, and thanks to local efforts to protect and preserve his Chandigarh furniture, buying opportunities in India essentially ended a decade ago. With demand high and supply limited, fakes and overly restored pieces have muddied the market. Fortunately, scholarship and standards of connoisseurship continue to improve, and the market remains strong. “Good things always sell for good prices,” says Laffanour. The only question is how much higher they can climb. 

It’s a busy season for Nadine Levy Redzepi, author of the new cookbook 'Downtime,' and her chef husband, René, who is about to reopen his celebrated Copenhagen restaurant, Noma. But on December 24, the couple’s focus is on gathering friends and loved ones to share a soul-warming feast and lots of rollicking yuletide cheer.


Stephen Wallis

December 14, 2017

http://www.foodandwine.com/chefs/rene-redzepi-noma-christmas

“My favorite thing about Christmas has always been the smells that go through the house—I like to have something in the oven all day,” says Nadine Levy Redzepi, whose husband, René, is the chef of Noma, the much-lauded temple of New Nordic cuisine that shuttered temporarily in February and is gearing up for a blockbuster reopening early next year. At home, more often than not it’s Nadine who cooks for the family, which includes three daughters (ages nine, six and three) and Nadine’s mother. Especially on weekends and holidays, meals at the Redzepis’ are about spending time together and with the friends they routinely entertain from places near and far. It’s cherished downtime from the stresses of the restaurant, and they make the most of it. 


So it’s no coincidence that Downtime is the name Nadine has given her first cookbook, a collection of favorite home recipes that, as she puts it, are about “blurring the distinction between family food and special occasions.” And few occasions at the Redzepis’ can compare with their annual Christmas Eve celebration, when they host upwards of 20 guests at their home in the city’s Christianshavn neighborhood. A 17th-century former blacksmith’s workshop, the space features lots of rustic timber beams and a forge that’s been repurposed as a kitchen fireplace—perfect for roasting an apple-and-prune–stuffed goose while truffled porchetta cooks in the oven. 


By the time guests start arriving mid-afternoon, Champagne has been opened and tables are arrayed with snacks. “We always have lots of smoked fish, cured fish eggs and fresh cheese that has been smoked in hay,” says Nadine, who likes to scoop salmon tartare onto her homemade potato chips (“my biggest weakness,” she admits). The kids get to open a few gifts, and then everyone sits down to enjoy the feast. Accompanying the traditional goose and tradition-twisting porchetta are classic savory-sweet side dishes like caramel potatoes and braised red cabbage—which René spends days making—plus plentiful bottles of red Burgundy and Vin Jaune. 


Afterward, the Danish custom of singing and dancing around the tree is usually supplanted by a lively gift-exchanging game involving lots of animated dice rolling that lets everyone work up an appetite for the rice pudding dessert. Not to be forgotten are the walnut crescent cookies—irresistibly crunchy and generously dusted with powdered sugar—a recipe Nadine picked up from an old friend of her mother’s and has been enjoying since childhood. “For me,” she says, sounding more than a little like a kid, “these cookies are Christmas.”

Leave No Trace

Architecture | Dec 2016

By Stephen Wallis

http://www.culturedmag.com/jean-nouvel/

Jean Nouvel is often described as an architect without a signature style. His buildings can be decidedly eccentric, whether robustly theatrical or impressionistic and lyrical. Surveying the many notable projects the Pritzker Prize winner has completed over his nearly five-decade career—a dizzying array of cultural buildings, office towers, residential high-rises, hotels and wineries—it is almost hard to believe they were all designed by the same hand. But make no mistake: Nouvel wears his chameleon-like identity with pride. “I never design the same project twice—never, never,” says the Frenchman in his heavily accented English. “I work on the specifics of the situations. I am a contextual architect.” Nouvel, whose Paris-based studio currently has more than 40 projects underway, from São Paulo to Beijing to New York, has long railed against what he sees as a global scourge of “rootless buildings”—generic, preconceived structures merely dropped into this place or that. “Like a composer, you have to create the music in relationship with the climate, ambience, history, geography,” he says.

Context is particularly important for two highly anticipated Nouvel projects moving toward completion on the shores of the Persian Gulf: the National Museum of Qatar in Doha and the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Though an opening date is not set for the Doha museum, construction has largely finished on the building—an abstract cluster of angled, interlocking discs inspired by crystalline formations known as desert roses. The sand-hued structure appears to emerge directly from the landscape, and will house galleries for exhibits about the history and culture of Qatar, as well as shops, restaurants and a research center. It wraps around a courtyard, deliberately evoking the caravansaries once central to desert culture. “The Qataris wanted a symbolic building,” Nouvel says. “This museum had to talk about the identity of the Middle East, and the greatness of the desert.”

Similar, if slightly less literal, allusions permeate the architect’s design for the Louvre Abu Dhabi, a much delayed project that is slated to open next year. The museum, whose wide-ranging exhibitions will draw heavily from French national collections, is the first of several planned buildings by Pritzker laureates (the roster includes Tadao Ando, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Norman Foster) that will anchor an ambitious arts district within the emirate’s massive Saadiyat Island development. Nouvel conceived the museum as a kind of miniature floating city, a medina-like warren of gallery structures and open-air plazas that overlook shimmering pools and canals. Hovering above most of the complex is a 600-foot-diameter cupola with intricately patterned perforations that act as a protective brise-soleil, permitting filtered sunlight to dapple the interior spaces. The result is a literal oasis in the desert, but also an unabashedly romantic architectural gesture that references mosque domes and traditional Islamic latticework screens, while the play of light conjures comparisons to dusky souks. The design is a bravura melding of past and present, poetry and technology—a symbol of an ancient culture that is now enjoying, as Nouvel has often put it, a golden age. “I try to invent something positive,” he remarks. “It’s not to create a wow—I don’t care about the wow. I want to create a deepness, a memory, a question, a little surprise.”

Visible in Nouvel’s Persian Gulf museum projects are threads that run throughout his career, especially his masterful use of light, transparency and reflection, as well as the inventive ways he breaks down rigid geometries. Nouvel shot to prominence with the 1987 opening of his Arab World Institute in Paris, a building that reimagined the Modernist glass box by inserting a façade of light-sensitive mechanical apertures—one of the architect’s early references to Islamic screens. For his 1994 Fondation Cartier across town, he employed overlapping walls of glass to create reflections that bring the trees, city and sky into the building and effectively dissolve the edifice into its surroundings. “Jean Nouvel has used the words ‘haze’ and ‘evanescence’ to describe that building, which is capable of absorbing and reflecting—not just in a literal sense but in a bigger sense—the ambience,” says Terence Riley, architect and former curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. “He understands architecture as a kind of phenomenon.”

Over the past decade, many of Nouvel’s buildings have incorporated ever more elaborate green façades, vertical gardens and terraces overflowing with lush plantings. For the architect, it brings nature into urban settings, while taking advantage of eco benefits like energy-saving solar shading. But these green elements are aesthetic, too, softening a building’s form and adding a sense of organic vitality, even a touch of the surreal. Nouvel often works with botanist Patrick Blanc, a pioneer in the field of vertical gardens, and their collaborations range from the 2006 Musée du quai Branly in Paris to the One Central Park residences that opened in Sydney in 2013. That latter award-winning project features a huge, showstopping cantilever, 28 stories up, with gardens, a pool and a heliostat system that directs sunlight onto shaded areas of the complex, while its underside becomes a huge light installation at night.

At least in spirit, One Central Park was a significant precedent for a residential development by Nouvel that has just broken ground in Miami Beach—his first project in a city now awash in buildings by star architects. Called Monad Terrace, it overlooks Biscayne Bay. “There are a lot of 1950s and ’60s drab buildings on that corridor,” says Michael Stern, CEO of the JDS Development Group, which hired Nouvel for the project. “We wanted someone who could come in and do something dynamic and new—sort of a nuclear bomb of design in a positive way.”

Nouvel, who describes the site as “very cinematic,” designed two buildings—one 14 stories high, the other seven stories—separated by lush gardens, a swimming pool and lagoon that appear to merge seamlessly with the bay. This allée of water was devised to serve as a buffer against storm surges and rising seas (a real and growing threat) and also act as a kind of mirror, the architect explains, casting reflections up into the apartments and creating “very poetical, atmospheric effects that are always changing throughout the day and the night.”

The exposures facing neighboring buildings are draped with vertical gardens to provide privacy, while views are channeled toward the bay on one side and the ocean on the other. “It’s totally protected,” says Nouvel, “and you are completely in relationship with the beauty of the site.”

Now 71, Nouvel still keeps a relentless schedule and travels constantly, though he escapes as often as possible to his home in Saint-Paul de Vence, in the South of France. “I work there with a little staff very often,” he says. “In this place I try to be quiet, to think in a better way for inspiration. It’s good for creating.”

As he has throughout much of his career, Nouvel continues to design products and furniture, mostly reductive and minimalist in spirit. Among his latest creations are a sleek desk and storage unit for Unifor, vinyl carpeting for Bolon and wallpaper for Maharam inspired by his 2010 summer pavilion for London’s Serpentine Gallery. The Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris is offering a rare look at this lesser-known side of Nouvel’s oeuvre with a comprehensive survey of his furniture and objects, on view through February 12. Integrated with traditional works from the museum’s permanent collection are more than 200 pieces by Nouvel, from furniture and lighting he devised for Artemide, Cassina, Ligne Roset, Poltrona Frau, Roche Bobois and other companies to tableware for Georg Jensen to limited-edition pieces for his galleries, Patrick Seguin and Gagosian.

Meanwhile, over the next few years, legacy-shaping landmarks by Nouvel will be joining city skylines across the globe, starting with the nearly completed twin Le Nouvel apartment towers in Kuala Lumpur (clad in vertical gardens by Blanc) and residential high-rises for two different developers in Singapore. In New York, his much discussed—and debated—53W53 building, a lithe and gracefully sloping 82-story skyscraper, is rising next to the Museum of Modern Art. In Paris, his strikingly faceted Hekla tower will become a new beacon in the La Défense district. And an arresting hotel-residential building he designed for Rosewood in São Paulo—incorporating the brand’s first six-star property in Latin America—promises to transform a historic site in a bustling area of the city.

As this list of projects shows, Nouvel has never shied away from luxury, but his work is grounded in a minded belief that architecture’s responsibility is to improve its surroundings and to serve a larger social purpose. Or, as he puts it, “With one building you can change the nature of a place.”

Neal Beckstedt Uses Color to Rev Up a Manhattan Pied-à-Terre

Inspired by two international clients, designer Neal Beckstedt looks beyond his neutral comfort zone to find a world of color awaits

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted September 17, 2018

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/neal-beckstedt-uses-color-to-rev-up-a-manhattan-pied-a-terre

While not exactly a chromophobe, Neal Beckstedt was never—by his own admission—an interior designer you’d go to for rooms bursting with color. Known for warmly modern schemes, where refined materials, rich textures, and sculptural furnishings tend to be the statement gestures, he has typically deployed color with a reserve that falls somewhere between judicious and parsimonious. And yet. . . .

When a friend connected him with a Hong Kong–based couple who were looking to renovate a Manhattan pied-à-terre, Beckstedt knew right away that the project was going to take him out of his chromatic comfort zone. “They loved color,” he says. “In particular, their art collection was supervibrant and bold. That became the starting point.”

Situated in a West Side building by architect Thomas Juul-Hansen, the two-bedroom apartment features an open living-dining space, with great natural light and enviable views overlooking the High Line. After dropping the ceilings a couple of inches to put in lighting—better for displaying artworks by the likes of Matthew Brandt, Steven Klein, and Marc Quinn—and installing some millwork for discreet TV cabinets and a bar, Beckstedt turned to the finishes and furnishings.

“It was clear that the clients were attracted to things that are a little avant-garde,” says the designer, whose initial acquisitions for the apartment included an eye-catching Max Lamb dining table made of engineered terrazzo. Speckling the table’s surface are flecks of bluish green, golden yellow, and punchy persimmon red—colors that Beckstedt adopted for neighboring walls and furniture fabrics. In the living area, he embellished walls with subtly patterned gold leaf, upholstered a 1950s Italian sofa in a teal velvet, and clad an Edward Wormley chaise longue in an acid-lime velvet with burgundy piping. Joining the mix are a Johnny Swing coin chair, a Deco-style folding screen, and vintage Jindrich Halabala lounge chairs covered in Mongolian sheepskin. The animated ensemble is reflected in the high-gloss ceiling, into which Beckstedt inserted a recessed oval detail. “It was all about how we could do a different take on things,” the designer explains.

In terms of color, the question became, “How far are we going to go?” Quite a bit further, it turns out. In the guest bedroom, Beckstedt used shades of teal for the bed, walls, and even the ceiling, which he contrasted with rust-colored curtains. For the master suite, meanwhile, he opted for a two-tone scheme, with deep burgundy-meets-aubergine colors on the bed and walls offset by the pale greens of the ceiling and curtains.

If this palette marks a departure for Beckstedt, certain hallmarks remain. “I’m always pushing pottery—there’s just a warmth and a depth to it,” says the designer, who chose ceramics ranging from a modern Berndt Friberg vase to recent sculptural vessels by the Haas Brothers. Also evident is his fondness for distinctive details, like the exposed selvage edges on the master bedroom’s coverlet and the variations in texture and pile on the living room carpet. Handwoven in South America, the rug adds an element of coziness while taking that space “down a notch, so it didn’t become too glam,” Beckstedt notes. Clearly, he hasn’t lost all of his reserve. nbeckstedtstudio.com

The architect and his partner, Lucien Rees Roberts, stylishly update a rare Desert Modern find

Spring 2018

By Stephen Wallis

Photography by Scott Frances

http://www.galeriemagazine.com/steven-harris-restores-a-midcentury-palm-springs-retreat/

Sometimes we’re lucky enough to find a place, a community, a home, that feels—unexpectedly—just right. When architect Steven Harris and his longtime partner, interior designer Lucien Rees Roberts, began looking at houses around Palm Springs a few years ago, it wasn’t for themselves but for good friends in need of guidance.

That hunt landed the friends, Hollywood agent Brian Swardstrom and movie producer Peter Spears, a house in Rancho Mirage by William Cody, one of the luminaries who made California’s Coachella Valley a nexus of the progressive midcentury architecture that came to be known as Desert Modernism. But the search also left a big impression on Rees Roberts and Harris, who asked a few real estate agents to keep an eye out for them.

Before long, an intriguing prospect turned up. It was a classic Desert Modern three-bedroom house from 1957, with a cross-shaped plan, lots of glass and steel, a palm-bordered pool terrace, and views out over an adjacent golf course to the mountains beyond. And it was in Rancho Mirage, just a few minutes’ walk from Spears and Swardstrom’s place. “As soon as I saw it on Google Earth and learned a little about it, I knew it was the house we wanted,” says Harris. “We pretty much agreed to buy it before we ever visited.”

That kind of trust-your-gut leap is perhaps easier to make when you already own six other residences in far-flung locations, as the New York City–based Harris and Rees Roberts do, and when you are as steeped in modernist architecture as Harris is. While they knew this house was significant, it took some sleuthing to figure out it had been designed by Donald Wexler, whose local projects included the Palm Springs International Airport main terminal and the Dinah Shore house, now owned by Leonardo DiCaprio. The clinching evidence came from the archives of celebrated landscape architect Garrett Eckbo, who conceived the house’s gardens and indoor floor planters.

The passage of time and some unfortunate choices during a 1970s renovation meant significant work was required, including removing air-conditioning ducts that had been added to the roof and undoing an expansion of the master bedroom that had spoiled the roof overhang. Consulting Wexler’s and Eckbo’s drawings, the couple set about returning the property closer to its original state while updating all of the systems and introducing less water-dependent native plants to the gardens.

In the end, “every piece of drywall, Sheetrock, and plaster was taken off and replaced,” says Harris, “but we were careful to maintain important details and the spirit of the house.” Where Wexler had used wood paneling, they installed a strikingly patterned veneer of Brazilian rosewood. They also called on a local specialist to match new terrazzo for the baths and kitchen with the original floors elsewhere.

Throughout the house, the furnishings are an assortment of custom Rees Roberts designs and vintage pieces acquired over the years. The master bedroom’s 1950s bed—its headboard outfitted with ashtrays, magazine pockets, and lights—was Italian design legend Gio Ponti’s own. In the dining room, a sculptural light fixture by Paris designer Alexandre Logé hangs above a showstopping late-’60s Willy Rizzo travertine table, a sculptural circle bored through its base.

The art is a similarly compelling mix. Works from three generations of notable painters in Rees Roberts’s family are on display, giving the collection a decidedly personal tint. Among the most significant works are the living room’s painting by legendary Brazilian landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx and a large abstract canvas by noted Slovenian artist Jože Ciuha. “We buy things we fall in love with,” says Rees Roberts. “They’re not necessarily particularly expensive, and in many cases, they’re not by famous people.”

An artist himself, Rees Roberts often spends mornings painting in the casita, a short bamboo-lined path away from the kitchen. “The light here is incredibly beautiful,” he says, “and in this house you feel very close to the landscape, the views.” Harris, for his part, likes to begin his days with a drive. A self-proclaimed “car freak” with a fondness for vintage Porsches, he typically sets out just after sunrise and heads up into the San Jacinto Mountains. “Having driven nearly all of the passes in the Alps,” he says, “this is one of the most beautiful sets of switchbacks and climbing roads anywhere.”

The couple also enjoys entertaining a steady stream of out-of-town guests and an expanding circle of friends in Palm Springs. “So many colleagues, friends, clients—all kinds of people—happen to be here or are looking for a house here,” notes Harris. After cocktails and dinner on the terrace, cushions often get pulled off the chairs and everyone settles down for a movie on an outdoor screen. “What’s remarkable is that this is a house we didn’t mean to have,” says Harris. And yet they were clearly meant to have it.

A ’60s Architecture Collective That Made History (but No Buildings)

By STEPHEN WALLIS APRIL 13, 2016

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/04/t-magazine/design/superstudio-design-architecture-group-italy.html

Italy’s legendary radical design group Superstudio never actually finished a building, and yet its hallucinogenic visions are still making waves.

HALF A CENTURY AGO, a group of 20-something architecture students from Florence decided to assume the small task of conceiving an alternative model for life on earth. Contemptuous of the long reign of Modernism, which they felt had sold itself as a cure to society’s ills and never delivered, they were jazzed by American science-fiction novels and the political foment of the 1960s. They gave themselves the colorfully assured name Superstudio, and soon after helped kickstart the radical architecture movement in Italy.

The fact that they never actually finished a building is, arguably, the point. Rather, they created “anti-architecture”: psychedelic renderings, collages and films depicting their dreams — and nightmares. At gallery shows and museum exhibitions, the collective shared its mind-bending dystopic visions: hulking buildings overtaking cities, giant golden pyramids and flying silver pods invading the bucolic countryside. They even imagined the planet with no architecture at all, just “Supersurface,” a network of energy that would replace objects and buildings with a grid — an essential theme in their projects — which people could access by simply plugging in. Then, such an idea was radical; now, of course, it feels eerily prophetic.

“Our idea for Supersurface was kind of a pre-vision of what became the Internet,” says Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, who co-founded Superstudio with Adolfo Natalini in 1966 (they were joined later by Gian Piero Frassinelli, Alessandro Poli and brothers Roberto and Alessandro Magris). “We wanted to show that design and architecture could be philosophical, theoretical activities and provoke a new consciousness.”

The group lasted only 12 years, until 1978, before scattering, mostly into academia, but Superstudio’s place in postwar design history borders on the mythic. At their height, they exhibited everywhere from the Museum of Modern Art to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and had conceptual projects published in Domus, the influential design magazine edited by Gio Ponti, the progressive Italian monthly Casabella and even Casa Vogue. Today, echoes of their imagery can be seen in the work of such contemporary architects as Rem Koolhaas, Steven Holl and Bjarke Ingels. Of the few furnishings they executed, a number of pieces still live on: Since 1970, Zanotta has produced their Quaderna series of rectilinear tables overlaid with a black-and-white grid pattern (based on the group’s theories for the ultimate rationalist solution, reducing architecture to a single template that could be endlessly scaled), which has lately been referenced by such of-the-moment designers as RO/LU and Scholten & Baijings.

THIS SPRING, the Maxxi museum in Rome is presenting “Superstudio: 50 Years of Superarchitettura,” featuring over 200 examples of sketches, photographs, collages and films from the group’s archives, including work last seen in “Superarchitettura I,” the historic 1966 exhibition they held in Pistoia, Italy, in conjunction with Archizoom, another collective from Florence. That show is widely considered to be the seminal moment of the short-lived radical design movement, its own version of the Salon des Refuses Impressionist show of 1874: a sharp stick in the eye of the establishment. “Superarchitettura,” the group’s manifesto, declared “is the architecture of superproduction, of superconsumption, of superinduction to superconsumption, of the supermarket, of superman and super-­petrol.” The blustery and abstract opening salvo, which was accompanied by playfully sculptural lamps and seating in exuberant hues, was a direct repudiation of the Modernist credo that form should follow function.

Today, though, the group remains best known for its project “Continuous ­Monument: an Architectural Model for Total Urbanization.” It proposed that vast, gridded megastructures would stretch across world capitals and pristine natural landscapes — spanning the earth, even into outer space. Among the most famous images is a striking view of Lower Manhattan enveloped by a horizontal monolith. The works have a trippy verve, but they were meant as a metaphor for the ills of globalization and unchecked proliferation of homogeneous modern architecture. There are clear influences of what the group was reading at the time — Issac Asimov, Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard, whose works had recently been translated into Italian. “The images are very seductive, and at the same time they present this paradox because the Continuous Monument is this nightmare,” says Gabriele Mastrigli, the curator of the Maxxi exhibition.

Amid the visions of dystopia and provocation, however, Superstudio did offer hope for the future, perhaps nowhere more so than with its unexpectedly poignant 1972 “Supersurface” project. The flat, featureless grid in the renderings represents not only an Internet-like matrix, but a state in which all people live a nomadic existence, freed from repetitive work, consumerist desires, hierarchies of power and violence. “We’ll keep silence to listen to our own bodies,” the group poetically proclaimed. “We’ll listen to our hearts and our breathing. We’ll watch ourselves living.” We still don’t really know what it all means, but that doesn’t make us love it any less.

SHARED VISIONS

In a world distracted by small-screen snapshots and selfies, two eminent photographers are proving that large-scale environmental images are not only relevant but also vital.

BY STEPHEN WALLIS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/edward-burtynsky-and-robert-polidoris-shared-visions-1473716110

STARTING IN THE 1990S, advances in digital technology made it easier for photographers to print their work at previously unimaginable sizes. The result was a golden age of vast pictures—typified by the work of artists such as Andreas Gursky—with the kind of impact previously limited to painting or films. But in these social media–saturated times, when we’re constantly thumbing  through palm-size images shared freely on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, is there still a meaningful place for photos measured in feet?
For Edward Burtynsky and Robert Polidori, two of today’s most esteemed practitioners of large-scale photography, the answer is unequivocally yes. And this fall they are both offering fresh reminders of their art’s visual power and relevance with gallery shows and new books. Both Canadian-born, these two artists have spent the past three decades working on loosely parallel tracks, each bringing a sharp aesthetic eye to documentary images that thoughtfully address issues of historical, socioeconomic and ecological consequence. Technically ambitious and often shot in far-flung, challenging locales, their images provide perspectives rarely seen. Seductive yet unnerving, they act like a mirror, revealing things about who we are and what we’re becoming.
In a way, Edward Burtynsky’s artistic path is the result of a wrong turn. Driving through Pennsylvania in the early ’80s, the photographer wound up in the tiny coal-mining town of Frackville, where he suddenly found himself in a surreal landscape stripped of all traces of nature. He knew he’d discovered his mission. “We’re an expanding population that’s bearing down on the resources of  the planet,” says the photographer, who has since traversed the globe photographing mines and quarries, oil fields and factories, waterways and farmlands. His bird’s-eye views, often taken from planes, helicopters and, more recently, drones, take an unsparing look at the relationship between humans and nature.
Today, Burtynsky oversees a busy Toronto studio, where a small team coordinates logistics for his complex shoots, performs post-production work and communicates with museums and his 11 galleries around the world. His first new body of work in four years, a group of stunning photographs of salt farms in India, is being unveiled this fall by galleries in three cities: Flowers in London (through October 29), Nicholas Metivier in Toronto (September 29–October 22) and both Howard Greenberg (November 4–December 30) and Bryce Wolkowitz (November 3–December 2) in New York. Also on display will be a selection of photographs from the forthcoming book Essential Elements (Thames & Hudson), a survey of Burtynsky’s career that pairs familiar images with some of his lesser-known work.
To capture the salt works, Burtynsky traveled to the Indian state of Gujarat, to an area near the Arabian Sea known as the Little Rann of Kutch. Here, more than 100,000 laborers work in a 400-year-old salt harvesting industry now under threat from a receding water table and unfavorable market forces. Working with his 60-megapixel Hasselblad camera, Burtynsky shot from both a helicopter and a Cessna at altitudes between 300 and 4,000 feet. The resulting images (Steidl is publishing a book of them this month) are captivating studies in pattern and color variations.
While the flats differ in size, shape and configuration, the palette ranges from gray, brown and white to ocher, pink and pale blues and greens. Burtynsky was especially fascinated by the radiating, almost calligraphic lines created by tire tracks and trenches.
Getting up close to a Burtynsky photograph, the largest of which measure nearly to five by seven feet, is a visceral encounter. Unable to take in the entire picture at once, your eyes scan across the surface as the image almost envelops you. “At that scale, there’s this hovering-over, bodily experience that I like to work with,” says Burtynsky. “You stand in front of it, and there’s an almost dizzying, vertigo-like effect.”
That many of his images evoke abstract painting isn’t lost on Burtynsky or his dealers. “He has been coming back to a more abstract visual idea,” says Howard Greenberg, who has co-represented Burtynsky in New York with Bryce Wolkowitz for the past several years. “He’s done that by shooting from even greater heights and eliminating the horizon.”
An important element of Burtynsky’s career has been his eagerness to embrace new mediums and technologies, whether using drones or experimenting with photogrammetry, a process that uses software to translate two-dimensional images of an object, taken from multiple angles, into a rendering that appears 3-D when viewed with virtual-reality goggles. Currently, Burtynsky’s team is working with some 2,000 images he shot before an ivory burn—the destruction of illegally obtained elephant tusks, meant to curb poaching—in Kenya earlier this year. “The technology isn’t quite there yet,” the photographer says, “but the idea is to have this pile of tusks, which was 20 feet high and 20 feet across, rendered in a way that would allow you to put on a VR headset and experience it at scale by walking around it.” Burtynsky’s aim with all of his work is “to have the viewer spend time with and really consider these worlds,” he says. “I want people to enter them.”

DESCRIBING HIS WORK as a photographer, Robert Polidori says he is “basically an impressionist.” The Montreal native, who recently moved his studio to Ojai, California, after three years in Los Angeles, clarifies that by adding, “I’m a medium, not a creator.” Despite his journalistic impulse—he has shot for many publications and was a staff photographer for The New Yorker from 1998 to 2006—Polidori has never been purely a documentarian. His interest has always been in making “psychological portraits” of architectural spaces, which he sees as vessels for memories and as projections of the people who have lived there.
The photographer’s best-known series includes shots of the Château de Versailles under restoration, crumbling old Havana interiors, New Orleans homes devastated by Hurricane Katrina and deserted sites near the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. “I picked Chernobyl as a subject because I thought it was historically important, a signal,” the photographer says. “It was a modern-day Pompeii, but it was an event caused not by nature but by man’s irresponsibility.”
This fall Polidori is having his first show with the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York. On view through October 15 are several of the evocative photographs Polidori shot inside Beirut’s deserted and crumbling Hotel Petra as well as three monumental works related to his interest in urban slums and favelas, places he refers to as “auto-constructed cities—the sort of wild, self-made, non-sanctioned settlements that come out of an organic need.” Created from photos he took in Mumbai, India, these technically remarkable works were a decade in the making.
Polidori’s Hotel Petra photographs—which are the subject of a book Steidl is publishing in December—are reminders of the lasting impact of Lebanon’s long civil war. The once-grand building was badly damaged in that conflict, which lasted from 1975 to 1990. It was left abandoned and was eventually demolished. Polidori’s images, some of which stand six feet high, are ravishing meditations on concepts of transience and decay, the cracked and peeling walls revealing layers of history.
“His commentary on humans’ relationship with architecture and on the changing world is incredibly compelling,” says Paul Kasmin. “Plus, his working process is quite extraordinary.”
Polidori shoots with a massive view camera with giant bellows, using large-format film, up to 11 by 14 inches, because, he explains, “I love the smoothness and higher resolution of film. Also, I like having something physical that the image is embedded in.” Everything is later scanned into digital form, allowing him to create works such as the centerpiece of his show at Kasmin: a panorama of 60 Feet Road, a street of makeshift dwellings cobbled together from junk scraps, in Mumbai’s Dharavi slum. Polidori started by photographing one side of the road’s entire length, moving his camera laterally, tracking-shot style, along an adjacent drainage canal. Detailed in its own forthcoming book, also from Steidl, the final work is a composite of 22 different images stitched together in
Photoshop and printed on a 40-foot-wide canvas.
It’s not the way our eyes would actually see the place, of course. Shot between 6:30 a.m. and 10:30 a.m., the 22 images have different light, for one thing. “On one side it’s darker and bluer,” notes Polidori, “and as you move across it gets reddish and golden,
and then you’re into shade and then bright sunlight again.” Plus, the perspective is as if we were standing directly in front of each segment simultaneously. “What I’m trying to do is make a more idealized version of what I perceive the subject to be,” he explains.
Part of what draws Polidori to places like 60 Feet Road is a compulsion to document an important aspect of human existence that he feels most serious photographers overlook. “When these places no longer exist, the images will be a record of one face of the industrial age’s end,” he says. “I’ve always felt that this is photography’s great utilitarian function—the witness of time.”

The Science of Uncovering Forged Paintings

With Basquiats, Modiglianis, and Picassos going for upwards of $100 million, the stakes have never been higher.

By Stephen Wallis

Sep 17, 2018

https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/a23086822/art-fraud-forgery-science/

There’s an old joke among art market veterans that says the thicker the file of supporting documents for a painting, the more likely it is to be a pants-on-fire fake. These days, in a world in which Basquiats, Modiglianis, and Picassos can top $100 million, the stakes have never been higher for prospective buyers, who want all the evidence they can get that the works they’re considering are exactly what they think they are. Less willing to rely solely on the opinions of experts—many of whom have stopped doing authentications, out of fear of being sued—collectors, dealers, and auction houses are increasingly turning to scientists.

They’re hiring people like Nica Gutman Rieppi, a technical art historian and conservator who serves as the lead investigator in New York for the firm Art Analysis & Research. The company, which also has offices in London and Austria, uses a variety of state-of-the-art tools to analyze materials and methods used to create ­paintings, determine condition and age, and help confirm attributions or detect fakes.

“Some people estimate that 20 to 50 percent of all works in the world are fakes, forgeries, misattributions, or unknowns,” says Rieppi, who notes that a large percentage of problematic works are, unsurprisingly, “found with artists who are selling at high price points.”

Rieppi says a typical day for her might begin by visiting an auction house to examine a Jackson Pollock coming up for sale, where she conducts a microscopic survey of its surface to look for, among other things, signs of artificial aging and any irregularities with the signature. (She has seen more than one fraudulent Pollock on which his name was misspelled.)

Later on she might be in her lab, doing infrared, X-ray, or ultraviolet fluorescence imaging on a painting that might be a Rembrandt “to determine whether it’s a work by a follower of Rembrandt from his contemporary circle, from his studio, or by the master himself,” she says.

For works made in the last 50 years or so she might employ a technology known as bomb curve analysis—she recently used it on a Basquiat—to help pinpoint the date of creation. In the late 1950s and early ’60s nuclear weapon tests caused a spike in radiation in the atmosphere, Rieppi explains, and determining the amount of radiation present in a canvas allows paintings to be dated more precisely.

One fake that Rieppi uncovered recently came to her as a Monet landscape from a private collection. The style was consistent with the Impressionist’s work, and the back of the period canvas had all the labels from galleries and exhibitions you’d expect to find. X-rays revealed an underpainting of a bouquet of roses, which wasn’t itself unusual, except that there was a layer of aged varnish on top of it, indicating that the landscape must have been painted considerably later. What cracked the case, Rieppi says, was the presence of a synthetic blue pigment that wasn’t available until 1997.

She is quick to note that AA&R does not authenticate works, it merely produces critical supporting, or damning, evidence. “We provide information that’s an aid for authentication, ruling out anomalous materials or techniques that are inconsistent with an artist’s work,” she says. “Forgers are getting more creative, and they’re aware of the science, but there are some things that they just can’t fake.”

A family of collectors transforms a historic German castle into Europe’s latest must-see art destination

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted October 17, 2017·Magazine

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/step-inside-the-hall-art-foundations-new-home

Over dinner some ten years ago, art dealer Leo Koenig and artist Georg Baselitz made an offhand suggestion to collectors Christine and Andy Hall that would turn out to be pivotal. The Halls had a particular fondness for German Neo-Expressionism, and Koenig had just helped the couple buy Baselitz’s personal trove of artworks, many by his contemporaries. “I told Andy and Christine that they should buy his castle as well,” recalls Koenig, referring to Schloss Derneburg, a sprawling complex in northwestern Germany where Baselitz had lived and worked since the 1970s. “I’m not sure I was serious, but a year later the whole thing was consummated.” This past summer, the couple unveiled a spectacular renovation of the castle as a museum, part of their family’s Hall Art Foundation.

Set amid rolling farmland and forests, Schloss Derneburg was originally built in the 11th century as a fortified castle. For nearly 700 years it served as a home for various religious groups, before a German count hired architect Georg Laves to reconfigure the property as a private residence in the early 19th century. Later, during World War II, Derneburg was used as a military hospital, and by the time Baselitz acquired it, in 1974, much of the estate’s land and some of its buildings had been sold to the state of Lower Saxony.

When the Halls purchased the castle, they didn’t have a clear vision. “That evolved subsequently and is still evolving,” says Andy, a prominent investment manager. “The fact that Baselitz lived there for 30 years makes it a natural home for our collection,” a trove that includes important works by Anselm Kiefer, Markus Lüpertz, A. R. Penck, and others. “Plus it’s a beautiful property with an intriguing history.” The renovations by architect Tammo Prinz would take the better part of a decade. While much of the work involved meticulous restoration, more radical interventions were undertaken to convert the warrenlike monks’ quarters and other domestic spaces into galleries for postwar and contemporary art. In the meantime, Christine and Andy, who are based in Palm Beach, Florida, established the Hall Art Foundation in 2007 and converted a Vermont dairy farm into their first art center. That venue, opened in 2012, boosted the Halls’ art-world profile, but as Koenig notes, “Derneburg is on another level.”

Featuring 70,000 square feet of gallery space, Schloss Derneburg opened on July 1 with no fewer than seven exhibitions, including two large group shows: a selection of moving-image works curated by Chrissie Iles of the Whitney and “Für Barbara,” a survey of works by female artists that Koenig organized as homage to his late stepmother, the influential Berlin dealer Barbara Weiss. In addition there are solo presentations devoted to Antony Gormley, Barry Le Va, Malcolm Morley, Hermann Nitsch, and Julian Schnabel. The Gormley show provides some of the most dramatic moments, among them Sleeping Field (2015–16), a group of 700 abstract figures installed in a former chapel. “It’s this interplay of art and architecture,” says Andy, “that makes Derneburg a true Gesamtkunstwerk.”

The plan is to keep the castle open on Wednesdays and weekends through December, close for a period, and then reopen in the spring. (Visitors must make reservations for guided tours.) Derneburg’s off-the-beaten-path location will no doubt appeal to those cultural insiders who can’t resist a good pilgrimage. And it’s really like nothing else. “Every little nook and cranny has a unique character,” says Koenig. “What the Halls have done is embrace the history and quirkiness of this place and the many lives it has gone through.”

As a parent and a fan, football can be hard to view. The injuries. The anthem protest divide. The hypocrisy. But, deep down, I still love so much about the sport.

By Stephen Wallis

Dec 06 2017

https://www.fatherly.com/love-money/why-i-still-watch-the-nfl/

A couple of years ago, I watched the Steelers pull out an improbable last-minute playoff win against the Cincinnati Bengals in a nasty, rain-soaked night game marred by ugly penalties and vicious hits that knocked out multiple players with concussions. The Steelers, my Steelers, won, but it felt like both teams — and the NFL — lost. It was the type of game I hoped I’d never see again.

Then I did. When the Steelers and Bengals met in Cincinnati this past Monday night, the rainy conditions called to mind that infamous playoff contest, even if the stakes were lower, thanks to the Bengals’ mediocre record. That wasn’t the only echo. This time the penalties were even more numerous and the hits more vicious, resulting in two players leaving the field strapped to carts. One of those, Steelers linebacker Ryan Shazier, remains in a local hospital three days later, as doctors monitor a spinal injury that has impacted his movements from the waist down. As my own six-year-old boy slept peacefully in his room down the hall, I couldn’t help but think: That’s somebody’s son out there, lying motionless on the field. The Steelers got the win, again on a last-minute field goal, but the victory hardly felt worthy of celebration.

There’s no question the NFL — and football in general — has a problem. It’s not just the head-trauma horrors of concussions and CTE that we can no longer ignore. Or the devastating injuries to backs, knees, and shoulders that have derailed the seasons of too many of the league’s biggest stars this fall. Or the recent tragicomic legal sideshows, from Deflategate to the on-again-off-again suspension of Ezekiel Elliott for alleged domestic violence — one of a disturbing number of such incidents players have been involved in (see: Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, Josh Brown). Or the ugly fight over embattled NFL commissioner Roger Goodell’s contract extension. Or the bewilderingly inconsistent — okay, at times downright poor — quality of play on the field. Or, not least, the most divisive issue facing the league: the national anthem protests. It’s all of those things and more, and it has produced a growing contingent of supporters who are increasingly conflicted over how to feel about this troubled sport as fans — and as parents.

Yet I still watch.

Though I haven’t been to a game in a stadium in years, I track scores on Sundays and do my best to catch bits on TV. I’ve played fantasy football and occasionally in the past gambled very modestly on games — two of the things that turn casual fans into deeply engaged ones. When I married my wife, who tolerates — only just barely — my relationship with football, I knew the sport would not be a part of our family culture in the way it was for me growing up. But it still meant something to me.

My bond with football formed early. Growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1970s and ’80s, the Steelers and football were — and still are — religion. It was the era of the Steel Curtain, the Terrible Towel, four Super Bowls in a decade. Some of my biggest boyhood heroes were Joe Green, Jack Lambert, and Lynn Swann. For years my parents had seats in the old Three Rivers Stadium, and occasionally I got to go with my dad. Mostly, though, I watched at home. On fall weekends, our TV was always tuned to football — college on Saturdays; NFL on Sundays. I can vividly remember curling up with my dad on the floor, watching a late-afternoon game, the room darkening as dusk fell. And to this day, football remains an important point of connection with my parents and siblings. Though I haven’t lived in Pittsburgh for more than a quarter century, the Steelers will always be my team.

At a young age, I loved to act out game-winning catches in the family room or my bedroom, tossing a ball and diving across a bed or sofa to snatch it in spectacular fashion. My inspiration came from the weekly highlights produced by NFL Films, featuring balletic pass plays and bone-crushing hits — often replayed in dramatic slow motion — to a rousing orchestral soundtrack familiar to any football geek over 40. In our awkwardly narrow and sloping backyard, my brother and I would often throw the football with my dad. We’d even put on helmets and pads and practice blocking and tackling, with dad egging us on and stoking our not-always-healthy fraternal competition.

Like many in my generation, I starting playing organized football as soon as I was old enough, joining a pee-wee league at seven (my dad was a coach), and continuing through high school. I prided myself on being tough, and in those ignorant days when we knew less about concussions that meant engaging in a lot of helmet-to-helmet collisions. Seems odd to say now, but I actually enjoyed that part of the game. I’ll never forget a nasty hit that broke my facemask or another that left me on my back, concussed and momentarily blacked out. My senior year, I sat out the first game because of a spinal compression issue in my neck. After an MRI seemed to show no imminent danger, doctors said that whether or not I continued playing was up to me.

The following week, I got back out on the field, wearing one of those old-school neck rolls that provided little actual support and failed to prevent a couple more “stingers,” the name given to the burning pain and subsequent numbness that results from vertebrae impinging on a nerve. I’m pretty sure I didn’t reveal the stingers to anyone, certainly not my coaches.

Among the expanding list of former players whose brains have been found to be riddled with CTE, the first was Mike Webster, the stalwart center on those Super Bowl-winning Steelers teams I grew up idolizing. His Hall-of-Fame career left him with dementia and depression, living at times out of a truck before he died of a heart attack at 50.

My son is now old enough to start playing football, but you can count me among the growing chorus of parents taking the stance of “not my kid.” And that, more than anything, is what threatens the future of the sport. Still a bit young to sit through and enjoy a game, he finds the commercials far more interesting. And I wonder: Will he ever become a fan? Do I even want him to?

One thing is for sure: He’ll never have that kind of intuitive understanding of football that comes from playing — not just the rules but the rhythm and flow of the game. Nor will he ever, I suppose, fully appreciate its complexity or its mythology, its ideals. This will take some getting used to.

Football has always been a brutal, smash-mouth sport that leaves bodies wrecked. And that’s just on the field, as fan-on-fan violence is a less-discussed ignominy. Attending a game at Three Rivers Stadium as a boy, I had to watch as a drunk guy in the row behind us repeatedly tried to pick a fight with my dad, before finally “accidentally” dumping a beer on him. To my dad’s credit, he walked away, soggy and stinking of Iron City, without escalating the confrontation.

But I can’t quite let go of the idea that football is also the innocent game I played in the backyard, that I fantasized about as I threw imaginary Hail Marys to myself in the living room. It’s arguably the sport that taught me the most about discipline, resilience, and teamwork as well as valuable lessons about how to win and, more importantly, how to lose. And despite escalating ticket prices and the profusion of luxury boxes, football does bring people together in momentary, imperfectly democratizing fashion. In football, the noble truths are as real as the ignoble ones.

Which brings me back to the anthem protests, football’s biggest story this fall. The Sunday after President Trump stoked the controversy with his suggestion that owners should fire any “son of a bitch” who fails to stand for “The Star-Spangled Banner”, even Americans who have no interest in football took notice as players across the entire league knelt and locked arms, or remained — as the Steelers did — in the locker room during the anthem. Depending on your views, this significant moment for the NFL and for the country was either the season’s high point or its nadir. I’ll make a case for the former with anyone willing to have a reasonable discussion. Honestly, I’m still trying to figure out how to talk to my son about the issues at stake, about athletes as activists and role models, about how to make some sense of the messy cultural-political moment we are in. It’s serious stuff to discuss with a six-year-old.

In the meantime, my Steelers — tied for the best record in AFC — have another big game on Sunday, and, yes, I will be watching. Perhaps my son will join me on the sofa to catch a few plays. Or not. And I’m okay with that.

Marvin Rand's Legacy Captured

The late architectural photographer Marvin Rand finally gets his due in a new book

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted February 22, 2018·Magazine

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/marvin-rands-legacy-captured-in-a-new-book

Postwar Los Angeles was a boomtown, industrially and culturally—an ideal playground for architects. The result was some of America’s great midcentury homes and commercial buildings, devised by talents such as John Lautner, Richard Neutra, and Rudolph Schindler. There to record these masterworks—for promotion and posterity—were a handful of photographers, the most famous among them Julius Shulman. But the forthcoming book California Captured (Phaidon) makes a case for his peer Marvin Rand as an equally significant chronicler of the scene.

An L.A. native, Rand (1924–2009) launched his studio in 1950, focusing on advertising and product pictures before shifting—partly on the advice of design historian Esther McCoy—to architectural photography. One of his early clients was Craig Ellwood, a charismatic architect who was married to the actress Gloria Henry and had a fondness for sports cars. Rand shot nearly all of Ellwood’s most celebrated projects, including two Case Study houses, brilliantly capturing their interplay of recti­linear volumes as well as their integration with nature. For Ellwood’s 1955 Hunt House, overlooking the Malibu surf, Rand photographed the highway-facing exterior as a hyper-minimalist silhouette: two cubic garages flanking an opaque glass wall, all framed by open sea and sky.

“It’s the incredibly graphic sensibility and the way Rand approaches buildings almost as exercises in abstraction that really stand out,” says Emily Bills, who coauthored California Captured with Sam Lubell and Pierluigi Serraino. Another defining aspect of Rand’s work, she adds, is that “it was never about photographing a lifestyle image of L.A. His interest was really the structures and how they fit into the city.”

Take Rand’s 1956 shot of the Capitol Records Tower in Hollywood. The cylindrical building, with its distinctive sunshades and spire, is seen from across a parking lot through an opening of tropical foliage. That building is perhaps the most famous creation by another of Rand’s key clients, Welton Becket and Assoc., the firm behind such L.A. landmarks as the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the Mark Taper Forum at the Music Center complex, and the Equitable Life Building—a modernist monolith with striking vertical striations, memorably shot in 1969 by Rand in three-quarter profile.

As California Captured vividly shows, Rand (a onetime AD contributor) photographed high-profile projects across Southern California, from the Salk Institute to the LAX Theme Building. But the book also highlights rarely seen works by such lesser-known architects as Lutah Maria Riggs and Douglas Honnold. The latter is represented by Rand’s nighttime shot of the drive-in Tiny Naylor’s, an evocative essay in light and shadow with cars parked beneath a soaring canopy. The authors, who spent more than five years combing through Rand’s archive—some 20,000 images strong—not only give the photographer his due but also further embellish “the grand mosaic,” as they put it, that is the story of California modernism.

Michael Del Piero’s Hamptons home is the ideal backdrop for her distinctive, far-flung finds. 

By Stephen Wallis

August 27, 2018

https://www.departures.com/lifestyle/home-design/michael-del-pieoro-minimalist-hamptons-cottage

“I hope you like music,” interior designer Michael Del Piero says, cheerfully, in the entryway to her not-quite-year-old home in Amagansett, on Long Island’s East End. It seems the audio system that she and her partner, antiques dealer Stuart Grannen, installed has been glitchy, and for the life of her, she can’t get it to turn off.

But then, even before we’ve settled down to talk, the music suddenly stops, and the only background noise is that of afternoon birdsong coming through the open sliding glass doors. Well, that and the occasional barks of a pair of Brussels Griffons staying at the house while their owners help ready a Hamptons outpost of Michael Del Piero Good Design, the interiors studio and shop the decorator founded in Chicago a decade ago. The new offices and shop, which features a mix of seating by Del Piero and furnishings that she sources on her global travels, occupy a renovated barn about 15 minutes down the road in Wainscott. “This is such a natural place for me to be,” she says, noting that 75 percent of what she sells on 1stdibs ends up in New York City or the Hamptons.

Despite the designer’s decision to expand her business to the East End, it’s not what brought her here. “Thirty years ago I married a man whose parents had a home in Amagansett, and every summer we would bring our two daughters,” says Del Piero, who worked for a couple of decades as an executive coach in Chicago before switching gears to a new career in antiques and interior design. “I fell in love with it the minute I arrived.”

When Del Piero and Grannen—who met while she was shopping at Architectural Artifacts, Inc., his 80,000-square-foot emporium in Chicago—began looking for homes in the Hamptons several years ago, they weren’t set on Amagansett. But they came across a small, late-19th-century cottage that enjoyed a covetable location on a quiet road just a five-minute drive from the beach. While clearly a project, it just felt right.

Del Piero and Grannen used the cottage as a summer getaway for a few years while considering what to do with the place. “The house was charming but falling apart,” she says. And the grounds, which total just over one acre, were awkwardly steep and overgrown with vines. In the end, the decision was clear: tear it down and build anew.

Working with Kathryn Fee, an architect in nearby Sag Harbor, the couple conceived a three-bedroom house that is as attuned to its location as it is to their shared sensibilities. For starters, that meant minimal and modest, with flexible spaces suited to relaxed entertaining and an emphasis on connections between indoors and out.

“It was about simplicity, and we wanted as much glass and openness as possible,” says Grannen, who recently sold the building that houses Architectural Artifacts and plans to convert his business to an online model. “To me, the Hamptons is about people, and we like to share the house with friends and relatives.”

The L-shaped residence is composed of two peaked-roof structures joined by a glass entry vestibule. The larger, two-story part contains the entertaining spaces and a pair of guest rooms, while the other holds the master suite. Rooftop solar panels provide most of the electricity. Black-painted cedar cladding, which calls to mind Japanese charred wood, gives the house a distinctive, dusky silhouette. The results are contemporary while nodding to vernacular Long Island barn architecture.

To make the grounds more appealing and accommodate a 50-foot swimming pool and small pool house, Del Piero and Grannen enlisted the firm Hampton Rustic Landscapes to regrade much of the property to no more than a gentle slope. They also extracted dense vines that had overgrown the perimeter, which opened up the views, and planted all new trees, along with low shrubs, grasses, and herbs. “I didn’t want lots of color or flowers,” explains Del Piero.

That chromatic restraint, one of her signatures as a designer, is also reflected in the interiors. The aesthetic is defined by a neutral, predominantly black-and white palette, with occasional warming hits of wood, including the kitchen’s beamed ceiling and the wide-plank floors upstairs. Floors on the main level are polished concrete, an unconventional beach- house choice that Del Piero explains as “really easy—you can just sweep the sand off them,” though a few furry rugs are strategically placed for softness.

The furnishings, meanwhile, are spare and sculptural. Del Piero’s own upholstered designs—mostly covered in pale, nubby linen—commingle with vintage pieces like the dining room’s 11-foot-long French farmhouse table and cerused chairs and a lightly restored Pierre Jeanneret teak-and-rattan armchair. “I like to combine things that are rough and worn with super-minimal and sleek finishes,” she says.

Animating the mix are standout objects and artworks discovered on the pair’s travels—both pleasure trips and more targeted “hunting and gathering” excursions, as Del Piero calls them. Among their finds is an abstract plaster figure reputedly once owned by Maria Callas that now lives in the foyer and a rustic, grape-harvest leather bag that hangs outside a guest room like a work of post-minimalist sculpture. “I love objects as art,” remarks Del Piero. “I usually don’t research things. I buy them because they’re beautiful.”

Most days here begin with breakfast on the porch of Brent’s General Store, catching up with friends. The couple often goes for a drive in Grannen’s 1960 Porsche 356 or another of his vintage convertibles, and there’s always some exercise, whether stand-up paddleboarding in Napeague Bay or going for runs (in the case of Grannen, a marathoner, very long runs), as well as beach and pool time. Del Piero teases her partner for initially resisting the idea of having a pool. “He didn’t even want it,” she says, laughing. “Now he’s in it every single day.”

R.I.P. Power Lunch

The legendary Four Seasons Restaurant is selling all of its stuff.

By Stephen Wallis

Jul 11, 2016

http://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a45933/four-seasons-restaurant-auction/

The legendary Four Seasons Restaurant is closing. That's the bad news. The good news? The objects that populated the perfect Philip Johnson interior are about to be sold.

Hello, Mr. Bloomberg. Welcome, Mr. Diller. Right this way, Mr. Lauder … Such is how things have been since the Four Seasons restaurant opened in New York in 1959, when the luxe modern dining rooms conjured by Philip Johnson became the original home of, as Esquire editor in chief to-be Lee Eisenberg later coined it in these pages, the "power lunch."

But the home of the power lunch is going on hiatus. On July 16, the Four Seasons will close. Ten days later, it will be cleared out: Wright auction house is selling the furnishings, tableware, cookware, and many other items that made the restaurant the icon it is.

It's a shocking turn of events—brought about by a dispute between the building's owner and the restaurant's longtime principal owners—that will see the landmarked interior taken over, old-guard regulars would say heretically, by a trio of buzzy thirtysomething restaurateurs. (The Four Seasons plans to open its next incarnation a few blocks away next year.) The episode has riled both powerful patrons and preservationists who decry the dispersal of Johnson's revered design scheme. It also means that some of the most storied and beautiful midcentury furniture in Manhattan is now available to own.

Six Eero Saarinen Tulip tables, specially made with polished-bronze tops for the lively Grill Room, are expected to bring in at least $3,000 each. The two classic Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chairsand ottomans that graced the travertine-clad lobby from day one are estimated at $5,000 to $7,000 for each pair. More than 200 of the Mies Brno dining chairs will be offered up, from pairs to sets of a dozen, with estimates starting at $1,000.

Also highlighting the 500-lot sale: banquettes Johnson custom-designed in a Miesian spirit, with slender metal legs and trim tufted cushions (estimates start at $2,000 each)—including the one installed around the Grill Room's table No. 32, where Johnson sat during his frequent lunches at the restaurant. "It was in the southeast corner, where he could see and be seen and command the space," recalls architect Robert A. M. Stern, outgoing dean of the Yale School of Architecture and a guest of Johnson's beginning in 1964. "Walking across the room to his table was like paying homage to the king." The estimate for that banquette is $3,000 to $5,000, but one would imagine that will prove conservative. After all, it's hard to put a price on a throne.

Knows-no-bounds art star Theaster Gates returns to the studio for a debut exhibition with his new U.S. gallery

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted December 12, 2016·Magazine

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/theaster-gates-chicago-new-exhibition

Where to begin talking about Theaster Gates, one of today’s most talked-about artists? For starters, calling him an artist is too narrow. Trained in pottery and urban planning, the Chicago-based dynamo is an activist, archivist, educator, facilitator, and maker, whose socially engaged practice ranges from sculptures, paintings, installations, and performances to adaptive-reuse projects. And in his richly complex world, everything is connected. “It could be a table or a sculpture or a renovated building,” he says. “Each one of those satisfies the same impulse in me and the same set of values.”

The diversity of Gates’s work is obvious upon stepping inside his sprawling studio, a former Anheuser-Busch warehouse on Chicago’s South Side. There’s a woodshop piled high with salvaged boards, a ceramics atelier littered with pots, and a storage area displaying pieces in progress, including bronze and stoneware elements for sculptures inspired by African masks and totems. “Those are things that have been on my mind for the last three years,” Gates says, “while other, larger projects were kind of casting a shadow on the quieter work.”

For nearly a decade, Gates, who grew up on the city’s West Side, has dedicated himself to reviving neglected properties throughout the South Side’s Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood and reactivating them with cultural programs. In 2011 he launched the nonprofit Rebuild Foundation to oversee his expanding initiatives, the most ambitious of which is the Stony Island Arts Bank, a long-abandoned 1923 building he bought from the city for a dollar, rehabilitated, and opened as a library, archive, and arts center just over a year ago. “I’m trying to work toward the creation of a cultural infrastructure, whereby the talented people of our city have more platforms to show the world what Chicago births,” he says.

Lately, Gates has been shifting more focus to his studio and making new work, a selection of which will be on view from January 14 through February 25 at Regen Projects, the Los Angeles gallery that now represents him in the U.S. Frequently incorporating cast-off objects and materials salvaged from building projects, Gates’s sculptures and installations are embedded with memory and history. Among his best-known artworks are tapestries crafted with strips of decommissioned fire hoses, evoking Civil Rights–era protests while also resonating with today’s challenging discussions about racial justice. Other works utilize old floorboards from gymnasiums, architectural fragments from a demolished church, remnants of shuttered shops—all symbolic reminders of the South Side’s past.

For Gates, the emphasis is on regeneration and restoring value. “I just love the part of the work that has to do with exhuming in order to help something live again, raising a thing up,” he says. His reference points can be deeply personal. Take his paintings made with roofing tar, which are both a literal, material exploration of blackness and an allusion to his father’s work as a roofer. And his experimental music ensemble, the Black Monks of Mississippi, can trace its roots directly to Gates’s involvement with a gospel choir.

In addition to the show at Regen Projects, Gates is preparing an exhibition that opens in March at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., as well as finalizing plans for his first permanent outdoor commission, slated to be unveiled at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden this summer. And while he’s hardly turning away from his community efforts with Rebuild, he’s relishing his time in the studio, working with his hands and having complete control over the process. “I want to be able to write a story that doesn’t require as many authors, so whatever ends up in the gallery space is what I decide will be there,” Gates says. “In a way, I’m back to the beginning.”

No Such Thing As Too Much

At a Manhattan townhouse decorated by Russell Groves, a family of art aficionados finds that more is more

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted December 18, 2017·Magazine

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/russel-groves-proves-that-theres-no-such-thing-as-too-much

Sitting in Melissa Neumann’s Manhattan living room, you can feel almost overcome—your eyes flitting from one artwork to the next, trying to take it all in. Over here a Jeff Koons sheepdog and a Futurist composition by Gino Severini. Over there classic abstractions by Joan Miró and Fernand Léger. Yet, for all the visual ping-pong, the room is actually one of the tamer spaces in the house, which is packed with a collection spanning three generations. Four, if you count the children. And this family does. “We just brought in a Kenny Scharf doughnut painting,” says Melissa, “and all three of my young kids were lobbying to put it in their room.”

Art has been embroidered into the fabric of the Neumanns’ lives ever since Melissa’s father, Hubert, and his father began buying, around 1950. Melissa and her sisters grew up surrounded with paintings and sculptures, and when she and her husband bought their latest home, there was no question it would be a showcase for art—the more the better. “This house is a cacophony,” says Hubert. “But so is the world. Why wouldn’t art, and showing art, reflect that?”

The 1899 residence, designed by architect Clarence True, might not have been an obvious fit for such dynamic treasures, but Melissa says she and her husband just felt it “had a great energy.” They hired Zivkovic Connolly Architects to renovate and expand the property, lightening its Victorian feel with a skylit central staircase whose walls and landings serve as galleries that reveal themselves as you ascend. “You see these fragmented views, which is similar to the visual vocabulary of many of the artists,” says Melissa, “but there’s also a sense of openness.”

For the furnishings the couple turned to Russell Groves, a designer known for rooms that exude a subtle glamour, combining warm palettes with a sophisticated mix of vintage and custom pieces. “The furniture couldn’t compete with the art,” says Groves. “We had to find a way to make the rooms feel softer and relaxed because there was already so much going on visually.”

The Neumanns have always favored art, Hubert says, that is “creative enough to make a significant step forward.” Translation: work that is joyously idiosyncratic and often obsessively intricate—if not outright chaotic. Take the entrance hall, where you are greeted by a vibrant 11-foot-tall totem by Charlie Roberts and a riotous 20-foot-wide Michael Bevilacqua painting with fragments of imagery and letters spelling out exclamations of joy. Climbing the stairs to the second floor, you encounter a pristine photo-realist portrait by Chuck Close beside a kaleidoscopic painting by Ashley Bickerton.

Nearby is a magisterial Jean-Michel Basquiat work, one of two the Neumanns bought from the artist in 1982. When it comes to the subject of curators and museums, Hubert, in particular, proudly wears his reputation for being opinionated and at times irascible. (Remarks like “Most museum installations are boring” are not uncommon.) But the family does regularly lend to exhibitions, like the recent Matthew Ronay show at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston and the Francis Picabia survey at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. These days, they are making hundreds of their works accessible on social media under the handle Aftermodernism.

Melissa says she and her husband plan to rotate what’s on display in their home and keep adding new acquisitions. Asked what unifies the mix, Hubert notes “it’s about antagonisms.” Melissa, pausing for a moment, remarks that while a lot of thought went into the way the house is laid out, there was also spontaneity. “Great art,” she adds, “just works.”

Artistic Pursuits

Architecture | Aug 2017

By Stephen Wallis

http://www.culturedmag.com/basil-walter/

One of the things you hear from people describing architect Basil Walter is that he’s a terrific collaborator, and a really “nice guy.” For those in the profession whose profiles fall somewhere below the starchitect stratosphere—which is to say, most everybody—that counts for a lot.

It also helps to explain the fact that Walter has been the go-to architect for Vanity Fair Editor-in-Chief Graydon Carter for 25 years, a gig that has brought its own kind of celebrity. In addition to working on Carter’s multiple homes and clubby, nostalgia-tinged restaurants (the Monkey Bar, the Waverly Inn, the Beatrice Inn), Walter also designs all of the magazine’s events—most notably its Oscars party, for two decades running. “The thing about Basil,” says Carter, “is that more than most architects, he works to make your ideas better, rather than just pushing his own. It’s at the core of his business and of his personality.”

But Carter is not the only high-profile repeat client of BW Architects, the New York–based, 16- person practice Walter heads with partner Brenda Bello. For more than 15 years, Walter and Bello have been working with Brazilian artist Vik Muniz, renovating his residences, assisting him with various art projects (including his mosaics for Manhattan’s new Second Avenue subway), and, recently, teaming up with him to create an experimental school in a Rio de Janeiro favela.

“It’s always dicey when you start working with a new architect, but with Brenda and Basil, I felt I had a working dynamic with them right away, and it just got better,” says Muniz, who first connected with the duo in 2000, when he enlisted them to revamp a Brooklyn warehouse as a live-work space. Bello, then just beginning her career, headed up the project, and as the artist’s life changed (a marriage to artist Janaina Tschäpe, a daughter, a divorce) she oversaw additional renovations.

This past winter, shortly after Muniz got remarried to Malu Barreto, BW Architects put the finishing touches on the couple’s new Paris pied-à- terre. A full floor in a Haussmann-era building, the apartment marries old-world touches, such as wide-plank herringbone floors and a neoclassical mantelpiece, with modern furniture and lighting. Muniz, who loves to cook and entertain, pushed for the large open kitchen and dining area that now serves as the home’s central hub,but he left plenty of decisions in the hands of the architects. “It’s hard to work with artists—we’re opinionated and we already have a picture in our head,” he says. “But Brenda is very good at telling me what to do, and now that we know each other very well she and Basil have a lot more authority over me.”

While the relationship Bello and Walter have with Muniz is a special one, it’s also reflective of the kind of rapport they try to cultivate with all of their clients. “Part of our process and the way we do things is entirely dependent on creating a positive feeling,” says Walter. “We really see ourselves as a vehicle for bringing clients and builders into a creative partnership.”

When Muniz came up with the idea for a school that would teach visual and technological literacy to children in Rio’s Vidigal favela, he knew he wanted Bello and Walter as collaborators. The project was a leap for everyone involved, not least because there were no precedents for creating a private, nonprofit school in the middle of the densely packed, steeply sloped favela—one that happens to be blessed with spectacular ocean views. From the outset, a great deal of effort went into making sure the school “has a sense of belonging—that people would feel it is a part of their life, that it’s theirs,” says Muniz, who came from a poor family in São Paulo.

To that end, the school’s exterior is terra-cotta brick, a material widely used in the favela, but its exposed structure is steel, which allowed the architects to create a lighter, stronger building than is normally found there. But that also created challenges. “Because there aren’t roads throughout the favela, all of the material had to be carried in by hand,” says Bello. “Building with steel was pretty much unheard of, so we had to limit the size the beams for the carry, and then everything was welded on site.”

Already, favela residents have begun adopting building techniques used for the school—not only using structural steel but inserting a layer of lightweight styrofoam into floors, even utilizing rainwater recycling systems. “People come by all the time asking for tips,” says Muniz, who notes that there are plans to add solar panels to the school to provide electricity. They want to find a setup that could feasibly be used as a model for people in the community.

Escola Vidigal officially opened last year, providing activities for preschoolers in the morning and after-school classes for kids between first and fifth grade. The curriculum is still evolving, but classes have ranged from drawing to computer programming to rooftop gardening. In addition to the classroom, the building features a residential wing, with two rooms for visiting artists and educators who will come for brief stays and work with the children. “We’re still learning,” says Muniz, “and we’re still figuring out the potential of the place.”

Consciously eschewing any kind of defining look in their work, Walter says he and Bello “like to think of style as being like language,” noting that “you can learn to speak more than one language well.” Ultimately, the thread that runs through all of their firm’s diverse work— whether creating a Modernist country house, renovating a historic townhouse, or designing events—is the level of sophistication and care. And for that, no translation is needed.

Art Dealers Like Design, Too

These gallerists refuse to see a divide between art and design.

By Stephen Wallis

July 8, 2018

https://www.1stdibs.com/introspective-magazine/art-dealers-who-like-design-too/

In this era when so many ambitious artists and designers are discipline-hopping, multi-hyphenate makers who defy easy labels, more and more contemporary galleries are straying out of their conventional lanes. Heavyweights like Gagosian and Sean Kelly have ventured into modern and contemporary furniture, while design dealers such as Friedman Benda, Cristina Grajales and R & Company are behaving a lot like art galleries.

The perceptual wall between art and design has been crumbling for years. At the same time, fairs that freely mix the two have proliferated, from FOG, in San Francisco, to the Salon Art + Design, in New York. As collectors become more comfortable with this fluid environment, enterprising dealers are taking various approaches to diversifying their exhibition programs and extending their reach to new audiences and clients. The three art galleries featured here have found success going outside the lines, each in its own distinctive way.

Peter Blake Gallery

Over the past quarter century, Peter Blake has made his gallery in Laguna Beach, California, a go-to destination for minimalist and Light and Space works by such artists as Larry Bell, Joe Goode and Helen Pashgian. A couple of years ago, he decided to diversify.

For his 2016 summer show, Blake staged his first-ever exhibition of vintage furnishings, showcasing pieces that he and his wife, artist Stephanie Bachiero, had collected over the years. “A lot of things had been in storage, and in some ways we just wanted to see our own stuff,” recounts Blake. “Even though we expected that some of our artists would get upset with us over having furniture in the gallery or clients might question what direction we were taking, we just said, ‘Screw it, let’s do what we want.’ ”

Among the pieces in the show, titled “The Tendency of the Moment — International Design: The Bauhaus Through Modern,” were chairs by Le Corbusier and Richard Neutra, an Edward Wormley sofa, a Charlotte Perriand sideboard and a David Gammon–designed turntable used as a prop in the film A Clockwork Orange. Nearly everything was presented on pedestals, like sculpture, and there was zero art. “At first, we were very hesitant to combine the two. We wanted to ensure that there was no way the furniture would look decorative,” explains Blake.

The show was a hit. As for the anticipated backlash from artists and clients, it never came. Earlier this year, the gallery presented its second design show: a survey of standout Brazilian furniture curated by São Paulo native Ulysses de Santi. And Blake now exhibits design and art together at such venues as the Dallas Art Fair and Collective Design, in New York, for which he conjured the home of an imaginary collector this spring. “They’re no longer the typical concrete-floor booths that we used to do,” he says. “Now, great design helps set the tone. The type of art we sell tends to be clean, minimalist, seductive, sophisticated, and the furniture kind of lightens and warms it up a bit.”

Blake is plotting several future design shows, including an exhibition featuring Antoine Philippon and Jacqueline Lecoq as well as one that will re-create a Walt Disney office based on pieces architect KEM Weber designed in the ’30s. A vintage stereo design show is in the works, too. “Unlike the regional art that we show, the design has an international audience, so we find ourselves selling to markets we would never sell to otherwise,” says Blake. “And people who like what we do on the design front are finding a way into the art side of the gallery. The two are growing each other.”

Ethan Cohen Gallery

Visitors to Ethan Cohen’s booth in the Spotlight section of this spring’s Frieze New York fair encountered a captivating selection of Hans Breder’s surreal, mostly chromatically muted photographs and videos. Offsetting those works was an incongruously purple suite of metal furniture used by staff manning the booth. The eye-catching table and chairs were specially created for the space by buzzy — and very busy — Russian-born designer Harry Nuriev, who heads his own firm, Crosby Studios.

“We needed something in the booth to balance out the pieces by Hans Breder — we needed a splash of energy,” says Vlad Sludskiy, the general manager at Ethan Cohen’s Manhattan gallery, who brokered the commission from Nuriev. “Harry is a friend of a friend from Moscow who moved to New York two years ago, and he’s been so successful in part because of his ability to collaborate. He’s done several collaborations with established brands and other design studios, and this was his first with a gallery that specializes in contemporary art.”

The abstracted arch forms that define the custom-made pieces are Nuriev signatures, as is the distinctive monochromatic hue. “This vivid purple color that he used all of a sudden seemed to become so popular,” says Sludskiy, noting that Frieze used the same hue in its navigation signage for the Spotlight section. (Nuriev, for his part, has apparently moved on to a new color crush.)

Sludskiy says that he and Cohen — who, in addition to the New York gallery, also oversees a building with studios and an exhibition space in Beacon, New York — hope to keep the relationship with Nuriev going. “I strongly believe in collaborations,” remarks Sludskiy. “The world is no longer with us in which you stick to a narrowly defined mission or assigned role. Fashion and design and art are part of an interrelated universe of creative minds. It’s really about expanding your audience and exhibiting unconventional objects in unconventional spaces.”

Cohen may be best known for showing high-profile Chinese artists like Ai Weiwei, Yue Minjun and Zhang Dali, but the gallery is looking at expanding its engagement with design. Says Sludskiy, “We see design as a new channel of communication for the gallery.”

Paul Kasmin Gallery

When it comes to collectible design with crossover appeal, few names can compete with the Lalannes: 94-year-old Claude and her late husband, François-Xavier. The French couple’s nature-inspired furnishings and sculptures are coveted by collectors around the world, thanks in part to the efforts of New York dealer Paul Kasmin, who began showing their work about 15 years ago, when Lalannes mania was just beginning to take hold. Today, they are superstars of a gallery roster that includes such artists as Saint Clair Cemin, Walton Ford and Tina Barney, not to mention the estates of Robert Motherwell, Stuart Davis and Constantin Brancusi.

The Lalannes, however, are hardly outliers at Kasmin, where design is an integral part of the mix. The gallery also represents Mattia Bonetti, the Swiss-born conjurer of baroquely imaginative furnishings. And in recent years, it has exhibited Scott Burton’s minimalist sculptural chairs and benches and tables, as well as inventive pieces by Ron Arad. “Throughout our program, you see a lot of people who don’t fit into particular categories easily,” says gallery director Nick Olney. “To us, functional work is another medium of contemporary practice. It’s when artists, sculptors, designers, makers are working in the intersections, pushing what art can be in different directions, that a lot of really creative and exciting things are made.”

Olney notes that Burton came to creating functional pieces from his early performance work in the ’70s, while Claude Lalanne’s exquisite chairs, tables and mirrors and her husband’s animalistic cabinets and desks were born out of the couple’s practice making Surrealist sculpture. As for Bonetti, showing furniture in an art gallery context has never been merely about blurring the boundary between design and art but rather about using it “as something to play with and prick at people’s expectations on both sides,” says Olney.

At a prominent art fair later this year, the gallery will present a new body of work by Bonetti, who marries refined craftsmanship and 21st-century technology in fantastical forms. “He’ll have someone who is making incredible leaps in what can be done with acrylics combined with traditional marble carvers combined with scagliola makers and experts in the leafing process or hand-wrought iron,” says Olney. “He’s playing with decorative-arts traditions but then infusing that with a very contemporary language.”

That emphasis on materials and artistry, wed to a compelling conceptual approach, appeals to adventurous collectors of all stripes. “Our clients have become more aware of design as unique or limited-edition or custom pieces,” says Olney. “It’s about objects that tell a story and really enrich a space and a collection.”

Designer Shawn Henderson and architect Scott Lindenau fashion a discreetly luxurious Aspen retreat perfectly sited to appreciate the ravishing landscape

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted June 7, 2016·Magazine

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/aspen-home-shawn-henderson-scott-lindenau

There’s a spot about ten miles outside the village of Aspen, Colorado, some 9,400 feet up, where the skies seem a brighter blue and the mountain views are almost surreal in their majesty. A nearby stream rushes with a dulcet murmur, and herds of elk roam amid slender white aspens whose leaves turn magnificently gold each autumn. It was here that a Hong Kong businessman bought a 24-acre plot several years ago, determined to create his ideal refuge.

The log cabin–style house that occupied the site was not what he had in mind, however. So he enlisted a local firm, Studio B Architecture + Interiors, to draw up concepts for a new home, while the existing dwelling was removed and donated to Habitat for Humanity. A divorced father of one at the time, the businessman soon remarried, and since his wife also had a child, the architects were tasked with thinking a bit more expansively—yet also modestly. “We were very conscious of preserving the feeling of unspoiled countryside,” says the wife, who recently gave birth to the couple’s twins. “We could have built something larger, but the setting is so perfect, the last thing we wanted was to ruin it with an over-the-top house. It had to be quiet.”

Studio B satisfied the brief with an 11,000-square-foot residence that projects an unexpectedly reserved attitude, thanks to its low horizontal profile and the fact that the first of its two floors is partially embedded in a slope. While the overall vibe of the L-shaped structure—which wraps around a rear courtyard and pool terrace—is minimal and modern, an unmistakable warmth emanates from the home’s materials. “The husband spoke a lot about the spirit and nature of wood,” says Studio B founder and design principal Scott Lindenau. “We used wire-brushed white oak and contrasted it with a beautifully grained reclaimed teak on both the interior and exterior.” The thoughtful palette also includes hand-chiseled limestone and wara juraku—a Japanese-style plaster that incorporates straw to produce an exquisite organic texture.

When it came to furnishing the seven-bedroom home, the couple initially decided to handle it themselves. Collectors of midcentury design, they owned a number of quality pieces—mostly American and Scandinavian—but the wife concedes that they just couldn’t pull it all together. “The house had a horribly empty feel,” she recalls.

Then, by chance, they were introduced to New York designer Shawn Henderson, whose discerning approach to texture and color and sophisticated vintage and contemporary pairings aligned perfectly with their own sensibilities. “They had been doing the interior piecemeal and wanted someone to come in and do a complete program,” Henderson explains.

While the designer’s handiwork is a study in lyrical restraint, the home certainly has its showstopping moments. The coup de théâtre is the living room, the first space you encounter after ascending the entrance hall stairs to the main floor. Measuring 25 by 40 feet, the room is enclosed on two adjacent sides by floor-to-ceiling windows, offering panoramic vistas across the valley to the Elk Mountains beyond. “I didn’t want it to feel overly decorated, with a thousand pieces,” the designer says, “so I decided to go with big gestures.”

To anchor the larger of the living room’s two seating areas, Henderson devised a sprawling 11-and-a-half-foot sofa based on a Jean Royère design, a pair of club chairs deep enough to curl up in, and a seven-foot-diameter cocktail table—all overlooked by a supersize Sam Orlando Miller mirror, mounted above the fire- place. In this room, as throughout the house, Henderson uphol- stered the clients’ existing seating in rich monotone fabrics. “For me, the landscape is what provides the color, so I wanted to be careful how I brought in other elements,” he notes.

Among those other elements are a smattering of large-scale artworks—including the living room’s Theaster Gates composition made with fire hoses and the stairwell’s Claudy Jongstra tapestry— as well as punchy Swedish carpets, which Henderson laid in the tailored wood-and-stone master bath and the meditation room. The latter, says the wife, is “probably the most important space for my husband”—a Buddhist who meditates every morning. “And because it’s mostly windows, it’s where you really feel closest to nature.”

That is if you’re not counting the guest cottage, which stands in a thicket just downhill from the main house. A later addition, also by Studio B and Henderson, the simple gable-roofed structure is all black, clad in a Japanese-style charred cedar that, Lindenau says, “picks up the dusky flecks in the bark of the aspen trees.” Inside, Henderson kept the furnishings uncomplicated, utilizing Danish pieces from the clients’ collection and tying everything together with a palette of soothing blues. “It’s amazing,” the designer says of the cottage. “You and I would be thrilled to live in it.”

In fact, the wife jokes about decamping to the cocoonlike cabin with her husband, leaving the children to fend for them- selves in the main house. But the cottage lacks two of the residence’s very important features—the inviting pool and the rooftop terrace, where the stargazing never fails to serve up a “wonderful shock,” as the wife puts it, for this family of city dwellers: “In Hong Kong we don’t get that kind of front-row seat to spectacular night skies,” she says. “It is truly breathtaking.”

Hoppy Valleys

July 22, 2011

By Stephen Wallis

https://www.ft.com/content/f3c73dfa-adf9-11e0-a2ab-00144feabdc0

Rule number one: never drive yourself to the Legendary Boonville Beer Festival in northern California (yes, “legendary” is officially part of its name). Rule number two: leave the parents and kids at home. Boonville, a sleepy town of 1,000 that’s set amid towering redwood forests and bucolic pastures in Mendocino County, has an independent streak. The residents even created their own system of slang, called Boontling, back in the 19th century, and locals still say “bahl hornin’” (“good drinking”) when raising a glass.

The drinking is certainly good – and heavy – at the rollicking annual May beer fest, which features more than 80 small, mostly west coast breweries spread across the Boonville fairgrounds. For four hours the taps flow freely, serving 5,000 visitors everything from German-style pilsners to Belgian-esque sours to American imperial stouts and IPAs (or India Pale Ales), the citrusy, often high-alcohol versions of the hoppy beers once shipped from Britain to the subcontinent. The brewers pitch tents on the grounds of the host Anderson Valley Brewery, cooking on grills and sharing their latest experimental beers.

“A real slice of old-school California – no stop lights, no chain stores, no traffic jams, just a lot of beautiful countryside,” said Anderson Valley’s brewmaster, Fal Allen. The taps stay open late in Anderson Valley’s barnlike tasting room, open year-round to visitors who can sample 10 to 15 draught beers, including the brewery’s signature Boont Amber and Hop Ottin’ IPA.

I had to settle for a takeaway bottle of the award-winning Brother David’s Double Abbey Style Ale for later, as Boonville was just my first stop on a beer-drinking tour that took me from Mendocino County down through the celebrated corridors of Napa and Sonoma, both about an hour’s drive north of San Francisco. It might seem an unlikely itinerary to those who know the area as the US’s pre-eminent wine country. But these Elysian fields for oenophiles are also home to some of the top names in the flourishing US craft beer industry, which in the past five years has seen annual sales jump by more than 50 per cent to nearly $8bn, according to the Brewers Association. Among those who care about food and drink, it’s becoming almost as essential to be able to appreciate the malty molasses flavours of your brown ale as it is the earthy barnyard notes in your pinot.

If you’re coming for the wine and food first and simply want to mix in a few hoppy diversions along the way, expect to spend time on the road, as the best breweries are scattered around. Designated driver take solace: what glorious scenery it is, especially on the back-country roads, winding through ancient forests and golden meadows, past old farmhouses and endless fields of cabernet, chardonnay and pinot noir.

The next stop was Healdsburg, a place of undeniable charm – its main square lined with speciality shops, restaurants and wine bars – although some describe its recent upscale development as the town’s “Napafication”. I stayed in the eco-chic H2 hotel, which offers minimalist luxury wrapped in architecture that has won awards for its environmental friendliness. It provides bicycles (pick up a picnic lunch at the Oakville Grocery and peddle out among the vineyards along Dry Creek). Its lively restaurant Spoonbar emphasises local and seasonal food and is noted for its creative cocktails, alas, rather than its beer selection.

But I had to walk only a couple of blocks to get to the brewpub of Bear Republic, named best small brewery at the Great American Beer Festival in 2006. The 15-year-old family business ships its beloved Racer 5, a drinkably decadent, heavily hopped IPA with citrus and pine notes, to 34 states. Owner Richard Norgrove said: “The last five years the number of people coming in on weekends has probably tripled.”

Sitting down for a tasting, with the unmistakable smells of brewing emanating from the copper tanks next to the bar, Norgrove and I had a couple of his mainstays – Red Rocket, a rich, caramel-malt Scottish-style ale, is a personal favourite – as well as a few of his eight rotating speciality brews. Then we headed next door to check out his latest project: a 1,200-sq ft warehouse that he plans to turn into a tasting room and shop selling bottles of limited-release barrel-aged beers. “We’re even going to try to do what some wineries do and sell futures,” Norgrove said. “People can taste and buy from a barrel before ageing, then we’ll package it up when it’s ready.”

The following morning, I drove down through the Alexander Valley – surely one of the most picturesque stretches of wine country anywhere – to Calistoga, the spa town famous for its natural mud baths. At Solage Calistoga, a hip spa resort (and a great spot to detox after indulging), I picked up its Michelin-starred chef Brandon Sharp, a beer enthusiast who agreed to join me for an afternoon of tasting. At his restaurant Solbar, Sharp offers a modest selection of beers on tap, including Napa Smith Brewery’s Cool Brew, a crisp, mildly hoppy pale ale that pairs nicely with Sharp’s robust, spicy dishes, such as his excellent chilli-rubbed pork cheek tacos.

For our first stop we dropped in on Brian Hunt, who operates Moonlight Brewery in an out-of-the-way farmhouse near Santa Rosa. A quick-witted Dennis Hopper look-alike, Hunt announced that he prefers his beer “dry and bitter, just like my personality”. His best-known brew, Death and Taxes, is a rich, malty black lager that’s surprisingly clean and crisp. “A hot weather beer,” said Hunt. “To me, it’s like drinking an iced coffee.”

We moved on to Hunt’s more adventurous brews like Left for Dead, a sour-mash dark ale with coffee aromas and tart, funky notes. Sharp remarked that it “would be smokin’ with a reuben sandwich’s rich salty, fatty, caraway flavours”. We also tried Legal Tender, an unhopped style of beer called gruit, which gets its astringency and woody, earthy flavours from redwood branches and herbs. “It tickles my fancy to make something people don’t know what to do with,” said Hunt. “I’m known for making weird-ass stuff.”

Downtown Santa Rosa is a prime destination for beer fanatics, especially because of our next stop, Russian River Brewing. Owner Vinnie Cilurzo has an almost cult following for his exotic and hop-heavy creations, especially his double IPA, Pliny the Elder, ranked among the world’s top 10 beers on the websites Beer Advocate and Ratebeer. Over lunch at Russian River’s convivial brewpub, we sampled Cilurzo’s other speciality, sour beers. Consecration, a mouth-puckering dark ale, boasted flavours ranging from burnt toffee to a tobacco-chocolate character as well as intense dried fruit notes that come from maturing the beer in cabernet barrels with 30 pounds of currants added to each cask.

On our way back to Solage – via the beautiful Petrified Forest Road (there’s a visitors’ centre with giant redwoods turned to stone 3.4m years ago) – Sharp and I made a stop at the Calistoga Inn Restaurant & Brewery to sample a few beers from its house-only list, including a very good red ale. It’s a low-key spot that reflects Calistoga’s laid-back vibe. “It’s definitely the Haight-Ashbury of Napa Valley,” remarked Sharp. “A funky, tight-knit community, as much about wellness as wine.”

Afterwards, I headed to central Napa Valley and checked into the Hotel Yountville, contemporary yet rustic and a short walk from the town’s inviting shops and world-class restaurants such as The French Laundry, Bouchon and Redd. You don’t want to eat only pub grub in Yountville, said to have the highest concentration of Michelin stars per capita on the planet.

The next morning I picked up Jamey Whetstone, best known for the luxuriant pinot noirs he makes under his Whetstone Cellars label. He’s also an avid beer drinker, especially during harvest when, as he put it, “Nothing’s better after a long day than a couple of cold barley soups.”

Together we drove to the town of Sonoma to visit the Sonoma Springs brewery, started two years ago by a trained chemist named Tim Goeppinger. Goeppinger’s passion is German-style beers and in his no-frills tasting room – a few stools around a plain wooden bar – he poured us his excellent New Bavaria Roggenbier, a yeasty rye ale with banana and clove flavours, and Volkbier Kolsch, a crisp lager with floral and grapefruit notes.

Next, Whetstone and I headed to Lagunitas Brewing on the outskirts of Petaluma, which will boost its production from around 200 barrels a day a few years ago to more than 1,700 barrels a day once an expansion is completed later this year. At Lagunitas’ festive beer garden, guests can enjoy 20 different beers on tap and live music in the afternoons. Despite its growth, it retains an irreverent northern California spirit, evident in its cheeky labels. Take the one for a limited-release strong brown ale called Wilco Tango Foxtrot (or WTF), which reads: “A Malty, Robust, Jobless Recovery Ale! We’re not quite in the red, or in the black ... Does that mean we’re in the brown?”

After dinner on my last evening, I popped into Downtown Joe’s, an old standby in Napa with brusque bartenders, well-oiled patrons and close to a dozen English-influenced brews on tap. I ordered for a nightcap the dry, hoppy Golden Thistle Very Bitter Ale, purportedly first made by mistake. The menu actually likens it to “chewing on a thistle”. How could I resist?

When it was time to head back to San Francisco, I left myself a few extra hours to drive down the legendary Highway 1, where the scenery ranges from gently rolling meadows to windswept, vertigo-inducing sea cliffs. I paid a quick visit to the Stumptown Brewery, a roadside brewpub with a majestic back terrace that overlooks the Russian River. After sampling the colourfully named Rat Bastard, a clean, dry pale ale, I drove straight south for one last stop: the famed Hog Island Oyster farm on the edge of Tomales Bay. Looking out across placid waters under a late-afternoon sun, I enjoyed a half-dozen extra-small Pacifics, sweet and briny and fresh in the way that only oysters just pulled from the sea can be. And I washed them down with a local Bear Republic Racer 5. Of course.

Details Rooms at H2 in Healdsburg start at $205 (www.h2hotel.com) Solage Calistoga spa has 89 urban loft/country cottage bungalows from $325 (www.solagecalistoga.com) The 80 rooms at Hotel Yountville start at $395 (www.hotelyountville.com)

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/mexican-architect-tatiana-bilbao

Mexican Architect Tatiana Bilbao Reimagines Smart Affordable Housing

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted September 6, 2016·Magazine

The architecture field, it seems, has rediscovered its conscience, with recent temperature-taking biennial exhibitions casting a spotlight on projects that are socially engaged and economically sustainable. Indeed, some of the industry’s buzziest names have become stars by doing work that is about doing good—not least Tatiana Bilbao. Tellingly represented at both the Chicago and Venice architecture biennials this past year, the Mexico City–based talent has been winning international accolades for a diverse practice that’s grounded in a humanitarian spirit, whether she’s designing a dramatic mountainside villa, a sleek university technology center, an art-filled botanical garden, or smart affordable housing.

Bilbao’s prototype for an adaptable low-cost home became one of the most talked-about exhibits in the Chicago show. Conceived to address Mexico’s housing shortage, her design incorporated years of research. After interviewing workers to learn how they want to live, Bilbao devised a two-story, two-bedroom modular structure that, at 775 square feet, is not only significantly larger than the minimum mandated by Mexican regulations but can also easily be expanded as a family grows, with terraces that can become extra rooms and double-height spaces to which mezzanines can be added. Though the model featured a concrete-block core with lightweight wood shipping pallets used for some walls, the homes can be made from different materials to adapt to a variety of settings. Around 20 houses have already been constructed in Ciudad Acuña, along the Texas border, while plans are under way to build as many as 3,000 per year in the southern state of Chiapas. Each dwelling will cost around $7,000, with the government covering a portion, based on need.

“Architecture really can change your life,” Bilbao says. “I take that responsibility seriously. At some point the profession had lost sight of that, and we have to realize what we have in our hands.”

Though Bilbao tends to prefer elemental forms and humble materials even when a client and budget allow greater freedom, she doesn’t shy away from bold gestures when context calls for them. Her 2011 Ventura House (which she describes as “a lab of architectonic experiences”) is an arresting cluster of pentagonal volumes on a mountain overlooking Monterrey. And a nearby estate she’s doing for members of the same family will eventually feature three separate structures, envisioned as a study in materials: One is clad in mirrored glass, one in wood, and one in custom-patterned ceramic blocks. “It’s really about embracing the beauty of the site,” says Bilbao, who insists on the close involvement of her clients, preferring to think of them as the true designers and of herself and her team as merely “the translators.”

Bigger commissions continue to roll in. The Pritzker Prize–winning firm Herzog & de Meuron tapped Bilbao to create three residential buildings (two with low-income units, one with market-rate apartments) as part of a major development in Lyon, France, while the University of Monterrey has enlisted her to design a million-square-foot student center next to its signature Tadao Ando building. Already spending lots of time in the U.S.—teaching at Yale and, this fall, Columbia—the in-demand Bilbao expects to soon announce her debut project here. No doubt it will be the first of many. tatianabilbao.com

With the help of Prada, a late-Renaissance treasure is restored 50 years after the deluge that almost destroyed it

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted August 18, 2016·Magazine

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/prada-restores-16th-century-renaissance-masterpiece-painting

On November 4, 1966, Tuscany’s Arno River, swollen by days of rain, inundated Florence with the worst flood the city had seen in centuries. The raging waters caused catastrophic damage to cultural treasures—including priceless works of art—and efforts to save them have continued to this day. Now, thanks to a partnership between Italy’s National Trust and the fashion house Prada (a major arts patron in the country), one of the most challenging of these rescue missions is nearly finished. This October Giorgio Vasari’s late-Renaissance painting The Last Supper will return to view 50 years after the flood that almost destroyed it.

“This is really a new page in the history of conservation,” says Marco Ciatti, head of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure (OPD), the Florence lab responsible for the groundbreaking restoration. “When we began to study the problems, we were not sure what the result would be.”

Around eight feet high and 21 feet across, the work was created in 1546 by Vasari—a Mannerist painter, architect, and writer who is widely considered to be the first art historian—for Florence’s Murate convent. After being moved several times over the centuries, it was installed at the Opera di Santa Croce museum, where it was submerged for some 12 hours during the flood. While layers of varnish helped minimize paint loss, the work’s five wood panels expanded in the water, stressing the painting’s surface. Its gesso ground, meanwhile, began to dissolve, causing the biblical scene to detach. Desperate museum staff separated the panels and covered them with layers of protective paper to keep the paint from sloughing off. The Last Supper was in such precarious condition that conservators didn’t dare touch it for four decades.

Several years ago, however, innovations and funding encouraged the OPD to attempt work once thought impossible. With support from the Getty Foundation, the team embarked on a four-year project to restore the wood panels and stabilize the painting. Using synthetic resins, they were able to re-adhere the paint layer to the wood, and they replaced crosspieces that had held the panels together. But there was still a tremendous amount of work to be done on the painting’s surface, and in 2014 Prada stepped in with a grant to carry out intensive cleaning and retouching. For more than two years a handful of conservators and students in the OPD workshop have labored with surgical precision—appropriately dressed in white lab coats, no less—to repair distortions and fill in cracks and losses of color, which were particularly pronounced across the work’s bottom edge. Fascinatingly, along the way they found evidence that The Last Supper had been damaged by two earlier floods and had undergone at least three earlier restorations—only adding to its improbable story of survival.

The painting, still extremely fragile, will be displayed at the Opera di Santa Croce in a gilded climate-controlled frame. Otherwise, it will look much as it did before the 1966 flood. “We’ve devoted our lives to this kind of result,” Ciatti says. “For us it is a dream that has become reality.” And rest assured: Should the Arno burst its banks again, The Last Supper can be mechanically hoisted to a safe height. It may have taken a half-century, but for the city of Florence, Vasari’s painting is now a symbol of triumph over tragedy.

Time Inc.'s Vibrant New Headquarters by Studios Architecture

September 29, 2016

By Stephen Wallis

http://www.interiordesign.net/projects/12368-tour-time-inc-s-vibrant-new-headquarters-by-studios-architecture

When Time Inc. announced that it would be leaving the storied Time & Life Building, the decision was about more than just finances and appeasing shareholders. The business founded by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden in 1922 had evolved from a group of tra­ditional print magazines into an increasingly integrated portfolio of digitally focused, multi-platform brands. As a result, the Mad Men–era Midtown office tower by Harrison, Abramovitz & Harris—where bar carts had famously rolled down the hallways—no longer suited Time Inc.’s needs.

Meanwhile, its bumpy transition into the new media landscape, accompanied by a spin-off from Time Warner, left the company looking to make some bold, image-changing moves. So Time, People, Entertainment Weekly, InStyle, Real Simple, Sports Illustrated, and more than a dozen other brands relocated to the financial district. The new headquarters by Interior Design Hall of Fame member Todd DeGarmo, CEO of Studios Architecture, occupies six levels of a building completed in 1988 by Cesar Pelli & Associates as part of a complex now called Brookfield Place.

As reinvented by DeGarmo, the interior is almost entirely open-plan. Private offices account for only 6 percent of the desks, a huge change from the Time & Life Building, where the number was more than 10 times that. There are also shared video and photo studios, an array of versatile meeting spaces, and an auditorium that hosts star-studded premieres.

Everything has been conceived with an eye toward interaction, efficiency, and flexibility. And lest there be any doubt that Time Inc. is more than a magazine company, the first stop for many visitors is a reception area where, just beyond the glass doors to the video studios’ control room, an array of screens is clearly visible. The message is immediate and unmistakable.

“The new space conveys energy and collaboration,” Time Inc. executive vice president Gregory Giangrande says. “We also needed the work we do—print, digital, video, photography, live events—to be a transparent part of the environment.”

But it took some persuading for Studios, which consulted on Time Inc.’s real-estate search, to convince executives that this location was the right fit, given its existing condition. “We had to help them imagine that it could be something spectacular,” DeGarmo says. That meant looking beyond the idiosyncratically configured, sprawling floor plates, the 8-foot ceilings, and the small windows.

Ultimately, those expansive floor plates helped to clinch the deal, as they offered the opportunity to bring multiple brands together while reducing the overall footprint to 700,000 square feet, down from 1.4 million at the Time & Life Building. The horizontal adjacencies would support the major restructuring the company has announced to further integrate editorial and business operations. “This is key to the reinvention of Time Inc.,” DeGarmo says. “From a design perspective, it was about reflecting how the brands are no longer stand-alone silos.”

The challenge, associate principal Joshua Rider adds, was “to make sure the spaces didn’t feel too confusing to navigate.” One solution was to carve out a top-to-bottom vertical circulation route, with open staircases flanked by lounges and self-serve coffee bars. Dubbed the Boulevard, this central artery promotes movement while encouraging informal meetings and “casual collisions,” as Rider puts it.

Animating walls along the Boulevard and serving as reminders of a rich corporate history, blowups from the Life Picture Collection include Audrey Hepburn backstage at the 1956 Academy Awards and models placing bets at the old Roosevelt Raceway horse track in Westbury, New York, in 1958. Furnishings mix vintage pieces, such as chairs and stools designed specifically for Time Inc. by Charles and Ray Eames, with current models of those designs and contemporary additions. “A lot of the new furniture we brought in is big, because these spaces are so bombastic,” DeGarmo explains. “Plus, upholstery was a way to introduce color.”

For the office areas, the aesthetic is subtly modulated by a palette of blue, red, and purple, with the dominant color varying by location. Time Inc. senior vice president for real estate Donna Clark explains that the priority was to “avoid a trading-floor look.” Above the rows of workstations, where employees can plug in their laptops, TVs flicker silently, creating a newsroom atmosphere.

People, InStyle, Essence, and the other brands now share a fashion storage area, and nearly all studio photog­raphy is shot in the same location. The video studios have allowed Time Inc. to ramp up production of Web series such as Fortune Live and SI Now. Food & Wine has a camera-ready test kitchen and a dedicated wine vault with a 3,500-bottle capacity and an area for tastings.

In the evening, the cafeteria can double as an events space hosting up to 400 people. Employees and guests take advantage of its terrace, complete with lush grasses and Hudson River views. That’s a long way from the Hemisphere Club, the members-only restaurant once perched at the top of the Time & Life Building, but this new power-lunch spot has its own undeniable appeal.

Project Team: Tomas Quijada; Randall Stogsdill; Elena Koroleva; Fei Chen; Lindsay Homer: Studios Architecture. Kugler Ning Lighting Design: Lighting Consultant. Airspace: Graphics Consultant. Arup: Theatrical, Acoustical, Audiovisual Consultant. Syska Hennessy Group: Audiovisual Consultant. Thornton Tomasetti: Structural Engineer. Robert Derector Associates: MEP. C.W. Keller & Associates: Metalwork, Woodwork. Jonathan Metal & Glass: Metalwork, Glasswork. Ferra Designs: Metal­work. Eastern Millwork: Wood­work. Coyle & Company; Drive21: Signage Workshops. Turner Con­struc­tion Company: Construction Manager. VVA Project Managers & Consultants: Project Manager.

Lost in Brazil: The Garden of Art

Far from the urban centers of Rio and São Paulo, Departures explores the visionary world of Bernardo Paz’s art-filled paradise.

By Stephen Wallis

May/June 2010

http://www.departures.com/travel/travel/brazils-art-gardens

Out in the Brazilian countryside, pretty much in the middle of nowhere, there’s a place where spectacular outdoor sculptures and buildings filled with top-tier artworks are improbably scattered across lush tropical gardens, wooded slopes, and open fields. This place, the dream of an art world Fitzcarraldo, is also home to one of the largest botanical collections on the planet, with dozens of rare species. And if its eccentric founder, 59-year-old Brazilian mining magnate Bernardo Paz, realizes his vision, it’ll eventually include a boutique inn, a hotel and convention center, a science exploratorium, and a whole lot more art.

Word is just beginning to spread about the Instituto Cultural Inhotim, located in the hills outside Brumadinho, a small town some 40 miles from Brazil’s third-largest city, Belo Horizonte, and several hours’ drive from either Rio or São Paulo. Getting here from abroad takes some effort. Which is why, for the moment, the place remains mostly a destination for locals and art world insiders. Only open to the public since 2006, Inhotim is one of those way-off-the-beaten-path spots, like Marfa, Texas, or the Japanese island of Naoshima, that lure knowing pilgrims in search of a cultural experience that’s not easily had—unique, even. And Inhotim certainly is that.

From the moment you pass through the gates, the perfect cobblestones, the manmade lakes, and the stately allé of eucalyptus trees (not to mention the heavily armed guards) make it instantly clear that you’re entering a world far removed from the conspicuous poverty that surrounds it. Elegant black swans squawk at each other in manicured plantings next to a lake, oblivious to Dan Graham’s glass pavilion nearby, its simultaneously reflective and transparent surfaces interacting with the hills, water, and sky. Across the lake, several huge slabs in pink and yellow and orange by Hélio Oiticica form a playfully utopian public square, a Tropicália vision of Stonehenge, perhaps.

Through the gardens, designed by Paz in collaboration with legendary Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, you chance upon such works as Simon Starling’s upside-down sailboat, which rests on its mast in a small clearing, looking both comically misplaced and absolutely right at home. Head in one direction and you arrive at a lakeside glass house containing a riotously red tangle of a sculpture by the Brazilian artist Tunga. Wander up a hill in another direction and you come to a circular glass pavilion by Doug Aitken with a hole at its center, several hundred feet deep, inside which geological microphones capture subtle growls and hums from the earth below. As you gaze out into the forest, straining to hear, a hyperawareness of your surroundings washes over. It may also inspire one of those wondrous “Where am I?” moments that seem to happen all around Inhotim.

“It is the most beautiful place in the world,” says Paz in his heavily accented English during a conversation over lunch about his vision of Inhotim as a model for an enlightened “contemporary life,” his unconventional art center being just one component. Paz, who has a silver mane of hair, intense blue eyes, and slightly ruddy cheeks, exudes a mix of charm, confidence, and distracted ambition. He can move quickly, sometimes awkwardly, between points. “The collection is not important, the place is,” he tells me, later adding, obliquely, that “art comes before technology—it shows you the path.” He occasionally speaks in aphorism-like phrases such as “Nothing’s important, everything’s important.” While some of this can be attributed to his imperfect English, he also has the air of a mystic talking about his personal Shangri-La.

It’s an impression shared by many who come to Inhotim. As one art world visitor, who prefers to remain anonymous, recounts, “Bernardo sort of emerged from the foliage in a T-shirt and a pair of shorts, having just worked out, and proceeded to chain-smoke and give an hour-and-a-half monologue on his vision of the future. I had this extraordinary feeling at the beginning of the conversation that I was sitting with a lunatic. But he’s very charismatic and engaging, and by the end of it I was thinking, This is really amazing.”

And it is. On a perfect blue-sky day last year, two of Inhotim’s three curators led me on a tour of the center, which is essentially an accumulation of art experiences as you move around the grounds. “It’s a place for getting lost and creating your own path,” says Rodrigo Moura, the Brazilian member of the international curatorial team. As we strolled along a leafy walk between buildings, head curator Allan Schwartzman, an American based in New York, described how Inhotim was conceived in very deliberate opposition to the conventional white-box museum, which can be “a kind of sensory-deprivation tank.” Here, he says, “the experience of art is intentionally integrated into one’s relationship with the natural landscape.”

As the institute has grown, Paz has put more and more control of the art program in the hands of his curators (the third is Jochen Volz, a German who helped organize the last Venice Biennale). Under the trio’s guidance, the collection has become more international—and more internationally trendy, though it’s certainly not assembled by checking off a list of today’s must-haves. There’s no Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, or Richard Prince. No Richard Serra or James Turrell. There’s not much in the way of paintings and only a modest number of photographs. The focus is on large-scale and often specially commissioned installations by artists such as Matthew Barney, Doris Salcedo, Cildo Meireles, Pipilotti Rist, Adriana Varejão (who is now Paz’s wife—his fifth), and Chris Burden.

One of Inhotim’s coups was getting Burden to reprise his famous Beam Drop, a work originally created in 1984 at Artpark in Lewiston, New York, and destroyed three years later. It involved releasing several dozen steel i beams of different sizes from a 150-foot crane into a huge pit of wet concrete. An exercise in controlled chance, the resultant sculpture sits dramatically in a clearing on a grassy slope, its thicket of variously colored and angled beams set against the mountains and the open sky. It is, in its raw physicality, a kind of sculptural equivalent of the action paintings produced by Jackson Pollock.

“It’s the best piece Chris Burden ever made,” says Paz, who is prone to speaking in superlatives. He tells me about the time Olafur Eliasson, the artist behind the big waterfalls project in New York City a couple of years ago, “came to Inhotim and saw that it would be the best museum of its kind in the world.” The goal, of course, is nothing less. Then again, there really isn’t anything of Inhotim’s kind anywhere.

The full scope of Paz’s ambitious vision includes a sizable amount of non-art development on the 3,000-acre property and adjacent sites. One of the first planned projects is a 40-room inn that will serve as a guesthouse for visitors. A feasibility study funded by the center is currently being done on adding passenger service to the industrial rail line running between Brumadinho and Belo Horizonte, which would make it much more convenient to get to Inhotim. Later will come a science center focusing on biodiversity and climate change, a couple of larger hotels, and, eventually, in partnership with the regional government, a convention facility.

Paz has lived here for years and still owns mining businesses in the region. As a result, he feels obliged to give something back to the nearby communities. He employs more than 400 locals, including what seems like an entire army of young adults in green T-shirts who patrol the grounds as guards and guides. The center hosts more than 30,000 students per year, and it’s an increasingly popular attraction among Brazilians. On a typical weekend Inhotim, which is open Wednesday through Sunday, draws 1,500 to 3,000 visitors. And international museum groups are coming through with increasing regularity. In a country where contemporary art receives limited support, Paz has emerged as its most important patron.

Since becoming a nonprofit institution and opening to the public, Inhotim has maintained a robust pace of growth. Nine new art projects, including those by Aitken, Burden, and Barney, were unveiled last fall, and the hope is to have at least one major opening every year for the foreseeable future. There are currently at least a dozen projects in various stages of planning and another dozen under consideration. Among those on the horizon are adapting the site of an old chapel on the property to display an Edenic video installation by Pipilotti Rist (originally shown in Venice’s Church of San Stae) and converting a farmhouse into galleries for a series of paintings by Carroll Dunham. A bit farther out is a new, 40,000-square-foot, three-level building that will become the center’s primary space for temporary displays.

All this initiated by a man who claims he never plans anything. “The important thing,” Paz says, “is to live during the time that you have. If I do everything I want to do, I will make a small difference.” Creating Inhotim has become Paz’s lifework and, as he noted to me, a legacy for his six children.

“Bernardo is a force,” says Schwartzman. “You often hear that as a kind of cliché about people, but in his case it’s accurate. He’s a visionary who believes that contemporary art can change the world, and he is inspiring at the highest level.”

Leaving the sanctuary of Inhotim, it was difficult to imagine the place doing a great deal for Brazil’s poor, let alone for the entire planet. But I thought back to my walks through the gardens and my encounters with the art, where time slowed and I felt an intensity of experience. And that, for me, is enough to sign on to Bernardo Paz’s unique, undeniably compelling dream.

The Basics

The Instituto Cultural Inhotim is located outside the town of Brumadinho, about 40 miles south of Belo Horizonte, the capital of the Minas Gerais state. Getting there and dealing with logistics on the ground takes some effort, but the São Paulo–based travel company Matueté will set up everything for you, including customized itineraries with trips to the region’s historic Baroque cities that lie along the colonial Portuguese gold routes. 55-11/3071-4515; matuete.com.

Staying in Belo Horizonte

Until Inhotim builds a guesthouse (still a couple of years away), the best option if you plan to spend more than a day visiting Inhotim—and one day probably isn’t enough to see it all—is to base yourself in Belo Horizonte. The only direct flights are from Miami, so a connection through either Rio or São Paulo on TAM Airlines is usually required. The reliable Mercure Belo Horizonte Lourdes isn’t luxurious, but it has comfortable rooms and an English-speaking staff. From $140. At 7315 Avda. do Contorno; 55-31/3298-4100; mercure.com.

Local Sights

Belo Horizonte is home to several buildings by the father of modern Brazilian architecture, Oscar Niemeyer, the most important of which are located in a park in the Pampulha suburb. Most buildings are open to the public, including a former glass-walled casino that’s now a small art museum, and the jewel-like São Francisco de Assis church, with its wave-form roof and blue-and-white mosaics.

Where to Eat

Chef Nelsa Trombino does excellent rustic mineiro dishes like tutu à mineira (seasoned mashed beans served with pork) at Restaurante Xapuri ($20; 260 Rua Mandacarú, Belo Horizonte; 55-31/3496-6198). A very local thing to do is to eat at one of the many botecos, casual, often open-air bars like Estabelecimento (160 Rua Monte Alegre; 55-31/9666-1569) that serve small, rich plates and lots of beer. (Don’t assume English will be spoken.) During the annual Comida di Buteco in April–May, these botecos compete with one another in different categories, including best dish, with the winner decided by public vote.

Visiting Inhotim

The center (Rua B, 20, Inhotim, Brumadinho; 55-31/3227-0001; inhotim.org) is open from Wednesday to Friday from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and on Saturday and Sunday from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Hiring transportation is recommended, and arrangements can be made through Inhotim. Guided tours of the art installations, galleries, and botanical gardens are available. Creating your own path around the grounds and getting “lost” is part of the experience, but be sure to make time to visit the outlying pavilions by Doug Aitken and Matthew Barney and, in a different direction, Chris Burden’s Beam Drop. The very good café offers a full lunch menu.

The “Gold Cities”

To the south of Belo Horizonte, two of the Portuguese colonial cities that rose to prominence during the region’s gold mining era in the 18th century make for fascinating day trips with their stunning Baroque churches: Ouro Preto, a unesco World Heritage site (about a two-hour drive), and the even more charming Tiradentes (about three hours), which is also home to an elegant inn, the Solar da Ponte (from $215; 55-32/3355-1255; solardaponte.com.br) and very good restaurants such as Tragaluz (dinner, $50; 52 Rua Direita; 55-32/9968-4837).

Brad Pitt collaborates on a furniture collection

The actor teams with furnituremaker Frank Pollaro on a range of inventive designs

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted November 30, 2012·Magazine

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/brad-pitt-frank-pollaro-furniture-collection-article

For his latest role, Brad Pitt joins a familiar ensemble cast. No, it’s not George Clooney and the rest of the Ocean’s Eleven gang reuniting for another film. This time Pitt’s costars are Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, Pierre Chareau, and Paul Dupré-Lafon. In his debut as a furniture designer, the actor is presenting about a dozen pieces—tables, chairs, and one rather fantastic bed—alongside 45 or so works by his collaborator, Frank Pollaro, whose New Jersey firm is noted for its impeccable reproductions of Art Deco furnishings.

The unveiling, which will take place November 13 through 15 in New York (register at pollaro.com for details), has been years in the making. “I’ve been doodling ideas for buildings and furniture since the early 1990s, when I first discovered [Charles Rennie] Mackintosh and Frank Lloyd Wright,” says Pitt. “Actually, I found Wright in college, when looking for a lazy two-point credit to get out of French. It forever changed my life.”

By now, Pitt’s passion for architecture and design is well established, evidenced by his Make It Right foundation, which enlists prominent architects to create quality affordable housing in post-Katrina New Orleans, as well as by his high-profile collecting of modernist and contemporary furniture. But it wasn’t until he met Pollaro that he seriously considered making his own furnishings. When Pollaro paid Pitt a visit to install a reproduction Ruhlmann desk the actor had commissioned a few years ago, he spotted Pitt’s sketchbook, filled with drawings of furniture designs. Pollaro didn’t hesitate. “I asked him, ‘Why don’t we make some of this stuff real?’” he recalls. “Brad said he thought that could be fun.”

They started with the bed—an Art Deco ocean liner of a bed, featuring a lustrous tropical-hardwood frame that extends from its gently curved headboard, along the floor, to a graceful arc that ends in a cantilevered bench capable of seating, one imagines, the entire Jolie-Pitt clan. Refinements include exposed nickel trusses to support the king-size mattress, integrated shagreen foot pads, and nickel side tables with silk-under-glass tops that seem more suited for cocktails than alarm clocks. It took Pollaro and his team more than two years to make the piece, in part because of “difficult physics and engineering issues related to the simplicity of the design,” he says. Once it was completed, he and Pitt agreed it should be exhibited. But not just the bed—a whole collection of Pitt’s creations. And their partnership was born.

To decide which of Pitt’s ideas to produce (there are “literally thousands,” according to Pollaro), the two men regularly get together for meetings “lasting anywhere from seven to ten hours,” Pollaro says. “We talk about design, about materials, about craftsmanship, about classicism, about modernism. He has a respect for the masters of design.”

Describing himself as “bent on quality to an unhealthy degree,” Pitt says Pollaro “embodies the same mad spirit of the craftsmen of yore, with their obsessive attention to detail. It just so happens Frank and I speak the same language. And we both have a predilection for far too much wine.”

In addition to the bed—only nine will be made, each in different materials—the Pitt pieces include a dining table, a cocktail table, several side tables, a few club chairs, even a bathtub for two in Statuario Venato marble. Many of the designs incorporate the idea of a single line. That line can be geometric, as in the case of a 17-foot-long wood dining table whose jagged base dramatically zigzags at unexpected angles. Or it can be sinuous, as with a glass-top side table that features a wispy spiraling metal base finished in 24K gold.

When asked about the appeal of an uninterrupted line, Pitt explains that there’s a metaphorical element that’s difficult to articulate. “It started with my introduction to Mackintosh’s Glasgow rose, which is drawn with one continuous line,” he says. “But for me there is something more grand at play, as if you could tell the story of one’s life with a single line.”

All of the initial designs, customizable in a variety of materials and finishes, will be made in numbered editions or limited production and signed by Pitt and Pollaro. Though Pollaro declines to discuss specific figures, he notes that his prices are “typically at the highest end of the custom-furnishings scale, and these will be up there, even north of that.” But, he adds, eventually certain pieces may be adapted for larger-scale production, in different materials—a chair in molded plastic, say. “The same chair we charge $45,000 for might sell for a fraction of that,” he says.

Pitt, who still has a pretty demanding day job—he plays an enforcer in Andrew Dominik’s stylish mobster film* Killing Them Softly,*which opens in theaters November 30—hesitates when asked how he feels about being called a furniture designer, cautioning, “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

For his part, Pollaro predicts that this is just the beginning. “I think we’ll be doing this for a long time,” he says.**

908-206-1888; the website pitt-pollaro.com launches November 11

Click here to read our exclusive Q+A with Pitt about his inspiration for the line.

Jaguar to Produce 9 New Jaguar XKSS Supercars from 1957

The British carmaker is traveling back in time to re-create the vintage model it calls the world’s first supercar

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted March 25, 2016

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/jaguar-produce-9-new-jaguar-xkss-supercars-1957

One of the holy grails for enthusiasts of classic sports cars has long been the Jaguar XKSS, the coolly charismatic 1957 roadster with Jayne Mansfield curves and a racing pedigree famously beloved by Steve McQueen. Based on the British carmaker’s D-Type, which won Le Mans three years in a row in the mid-’50s, the XKSS could hit 60 m.p.h. from a standstill in five seconds. Ultimately, only 16 were ever produced—a result of a devastating fire at the company’s factory—but six decades later Jaguar is bringing back the legend it calls the world’s first supercar.

Well, it’s making nine of them, anyway, with a price tag in excess of $1.5 million each. Unlike the recent, widespread moves by carmakers of rolling out retro-inspired designs, Jaguar Land Rover is experimenting with a different approach. Two years ago, the company’s special operations division built six Jaguar Lightweight E-Types, a sultry successor to the D-Type, handcrafting them, not as reengineered versions with cutting-edge performance capabilities and comforts but as unmodified replicas sticking to period specifications. The success of that project—all of the cars, priced between $1.6 million and $2.5 million, were quickly sold—encouraged Jaguar to do something similar with the XKSS, faithfully re-creating the riveted side panels, the leather hood straps, the throaty purr of the side exhaust pipes. As with the E-Types, the new XKSSs aren’t intended for road use, as they don’t meet today’s safety or emissions standards. Instead, they are targeted to top-end collectors who will bring them to shows and rallies. Although the new XKSSs won’t be ready until early next year, five of the nine have already been sold.

Buyers have a choice of colors: British racing green (preferred by McQueen), Old English white, red, black, or gray. The luggage rack and folding top are optional, as is the fuel gauge—a feature the original didn’t have. While the sticker price might seem shocking, keep in mind that McQueen’s XKSS, now owned by the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, has been valued by some at more than $30 million.

Berlin Erupts

Until recently Berlin was perhaps best known for a wall that no longer exists. It’s now home to the largest concentration of artists in Europe—and to a sense of creative energy found nowhere else.

By Stephen Wallis

May/June 2007

https://www.departures.com/letters/features/berlin-erupts

Our first courses didn’t start arriving until after 11 o’clock, but the food was little more than an afterthought on this Saturday night. There were plenty of drinks, everyone was smoking (living in New York, I’d forgotten what that was like), and the vibe was good.

Robert Goff and Cassie Rosenthal were hosting the dinner on the top floor of the Postfuhramt, an old imperial post office, to celebrate the opening of a Berlin branch of their New York gallery, Goff + Rosenthal. It was the weekend of Art Forum Berlin, the city’s prestigious annual fair, and artists, collectors, curators, and assorted friends from several countries filled the room. Above our heads a slightly decrepit neoclassical rotunda soared some 50 feet, a faded emblem of 19th-century grandeur. Downstairs in the C/O Berlin, a small institution that shows photo and video works in dilapidated rooms with peeling paint, Louis Vuitton was throwing a party for a series of Vanessa Beecroft photographs the company had commissioned. It all felt like the perfect microcosm of Berlin, a distinctive confluence of culture, nightlife, and alluring architectural spaces.

I sat next to Cornelia Renz, a fortyish painter who draws large carnivalesque images of underage vixens and dominatrices using acid-hued pigment markers. Her work owes a debt to Freud, tattoo parlors, and the outsider artist Henry Darger for its graphic, illustrational quality and fetishization of powerful girl characters. Renz studied at Leipzig’s Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, the academy that has produced some of the hottest painters in the art world lately. When I asked her about the recent attention on Berlin, she joked that even fellow Germans—always slow to recognize something positive—are taking notice. "Now the city magazines are writing about this phenomenon," she told me. "One article I just read was saying, ’Wow, finally we don’t have to think about moving away because other people are coming here.’ " Goff—who also shows work from several other Germans, among them Susanne Kühn, Oliver Pietsch, and the duo Abetz/Drescher—described the city as becoming almost like a year-round art fair. "People are constantly passing through to find interesting work," he said. "Plus, it’s just a cool place to be."

Today there are more artists in Berlin than anywhere else in Europe, including a large number, like Renz, from the former Communist east. If you ask why they moved here, they all say the same thing: the cheap rents and the lifestyle. By European standards it’s a poor city. Large sections are run-down, and despite the arrival of companies such as Universal Pictures, Condé Nast, and Bertelsmann the economy is stagnant (unemployment is close to 20 percent). Nonetheless the film, fashion, design, music, and club scenes are thriving, and there is, of course, all that inexpensive studio space. Mayor Klaus Wowereit—who, it is invariably noted, is gay—has actively promoted what has become a kind of slogan for the city: Poor but sexy.

"It’s been said that Berlin’s opportunity was precisely in its failure," says Klaus Biesenbach, a founder of Kunst-Werke Berlin, the pioneering foundation that runs an exhibition space in an old margarine factory, and now chief curator of media at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. "Because the city didn’t succeed financially and didn’t grow to five million people as everybody had predicted, this provided opportunities for artists to live here and have huge studios and production facilities."

After the wall fell in 1989, stars like Damien Hirst, Gabriel Orozco, and Rachel Whiteread started arriving and others soon followed, drawn in part by the promise of a new, reunified German cultural capital. Except for a post-9/11 dip, Berlin has experienced a steady surge of momentum, and its art scene is now likened to New York in the sixties or London in the early nineties. Such comparisons may be beside the point, but they highlight the vitality and the critical mass of creative energy and talent that has converged in this culturally complex city, one that is still finding its identity after being physically and psychologically bisected for nearly 30 years.

Standing in the studio of photographer Frank Thiel on a cloudless afternoon, I had a perfectly framed view of the Fernsehturm, a 1,200-foot-tall TV tower that was built by the East German government in the late sixties and remains one of the city’s more iconic landmarks. Thiel, 41, grew up outside East Berlin and spent 13 months in prison for political activities as a teenager before being released into West Germany in 1985. After the wall came down he moved back to the east and began photographing the city’s dramatic transformation. His mural-size prints, often six by eight feet or more, include crane-filled panoramas of the Reichstag and Potsdamer Platz, nearly abstract expanses of rebar on construction sites, close-ups of richly hued paint peeling from decaying walls that look like Expressionist canvases. His work shows at galleries in New York, Madrid, Geneva, and Vienna.

Thiel lives in a refurbished actory complex in the eastern section of Mitte, the city’s central district, a short walk from Alexanderplatz. When he first rented a studio there in the mid-nineties, he had no heat or running water and several buildings in the complex were empty shells. Now it houses media companies and the local office of the Boston Consulting Group, and espected dealer Barbara Thumm has a gallery in the courtyard. The changes are typical for the neighborhood, where something like three fourths of the commercial real estate has been snapped up by foreign investors looking to cash in on a revitalized East Berlin. "You get the sense," Thiel says, "that all the buildings around here have been sold and resold in the last ten years."

Still, if the city’s real estate market is churning, its cultural scene is far less intense. Some artists move here specifically to escape the pressure of competing in New York or London. With all the hyperventilating about billionaire hedge fund collectors, speculative buying, and prices tearing through the roof, Berlin can be a tonic.

"I can drink a beer in the streets and I can smoke everywhere," says Frank Nitsche, a painter who grew up in Görlitz, near Poland, and studied in Dresden. "I can play sports naked if I want." Nitsche, 43, makes paintings constructed from bits of collected imagery—mass-media photos, architectural drawings, design renderings—which he abstracts and layers into overlapping, interlocking forms punctuated with splashes of retro-Pop color. There’s a tension between the formal coolness and dynamic energy in his canvases. An exhibition of his work is now at the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain in Strasbourg, France, his first solo museum show.

Based in Berlin since 1993, Nitsche rents a studio off Zimmerstrasse, in the same complex where his dealer, Max Hetzler, and several other major galleries have spaces. He can often be found, cigarette in hand, down the street at Café Adler—"my loveliest café," as he calls the famous coffeehouse next to Checkpoint Charlie. Nitsche is one of a handful of German artists who have seen growing interest in their work, many of whom, like Nitsche, trained at academies in the former east. International collectors and curators tend to identify current German art most closely with the photo-based, often realist styles practiced by painters such as Tim Eitel, Matthias Weischer, and David Schnell from Leipzig and Eberhard Havekost and Thoralf Knobloch from Dresden.

Also on that list is Thomas Scheibitz, who trained in Dresden and represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 2005. Drawing from an archive of media images, Scheibitz creates exuberant paintings that combine architectural and figural elements into kaleidoscopic, largely abstract compositions. Often he pairs his paintings with related sculptures, extending his exploration of line and form into three dimensions. The 39-year-old moved to Berlin exactly one day after receiving his diploma in 1996. "It’s been the same story for the last three hundred years— artists always go to places where they have opportunities," says Scheibitz, who took a garagelike studio in the city center, not far from the Reichstag, when he was preparing for Venice.

Scheibitz is well known for his role in helping organize "36 x 27 x 10," an already legendary exhibition held in late December 2005 at the Palace of the Republic, the former East German parliament and cultural center that is now a steel skeleton in the last stages of demolition. "I remember the building from when I was a schoolboy," he says. "It was a kind of working-class palace and so kitschy, almost like Versace, with all the gold."

The decision to tear the palace down (there are plans to replace it with an ersatz copy of a Baroque building that once stood on the site) met with strong opposition, and the artists behind the show conceived it partly as a protest. In Berlin it’s not uncommon for artists to run temporary galleries and stage exhibitions, some of which are little more than excuses for a party—"people calling each other and saying, ’Here’s a space for one week and we’re having a show of only black-and-white works, or only works sent through the fax machine,’ " as Scheibitz explains. But he and his girlfriend, video and installation artist Lisa Junghanss, recruited 36 of Berlin’s biggest names—Franz Ackermann, John Bock, Monica Bonvicini, Thomas Demand, Olafur Eliasson, and Daniel Pflumm—to contribute significant pieces. They put the whole thing together in just days, without a plan, a budget, or insurance.

The show was a clear shot across the bow of the city’s museums, which have been frequently criticized for underrepresenting local artists. Berlin is rich in museums, but with the exception of the Hamburger Bahnhof and a few smaller institutions like the Kunst-Werke, they have a poor track record of presenting contemporary art. Instead that task falls to the commercial galleries which have poured into the city over the past decade, lured by the abundant cheap real estate and the deep pool of creative talent. The biggest influx has come from the country’s onetime contemporary art capital, Cologne, but dealers from New York, Los Angeles, and London have also opened branches here. "It’s because the artists all want to show in Berlin at the moment," says dealer Matthias Arndt. "The galleries come here because they don’t want to lose their artists or have to share them."

A leader among the younger generation of Berlin art entrepreneurs, Arndt founded Arndt & Partner Berlin in 1994, when he was 26, with just $10,000. He now represents nearly 30 artists and has some 9,000 square feet of exhibition space. When I visited, Arndt was showing an otherworldly installation by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama that featured one room with a mass of white fabric tentacles sprouting wildly from wooden boxes and another with large stainless-steel pinballs scattered across the floor. Upstairs he had set up an eclectic group show of paintings, sculptures, and videos. "In the last year and a half we’ve had the maximum international attention on Berlin," Arndt says. "Artists have been here for years—the seeds were planted a while ago—but let’s say the harvest is happening now."

Arndt & Partner is on Zimmerstrasse, essentially Berlin’s "uptown" gallery district, with top-notch dealers Hetzler, Volker Diehl, Claes Nordenhake, Barbara Weiss, Rafael Jablonka, and Thomas Schulte also in the neighborhood. Schulte, one of the first international dealers to open in Berlin after the wall came down, moved last year from Charlottenburg in the western part of the city into a historic building that once housed Kersten und Tuteur, a high-end women’s clothing store during the Weimar era. (Large-scale installations show perfectly in the double-height corner window.) Like most leading galleries, Schulte has an international program, with veterans such as Richard Artschwager, Allan McCollum, and the young Berlin artist Iris Schomaker, who does minimalist paintings of lithe figures and spare landscapes in wan hues.

"Fifteen years ago there was little here," says Schulte. "You knew the hundred people you would see at every opening and you could count the events that would happen during the week on one hand." These days new galleries are coming to Berlin practically every few weeks—and it’s not because business is better. "It’s more that the city has become this major global center for galleries and new tendencies in art," Schulte says. "People call it Studio Berlin."

Making the rounds last fall, I stopped in at Contemporary Fine Arts, where Berlin-based Jonathan Meese had a sprawling exhibit of paintings and sculptures that reflected his theatrical brew of history, mythology, and teenage fixations. Neugerriemschneider, in a handsome old chimneyed factory building on Linienstrasse, had works by Isa Genzken, Germany’s representative at the Venice Biennale this summer. And Eigen + Art, on Augustrasse, showed a series of large photographs of young women, mostly undressed, by Martin Eder, a Dresden-trained artist living in Berlin. The stark, moody pictures were a departure for an artist known for self-consciously middlebrow paintings of nymphets with kittens.

"The idea was to show where his paintings, watercolors, and drawings come from," says Eigen + Art’s owner, Gerd Harry Lybke, who also has a gallery in Leipzig and promotes several of the so-called Leipzig School artists—Tim Eitel, David Schnell, and Matthias Weischer—whose work is currently an art market obsession. The photos are among the thousands Eder has shot to use as source material, and this was the first time he had exhibited them. "People who like Martin said it’s great work and he’s a genius," Lybke says. "Collectors who don’t like his other work came in and said, ’I’m sorry, he’s great.’ "

As I slipped through the opening-night crowds at Art Forum Berlin, the scene felt distinctly different from that of other international art fairs, such as the Armory Show in New York or Art Basel Miami Beach. Plenty of faces were the same, but the atmosphere seemed younger in spirit, more welcoming, more fun—like the rest of Berlin. Business was certainly being done. I checked in with my friends Cassie and Robert, whose booth was devoted to colored-pencil drawings by a young Austrian named Christoph Schmidberger. The works sold out in two hours.

Later that evening I attended a wall- to-wall party announcing the finalists for the 2007 Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art, Germany’s answer to the Turner Prize in Great Britain. Sponsored by BMW, the event took place in a huge automobile showroom on the Kurfürstendamm, the bustling commercial artery that runs through Charlottenburg. That was followed by a drink at the nearby Paris Bar, a legendary West Berlin hangout where the walls are covered in works donated by artists who ate and drank there.

At 2 a.m. I got a text message from Marc Spiegler, a writer and critic: "Peres party at oderbergerstr 56. Incredible space!" He was at a gathering put on by Javier Peres, a young Los Angeles-based dealer who opened a gallery in Berlin 18 months ago. I headed instead to Week-End, a club on the 12th floor of a nondescript office building in Alexanderplatz. It’s a well-known place where you can dance till dawn and watch the sun come up over the old Socialist apartment blocks on Karl-Marx-Allee.

In the taxi on my way home that night, I thought back on my discussion with Frank Thiel. "The art world is a moody beast," he said when I asked him about the city’s ascendance. "It might decide it loves another place." For the moment, Berlin still has all the energy, excitement, and promise of a fresh crush.

By the Sea

Architecture | Feb 2017

By Stephen Wallis

It could be said that Richard Meier’s architecture career truly began, more than five decades ago, on the water. His first credited project was a modest beachfront cottage he designed on New York’s Fire Island for artist Saul Lambert and his wife. A simple rectilinear box, with abundant glass and an open interior, the house reflected Meier’s unshakable commitment to the modernist ideals espoused by Le Corbusier and by the young architect’s boss at the time, Marcel Breuer. “This small house, which was built in just nine days for a total cost of $9,000, was strongly inspired by what I’d learned from Marcel Breuer,” recounts Meier. The only thing the precut-timber structure lacked was the white palette he would become so famous for.

Within a year Meier founded his namesake firm in New York City, and he soon established a reputation as a designer of strikingly elegant residences that combined bold geometric volumes, dynamically intersecting planes and exquisitely minimalist surfaces. The most refined of the so-called New York Five architects—a group that also included Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey and John Hejduk—Meier was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1984, when he was just 49, shortly after completing the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Coveted commissions for courthouses, campus buildings and more museums followed, notably his most famous project, the sprawling hilltop Getty Center in Los Angeles—which turns 20 this year.

Not atypically for an architect of his stature, Meier has had numerous opportunities to build on prime plots, and waterfront sites in particular have been a recurring theme across his long career. For one thing, his distinctive, crisply sculpted forms look particularly arresting and iconic set against blue expanses of water and sky, their white surfaces changing with the varying light conditions. And because of their emphasis on light, transparency and openness, his buildings are tailor-made for such settings, from the Ackerberg House on the beach in Malibu to the Perry Street condo towers overlooking the Hudson River in New York City to the recently completed Seamarq Hotel with panoramic lake and sea views in Gangneung, South Korea. “When I look back over 50 years, it’s amazing the number of projects I’ve had on the water, from private houses to hotels,” says the architect. “I’ve been very lucky to have worked on sites where the light reflected off the water changes with the different times of day and different seasons.”

It’s perhaps surprising, then, that Richard Meier & Partners is only now realizing its first project in Miami, given the city’s abundance of water and compelling light. Of course, it was only a matter of time before the Pritzker laureate joined the roster of celebrated architects who’ve contributed buildings to Miami’s runaway real estate boom. Enlisted by the developer Fort Partners, Meier has overseen a much-anticipated expansion of the Surf Club, the storied private getaway in Surfside, just north of Miami Beach, that opened in 1930 and once welcomed Frank Sinatra, Gary Cooper, Elizabeth Taylor and Winston Churchill, who liked to paint in the ocean-facing cabanas that snaked gracefully along the sand.

Opening in April, the new Surf Club is a dramatic update from the old one. The original building, designed by Russell Pancoast in Mediterranean Revival style, with stucco walls and a terra-cotta tile roof, has been restored. But Meier, working in consultation with Miami architect Kobi Karp, has added an eye-catching trio of metal-and-glass structures. At the center, a tower housing a Four Seasons hotel and residences (with interiors by designer Joseph Dirand, known for his own sensuous brand of minimalism) rises above the Pancoast building, which will feature two restaurants. On either side of the building are large, 12-story asymmetrical towers—one has a curved façade, while the other is stepped—containing 150 airy condos finished in warmly spare, classic Meier style. The complex also boasts a spa, four swimming pools, gardens designed by Fernando Wong and some 40 beach cabanas arrayed in a serpentine pattern, nodding to the original.

The idea from the outset was “to keep the new buildings as minimal as possible and let the old Surf Club be the jewel in the operation,” says Bernhard Karpf, the project’s associate partner-in-charge who has worked in Meier’s offices since 1988. “Ultimately, the contrast between the old and new, in terms of scale and material finishes and detailing, works really well.”

In the end, the architecture is all about amplifying the setting and having 1,000 feet of unobstructed beachfront in Miami was a rare luxury. “I couldn’t imagine a more interesting site than this one,” says Meier. “With views out to the bay on one side and ocean views on the other, the quality of light is incredible.”

Looking ahead to other Meier projects slated for completion in 2017, there are residential towers in Tel Aviv, Tokyo and Taipei as well as a high-rise mixed-use complex in Mexico City. That last project, known as Reforma Towers, promises to establish a new landmark on one of the Mexican capital’s busiest thoroughfares, with the larger of the two buildings (40 and 27 stories) distinguished by a large wedge-shaped void spectacularly cut out of its middle, creating, as Meier describes it, “a sort of a plaza in the sky.” The terrace, which will likely feature a restaurant, not only offers views in virtually every direction, but it also serves the functional purpose of bringing natural ventilation into the building and reducing the need for air conditioning.

It’s notable that so many of the firm’s current projects are residential and office towers—something Meier wasn’t especially known for during the first decades of his career. Many of them are also in locales where Meier hasn’t previously worked. To a large extent these shifts have to do with global economics, but it also reflects how the practice is evolving under the leadership of the six partners not named Meier, who include, in addition to Karpf, James R. Crawford, Michael Palladino, Vivian Lee, Reynolds Logan and Dukho Yeon.

Not that Meier didn’t want to build tall buildings earlier on. Pointing to his 1987 proposal to put a 72-story skyscraper atop Madison Square Garden, he notes, “We’ve had designs that have never been built, and it’s nice now to have a number of these things coming to fruition. Good things come late in life.” At the moment, Meier has two residential buildings—each 460 feet tall—under construction on both coasts of Manhattan. One is part of the Riverside Center development on the West Side, while the other, on a parcel overlooking the East River just south of the United Nations, has received much fanfare as his first-ever black building. “It wasn’t my choice!” explains Meier, gamely noting that “even though the glass is very dark, there’s a still a transparency about it, and the interiors are all white. You could say it’s like living in a white building with sunglasses.”

After all these years, Meier says the most rewarding part of his work—other than seeing people enjoying a completed building—is still the early design stages, when he is conceptualizing and sketching. Despite the advances in digital modeling, Meier has never taken to working on a computer. He retains a deep love of physical, three-dimensional models, and dozens of the ones his firm has created are now on permanent display—as the Richard Meier Model Museum—at the Mana Contemporary space in Jersey City, New Jersey. Numerous exhibitions have been devoted to Meier’s prolific output—both his architecture and the spirited collages he continues to make. “You know,” remarks Meier, “some people take a day off and play golf. I take a day off and go work in a studio.”

In the heart of Napa Valley, Russell Groves transforms a humdrum, half-finished house into a heavenly retreat for longtime clients

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted December 4, 2016·Magazine

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/russell-groves-napa-valley-estate

Adam Weiss likes to begin most days at his family’s Napa Valley getaway with a stroll. Perched high up in the Mayacamas Mountains, on the valley’s western edge, the home enjoys stunning views in every direction. “You get this coastal fog that settles in at night,” says Weiss. “After I wake up, I’ll walk around the gardens and watch the mist burn off. When the sun breaks through those clouds, it’s just spectacular.”

If the mornings here are magical, the afternoons and evenings can be even more so, which is what drew Weiss and his wife, Lydia Callaghan, to the house. Their primary residence is two hours south, in Palo Alto, where he runs a hedge fund and she recently launched Bouclier, a company that makes bicycle helmet visors designed to provide full-face sun protection. The couple and their twin preteen daughters come to Napa year-round, often with friends and extended family in tow. Days are spent playing on the tennis court, splashing in the infinity pool, or hiking down rugged trails to the creek that runs through the 250-acre property. Sunsets are frequently enjoyed with wine in hand, and star-filled skies and the occasional meteor put on nighttime shows. “In the summer, especially, we like to light a fire on the porch and make s’mores and play board games,” Callaghan says.

The vision from the beginning, she explains, was to create a retreat that would be “rustic and fun and camplike.” To do so, Callaghan and Weiss enlisted Russell Groves, the architect and designer who has done all of their homes and offices over the past 14 years—now seven projects in total. Certain they wanted a place in Napa, the couple initially eyed move-in-ready homes, until their broker insisted they look at this property. A developer was midway through building a house in a château style that, Groves recalls, was a bit too McMansion-esque.

But at 12,000 square feet, with eight bedrooms, including a two-bedroom guesthouse, it would allow for lots of visitors—and the setting was irresistible. “We thought, Wow, even if it’s going to be a major project, this place is so breathtaking,” says Callaghan. Adds Groves, “I don’t mean to deny our creativity, but you could have done practically nothing to this house and it would have been amazing because of its setting.”

In the end, however, Groves and his team spent more than two years on a gut renovation of the residence, which Callaghan and Weiss now call Rancho. In addition to putting on a new standing-seam metal roof and recladding the exterior with gray cedar panels, Groves replaced generic wood windows and doors with larger, leaner ones in steel, dramatically bringing in more light. He also created unimpeded sight lines that extend from the front porch through the house and—thanks to a retractable glass wall—all the way out to the pool and beyond.

When that 70-foot-wide window wall is open, as it often is, the rear terrace and the double-height great room become one continuous space. “Merging indoors and outdoors was a top priority,” says Weiss. “We wanted the house to be the kind of place where everyone would feel relaxed and at home and in nature.”

Which is not to say the house is lacking in refinement. Oak paneling and floorboards, stained in subtle shades of gray, and earthy Heath Ceramics tiles can be found throughout the rooms. The furnishings, meanwhile, are a sophisticated mix of midcentury-modern and bespoke pieces. In the great room, a showstopping table and set of chairs custom made by George Nakashima Woodworker anchor the dining area, while vintage Nakashima armchairs and ottomans accent the living area. And there’s more Nakashima in the master suite, including the bed’s headboard and built-in side tables.

When it comes to furniture, Weiss and Callaghan mostly defer to Groves, but it’s a different story with art, which Weiss says is his real passion. He has a particular affinity for postwar works by artists such as Richard Artschwager, Brice Marden, and Robert Mangold, whose shaped yellow canvas is given pride of place above the living area hearth. Across the room is one of Sol LeWitt’s iconic white grid sculptures. “It’s so mathematical, so geometric,” says Callaghan. “Everyone delights in that piece.”

Certainly Rancho is often buzzing with visitors. “This house is actually much bigger than one we would have built,” says Weiss, “but there are many times when it is completely full with family and friends.” Which is exactly how the couple wants it. “That’s the magic of the place,” Weiss adds. “If I died next week, I would remember all the lovely times we’ve shared up here.” Easy to say, perhaps, when you’ve already got your own little bit of heaven.

Diego Giacometti’s Red-Hot Market

A sale of Giacometti furnishings from Hubert de Givenchy’s collection smashes records and boosts already surging prices

March 15, 2017 By Stephen Wallis

http://www.galeriemagazine.com/diego-giacometti-auction-christies-sothebys-market-2/

For most people, the name Giacometti calls to mind impossibly elongated bronze figures, roughly modeled and hauntingly thin. Viewed as brooding meditations on the anxiety and alienation of modern life, Alberto Giacometti’s iconic sculptures have commanded some of the highest auction prices ever, including the cast of his 1947 Pointing Man that fetched a record $141 million two years ago.

But lately another Giacometti, Alberto’s younger brother Diego, has been making headlines—most recently for a sensational $34.5 million sale of his works from the distinguished collection of fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy on March 6. All 21 lots at Christie’s Paris—including stools, lighting, candleholders, and his signature tables with whimsical sculptural elements—sold well above their estimates. An octagonal table, featuring an oak top and a bronze base with caryatid figures, set a new auction record for Diego Giacometti, selling for $4.4 million against a high estimate of $843,000. Two Tree of Life sculptures brought $2.9 million and two candleholders with stag heads (a favorite Givenchy motif) fetched $870,000, while a pair of glass-top square tables whose bronze stretchers play host to small dogs went for $1.9 million.

“We really started to understand a day or two before the auction that we were going to have exceptional results—that it was going to go mad,” says Christie’s specialist Pauline de Smedt. Because of the distinguished provenance (Givenchy commissioned most of the pieces himself, between the early ’60s and early ’80s), she adds that “it wasn’t just the usual Giacometti buyers. It really was the most important art collectors across categories.”

Diego Giacometti left Switzerland to join Alberto in Paris in 1925, and he spent the next four decades modeling for and assisting his brother, helping to create his plasters and executing patinas for his bronzes. It wasn’t until the 1960s that Diego began focusing on his own work, especially after Alberto died, in 1966. Although his creations share some stylistic similarities with his brother’s sculpture—the lean shapes and sensuously hand-molded surfaces—their spirit is much lighter and more lyrical. Producing furnishings and sculptures on commission, often for friends and acquaintances in the worlds of art and fashion, Diego developed a distinctive visual vocabulary inspired by ancient Etruscan forms and rooted in nature, his unmistakable tables, chairs, and light fixtures ornamented with various flora and a fanciful menagerie of birds, dogs, cats, turtles, horses, deer, and more.

“Until Alberto died, Diego was always his partner, so they can’t really be totally separated—they needed one another, and they were nothing without the other,” notes de Smedt. “But Diego’s creations are totally different in terms of the emotion. Everything in his work is full of dreams—it’s poetic, it’s a fantasy world.”

Diego’s biggest commission—a collection of furniture and lighting for the Picasso Museum in Paris, created shortly before his death, in 1985—helped bolster his recognition. While there has always been a following for Diego’s work, his market has had issues with fakes and unauthorized casts, problems exacerbated by the fact that he didn’t number or always sign his pieces. “For Diego, Giacometti was his brother’s name, and at no point did he want to use the fame and recognition of his brother for himself,” explains de Smedt.

But in the past year, Diego’s market has enjoyed a burst of momentum, thanks to a handful of major sales. Last spring Sotheby’s Paris offered a group of works by Giacometti in its May design auction, led by a tree-form side table that brought nearly $500,000. The Paris firm Artcurial followed that with a robust $5.2 million sale in September of Giacometti pieces from the Brollo family, which had a 20-year relationship with the artist. Sotheby’s achieved a short-lived record for Diego Giacometti, selling one of his octagonal tables for $3.8 million (along with eight other works by him) in its November Impressionist and modern sales in New York. Sotheby’s then mounted an impressive non-selling Giacometti exhibition in Paris, just as Christie’s was gearing up for its spectacular Givenchy sale.

The latest test for the Diego Giacometti market will come on May 17, when Sotheby’s stages a special Paris auction of 30 or so works on May 17. Highlights including a glass-top low table, whose rustic bronze base is ornamented with a small bat and is estimated to bring as much as $320,000.

Despite all the recent activity, de Smedt, for one, isn’t concerned about too much of a good thing creating Giacometti fatigue among buyers. “The work is full of poetry and is very elegant, but it is also timeless,” she remarks. “It can live in a very classic interior or it can very easily live in a contemporary interior. That is its strength.”

Jonathan Horowitz mines politics, social issues, and pop culture to create works of unsettling allure

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted May 11, 2016·Magazine

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/jonathan-horowitz-brant-foundation

A few years ago, New York artist Jonathan Horowitz found himself with “many, many half-full cans of strange-colored paint,” he says—surplus from an earlier project. So he decided to see what he could do with them. At first he mostly dabbed the paint around the center of canvases, but he soon began flinging with abandon, splattering every inch of the surfaces, not to mention the walls of his Bronx studio. The resulting works are chromatic supernovas. “I never really know how they are going to turn out,” says the artist, who also notes that the pieces have an environmental conceit. “I see them as a repository for something that would have gone in a landfill.”

These “Leftover Paint Abstractions,” as Horowitz calls them, are making their debut in an exhibition at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center, the Greenwich, Connecticut, museum established by megacollector Peter Brant. On view May 8 through October, the show focuses on the past decade of Horowitz’s 25-year career, during which he has addressed issues ranging from war to gay rights to animal welfare while routinely slinging sardonic arrows at consumer culture, the media, and celebrity. He’s known for cleverly mixing pop and politics, irony and earnestness, often incorporating art-historical references.

At the Brant there are works devoted to Mel Gibson, Anthony Weiner, and Beyoncé; a glittery rainbow flag that riffs on Jasper Johns’s iconic series; and paintings by friends and assistants who’d been instructed to copy freehand—with varying degrees of success—Mirror #2 by Roy Lichtenstein. The centerpiece is November 4, 2008, a room-size installation documenting Barack Obama’s first White House win, with CNN and Fox News coverage from the day replaying on opposing monitors surrounded by presidential portraits. “With the election coming up, it seemed like the right time to look back,” Horowitz says.

Also on display is the first of his now-celebrated dot-painting projects, in which he invites strangers to render a solid black circle on a small canvas. Each contributor receives a $20 check, and their creations are combined into large grids. “I see the dot works as populations,” says the artist. “Each dot, with its variations, is a kind of portrait of the person who made it.”

Vienna's New Design Hotel

Jean Nouvel’s art-filled Sofitel is Vienna’s cool new design hotel, and a 21st-century beacon for the city.

By Stephen Wallis

March 04, 2011

https://www.departures.com/art-culture/culture-watch/viennas-new-design-hotel

Dinner in The Loft, the top-floor restaurant at the new Sofitel Vienna, is breathtaking. Fifteen-foot-high glass walls provide 360-degree, drop-dead views across the city’s historic center, with the great Gothic St. Stephen’s Cathedral front and center. Designed by Jean Nouvel, the room reflects the French architect’s taste for minimal interiors—all crisp, clean lines and battleship grays. But there’s a twist. Overhead, the ceiling is a riot of gold, amber and blue, a kaleidoscopic image of fall foliage and sky. It’s one of three large-scale works created for the hotel by the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist.

Because the ceiling is curved slightly, its reflections in the glass appear to extend out into the horizon, creating the remarkable illusion of Vienna suspended in permanent, brilliant sunset. The colors are also highly visible from outside the building, serving as a kind of beacon or, as Nouvel likes to say in his heavily accented English, “a magic carpet floating over the city.”

For Nouvel, The Loft was always going to be the signature space of the Sofitel Vienna Stephansdom, the proper name of the 182-room, 18-story hotel located along the Danube Canal, a several-minute walk from the cathedral. The $180 million building, which had a soft opening in December and will be officially launched by Sofitel in March, is a resolutely 21st-century landmark for a city that clings tightly to its imperial Hapsburg and Art Nouveau past.

At 65, the Pritzker Prize–winning Nouvel has done so many notable buildings—the Cartier Foundation and the Arab World Institute in Paris, the Agbar Tower in Barcelona, the Copenhagen Concert Hall—that it’s hard to boil them down to greatest hits. Famously, he does not have a signature style. Despite being a self-professed expert on hotels (“I spend one third of my life in them,” he says), Nouvel has designed few over the years. What he personally wants in a hotel, he says, is “to feel something.”

Viewed straight on during the daytime, Nouvel’s Sofitel might strike some at first glance as a fairly ordinary glass box. Indeed, the architect says he set out to create “the most abstract building possible.” His design, chosen over proposals from Richard Rogers, Rafael Moneo and several others, features low, wide windows that give the building a squat, muscular feeling, despite being one of the tallest structures in Vienna. But as one moves around it, Nouvel’s use of asymmetrical volumes, cantilevers, planes intersecting at unexpected angles, lots of transparent and mirrored surfaces and occasional bursts of color all contribute to a sense of energy and surprise.

The aggressively minimal rooms are nearly monochromatic, either white or gray, plus three that are all-black—colors Nouvel admires for their quality of nothingness. “I always have the temptation of the void,” he says. “Kind of a neutral materiality.”

Contrasting that neutrality is a massive plant wall by Patrick Blanc, the landscape designer and botanist known for his vertical gardens, and a repeat Nouvel collaborator. Located at the rear of the building, Blanc’s wall is visible through the hotel’s lobby and public spaces on the lower levels (including a retail atrium filled with high-end design shops). But the real pop comes from the artworks by Rist. Best known for her hugely popular video installation Pour Your Body Out (7,354 Cubic Meters), exhibited in the atrium at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2008–09, Rist was commissioned to make several works, the most prominent being the restaurant ceiling. In addition, she created a huge aquatic scene over the winter garden (which occupies a triangular void a third of the way up the building) and another one at the entrance, where visitors are greeted by an abstracted close-up of a woman’s eyes, nose and lips underwater. At night those illuminated swaths of color define the building. Nouvel describes them as “explosions.”

Sitting down with Nouvel at the Sofitel’s lobby the day before it opens, he seems a bit tired. It’s been a long day of press conferences (including a consecration by the local bishop), tours of the hotel and small talk. And he’s dissatisfied. It’s the lighting around us—“too bright,” he says with a shrug. That’s not the only thing. The flowers. The staff had put out a large vase of long-stemmed red roses, which he promptly ordered removed, only to have them replaced by branches that were, in his view, absurdly chunky. “Like firewood,” he jokes.

He livens up when talking about Rist. “I thought that Pipilotti was the right artist because she has this very alive and provocative attitude,” he says, noting that her work has an accessible, even optimistic, quality. “I didn’t want to be purely intellectual. I took this approach of almost no color, and I needed a contrast.” He says, without false modesty, that he believes the building will be best known for Rist’s art than for his architecture.

Like all of Nouvel’s buildings, the Sofitel began with him thinking about its context and how to “create complementarity and continuity with the local culture, which in Vienna,” he says, “is linked to painting, to interior decoration, ornament.” His most literal reference was to use diamond-shaped panes in the winter garden that directly echo the iconic roof tiles on St. Stephen’s Cathedral. In an effort to connect to Vienna’s artist community, he brought in art students to execute abstract-patterned works that are drawn in graphite and ink directly on the walls of every guestroom. Most of all, there is a continuity of spirit—a melding of design and art, of luxury and modernity—that mirrors the principles of the great Wiener Werkstätte.

For Sofitel, the Vienna property is arguably the most dramatic example of a global rebranding initiated by its parent company, Accor, the French hotel group. After reducing its portfolio from 204 to 133 hotels in recent years, Sofitel has been overhauling existing properties and building new ones to reflect a new, more upscale image. It has enlisted top French designers like Nouvel and Andrée Putman and given them the autonomy to implement their own style and personality.

“We don’t want to be cookie-cutter,” says Robert Gaymer-Jones, COO of Sofitel worldwide. “We are making sure the style of our brand is unique in every location. If we have a hotel that is challenging and provocative, that’s great—it creates awareness. The last thing I want to be is boring.”

Nouvel, for his part, says he viewed the project as “a real opportunity to create a new attitude for the five-star hotel.” There was at least one concession Sofitel forced him to make. Those all-black rooms. No more than three, they insisted, even though Nouvel pushed for more. While granting that one might not want to sleep in a black room every night, he says, “It can be erotique.”

Next up for Nouvel is the first of his projects in Doha, Qatar: a cylindrical 45-story tower, wrapped in an Islamic-pattern brise-soleil, slated to open in May. “This building cannot be in New York or Paris,” says Nouvel. “It has an Arabian feeling, continuity, sense of light, geometry.” He has major cultural buildings in the works in Doha, Abu Dhabi and Paris (see “Nouvel in Progress”) as well as a hotly debated 82-story skyscraper in New York that would rise next to MoMA and become the second-tallest structure in the city, if built.

His firm, Ateliers Jean Nouvel, is smaller than it was in the go-go days of 2007. And Nouvel is spending more time at his home in the south of France. Over dinner in The Loft—including pâté and frog’s legs and several bottles of wine—his partner and director of business development, Alain Trincal, talks about how Nouvel has expressed a desire to scale back his workload and delegate more. But letting go doesn’t come easily.

After most of the dinner guests have gone, Nouvel can be found in the stairwell leading to the restaurant’s bathrooms, members of his team at his side. He is obsessing, it seems, over something that’s wrong with a small green emergency-exit sign. Turning to say good night, he shrugs and says, “It’s the details.”

Rooms at the Sofitel Vienna Stephansdom start at $330; 1 Praterstrasse; 43-1/906-160; sofitel.com.

Under Construction: Jean Nouvel

Ateliers Jean Nouvel has some 60 projects around the world under construction or in development. Here, a snapshot of three—two of them in the Persian Gulf, where, Nouvel says, “the danger is creating buildings without identity, without culture. No rules, a little wow, different shapes, without reason to be there.” For more details, visit jeannouvel.com.

Philharmonie de Paris: The first major concert hall to be built in the French capital in nearly a century, the $250 million Philharmonie de Paris suggests a loosely stacked pile of bent and crumpled aluminum-clad plates from the outside, with 2,400 terraced seats surrounding the orchestra inside. Slated to open in 2012.

Louvre

Abu Dhabi: Part of a 21st-century cultural complex on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island that includes buildings by Norman Foster, Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid, the Louvre’s $120 million outpost features a huge lace-like dome over a 260,000-square-foot campus of exhibition pavilions, plazas and canals. Slated to open in 2013.

Qatar National Museum: A series of low pavilions in the form of tilting, intersecting disks, the Doha museum was inspired in part by a desert rose. It’s “a symbolic building,” says Nouvel, that addresses “the Qataris’ identity—the meeting of the sea and desert.” Slated to open in 2014.

The Modigliani Mess

His canvases sell for millions. He is also one of the most faked artists of the 20th century. Now, competing catalogue raisonné projects threaten to complicate a historically troubled market.

By Stephen Wallis

April 2001

New York—Page 38 of the 1996 book Modigliani: Témoignages, the fourth volume of Christian Parisot’s catalogue raisonné of the works of Amedeo Modigliani, features a painting titled Tête de femme (“Head of a Woman”), dated 1915. Two pages later, a painting of a reclining nude, titled Nu couché and dated 1916, occupies a dramatic double-page spread. Parisot, a 53-year-old art history professor at the University of Orléans who has devoted much of his career to studying Modigliani’s work, is not the first scholar to publish these paintings. They, along with three dozen other works in Témoignages (“testimonies”) also appear in a 1970 Modigliani catalogue raisonné prepared by Joseph Lanthemann.

But Lanthemann’s catalogue is widely acknowledged to contain numerous mistakes, and these two paintings, says Marc Restellini, are most certainly not the work of Modigliani. Restellini, 36, is director of the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris and has for the past four years been preparing his own catalogue raisonné of Modigliani’s paintings and drawings under the aegis of the Wildenstein Institute. He says that lab tests on the Nu couché in Parisot’s book prove that Modigliani could not possibly have been its author: Analysis conducted at University College London revealed the presence of titanium white, a pigment that was not available until after the artist’s death. And Tête de femme, he says, needs no scientific study—it is obviously not by Modigliani.

These are not the only instances in which Parisot and Restellini have reached contrasting conclusions about works attributed to Modigliani. Both men will tell you that they are not rivals, but if you press them a little, they’ll each give reasons why he and not the other should be considered a trusted authority on Modigliani’s work. The volleys—delivered in generally guarded tones—have ratcheted up since January, when Parisot announced that he was organizing a new committee to research, authenticate and publish the “definitive” catalogue raisonné of the artist’s oeuvre. In other words, to do exactly what Restellini has been doing since spring 1997.

Despite Restellini’s statement that he does not want to “get into a war between experts—we want to stay absolutely outside of these things” and despite Parisot’s insistence that the new committee is not being set up in opposition to Restellini, as one well-placed observer aptly (if crassly) puts it, “there’s obviously a major pissing match going on.”

The stakes in this battle are potentially high. Intensely popular, Modigliani’s paintings sell for huge sums—four have broken the $10 million barrier at auction since November 1998. To establish that a painting is or isn’t by Modigliani creates or negates millions of dollars in value. Complicating matters is the fact that Modigliani is among the most faked artists of the entire 20th century, and his legacy has been notoriously plagued by shoddy scholarship—or worse. “Shark-infested waters” is how one dealer describes the Modigliani market. Another calls it “a minefield.”

“Only somebody who would need their head examined would pay a market price for a painting attributed to Modigliani without getting some kind of professional advice,” says Michael Findlay. A longtime 19th- and 20th-century art specialist at Christie’s who is now with Acquavella Galleries in New York. The issue of where to turn for the final word on works by Modigliani that are not already established could be complicated by the introduction of Parisot’s committee, Findlay notes, although he adds that he has not spoken anyone on the Modigliani committee or discussed its existence with colleagues in the trade or at the auction houses. “If they are presenting themselves as different from or in any sense better than Restellini,” he says, “then I can only say that this is going to muddy the waters. Because that, in effect, will be a glove thrown down as a challenge and will force every dealer, collector and, to some extent, museum curators and auction house people to make a choice as to which catalogue raisonné to accept.”

Findlay’s fear is that people will embrace either the Parisot committee or Restellini based on which one accepts their paintings. “I’m not excited by the prospect that there are possibly going to be two competing experts in a field where, for many years, there has been no living person, only Ceroni.”

Ambrogio Ceroni, who died in 1970, is the only universally accepted Modigliani authority. The catalogues he published in 1958 and 1965 and later updated (in Italian in 1970 and French in 1972) are the starting point for anyone researching a picture attributed to the artist. It is thought that among the 337 paintings that Ceroni included in his final catalogue, he made almost no mistakes. But it is clear that Ceroni was unable to catalogue every single authentic painting, and just how many genuine pictures exist is a matter of significant debate.

According to Parisot, there are at least 50 genuine non-Ceroni paintings that are known. He says that Ceroni indicated there were some 80 pictures he was unable to include in his catalogue because he simply could not locate them. Restellini insists that number is too high. “Modigliani painted five or six paintings a month, so you arrive at a total of around 350 or 360,” he says. “But not 420—that’s impossible.”

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Over the years, numerous Modigliani catalogues and books have been published with false paintings. Indeed, fakes have been around since shortly after the artist’s death. When Modigliani succumbed to tuberculosis in Paris in January 1920, at age 35, very few records of his output existed. During his lifetime, he achieved minimal recognition, and his work wasn’t worth much. But that began to change shortly after he died, and it is widely held that his last dealer, Léopold Zborowski, was involved in commissioning fakes or completing canvases left unfinished in the artist’s studio and selling them. A Polish immigrant who became Modigliani’s official representative in 1918—after dealer Paul Guillaume canceled his contract with the troubled artist—Zborowski is said to have been perpetually short of money.

“The value of Modigliani got up so high just after he died, and Zborowski was the only source for works,” says Restellini. “He got requests and started to make Modiglianis. So we have very old paintings that are completely fake.”

Modigliani is perhaps tempting to forgers because the distinctive style of his figures—the elongated faces and necks; the curved or angular noses; the small, pursed mouths; the sloping shoulders; the almond eyes—might seem, superficially at least, easier to fake than other artists’ work. According to Restellini, for every authentic Modigliani painting there are three fakes, and for every drawing, nine fakes.

David Norman, director of Impressionist and modern art at Sotheby’s New York, says he has not encountered as many fakes as Restellini describes, but agrees that among 20th-century artists Modigliani is “one of the handful that is most often faked.” He adds that he sees plenty of works that he would “not necessarily count as fakes but perhaps wishful thinking on the part of owners.”

Given the proliferation of Modigliani forgeries, it’s hardly surprising that a significant number of them have entered the market and been published as genuine. “I have occasionally gone through old sale catalogues from the ’30s and ’40s and have looked at works that, to my eye, most anybody today would reject,” says Norman. “The Modigliani field always seems to have been rife with contending scholars and sources, and Ceroni remains the only book that everybody universally accepts. In every other book you can easily find a work that somebody calls into question.”

That includes Parisot’s, which dealers and auction house specialists contacted by Art & Auction allege contain a number of questionable works and obvious fakes. Parisot, who has held a chair at the University of Orléans since 1978, says his “lifetime passion” for Modigliani began when he met the artist’s daughter, Jeanne Modigliani, in 1975. The two worked together until her death in 1984, and Parisot has since organized numerous exhibitions and published (by his count) more than 20 books on Modigliani and the School of Paris, including his unfinished Modigliani catalogue raisonné.

Parisot says that Jeanne Modigliani entrusted him with an unspecified amount of archival material related to her father’s work. He claims that she also assigned him the droit morale, a group of legal rights in France belonging to artists that are designed to give them the authority to protect the integrity of their work. Some of these rights pass to the artist’s heirs, the most significant of which is the right to perform authentications. But droit morale or not, Parisot’s authority as a Modigliani specialist has not been universally acknowleged.

Meanwhile, with the backing of the Wildensteins—the respected publishers of more than 40 artists’ catalogues raisonnés and owners of the Wildenstein & Company gallery in New York—Restellini quickly became the primary authenticator of works attributed to Modigliani. Howard Rutkowski, head of Impressionist and modern art at Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg, who previously worked at Sotheby’s, recalls, “Until Restellini starting vetting pictures, essentially we wouldn’t take a picture if it was not in Ceroni.” But today, as dealers will tell you, if you want to sell a Modigliani that is not in Ceroni, you’ll probably need Restellini’s blessing.

When Restellini began working on his catalogue raisonné, however, he was not exactly a household name in the field of Modigliani scholarship. A lecturer in art history at the Sorbonne from 1988 to ’93, he had prepared a small exhibition of Modigliani’s portraits and landscapes in ’88 in Paris (for which he borrowed a group of drawings from Parisot) and a retrospective of the artist’s work in ’92 in Tokyo. But Restellini says that his experience with the artist’s work dates back to his childhood. “My grandfather was very close with the main sponsor of Modigliani,” he explains. “I first held a Modigliani in my hands when I was five years old.”

That sponsor was Jonas Netter, “a partner of Zborowski,” who, Restellini explains, “between 1918 and 1920, paid Modigliani FF500 a month.” Netter also bought a number of Modigliani’s paintings and kept lists, bills of sale and correspondence related to his purchases. Thanks to the family connection, Restellini has access to these documents. He claims that he is the only scholar who has access to this archival material, as well as to material provided to him by a relative of Roger Dutilleul, another important collector of Modigliani’s work.

The fact that Restellini has these archives may well have played a role in the Wildenstein Institute’s decision to work with him. He says the project came together a couple of years after he was introduced to Daniel Wildenstein (who oversees the institute) by Joachim Pissarro, who is currently preparing a catalogue raisonné at the institute on the works of his great-grandfather, Camille Pissarro.

Not everyone is pleased with the authority that Restellini now wields, and his working methods have occasionally caused frustration among those awaiting decisions on works sent to him for examination. One auction house specialist raises concerns about Restellini’s reliance on scientific analysis. “We had a painting, and he was concerned that one element of it was not by the artist,” the specialist recalls. “Stylistically, I was looking at it with all my colleagues and saying, Of course it is. And we were held up for months having to send the picture so that a little speck could be taken and analyzed. That kind of stuff can make you crazy, because we knew it was right and he determined that it was right but we missed a sale.”

Restellini defends his use of scientific analysis as essential to understanding how Modigliani worked from year to year—what types of paint he used, whether he made underdrawings, etc. Such information, he says, is needed in order to compare works and make judgments about authenticity. “It’s the only way to do serious research on Modigliani,” he says. “We have objective, scientific analysis, which confirms what the eye sees. I refuse to be pushed by pressure from the market, and that’s a problem because an auction house will come here with a painting and they want to know in two or three days whether or not we will include the painting [in the catalogue raisonné]. But sometimes we must compare, we must understand, we must make different analyses.”

Several members of the trade note that, however slow Restellini might be, they respect his thoroughness and insistence on inspecting every work firsthand. Restellini spends only two afternoons a week at the Wildenstein Institute, and he receives no compensation for his work, except for the royalties he will earn on the catalogue raisonné, whose publication is tentatively planned for late 2002 or 2003.

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Unveiled at a sparsely attended press conference at the Carlyle Hotel in New York on January 23 and detailed in an information packet that was sent out to journalists, auction houses and some 250 international galleries, the new committee assembled by Parisot is being trumpeted as a “blue-ribbon panel” of “foremost scholars” whose purpose is “to safeguard, research and authenticate [the] work of Amedeo Modigliani.” In a mission statement included in the press materials, Parisot noted that “the controversy over the artist’s oeuvre has escalated” and that “the controversy must be resolved.”

The committee’s members, who are unpaid and are to meet two to four times a year, are (in addition to Parisot): Jean Kisling, the son of artist Moïse Kisling—a close friend of Modigliani’s—and author of the catalogue raisonné of his father’s work; Masaaki Iseki, director of the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum and a specialist in 20th-century Italian art; Claude Mollard, an art historian and delegate of the French Ministry of Culture; and Marie-Claire Mansecal, archivist of the works of Georges Dorignac, a secondary School of Paris artist who was related by marriage to Modigliani’s last mistress, Jeanne Hébuterne. André Schoeller, a Paris expert in late 19th- and 20th-century art, resigned from the committee shortly after it was unveiled, citing health reasons.

Officially headquartered in New York, the committee also has offices in Paris and Livorno, Italy (Modigliani’s birthplace). Funding for its activities is provided by Canale Arte Publishing in Turin, Italy, which will publish the group’s catalogue raisonné. All decisions on whether to accept or reject works for the catalogue will be made by majority vote, and each member has one vote. The committee’s first working meeting is scheduled for this month in Paris. Among the issues to be addressed at the meeting—according to a handwritten agenda faxed to Art & Auction—is the legal basis on which Parisot and the committee claim the sole right (assigned, Parisot asserts, by Jeanne Modigliani) to call their catalogue the official “catalogue raisonné.”

But the committee faces an uphill battle in gaining acceptance from the art market. A number of dealers and auction house specialists express skepticism about the credentials of the individual committee members to serve as authenticators of Modigliani’s work.

Indeed, veteran Paris dealer Daniel Malingue doesn’t mince words in voicing his doubts: “This committee is a complete joke. Jean Kisling is a good friend of mine, but I don’t think that he or the other people know enough to be members of the committee. Parisot went fishing and got people who all the world can see don’t know enough about Modigliani to say whether something is good.” Malingue believes that the committee will have minimal impact because, he says, “nobody will take their catalogue seriously.”

Respected Geneva-based art adviser Marc Blondeau, is equally forthright in his dismissal of the committee. “It’s a nonsense for me—it’s a non-event,” he says. “How can we trust someone who made a catalogue that includes some very dubious and obvious fake paintings? Parisot can’t be trusted.” Blondeau adds that “the only person with an eye in that group is André Schoeller, and he has resigned.” (Schoeller organized the 1987 sale of the Georges Renand collection in Paris, featuring the 1917 Modigliani nude La Belle Romaine, which became the most expensive work by the artist ever sold at auction when it brought $16.8 million at Sotheby’s New York in November 1999.) When contacted by Art & Auction, Schoeller’s son, Eric (who is an expert in modern and contemporary art), confirmed that his father had stepped down for health reasons, and added, “We are on good terms with Mr. Parisot and with other members of the committee.”

Most auction house specialists, meanwhile, offer cautiously neutral reactions to the committee, indicating that they are taking a wait-and-see attitude. One specialist concedes that he doesn’t “know of anyone who sees this committee as having a shot at being credible” but explains that he is hesitant to publicly dismiss the group. “They could make a fuss and claim that something is fake when it’s not,” he says. “A purchaser at an auction might see this and might not understand the nuances, and we might get stuck having to cancel a sale, or the work could get devalued. I don’t fear these people’s judgment, but they could still cause problems down the line, which is why I think people at the auction houses are going to refrain from saying that they won’t use them.”

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As part of efforts to promote the committee, Parisot is eager to draw distinctions between his group and the Wildenstein Institute. Speaking with Art & Auction (through an interpreter) at the committee’s New York offices in January, he suggested that there was no certainty that Restellini’s catalogue would ever be published. To lend weight to this possibility, he claimed that to his knowledge only one of numerous catalogues raisonnés started by the Wildenstein Institute has been published—the works of Claude Monet. In fact, some 40 have been published.

Parisot also emphasized that there are no collectors or dealers on the committee. “We do not have paintings worth millions like Wildenstein, so we can be more independent,” he says. “Wildenstein has financial weight, we have intellectual weight.”

In a rare interview with Art & Auction conducted at the institute in early February, Daniel Wildenstein insisted that the gallery has no involvement with the institute’s catalogues. He said that he does not own a single work by Modigliani nor has he bought or sold any of the dozen or so previously uncatalogued works discovered by Restellini.

His reasons for supporting Restellini have nothing to do with financial interests. “I knew Ceroni very well, and he was a real connoisseur of Modigliani,” he said. “Later on, some other books were published on Modigliani that seem to me to be very wrong—they accepted pictures that should not have been accepted. If I had bought all the Modiglianis that were discovered since Ceroni, we would be ruined.”

In the January interview, Parisot made a point of noting that the Wildenstein Institute has twice been taken to court in France by owners of works that Restellini has not accepted for his catalogue. One case involves a drawing of a young girl that appeared in an October 1997 sale at the Bern, Switzerland, auction house Dobiaschofsky. The undated drawing had been consigned along with a drawing of a young boy, and each work was given an estimate of SF290,000 ($199,000). Both failed to sell, and a few months later the owner took them to Restellini for examination. In letter dated March 5, 1998, Restellini wrote to the owner informing him that he did not intend to include either drawing in his catalogue. He believes that the two drawings are by the same hand but that “there are elements that are not credible” as works by Modigliani. In August 1999, the owner sued the Wildenstein Institute over the drawing of the girl, and the Tribunal de Grande Instance in Paris ordered a new evaluation of the work by the expert Guy-Patrice Dauberville, who determined that it is, in fact, genuine. The owner had purchased the portrait of the girl for FF1.7 million ($252,000) in a March 1991 sale conducted by Paris auctioneer Pierre Cornette de Saint-Cyr, and the portrait of the boy for SF230,000 ($177,000) in December 1990 from Bevaix, Switzerland, auctioneer Pierre-Yves Gabus. Both drawings are included in the second volume of Parisot’s catalogue raisonné, published in 1991. The parties are currently awaiting a ruling from the court.

The other case involves a drawing of a woman in a hat that was last sold in June 1985 by Paris auctioneers Ader, Picard and Tajan in June 1985 for FF379,000 ($55,000). Again, when the drawing was submitted to Restellini, he indicated that he did not intend to include it in his catalogue. The owner took the matter to court, and another expert, Marie-Hélène Frinfeder, is currently evaluating the work. For now, Restellini stands firmly by his opinion. As support he points to a copy of an exhibition catalogue from a 1968 show in Japan that features handwritten notations by Ceroni. Beneath the illustration for this particular drawing, Ceroni clearly wrote “non,” which Restellini interprets to mean that Ceroni did not believe the drawing is right.

Ceroni included in his catalogues fewer than 180 of Modigliani’s drawings, which are much more problematic to authenticate than his paintings. (Modigliani also made stone sculptures, 25 of which survive and are well known.) “The drawings are very difficult,” says Malingue. “Nobody knows. If people were prepared to put their own heads on the line saying, ‘I’m sure this is good and this is fake,’ all the heads would be cut off. Everybody will make mistakes in the authentication of [Modigliani’s] drawings.”

—

On March 8, Swann Galleries in New York offered a colored drawing of a caryatid figure attributed to Modigliani, dated circa 1912–14, with an estimate of $175,000 to $200,000. Twice offered at auction in the early ’90s, the work was accompanied by a 1994 letter of authentication from Parisot, but it is not in Ceroni and had not been seen firsthand by Restellini. Swann had sent photographs to Restellini’s office, but did not respond to his request to submit the drawing to him for direct examination because there wasn’t enough time, says Swann prints and drawings specialist Todd Weyman. Despite the fact that Swann featured the work in its ads and promotional material for the sale, bidding on the caryatid stopped at $140,000. However, according to Weyman, none of the clients interested in the drawing expressed concern about its authenticity.

Because Modigliani’s drawings are less well documented than his paintings, previously unknown examples are more likely to surface. Nearly a decade ago Noël Alexandre—the son of the earliest significant collector of Modigliani’s work, Paul Alexandre—organized an exhibition of more than 100 unrecorded drawings from his father’s collection called “The Unknown Modigliani,” which appeared at several museums around the world between 1993 and 1996. In December 1999, Sotheby’s London offered 18 drawings from this group, all accompanied by notices from Restellini stating that he planned to include them in his catalogue. Eleven of them sold for total of £738,800 ($1.2 million).

However, a large number of fake Modigliani drawings have circulated (the famously accomplished forger Elmyr de Hory is thought to have produced some), and of course, there are people who want to sell them. Restellini says that not only has he been approached with bribes—he once received a drawing for examination accompanied by a check for FF2 million ($284,000)—his life has even been threatened.

The financial stakes are highest with paintings, of course. To date, Restellini has declared his support for around a dozen paintings that are not in Ceroni, including a small portrait of man that Phillips offered in its New York Impressionist and modern sale in November. Estimated at $600,000 to $800,000, the circa 1918–19 portrait failed to find a buyer but sold privately after the auction for an undisclosed price.

Asked whether the fact that the painting is not in Ceroni had a negative effect, Rutkowski says, “One person questioned it, but most were satisfied with the Restellini certificate.” However, he adds, “While the Wildenstein Institute seems to satisfy a lot of people, you hear that maybe this is not the ideal solution, and it’s a real problem. Essentially, we would just prefer to have something that is in Ceroni and for which there are no questions.”

Indeed, members of the trade say that serious collectors insist on thorough documentation for any work attributed to Modigliani before they invest their money. Until an updated catalogue raisonné is published and accepted, many collectors will simply shy away from works that are previously unrecorded.

In the meantime, as Philip Hook, senior director of Impressionist and modern art at Sotheby’s London, points out, dealers and auction house specialists will continue to rely, at least in part, on their own instincts. “The people who have a lot of practical, day-to-day experience handling Modigliani’s work—the more experienced dealers and the auction houses—do form their own views,” he says. “Where the existing expertise seems to be inadequate or inconsistent with the views of people in the trade who have a lot of experience with the artist, ultimately, people in the trade follow their own instincts. There are situations where people in the trade and the auction houses actually are better judges than certain experts.”

—

Given its pervasive problems with fakes and with conflicting scholars and reference texts, the Modigliani market is an interesting case study for the mostly unspoken ways in which the art world functions—as an essentially self-regulated marketplace. “The problem in our business is that there is no law, there are no rules,” says Malingue. “Tomorrow, if I decide I want to put together a committee and make a new catalogue raisonné, nobody’s going to do anything to stop me. People sometimes sell works of art with certificates of authentication of certain experts but, in fact, the world knows that these experts are not good. But there is no police. Anybody can claim to be an expert.”

Perhaps, but to have a lasting influence, any “ expert” must be recognized by the academic and art market communities. As Michael Findlay notes, “You can always wave a piece of paper. The standing joke in the art world is, the thicker the file, the less likely the painting is to be right.”

The process whereby an individual or a committee becomes the reigning authority on an artist’s work is not something that is decided formally, of course, and it occurs over a period of time. Presently Restellini is the authority that auctioneers and dealers most often turn to for an opinion on works attributed to Modigliani. For what it’s worth, several months ago, Joseph Guttmann, a private dealer based in New York and Los Angeles who is friendly with Parisot, predicted to Art & Auction, “While Marc Restellini is at the moment the darling of the auction houses, it won’t be much longer before he is going to run out of favor with them.” Time will tell.

Meanwhile, Restellini and Parisot continue with the lengthy, costly and, in some respects, thankless task of preparing their catalogues. According to a brochure from the Wildenstein Institute, it took Daniel Wildenstein 36 years to complete his five-volume Monet catalogue raisonné. “This labor of love,” reads the brochure, “demands the dedicated patience of a Benedictine monk, the painstaking probing of an ant.” And, one might add, the intrepid spirit of an explorer.    

Dealers Battle Over Modigliani—Or Is It?

By Stephen Wallis

January 2000

So You Want to Buy a Rembrandt?

In this rarefied collecting field, it's all about last chances.

By Stephen Wallis on March 30, 2010

http://www.departures.com/art-culture/culture-watch/so-you-want-buy-rembrandt

With this year marking the 400th birthday of Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, there's no shortage of opportunities to see the Dutch mas-ter's work in museums from Dayton to Washington, D.C., to his adopted home of Amsterdam, where he's being fêted as a national hero. But if one should want to actually buy a Rembrandt painting, the options are, well, gloriously few.

"Just by heart I think there are fourteen Rembrandts in the world that are still privately owned," says Robert Noortman, the dealer in Maastricht, the Netherlands, who has sold three himself in the past couple of years. "Of those, six are in Britain and won't get an export license to leave the country."

It's hard to understate the mythic status of Rembrandt's paintings, with the high, stark light, the moody palette of ochers and umbers, and the intense emotion—masterpieces such as The Return of the Prodigal Son in the Hermitage and the great portrait of Jan Six in the Six Collection, a work valued at more than $300 million.

At one point, some 630 paintings were attributed to the artist. That number has been cut in half since the Rembrandt Research Project— currently headed by Ernst van de Wetering—compiled a definitive catalogue, downgrading works done by pupils and imitators or worse. As this issue goes to press, three major paintings endorsed by Van de Wetering are on the market.

Noortman is selling one of them, the dashing Portrait of a Man in a Red Doublet from 1633. The sitter, he says, was probably "a Spanish soldier in a garrison in The Hague—a guy who was very pleased with himself and wanted to be painted." The asking price: $32 million.

New York dealer Otto Naumann has the 1635 Minerva in Her Study priced at $45 million (see "A $45 Million Goddess"). At that echelon, the number of potential buyers is thin. Naumann has been offering the painting for almost five years. "I think I know all the buyers who can spend a lot of money, and almost no collectors of old masters have reached that high," he says.

Similarly, Noortman has had Man in a Red Doublet since he purchased it at auction in early 2001. And it took him more than four years to sell the $50 million Portrait of a Lady, Age 62, an exquisite work from 1632 that he had acquired in 2000. September 11 definitely had a chilling effect, but the bottom line is, deals on this level take time.

A more recent market entrant is the 1661 Apostle James the Major, from the collection of the Shippy Foundation of Anne Peretz, wife of the New Republic magazine owner, Martin Peretz. Included in last year's traveling exhibition "Rembrandt's Late Religious Portraits," the work is being offered by Salander-O'Reilly Galleries in New York for around $41 million.

"It possesses the kind of profound pathos and intensity that's so admired in the artist's work," says Andrew Butterfield, a director at Salander-O'Reilly. Plus, he adds, it is extremely rare, even by Rembrandt standards: "It's the only one of his paintings from the 1660s not in a museum, and there are just a very few from the 1650s left in private hands."

Late paintings don't come up, in part because Rembrandt became less prolific. Naumann also explains that "the later works were more sought after when the tycoons like Mellon were buying. They liked the bigger, splashier ones that the artist painted more alla prima, without so much preparation."

These days buyers don't have the luxury of preference, with such a minuscule supply. Sure, paintings are reattributed and discoveries do pop up, such as the self-portrait casino mogul Steve Wynn bought three years ago for $11 million; it had been found beneath layers of overpaint. But any Rembrandt on the market is, essentially, a last-gasp opportunity.

Who to Know

Andrew Butterfield Salander-O'Reilly Galleries,22 E. 71 St., New York;212-879-6606; www.salander.com

Otto Naumann 22 E. 80th St., New York;212-734-4443; www.dutchpaintings.com

Robert Noortman 49 Vrijthof, Maastricht, the Netherlands; 31-43/321-6745; www.noortman.com

Ernst van de Wetering Rembrandt Research Project, www.rembrandtresearchproject.org; rembrandt.research.projectfgw@uva.nl

A $45 Million Goddess

It was the talk of the art world when New York dealer Otto Naumann unveiled it at the 2002 European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht: Rembrandt's Minerva in Her Study, a monumental portrait of the goddess of war and wisdom, signed and dated 1635, for $40 million.

Little is known about the Minerva's history prior to the 18th century, when it was recorded in the collection of Lord Somerville in Scotland. Over the next 200 years, it had numerous owners—including the Swedish industrialist Axel Wenner-Gren, the founder of Electrolux—before landing with a Japanese collector who sold it to Naumann and his busi-ness partner, Milwaukee dealer and collector Alfred Bader.

"If you don't know anything about Rembrandt, this painting can be hard to swallow," Naumann says. "She's a big, wide lady, but she's a mythological figure and she's supposed to be larger than life. One thing's for sure: The work is in remarkable condition. It's rare to see something that's almost exactly how it looked when Rembrandt took away his last brushstroke."

The Minerva paid a long visit to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, but the museum couldn't raise the cash and opted instead to buy the 1633 Portrait of a Young Woman from Naumann for $13 million. Naumann also sent the Minerva to Stockholm, hoping the Wenner-Gren connection might stir interest there—to no avail.

"It's hard to say the Minerva [now $45 million] has been burned, although it has been shopped around—and not all by me," Naumann notes. "One guy pulled it right off my Web site and offered it to a lot of people, claiming he had the exclusive. A so-called dealer from Florida even tried to sell it to me for thirty-five million, saying the owner would come down. Amazing."

Designer Paul Cocksedge Excavates His Studio for His Latest Creations

Facing eviction, the designer uses pieces of his London work space for a new suite of furniture to debut during Milan Design Week

By Stephen Wallis

March 24, 2017

http://www.galeriemagazine.com/paul-cocksedge-excavates-his-studio-for-his-latest-creations/

British designer Paul Cocksedge creates the kind of work that makes you think—if not exclaim outright—“That’s brilliant!” To conjure his minimalist furnishings and lighting, he experiments intensively with materials and process, but the resulting pieces inevitably embrace whimsy, surprise, even visual sleights of hand: ghostly pendant lights that appear to float in midair, say, or cantilevered metal tables that by all rights look as if they should topple over. There’s a moment of discovery that happens once you recognize the magic.

The latest works to emerge from Cocksedge’s London studio, former Victorian stables in Hackney, will be the last ones produced in the space. With an impending redevelopment of the site forcing the designer to relocate, he decided to make the building itself part of a farewell project.

Using special tools, Cocksedge repeatedly cut deep down into the studio floor and extracted hundreds of cylindrical core samples, each revealing layers of concrete, rubble, and brick. He then trimmed the circular pieces—some resembling rustic terrazzo—and incorporated them into glass-top tables and shelving.

Five of these works will be unveiled at the Palazzo Bocconi-Rizzoli-Carraro in Milan, April 4–9, to coincide with the Salone di Mobile. Titled “Excavation: Evicted,” the show is being presented by Friedman Benda, Cocksedge’s New York gallery, in collaboration with Beatrice Trussardi, whose foundation supports a variety of art projects, often in unconventional spaces. (The palazzo is currently undergoing renovations and is slated to reopen as a museum of Etruscan art next year.)

Cocksedge’s idea for the body of work was to commemorate the dozen years he spent in the studio and to reference the building’s history. He also sees it as being symbolic of how London’s surging real estate prices are pushing creative communities out of many neighborhoods and requiring them to take root elsewhere. “This project is a personal elegy,” notes Friedman Benda director Jennifer Olshin. “But it’s also a metaphor for reinvention.”

The Bold Work of Charline von Heyl

With her richly dissonant, enigmatic canvases, the artist continually pushes painting in compelling new directions

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted February 29, 2012·Magazine

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/artist-charline-von-heyl-article

Charline von Heyl is all about incongruities—in life as well as in her art. The German-born painter divides her time between New York and Marfa, the middle-of-nowhere West Texas town that, despite its well-documented rise as a cultural destination, remains undeniably sleepy. She and her husband, painter Christopher Wool, both did artist residencies in Marfa and fell in love with it. “I need the electric environment of New York, but I’m always so hungry to get to the solitude of Marfa,” says Von Heyl, who typically spends at least part of each winter in Texas. “It allows me to really concentrate and dig deeper.”

That intense engagement is evident in Von Heyl’s paintings, complexly layered compositions teeming with oppositions: abstraction and figuration, organic and geometric forms, depth and flatness. Though she draws inspiration from disparate sources ranging from comic books to Abstract Expressionist masters, her references are rarely literal; each canvas is an improvisation the artist works and reworks, obliterating and rebuilding as she goes, often mixing media. “It’s like bending bones,” she says, “combining things that don’t seem to want to go together to make a new kind of image.” This keen sense of process, even struggle, is what gives Von Heyl’s art its vitality, the interplay of elements amounting to a rich visual stew. As critic Jerry Saltz once wrote, “Much of her art takes me to a wonderful snake pit where styles I thought were outmoded turn dangerous again.”

Long respected within the art world as a painter’s painter, Von Heyl is now receiving wider recognition, thanks to a pair of traveling shows. The first U.S. museum survey of her work is at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston from March 21 to July 15, while another, larger exhibition is at the Tate Liverpool from February 24 to May 27. For the moment Von Heyl’s market remains more steady than spectacular, with her new canvases priced around $90,000 at the galleries 1301PE in Los Angeles (6150 Wilshire Blvd.; 323-938-5822) and Friedrich Petzel in New York (535/537 W. 22nd St.; 212-680-9467). As the artist herself puts it, her work is “an acquired taste—people have taken a long time to get into it because it really benefits from a second look.” Or even better, a third.

Construction Begins on SHoP’s American Copper Buildings in New York City

The New York–based firm’s design features two buildings connected by a dramatic three-story sky bridge

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted April 27, 2016

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/construction-begins-shop-architects-new-york-skyscrapers-linked-skybridge

A pair of tilting apartment towers now under construction on Manhattan’s far east side is bringing a stretch of humdrum riverfront some serious architectural pizzazz. Designed by SHoP Architects, the recently topped-out buildings at 626 First Avenue feature distinctively bent profiles that suggest a dancing couple, their backs gracefully arched. Rising 41 and 48 floors, the two structures are linked in the middle by a three-story sky bridge—the highest in the city—containing a lounge area and a 75-foot lap pool with dramatic views.

“We thought about how we could push the idea of a residential tower in terms of form but also stay within the site’s prescribed envelope,” says SHoP principal Gregg Pasquarelli. “The idea we came up with was to have one building fold north-south and the other fold east-west. Then where they come closest together, we thought about connecting them with this public amenity space—it’s like the moment in a tango when the arm goes around the small of the back.”

The towers, created for JDS Development Group, have been named the American Copper Buildings, thanks to another eye-catching feature: their shimmering metal façades. While the sides looking east and west are entirely glass, the windows on the north and south exposures are framed by copper panels—some 5,000 of them, weighing a total of more than four million pounds. “I don’t think anyone had ever done a copper building that tall,” says Pasquarelli. “We really liked the idea that the material comes as this super-shiny penny, then mellows to a kind of chocolate-brown and eventually turns green.” Just how long that process will take isn’t certain—anywhere from a decade to half a century. Pasquarelli notes that they could have treated the copper to make it green from the get-go, but given the building’s highly visible location next to FDR Drive, the East River Ferry’s 34th Street terminal, and the Midtown Tunnel, they decided to leave the metal raw. “We thought it would be cool for the whole city to be able to watch it age and develop a patina, until it becomes the color of the Statue of Liberty,” he says. “We thought of it almost as a building performance art piece for New York.”

The buildings will contain 761 rental apartments, 20 percent of which have been designated as affordable housing. Amenities include a fitness center, hammam, yoga studio, rock-climbing wall, screening room, and rooftop deck with an infinity-edge pool. SHoP is devising the finishes, fixtures, and cabinetry for the residences as well as overseeing all aspects of the decor for the public spaces. Outdoors, the landscape firm Scape is designing a 38,000-square-foot park with storm buffers that would offer protection in the event of flooding from the East River.

The refinements and amenities in the American Copper Buildings, which are slated for completion by early 2017, aim to be on par with those of high-end condo properties. It’s the same strategy behind another high-profile collaboration between SHoP and JDS, the recently approved 73-story rental apartment tower in downtown Brooklyn, which will be that borough’s tallest structure. Says Pasquarelli, “Our client, Michael Stern at JDS, has said that his goal is to reposition how people think about rental buildings.”

Photographer Clifford Ross Gets The Spotlight This Summer

Lyrical beauty meets high-tech precision in the captivating work of photographer Clifford Ross

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted June 30, 2015·Magazine

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/clifford-ross-wave-art-article

It’s hard to believe that, as a child, artist Clifford Ross was terrified of going into the ocean. Numerous times over the past two decades, he has ventured chest-deep into roiling surf off East Hampton, New York, camera in hand, to create his mesmerizing black-and-white photographs of hurricane waves. “I realized the only way to convey that power and lyricism was to put the audience closer,” says Ross, who began the series in the late ’90s. “You don’t fight that ocean, you just become part of it.”

The uncompromising Ross—whose work is the subject of multiple shows this summer, most notably a midcareer survey at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts—thrives on tackling challenges both creative and technical. Starting in 2002, he engineered and patented his own camera, which uses military aerial film, to capture Colorado’s Mount Sopris, producing some of the highest-resolution landscape images ever. “I spent a year and a half building the camera and another year figuring out how to get the prints right,” he says. “In the end it took about five years to make 14 photographs.”

As is typical for Ross, those pictures seeded new, related bodies of work. In recent years he has consulted endlessly with veneer experts on the elaborate process of printing a 114-foot-long version of a mountain photograph on wood, and fragments of that same image have found their way into Ross’s ongoing experiments with augmented-reality digital animation. “I like exploring,” remarks the artist. “It keeps me in a restless state.”

Ross’s growing interest in “creating immersive experiences with moving images,” as he puts it, eventually led him back to his great muse, the sea. Initially he tried shooting video of waves but couldn’t get the high-frame-rate, high-definition camera into the water. So Ross began collaborating with animators at his New York City studio to devise computer-generated waves with “movement as eccentric as I remember it in nature,” he explains.

The result of these efforts will be shown for the first time at MASS MoCA, on two 23-foot-wide LED walls conjuring crashing surf. “We’ve created something genuinely visceral,” Ross says. “Each video is made up of 1.6 million moving dots of light, and we’re firing them off at a furious rate. It’s almost like you’re being shotgunned with beauty.”

For more details on his work and current shows, visit cliffordross.com.

Click here to see one of Ross's wave videos.

See the Designs for the First Free-Form 3D-Printed House

A Chicago-based design consultant has proposed a technology that could build a single-story, 600- to 800-square-foot residence using 3D printing

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted June 17, 2016

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/tour-worlds-first-free-form-3-d-printed-house

The Chicago office of WATG’s Urban Architecture Studio has conceived what it hopes will be the world’s first free-form 3D-printed house. The proposal won first prize in a competition organized by an entrepreneurial firm in Chattanooga, Tennessee, called Branch Technology, which solicited plans for a single-story, 600- to 800-square-foot residence to be constructed using its proprietary 3D printing process.

WATG’s design, dubbed Curve Appeal, calls for an amorphic structure that would wrap around a mostly glass-walled core containing a living room, kitchen, bedroom, and bath. The scheme features a carport and interior terrace illuminated by skylights. It’s a complex form made possible by Branch’s so-called Cellular Fabrication technology, which uses a customized Kuka robotic arm to print diagrid elements with a carbon-fiber-reinforced composite—in basically whatever shape is desired. After these components are welded together into a complete framework, conventional insulation and concrete can be sprayed to form the walls. The goal is to eventually have a multi-element robotic arm capable of extruding the fill-in material as well as the structural framing, but for now, it’s essentially a hybrid process. “It’s a little like having a UFO and strapping ordinary jet engines to it to make it fly,” says WATG associate vice president Christopher Hurst, who helped oversee the project. “But this is just the infancy of where we’re looking to go with the technology.”

For years, evangelists have been proclaiming the potential of 3D printing to make everything from simple household objects to entire houses. While early experiments in scaling up to create habitable structures have produced aesthetically underwhelming (i.e., boxy, simplistic) results due to the limitations of how conventional 3D printers layer material, the development of robotic arms that can print in midair has opened up a world of dynamic possibilities.

“Right now, 3D modeling and parametric design is going crazy—you can do all kinds of things with the technology,” Hurst says. “But the problem is that so many designs being produced are too complicated and expensive to be fabricated. A lot of gymnastics goes into making standard materials fit onto these designs.” What 3D printing can do, in principle, is allow architects to avoid having to dumb down designs for cost reasons. “Eventually, you’ll be able to hand over your designs to a contractor, and they’ll be able to go out with their army of Kuka arms and fabricate the structure on site,” adds Hurst. “The effect would be to level the economic playing field—and free up the minds of designers.”

Cy Twombly and Sally Mann’s Studio Days

Painter Cy Twombly and photographer Sally Mann developed a special bond through many shared days in Twombly’s studio, documented by Mann and compiled in her upcoming book Remembered Light: Cy Twombly in Lexington, published by Abrams in association with Gagosian Gallery

By Stephen Wallis

Sept. 7, 2016

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cy-twombly-and-sally-manns-studio-days-1473270128

IT WAS INEVITABLE that Cy Twombly and Sally Mann would find each other. After all, the two most famous artists from Lexington, Virginia, were both misfits. He was the idiosyncratic painter whose mix of graffiti-like scrawls and literary references defied easy categorization, and she the photographer of evocative family pictures and landscapes who always cleaved a distinctive path. Both chose to work outside the glare of art-capital spotlights: Mann has always been based in rural Lexington, while Twombly spent most of his career in Gaeta, Italy. But in the early ’90s, when he started returning home for half the year, they developed a special bond that lasted until his 2011 death.

“We thought of each other as kindred spirits,” says Mann, who recounts how the two often took walks, went for long rides in her old BMW (“Cy loved that car because it was like a luxury boat, and he could stretch out in it”) and spent time in each other’s studios. His unlikely workspace, a former gas company office, was a humdrum, 1950s brick building with single-pane windows. But there, amid low ceilings and fluorescent lighting, Twombly completed a number of major works. One day in 1999, Mann decided to take a few pictures of his studio, and it turned out to be the start of a 13-year project.

“It began very casually and became sort of a labor of love,” she says. “It never occurred to me that they would ever be published or exhibited.” But this fall, Remembered Light: Cy Twombly in Lexington, a book of those photographs, will be published by Abrams in association with Gagosian Gallery, which will exhibit a selection of the images at its Madison Avenue location through October 29. The pictures capture works in various stages of progress, tabletops piled with materials, walls and floors splashed with paint. “Cy had these competing impulses between personal restraint and this feeling of Dionysian excess and celebration,” says Mann. “In the earliest photographs, the studio was pristine. And by the end you could barely walk through.”

Artist Ellsworth Kelly Dies at Age 92

The unorthodox talent was known for his deceptively simple-seeming, often brilliantly colored abstractions

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted December 29, 2015

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/artist-ellsworth-kelly-dies

America has lost one of its giants of postwar art, Ellsworth Kelly, who died at age 92 on December 27, 2015 at his home in Spencertown, New York, where he had lived and worked for the past 45 years. Known for his deceptively simple-seeming, often brilliantly colored abstractions, Kelly was an unorthodox talent whose seven-decade career defied easy categorization.

After serving as a designer in the army’s camouflage unit during World War II, Kelly studied painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and then set off for Paris, spending several years soaking up the influence of Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, Jean Arp, and other modernist luminaries. In 1954 Kelly moved to New York, which by then had replaced Paris as the premier art world center, but he had no affinity for the Abstract Expressionism that was then in vogue, rejecting in particular what he saw as its cult of personality. Instead he remained resolutely focused—as he would throughout his life—on the austere abstractions he’d begun painting in France, often basing the forms on shapes lifted from nature and life, such as shadows, the contours of leaves, and odd fragments of everyday objects. He did, however, embrace the American penchant for working big.

At the heart of Kelly’s unwavering exploration of form and color was his interest in the perceptual effects of juxtaposing various shapes and hues. He embraced rectilinear and organic forms alike, with gloriously arcing wedges being one favorite. He made captivating use of color but also demonstrated masterful use of black and white. While his work is sometimes lumped in with hard-edged abstraction and minimalist painting, his oeuvre was really too idiosyncratic, too personal for tidy labels.

In addition to paintings, drawings, prints, collages, and even photographs, Kelly made wall reliefs and freestanding sculptures—slender monoliths or intriguingly folded shapes that cast compelling shadows and interact with their settings. Much of Kelly’s art was about creating a dialogue with the surrounding space, and his work nearly always looks its best installed in groups. Never was this truer than for his magnificent 1996 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, with Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiraling rotunda partnering in a dazzling pas de deux.

Kelly received numerous commissions for site-specific works in buildings, and he was keenly interested in architecture. Last year he donated to the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin an unrealized chapel-like structure he had conceived for a collector in the ’80s. His only building design—to be constructed once fundraising is completed—calls for a 2,715-square-foot stone edifice with colored-glass windows, a series of black-and-white marble panels, and a totemic wood sculpture. The artist envisioned it as a place to “rest your eyes, rest your mind,” as he told the New York Times.

Kelly worked up until the end of his life and just last spring impressively filled all four Manhattan spaces of his gallery, Matthew Marks, with new canvases and wall reliefs. Interviewed by A.M. Homes for a story in W magazine a few years ago, the artist enthused that he was “still excited about things I haven’t done,” adding, “Who needs heaven? I only feel my best when I’m working.”

One can imagine him up there in the pantheon, alongside some of his heroes, tools in hand, still toiling away.

The Fate of Art in a Poor Economy

When the economy went topsy-turvy, everyone could see art was next. How bad will it get?

By Stephen Wallis on March 30, 2010

http://www.departures.com/art-culture/culture-watch/fate-art-poor-economy

It wasn’t a promising start. Two days before the opening of Art Basel Miami Beach in early December, the economy was officially declared to be in recession. The Dow, on cue, plunged 700 points. Not that any of this was entirely a surprise. Expectations at the country’s top contemporary art fair—an event that has ballooned into a huge festival with nearly 20 fairs, endless exhibitions, and nonstop parties—were already subdued.

The parade of bad news, from the real estate debacle to the credit crunch to Wall Street’s implosion (the latest poke in the eye, Bernard Madoff’s $50 billion Ponzi scheme, came just days later), had thrown a big wet blanket on the global art boom and left galleries, auction houses, collectors, and artists bracing. Hefty declines at the major fall auctions, where large numbers of works went for well below their estimates or failed to sell at all, added to the anxiety.

In the end, the results in Miami were mixed. While far from a disaster for most, overall sales were down, with many collectors focusing on less-expensive works and galleries having to offer substantial discounts and payment plans. “There is a lot of hesitation,” says Rachel Lehmann, co-owner of the Lehmann Maupin gallery in New York. “Lots of hand-holding is needed, not just with collectors but with artists, staff, curators. Before Miami we had serious talks with all of our artists.
We said, ‘Would you rather go for deeper discounts and sell? Or if you don’t want to, that’s fine, and we won’t push to sell your work in the same way.’ Work by artists who agreed to discounts sold well in Miami. Those who didn’t, barely sold.”

Undeniably, it’s a different world out there, especially in the previously frenzied market for contemporary art. Galleries are laying off staff and cutting back on expenses. Sure, during Art Basel heavyweight dealers like Larry Gagosian and Jay Jopling could be seen drinking $18 cocktails at the Setai, but these days flying coach is more likely to be viewed as a badge of honor than an embarrassment. Dealers are having to work harder, be more patient, and be less controlling in placing works. Laura Solomon, a New York art advisor, recounts how last year, when she approached a prominent gallery about buying a young artist’s work for a client, “they practically asked for his firstborn, requesting information on his collection and a commitment in writing that he’d donate the piece to a museum,” she says. “Recently that same gallery overnighted images and followed up with me every day for a week about a possible sale. They bent over backward.”

New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz, who delivered a talk at Art Basel with the Cassandra-ish title “This Is the End: The Rising Tide of Money Goes Out of the Art World and All Boats Are Sinking,” is among those who argue that the brave new world is actually a blessing for artists, because “marketability will no longer equal likability.” It’s an interesting point, but how will artists fare in a downturn Saltz himself predicted will be harsher than the one in the early nineties? Many galleries are sure to close—maybe 50 or more in New York alone. Who knows? Everyone agrees tough times are here.

That includes the auction houses, which spent the past several years offering sellers ever more generous terms, including lavish guarantees (a privately negotiated sum given to the seller regardless of the result) and splashy catalogues. For the November sales in New York, Christie’s bundled the Hillman and Lawrence collections of late-19th- and 20th-century art into companion hardcover catalogues branded “The Modern Age.” Together they made $47 million, less than half the $104 million low estimate. Especially painful for Christie’s was that the Lawrence works were guaranteed, a practice the company has now essentially stopped, as has Sotheby’s, which announced losses of $52 million on guaranteed property in its fall sales.

The old saw “quality always sells” still (mostly) holds true, though not at any price. Failures in the autumn auctions included major works by Richter, Rothko, and Lichtenstein. Francis Bacon, whose skyrocketing prices reached $86 million last May, also fell back to earth: A 1964 self-portrait, estimated at around $40 million by Christie’s, found no takers. At Sotheby’s an early Philip Guston abstraction from the fifties went for just half its $18 million guarantee.

Based on the recent backsliding in contemporary art prices, some have suggested we’ve returned to 2005–06 price levels, which are, taking a long-term view, still quite high. And while many of the young hedge funders and new buyers from emerging markets who helped fuel the worldwide art boom have retreated in the face of recession, experienced collectors are hunting for opportunities. “The way I look at the fall auctions in New York is that $300 million was spent on postwar and contemporary art in three days,” says art advisor Allan Schwartzman, whose clients include Dallas collector Howard Rachofsky. “That’s a huge amount of money at a moment when the world is in a financial crisis whose depth and length is totally unclear. I was surrounded by real collectors who were bidding—and bidding comfortably. It’s a very different situation from 1990, when the art market crashed and there was a loss of confidence at every price level.”

While it’s to be expected that postwar and contemporary art, which saw the sharpest gains, would fall farthest in a downturn, there were relative bright spots in other categories at the end of 2008: the notably solid Old Masters sales; Sotheby’s antiquities sale, which more than doubled its $4 million low estimate; the Constantiner collection of fashion and celebrity photos at Christie’s, which made $7.7 million and was 90 percent sold.

“It was a quite interesting autumn in fields other than postwar and contemporary,” says Marc Porter, president of Christie’s Americas. “It would be conventional wisdom to say that the whole market has dropped dramatically, but, in fact, other collector markets are chugging along pretty steadily.”

Nonetheless, both houses are cutting costs, laying off staff, and pressing consignors to accept lower estimates and reserves. Of course, the next six months will be critical in assessing how wide and deep the market retrenchment goes. A number of important tests loomed as this issue went to press: the January Old Masters sales in New York, London’s February sales of Impressionist, modern, and contemporary art, and the Yves Saint Laurent collection in Paris, which is expected to bring upwards of $400 million. In March and April there are benchmark New York sales of photographs and of Russian and Asian art—two closely watched categories. Already, a former centerpiece of New York’s Asia Week, the International Asian Art Fair, has been canceled, citing concerns about the economy.

The slump has hit museums hard, too, not only in their endowment investments but also in charitable donations and government funding. In one of the highest profile cases, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art agreed to a much-debated financial bailout by collector Eli Broad after its endowment dwindled to just $6 million from more than $40 million several years ago. Broad, for his part, could be seen at the November auctions snapping up works by Donald Judd, Ed Ruscha, Jeff Koons, and others. “It was a half-price sale,” he told The New York Times after Sotheby’s contemporary art evening session.

“This is normal—cycles never go only up,” says Rachel Lehmann. “There are fantastic opportunities in times like this. Personally I think we’ve seen the bottom of it, but nobody knows how long it’s going to last.”

Sector Watch

Troubled Waters

1. Contemporary Chinese Art

There are all kinds of concerning issues in this recently fast-rising market—rampant speculative buying, artists churning out vast quantities of work in factorylike studios. At the fall contemporary Asian auctions in Hong Kong, results for Chinese works were spotty, with major paintings by high-flying artists such as Zeng Fanzhi, Yue Minjun, and Fang Lijun failing to find buyers. One of the top lots at Christie’s—which saw its total for these sales free-fall from $73 million in May to just under $19 million in November—was Tang Zhigang’s Chinese Fairytale. Meanwhile, reports from New York’s Asian Contemporary Art Fair in November and Miami’s new Art Asia in December weren’t especially encouraging.

2. Russian Art

The meltdown of Moscow’s stock market and plunging oil prices have taken a toll on the newly rich Russians who fueled the swift run-up in this field. At the late-November London sales, Christie’s sold $21 million worth of Russian paintings, silver objects, and icons, compared with $81 million a year ago. Sotheby’s did $38 million—including $337,000 for a Fabergé heart-shaped frame with a miniature of Empress Maria Fedorovna—but that was down from $80 million. Less expensive auctions at Bonhams and MacDougall’s fared even worse. Undeterred, dealer Peter London of West-Eleven gallery is launching the Russian Art Fair in London, slated for early June.

3. Richard Prince (ET Al)

Not to pick on Prince, whose work is much admired (and coveted), but prices paid for his “Nurse” paintings—$8.4 million for one last summer that sold for less than $100,000 six years ago—seem to typify the irrational exuberance that has characterized segments of the contemporary market. In November Sotheby’s and Christie’s each offered a “Nurse” painting, with equally disappointing outcomes. Christie’s had estimated Lake Resort Nurse, from 2003, at $5 million to $7 million, and Valentino’s partner, Giancarlo Giammetti, snagged it for “just” $3.3 million. Of course, similar stories can be told about other artists—Damien Hirst, for one, whose market has been all but dead since his $200 million sale at Sotheby’s in September.

Safer Harbors

1. Old Masters

Stable, steady, driven by connoisseurship rather than investment interests: That’s how the Old Masters market is often described. Without question, the field is not as reliant on the new wealth that pumped up contemporary prices, and results were reassuringly solid at the December auctions in London, where Giambattista Tiepolo’s Portrait of a Lady as Flora brought $4.2 million at Christie’s. As this issue went to press, a big test loomed at the late-January Old Masters sales in New York: Sotheby’s was offering a $12–$16 million J.M.W. Turner and a pair of Frans Hals portraits expected to fetch up to $21 million combined.

2. Modern Decorative Arts

As prices for contemporary design spiked in recent years, early-20th-century decorative arts, generally speaking, enjoyed a more modest rise. And areas like Arts & Crafts, Tiffany, and Art Deco—the traditional core of the design-collecting field—have performed relatively well in spite of the economic downturn. The $3.6 million sale of the Lindemann collection at Christie’s in December—heavy on French pieces from the twenties through forties by Eugène Printz, Pierre Chareau, and Paul Dupré-Lafon—saw robust buying. And both houses’ sessions dedicated to Tiffany were around 90 percent sold.

Painter Enoc Perez's Latest Work

Known for his paintings of modernist buildings, artist Enoc Perez is pushing his work in bold new directions

Text by Stephen Wallis

Photography by Joshua McHugh

Posted October 31, 2013·Magazine

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/enoc-perez-paintings-digital-prints-sculptures

Chalk it up to middle age, but Enoc Perez has never been more productive or creatively rangy. “You reach a point where you don’t feel like you have to prove anything, you just paint for yourself,” says the 46-year-old Manhattan-based artist. “I’m going to keep making art. Lately more is more.”

Perez’s signature works—large, seductive paintings of modernist buildings, from hotels in his native Puerto Rico to icons such as New York’s Lever House and Chicago’s Marina City towers—are owned by major museums and influential collectors like Peter Brant and Aby Rosen. The earliest examples were made via a meticulous process of transferring oil-stick drawings to canvas, sometimes dozens of layers of them, by hand. A couple years ago Perez began using a brush as well, giving the works a more painterly, abstract feel, with thick drips and daubs adding texture and complexity—“almost a sense of decay,” he notes. At the same time, his colors got more extreme, tending toward acid hues or dark, moody tones. “It’s not a naturalistic palette, because I want the works to be discovered as paintings first, not as images of architecture,” says the artist, who just completed a series on buildings by Swiss architects for a spring show at Thomas Ammann Fine Art in Zurich.

But Perez is also moving into entirely new territory, namely with sculptures based on his collection of vintage swizzle sticks, most from Caribbean hotels. The finished works, several of which he debuted in January at Acquavella Galleries—his New York dealer—are cast in bronze or aluminum then painted white, and stand up to ten feet tall. Composed of enlarged versions of the stirrers fused together, the pieces suggest playful, oddly enchanting totems commemorating some faded tropical paradise. “They look like disasters—they’re broken,” the artist says, acknowledging the sense of “failed utopia” and disillusioned modernist ideals that pervades his work.

Perez also paints retro-ish, slightly kitschy nudes (the full scope of his output is chronicled in a monograph coming out from Assouline in December), and he has embarked on another series that involves making digital prints that combine those nudes with works by Picasso, no less, and then adding layers of paint and silver leaf. “I’m addressing perhaps the most important artist in history—that makes anyone nervous,” says Perez. “It’s about shifting out of my comfort zone.” 

A Geometric Hamptons Guesthouse

The architects at Leroy Street Studio and decorator Thad Hayes design a beach retreat with a modern edge

Text by Stephen Wallis

Photography by Scott Frances

Posted July 31, 2011·Magazine

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/leroy-street-studio-hamptons-beach-house-article

The brief a Manhattan-based couple gave the architects of Leroy Street Studio was fairly simple: Build a modern guesthouse that both accommodates visiting families and takes advantage of the spectacular wetlands of the Long Island, New York, village of Westhampton. The firm’s solution, however, turned out to be far more inventive than just a response to a checklist.

Despite its six bedrooms, the couple’s Hamptons retreat had begun to feel cramped, thanks to their five young children and endless guests. “We were chock-full, weekend after weekend,” the wife says, adding that during some Jewish holidays, namely the fall feast of Sukkoth, “we can have up to 30 people eating all their meals here and staying over for three or four days.” So when a property across the street fortuitously came up for sale—a sandy wedge of land facing glittering Quantuck Bay—she and her husband jumped at the opportunity to build expansive guest quarters that would, she explains, “reflect some of our evolving contemporary sensibilities.”

In a part of Long Island where most new construction is hardly shy and retiring, the building reveals itself gradually. Viewed from the road, the two-story, four-bedroom structure appears at first glance to be a modernist box with few windows and cedar cladding. But there is a twist—literally. A section of the first floor is rotated out at a 20-degree angle, with a small portion of the second floor cantilevered above it. Eye-catching too is the slot in the center of the façade that takes the place of a traditional front door; a gangway-style walk passes straight through it to the other side of the house.

“It’s the inverse of a big, grand entrance,” says Marc Turkel, one of the founding partners of Leroy Street Studio, a New York City firm known for high-end residential work and socially minded community-development projects. “The house is quiet on the street, and then, after you pass through this aperture, it opens up to a courtyardlike space with unexpected diagonal views.” Overlooking the bay out back, two wings—raised on stilts above the floodplain—form a bold V shape, with a mahogany deck, a small pool, and a grove of birch trees (the latter had to be hoisted over the house by crane) between them.

The architects’ unusual plan “maximizes the bay experience,” as Morgan Hare, Leroy Street Studio’s other founding partner, puts it. Transparent materials dominate the bay side, most dramatically in the double-height living space and adjacent dining area, where soaring glass walls offer unimpeded views of salt marshes and flocks of shorebirds. All that glass, metal, and pale wood, coupled with the structure’s strong geometries, give the house a somewhat sober personality, but interior designer Thad Hayes ensures that its rooms are also welcoming.

“Because the architecture is very rigorous, I introduced more color and texture than I’d typically use, in order to soften it,” says the Manhattan-based Hayes. “I wanted the spaces to be tailored and clean without being icy or hard-edged.” In the living area, where one wall is taken up with glass-fronted storage for kosher wines, the designer placed custom-made sofas upholstered in a lively cotton by Florence Broadhurst, as well as a lava-stone cocktail table and a handwoven rug from Colombia. Throughout the house, whether on banquettes in the Bulthaup-appointed kitchen or on headboards in the bedrooms upstairs, the fabrics Hayes chose are sturdy and patterned (“nothing precious,” he says) to hold up to children’s play. The designer also accented the spaces with ruggedly stylish vintage furniture, such as George Nelson desks for the bedrooms and George Nakashima chairs around the dining table.

The art, acquired through adviser Candace Worth, is displayed sparingly, often just one work per room. “In the city everything is shown one on top of another,” says the wife. “I really like how the pieces here stand alone.” A suite of abstract oil-stick drawings by Jack Pierson hangs in the living area, and a painting by Daan van Golden—a bold, silhouette-style detail of a flower—blooms above the dining area mantel.

This being the shore, however, family and guests spend most of their time outdoors. Children frolic in the pool or fish off the dock while parents relax in deck chairs, drinks in hand—especially in the evenings, when cinematic sunsets fill the sky. “Unlike the typical arrangement of many homes, where the focus is a great room,” says Hare, “here the great room is the bay.”

The Frieze Generation

A decade after Saatchi and the Young British artists caused a sensation, Pernilla Holmes and Stephen Wallis report on London’s new art and design wave.

By Stephen Wallis and Pernilla Holmes

September 2008

https://www.departures.com/letters/features/frieze-generation

Saturday, October 13, 2007: It was the final night of Frieze Week, the bacchanal of art fairs, auctions, gallery openings, and nonstop cocktails that takes over London each fall. Phillips de Pury auction house, which had spent most of the previous nine hours selling off $85 million worth of recent art, was celebrating with a jam-packed after-party in its still-under-construction Howick Place headquarters. Out on the makeshift dance floor—where an 18-foot, $9.6 million Damien Hirst “Butterfly” painting lined one of the walls—the crowd grooved to the disco and funk band Chic. With ebullient auctioneer Simon de Pury urging collector Jean Pigozzi to join him onstage, Chic broke into “Good Times,” its Studio 54–era classic: “Good times, these are the good times / Our new state of mind, these are the good times.”

One could easily imagine the song as a kind of anthem for the entire weeklong fest that revolves around the Frieze Art Fair, an event that, since its debut in 2003, has energized London’s contemporary art scene and served as a beacon for the rest of the world. Last year Frieze attracted almost 70,000 visitors. During that week the contemporary art sales held by Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips totaled $360 million. Galleries threw parties at the Ritz for star artists and hosted boozy dinners for VIPs at St. John and Claridge’s. Despite escalating concerns over the global credit crunch, real estate woes, roiling stock markets, and the tanking dollar, there are few signs any of this is slowing down.

Not only do galleries put on highly anticipated shows and the auction houses stage major sales during Frieze, but concurrent fairs such as Zoo, Scope, and last year’s newcomer, DesignArt London, help ensure that the top—increasingly international—collectors make a point of being in town. “At the fair we’re seeing more buyers from outside the established markets, from places like Latin America, Russia, and Asia,” says Frieze cofounder Matthew Slotover. “Some of them are beginning to buy art in a very significant way.” Just look at Russian oligarch and part-time London resident Roman Abramovich, whose recent spending spree included $120 million for a pair of trophy paintings by Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud at the May auctions.

A decade ago, when the Royal Academy of Arts staged the landmark “Sensation” exhibition of works from Charles Saatchi’s collection, Hirst, Tracey Emin, and the rest of the Young British Artists, or YBAs, were virtually the country’s official artists and Saatchi was the only London collector most people could name. Now the city boasts a new crop of collectors, some with their own museum spaces, and the most talked-about artists in London often aren’t British but come from Africa, Asia, or Eastern Europe. And there are ever more intriguing overlaps between London’s art world and its richly talented design community.

Frieze launched just as many of these shifts were gathering force, helped along by the opening of the hugely popular Tate Modern and the growth of London as a global financial center. It was the right fair at the right time. And while Frieze pitches its tent in Regent’s Park for a mere handful of days a year, its impact has been huge. “Frieze has made the idea of buying contemporary art more accessible and brought it to a wider British public,” says Slotover. “People have said to me that it used to be weird if you bought contemporary art, and now you’re a bit weird if you don’t.”

In many ways the fair has defined London’s art world today. This is the Frieze Generation and the times are good. —Stephen Wallis

To read the rest, visit: https://www.departures.com/letters/features/frieze-generation

Mono-ha Moment

By Stephen Wallis

magazine Dec 5, 2011

http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/mono-ha-moment/

In the thoroughly mined field of midcentury art, few stones have been left unturned by ferreting curators or opportunistic dealers and collectors. So it’s somewhat surprising that, in the American art world at least, the mention of Mono-ha still brings mostly shrugs. But thanks to interest among some high-profile players, there’s growing curatorial and market awareness of the short-lived Japanese art movement, which lasted roughly from 1968 to 1973.

Mono-ha, usually translated as “School of Things,” was the name given to a loosely associated group of artists, most of whom graduated from Tokyo’s Tama Art University during the youth-driven unrest of the late ’60s. Their work was stridently anti-modernist-primarily sculptures and installations that incorporated basic materials such as rocks, sand, wood, cotton, glass and metal, often in simple arrangements with minimal artistic intervention. More experiential than visual, Mono-ha works tended to demand patience and reflection. Many were also ephemeral. For both artistic and practical reasons, the often site-specific pieces were usually destroyed. There were no buyers, and the artists couldn’t or wouldn’t preserve them. In other words, Mono-ha was deeply at odds with what today’s market craves most: brand-name, high-gloss art with instant visual pop.

And yet, four decades later, a market for Mono-ha is emerging, though its supply is inherently limited. Leading the way is Korea-born Lee Ufan, the group’s best-known figure, who, despite a long, successful career in Europe and Asia, remained largely unrecognized in the U.S. until just a few years ago [see A.i.A., Dec. ’08]. Following an installation of his work at the Palazzo Palumbo Fossati during the 2007 Venice Biennale, his status has skyrocketed in this country, thanks to his first American solo shows at Pace Gallery in New York (2008) and Blum & Poe in Los Angeles (2010), and especially his eye-opening retrospective at New York’s Guggenheim Museum this past summer.

Auction prices for Lee’s “From Line” and “From Point” paintings of the ’70s and early ’80s have topped $1 million (his record is $1.9 million, set at Sotheby’s in May 2007). Re-creations of his early “Relatum” stone-and-steel sculptures now sell mostly in the $300,000 to $500,000 range, though the largest pieces can approach $1 million, according to Blum & Poe partner Tim Blum. “The Guggenheim show helped a lot,” said Pace Gallery owner Arne Glimcher. “Many works were sold during the exhibition.” Glimcher noted that Lee’s early works were made at a time when critical and market focus in the U.S. was on American artists. “Now it’s a very pluralistic, international art world,” he said.

Nonetheless, most of the dozen or so other Mono-ha artists have stayed completely under the American market’s radar, not to mention out of the critical discourse and art history books. That should change somewhat this winter, with a landmark show organized by Blum & Poe that will feature major works by Mono-ha’s key figures. Running Feb. 25 to Apr. 14, it’s the biggest show the gallery has ever mounted and will occupy its entire Culver City building. There will also be a substantial catalogue, edited by the show’s organizer, Mika Yoshitake, an independent curator and Mono-ha specialist.

“Anything that relates to Mono-ha that was iconic is going to be included,” said Blum, who lived and worked in Japan for almost five years in the ’90s, speaks the language and represents Lee as well as Takashi Murakami and a few other Japanese artists. “Like everybody else, I’ve seen a lot of this work only in poor black-and-white reproductions-with the exception of a few small gallery shows in Japan.”

In addition to a handful of important works by Lee (none of which were in the Guggenheim exhibition), highlights of the Blum show include an outdoor installation of Koshimizu Susumu’s August 1970/2011-Cutting a Stone, a piece that involves creating a single split in a large rock. There are four installations by Suga Kishio, including his 1970 Infinite Situation II (steps), in which sand is packed onto a flight of stairs so that just the edges of the steps are visible, both concealing and drawing attention to their structure. And Sekine Nobuo’s Phase-Mother Earth (1968), the work that is sometimes credited with giving birth to Mono-ha, will be re-created off-site, at a location yet to be announced. Originally made for a sculpture exhibition in Kobe’s Suma Rikyuo Park, it consists of an 8½-foot-tall cylinder of earth standing next to an identically sized hole in the ground-a powerful iteration of pure form and material that deteriorates over time.

Blum declined to cite prices for individual works, in part because some have already been sold. He says pricing has been challenging, as “there’s no market and we’re starting slightly from scratch.” But he noted that “major works from this period can be had for under half a million dollars.”

The Dallas Museum of Art is one of the museums, along with the Guggenheim, New York’s Museum of Modern Art and London’s Tate Modern, that has an active interest in Mono-ha. Already, the DMA has acquired several works in collaboration with local collectors Howard Rachofsky and Deedie Rose, and other significant acquisitions are expected to be announced soon.

Lee Ufan: Relatum, 1978/2011, two steel plates, 110 ¼ by 82 ½ by 3 ½ inches each, and two stones, each approx. 27 ½ inches high, in “Marking Infinity” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo David Heald. Courtesy National Museum of Art, Osaka.

In the thoroughly mined field of midcentury art, few stones have been left unturned by ferreting curators or opportunistic dealers and collectors. So it’s somewhat surprising that, in the American art world at least, the mention of Mono-ha still brings mostly shrugs. But thanks to interest among some high-profile players, there’s growing curatorial and market awareness of the short-lived Japanese art movement, which lasted roughly from 1968 to 1973.

Mono-ha, usually translated as “School of Things,” was the name given to a loosely associated group of artists, most of whom graduated from Tokyo’s Tama Art University during the youth-driven unrest of the late ’60s. Their work was stridently anti-modernist-primarily sculptures and installations that incorporated basic materials such as rocks, sand, wood, cotton, glass and metal, often in simple arrangements with minimal artistic intervention. More experiential than visual, Mono-ha works tended to demand patience and reflection. Many were also ephemeral. For both artistic and practical reasons, the often site-specific pieces were usually destroyed. There were no buyers, and the artists couldn’t or wouldn’t preserve them. In other words, Mono-ha was deeply at odds with what today’s market craves most: brand-name, high-gloss art with instant visual pop.

And yet, four decades later, a market for Mono-ha is emerging, though its supply is inherently limited. Leading the way is Korea-born Lee Ufan, the group’s best-known figure, who, despite a long, successful career in Europe and Asia, remained largely unrecognized in the U.S. until just a few years ago [see A.i.A., Dec. ’08]. Following an installation of his work at the Palazzo Palumbo Fossati during the 2007 Venice Biennale, his status has skyrocketed in this country, thanks to his first American solo shows at Pace Gallery in New York (2008) and Blum & Poe in Los Angeles (2010), and especially his eye-opening retrospective at New York’s Guggenheim Museum this past summer.

Auction prices for Lee’s “From Line” and “From Point” paintings of the ’70s and early ’80s have topped $1 million (his record is $1.9 million, set at Sotheby’s in May 2007). Re-creations of his early “Relatum” stone-and-steel sculptures now sell mostly in the $300,000 to $500,000 range, though the largest pieces can approach $1 million, according to Blum & Poe partner Tim Blum. “The Guggenheim show helped a lot,” said Pace Gallery owner Arne Glimcher. “Many works were sold during the exhibition.” Glimcher noted that Lee’s early works were made at a time when critical and market focus in the U.S. was on American artists. “Now it’s a very pluralistic, international art world,” he said.

Nonetheless, most of the dozen or so other Mono-ha artists have stayed completely under the American market’s radar, not to mention out of the critical discourse and art history books. That should change somewhat this winter, with a landmark show organized by Blum & Poe that will feature major works by Mono-ha’s key figures. Running Feb. 25 to Apr. 14, it’s the biggest show the gallery has ever mounted and will occupy its entire Culver City building. There will also be a substantial catalogue, edited by the show’s organizer, Mika Yoshitake, an independent curator and Mono-ha specialist.

“Anything that relates to Mono-ha that was iconic is going to be included,” said Blum, who lived and worked in Japan for almost five years in the ’90s, speaks the language and represents Lee as well as Takashi Murakami and a few other Japanese artists. “Like everybody else, I’ve seen a lot of this work only in poor black-and-white reproductions-with the exception of a few small gallery shows in Japan.”

In addition to a handful of important works by Lee (none of which were in the Guggenheim exhibition), highlights of the Blum show include an outdoor installation of Koshimizu Susumu’s August 1970/2011-Cutting a Stone, a piece that involves creating a single split in a large rock. There are four installations by Suga Kishio, including his 1970 Infinite Situation II (steps), in which sand is packed onto a flight of stairs so that just the edges of the steps are visible, both concealing and drawing attention to their structure. And Sekine Nobuo’s Phase-Mother Earth (1968), the work that is sometimes credited with giving birth to Mono-ha, will be re-created off-site, at a location yet to be announced. Originally made for a sculpture exhibition in Kobe’s Suma Rikyuo Park, it consists of an 8½-foot-tall cylinder of earth standing next to an identically sized hole in the ground-a powerful iteration of pure form and material that deteriorates over time.

Blum declined to cite prices for individual works, in part because some have already been sold. He says pricing has been challenging, as “there’s no market and we’re starting slightly from scratch.” But he noted that “major works from this period can be had for under half a million dollars.”

The Dallas Museum of Art is one of the museums, along with the Guggenheim, New York’s Museum of Modern Art and London’s Tate Modern, that has an active interest in Mono-ha. Already, the DMA has acquired several works in collaboration with local collectors Howard Rachofsky and Deedie Rose, and other significant acquisitions are expected to be announced soon.

Jeffrey Grove, the museum’s senior curator of contemporary art, said, “We’re looking for singular Mono-ha objects that fold in with other pieces in the collection-postwar abstraction, Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, Arte Povera-to give a more international perspective to the story of art from that period.” This past summer Grove featured a couple of recent Mono-ha acquisitions in his “Silence and Time” exhibition, including a series of Nomura Hitoshi photographs from 1970 in which the artist meticulously documented the evaporation of blocks of dry ice as a study in ephemerality and the dematerialization of the art object.

The Nomura works were purchased from New York gallery McCaffrey Fine Art, which is the other primary source in the U.S. for Mono-ha material. Like Blum, Fergus McCaffrey lived in Japan and speaks the language, and he’s done shows of work by Nomura, Lee, Enokura Koji and Takamatsu Jiro, who was a teacher at Tama Art University when the key Mono-ha artists were students there. McCaffrey calls Takamatsu the “most important Japanese artist in the ’60s because of his influence.” McCaffrey organized the first solo show of the late artist’s work in the U.S. two years ago, and when he took a group of Takamatsu’s photographs of photographs from 1972-73 to the Independent art fair in New York last March, he said, “they were vacuumed up by major museums” at around $50,000 to $60,000 each.

From Jan. 6 to Mar. 17, McCaffrey will be showing pieces by Haraguchi Noriyuki, an artist who is connected to Mono-ha, though, as McCaffrey noted, “he is very political in a way Mono-ha is not.” The artist is also creating a full-size replica of the tail of an American Corsair A7 fighter jet, based on a print he made in 1972, when there were protests against the U.S. military bases in Japan. Prices, McCaffrey said, will range from $50,000 to $650,000.

Interestingly, there’s hardly any market for Mono-ha in Japan itself. One exception is the Kamakura Gallery in Kanagawa, which was originally located in Tokyo and has been showing Mono-ha artists for many years. Most recently, the gallery presented re-creations of early sculptures that Sekine made for a 1970 exhibition in Milan using rock and either stainless steel or fluorescent bulbs. The gallery declined to give prices but according to sources familiar with the work, they are in the same range as comparable pieces at Blum & Poe.

Allan Schwartzman, a private dealer and curator who works with Rachofsky, Rose and the Dallas Museum of Art as well as Brazilian collector Bernardo Paz, said of his discovery of Mono-ha a few years ago, “It’s rare to come upon something in our field that you really didn’t know anything about. From a collecting perspective, the work is comparatively undervalued.”

The necessary re-creation of pieces raises questions when trying to establish value. Yoshitake, the curator of the Blum show, noted that while “it was very natural for the artists to install their works and then discard them,” such practices are “not compatible with the values of preservation and originality that are so important to museums and collectors.” For the first time, ownership agreements and certificates of authenticity are being drawn up with the artists or their estates. Yoshitake points to the work of Sol LeWitt and Félix González-Torres as precedents.

The key, Glimcher said, is that everything is being done according to the artists’ wishes and specifications. “If Lee Ufan’s works were being posthumously re-created, I wouldn’t have any use for them, but he’s doing it himself,” he said. “It would be a tragedy for those works to exist only in photographs.”

Art of the West Rounded Up for a Rebound

By Stephen Wallis

July 23, 2011

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303661904576454192598674396

For those who sell art of the American West, it's hard not to feel nostalgic for the good ol' days—not the cowboy era but the wild-west years of 2003 to 2008, when prices blasted to record highs.

On Saturday the Coeur d'Alene Art Auction, the best-known annual sale of Western, wildlife and sporting art, will take over the grand ballroom at the Silver Legacy Resort in Reno, Nev. The auction's totals peaked at $37 million in 2008. A year ago, by contrast, the auction brought in just $9.2 million.

"That was probably the weakest we've seen the market since we started 26 years ago," said Reno art dealer Peter Stremmel, a Coeur d'Alene founder who also serves as its auctioneer. Though buyers are still being cautious, he says, he anticipates a bounce-back year.

A summer ritual since 1985, the Coeur d'Alene auction (which kept its name, despite moving from Idaho to Nevada a decade ago) is basically Art Basel for the ranching and oil set, who come for the Western camaraderie as well as for the art.

Among those expected this year is Idaho lumber magnate Marc Brinkmeyer, who primarily collects contemporary Western works. Mr. Brinkmeyer has attended the auction for close to 15 years: "Usually I come home with more than I bargained for. It's good for us collectors that the market's down a little bit."

At Saturday's sale, just under 300 lots will be hammered down in roughly five hours, with spotters in the room pointing out bidders with enthusiastic "yips" and "has." Highlights include four works by the 19th-century landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, whose view of "Mount Rainier" carries a high estimate of $2.5 million. Stalwarts Frederic Remington and Charles Russell will be represented, the latter by an 1892 painting of an Indian camp with a top estimate of $1.2 million. Among the more recent-vintage material, there are 13 works, expected to fetch upwards of $425,000, from the estate of the sculptor Harry Jackson.

Unlike most collecting fields, Sotheby's and Christie's aren't necessarily the go-to options for sellers of top Western material. Coeur d'Alene, a bellwether for the market, holds several major artist auction records, including those for Russell and N.C. Wyeth.

But it has rivals. The Scottsdale Art Auction in Arizona could surpass Coeur this year, having posted a $15.3 million total in April, including $4.2 million for a landscape by the Hudson River School master Thomas Moran. Not far behind are the Jackson Hole Art Auction, in Wyoming on Sept. 17, and the Santa Fe Art Auction, which emphasizes Southwestern works, on Nov. 12. Bonhams, meanwhile, is holding one of its three yearly sales of California and Western paintings in Los Angeles on Aug. 9.

China's Xu Bing Gives Flight To Words at the Morgan

By Stephen Wallis

July 2, 2011

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304447804576413731008492102

Chinese artist Xu Bing is about to turn New York's Morgan Library & Museum into an installation site. For its second annual contemporary art commission, the Morgan invited Mr. Xu to create a larger version of his well-known work "The Living Word," originally made in 2001. The piece will consist of some 350 carved and painted Chinese characters for the word "bird" in various historical scripts—all hung from the ceiling of the Morgan's soaring entry court in a cloudlike cluster that will rise dramatically from the floor to the top of a 50-foot glass wall.

Along with Ai Weiwei and Cai Guo-Qiang, Mr. Xu is among the most famous of China's New Wave artists who first came to prominence in the 1980s. He moved to New York in 1990 after falling out of favor with the authorities. Though he returned to China in 2008 as vice president of the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, he continues to do projects around the world.

Mr. Xu remains best-known for conceptual works dealing with written texts, often highlighting their unreliability. "He takes a somewhat critical position vis-à-vis the authority of the written word, which you could say for a library is a little ironic," said Isabelle Dervaux, the Morgan's curator of modern and contemporary drawings. "The Living Word" has been shown in the city only once before, when a version sold for $408,000 (a record for the artist) in a landmark sale of contemporary Chinese art at Sotheby's in 2006.

Speaking from Beijing via a translator, Mr. Xu said "The Living Word" is largely about "the connection between writing and nature." The work begins on the floor, with a dictionary definition for "bird," rendered in a simplified calligraphic script that Mao Zedong made standard in a bid to improve literacy. Higher up, the characters shift to earlier styles, and the work ends with a primitive representation of a bird. "At the top, the colors become quite vivid, and it's almost like the bird is flying out of the window to escape this prison of language," said the artist.

Visitors to the Morgan will be able to watch Mr. Xu and his team install "The Living Word" over four days, starting July 12. The finished piece will be on view through Sept. 15.

Coming up this fall for Mr. Xu is the third part in his Tobacco Project, examining ties between the U.S. tobacco industry and China, at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. And during the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council plans to exhibit his "Where Does the Dust Itself Collect?," a 2004 room-size work with a Zen Buddhist poem written into dust from the World Trade Center.

A Connoisseur of Novelty, Big Apple to Beijing

By Stephen Wallis

June 4, 2011

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304066504576343282755948362

Five years ago, Richard Chang decided to make supporting contemporary art his "second job." Since then, the 38-year-old Chinese-American collector, who oversees investments in real estate, hotels, media and fashion for his wealthy family, has raised his international art-scene profile considerably.

He splits much of his time between New York and Beijing, where he started the nonprofit Domus Collection to educate local audiences about Western art through exhibitions. The first such show, "Roundtrip: Beijing–New York Now," was staged at the Ullens Center last year. Mr. Chang is also a key adviser to the fast-rising Hong Kong International Art Fair. Attending the fair's latest edition last weekend, Mr. Chang talked about being a global collector today. Below, an edited transcript.

"The first work I bought, in 1997, was actually a Picasso, a drawing from 1961—nothing significant. It turned out to be not such a bad choice, but it was sort of a one-off. After that, I collected mostly young, emerging artists. As you get more confident as a collector, you get bolder and start raising the stakes. Now I'm buying some works that run well into seven figures. For me, that's high. So it becomes less impulse-driven. But even if I couldn't buy art, I think I would keep an inventory of my own imaginary museum.

"Outside of my business I spend 100% of my time on art, whether with institutions, with galleries, collecting, socializing, networking—it's all art. Last year I went to 12 or 13 art fairs. And I haven't even hit the Latin American fairs yet.

"For me, collecting is also a social thing, and many of the artists I collect I've gotten to know—Damien Hirst, Anish Kapoor, Ryan Gander and Matthew Day Jackson, who is one of my favorite artists at the moment. One piece of his I own is a Hudson River School–type scene created using different types of Formica to represent the sunrays, mountains, water and everything. It's a painting made without a paintbrush. It's almost utopian kitsch—the colors are like you entered heaven or something, but underneath these surfaces the Formica is just cheap fiberboard.

"Another work I bought recently is a Damien Hirst butterfly triptych from Jay Jopling at White Cube. It's a beautiful stained-glass-window kaleidoscope about 10 feet high by almost 23 feet wide—the sheer scale is fantastic. Standing in front of it you get the full impact of what I think Damien is trying to say about religion and death and life.

"The Chinese artists I've collected include Zhang Xiaogang, famous for his 'Bloodline' paintings of Chinese families, and one not-so-famous painter, Yang Shaobin, who has been called the Francis Bacon of China. I'm also buying artists from the Middle East and India.

Matthew Day Jackson's 'Looking Down the Yosemite Valley' Domus Collection

"Because I'm American and also Chinese, I want my collection to reflect that global nature. Maybe I'll find out one day that the world is just too big to collect so broadly. Then maybe I'll a do complete 180 and zero in on New York artists. Who knows?"

Napa Valley Now

California’s most celebrated wine region is buzzing with stylish hotels, smart tasting experiences, and talented new players.

By Stephen Wallis

July/August 2010

https://www.departures.com/lifestyle/wine-spirits/best-napa-california

Yes, the economic downturn hit Napa Valley pretty hard. Declining land values, tighter credit, and consumers buying fewer premium bottles of wine have pushed a number of winemakers to the brink. And some predict the hangover could last a while, with quite a few foreclosures and distressed sales of vineyards before things turn around. The prices of many Napa wines will almost certainly come down, especially after the huge 2009 harvest left a glut of Cabernet grapes. Not a bad thing for wine drinkers!

Actually, there’s plenty of good news for visitors to this epicurean paradise, as the success of recent years has brought more quality options than ever in the form of sophisticated restaurants, new and improved hotels, and intimate, hands-on experiences with wine and food. Lessons learned during the nineties dot-com boom encouraged thoughtful development, and all across Napa Valley the watchwords are sustainable, organic, and local, local, local.

“Green is not a political statement anymore—it’s almost a necessity,” says John Conover, general manager and partner at PlumpJack Winery and its newer sister, Cade, which just joined nearby Hall as California’s only gold-LEED-certified wineries. With sexy state-of-the-art architecture and an eco-smart approach, Cade and Hall are representative of the new generation that’s defining Napa today.

For full story, see pages at left.

Hello Chiho

A self-taught visionary inspired by scroll painting, Symbolism, and anime, Japanese artist Chiho Aoshima is stepping out of the shadow of her celebrated mentor.

By Stephen Wallis

September 2007

http://www.departures.com/letters/features/hello-chiho

To stand before a mural-size panorama by Chiho Aoshima is to lose yourself in another world—one where Japanese anime, traditional scroll paintings, apocalyptic visions, and Hello Kitty meld in magnetic, eye-popping fantasy. I was first seduced by her work several years ago, when I came across Japanese Apricot 2, an eight-foot-high image of a doe-eyed girl (in Aoshima's universe it's always girls) elaborately bound up in a tree. The scene is set in an intensely stylized landscape against a cotton candy–colored sky. While the cloud swirls and impossible mountain peaks owe a debt to classical Japanese painting, the apricot blossoms and sweet little birds are pure kawaii, the culture of cuteness that's so prevalent in contemporary Japan.

At the time I knew little about Aoshima beyond the fact that her mentor was Takashi Murakami, the guru-impresario who almost single-handedly launched the Japanese contemporary art sensation in the late nineties. Her digital creations seemed to tap into many of the same currents—interest in anime and kawaii, two-dimensional graphic imagery, fetishistic impulses—that gave Murakami's art an irresistible Pop appeal. Yet, compared with his detached, industrial-commercial style, hers registered as more emotional, more intriguingly personal.

Soon Aoshima's work started cropping up more frequently: images of anthropomorphized mountains and buildings, fantastically lush landscapes, otherworldly dreamscapes, dramatic conflagrations, at least one tsunami, and (clearly something of an obsession of hers) zombies. From the beginning she has veered between happy, almost utopian imagery and scenes of loneliness, death, and destruction. In some cases both can be found in the same piece, creating a kind of bipolar tension that runs throughout her art.

"Because of the places where I'm presenting my work, I sometimes feel I have to make lighter, happier images," Aoshima told me via a translator. "But I really enjoy drawing the dark, disturbing worlds. I believe the only way to feel positive is by being aware of darker things. Of course, in the end, even those should be cute."

In May the 32-year-old artist sat down with me at the New York studio of Kaikai Kiki, the company founded by Murakami to handle fabrication, licensing, and promotion for him and the handful of artists he represents, including Aoshima. She had come to the city for the summer to practice her English, prepare for a solo show this fall at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Paris, and simply be at the center of the international art world. With a string of prominent public commissions and museum projects under her belt, she is establishing herself as more than just a talented Murakami protégée.

Unlike other Kaikai Kiki artists, Aoshima didn't go to art school. After getting her degree in economics at Tokyo's Hosei University in 1995, she spent a few years at an advertising firm, where a graphic designer taught her how to use Illustrator software. She started doodling on her computer, as she put it, and when Murakami came in to oversee one of the firm's ad campaigns, she showed him a few pieces. "He thought they were interesting and encouraged me to keep doing them," Aoshima recounted. "About a year after that, he offered to include my work in a show he organized, 'Tokyo Girls Bravo.' I guess that's when I started thinking of myself as an artist."

He also hired Aoshima as a designer for Kaikai Kiki in Tokyo, working on Murakami-branded projects. It was her team, for example, that came up with the multicolor logo pattern on those hugely popular Louis Vuitton bags. At the same time she continued making her art which, especially at first, had a strong Pop sensibility, influenced by Japanese manga, or comics. She featured cheerleaders and schoolgirls and occasionally incorporated text. Building, from 1999, shows a girl wedged into a narrow space between hulking high-rises, where the only signs of life are a few wispy ferns, a centipede, and a snake. The kawaii elements are there, but the image hints at darker thoughts: It isn't clear whether the girl is trapped or taking refuge.

Between 2000 and 2005 Aoshima enjoyed an accelerating stream of shows and projects. She did a couple of high-profile collaborations with designer Issey Miyake (an installation at his Tokyo store and two lines of dresses printed with her images). Her work appeared in several shows at Perrotin and the Los Angeles gallery Blum & Poe. And most influentially, Murakami featured her in all three exhibitions of his celebrated trilogy, "Superflat," "Coloriage," and "Little Boy." Last year, with her career shifting into high gear, she gave up her position at the studio to focus on her own art.

Kaikai Kiki still represents Aoshima, and she remains in close contact with her mentor. "Takashi really understands me and my work," the artist said. "He will often make suggestions on how I should do things: 'Why don't you emphasize this part or downplay or eliminate that part of a piece?' And if he sees me slacking off, he comes and pushes me to work faster—kicks me in the ass a little bit."

Not that it's a two-way exchange. I asked if she ever offers him ideas or criticism. "I almost never—" she responded tentatively, before adding, "I don't."

For his part, Murakami said he has never thought of Aoshima as a disciple and certainly not, as one critic recently described the Kaikai Kiki artists, a clone. "Basically the similarity between us is that we were born and raised in Japan, in Tokyo," he said. "Our expressive mechanisms are animelike, but our messages are totally different. My works are inundated with resentment, whereas unease and happiness coexist in hers."

The full span of Murakami's output will be on display this fall, in a midcareer retrospective at the Geffen Contemporary branch of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). The curator, Paul Schimmel, has been involved with both artists' work for years. "I think Takashi is, in some ways, in awe of Chiho's command of the computer, her complete control of her materials," he said. "She ran Kaikai Kiki's design department with great authority, and he always gave her a lot of respect and a lot of room. She's very quiet, but she's a force."

During my visit with Aoshima she came off as thoughtful and, at moments, quite serious—an impression softened by her disarming laugh and gestures of girlish animation, like when she skipped off to fetch a stack of books she has been using for inspiration. She came back with a small paperback on traditional Japanese painting, a book of satellite images titled Earthcam: Watching the World from Orbit, and chunky volumes on Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture and Japonisme—the term for that country's influence, especially of its 19th-century woodblock prints, on Western artists from Van Gogh to Toulouse-Lautrec to Gustav Klimt.

Lately, she told me, she's been looking a lot at the work of the 17th-century Japanese artist Tawaraya Sotatsu and the French Symbolist Odilon Redon, two distant yet eccentric figures. A cofounder of the Rimpa school of decorative painting, Sotatsu was known for his simple, exquisite scenes from nature and literature, often done on gold backgrounds. It's not hard to see connections between Sotatsu's stylized, two-dimensional imagery and Aoshima's digital prints. Similarly, her interest in nature and cycles of life, in fantasy and nightmares relates closely to Redon's. In fact, Schimmel described her as "kind of a 21st-century Symbolist."

To give a sense of how she works, Aoshima pulled out a laptop, her roving studio. She opened the Illustrator file for A Fleeting Moment of Happiness, a piece she made last year for the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Lyon, France. It's an ultrawide Technicolor landscape of hills and wormlike buildings with cute faces seemingly about to be overcome by a purplish, toxic-looking cloud. The image could be read as a statement about man's relationship with nature—and the future appears pretty dim.

Once the work was up on her screen Aoshima switched to a black-and-white view that revealed the hundreds of intricate vectors making up the image. With a few clicks she showed how she could adjust the contour of a building or add a butterfly. Aoshima maintains a library of motifs that she occasionally recycles, with modifications, but she draws most things from scratch. Then she started dropping in colors. The brief demonstration revealed how complex, infinitely changeable, and time-consuming her work can be.

It typically takes Aoshima about two months to complete her pieces, which she then outputs as editioned ink-jet or chromogenic prints. For exhibitions she sometimes creates huge one-off prints that she calls wallpapers. When installed at the Lyon museum, A Fleeting Moment of Happiness measured some 86 feet across.

"With the computer you can print things out at almost any size. It was kind of an accident when I did the first wallpaper," she said. "Looking at it on a small screen and then printing it out so big, it was completely different from the way I had imagined. Every time I do one, it seems there's something in the result that surpasses my imagination."

Aoshima also does sketches in watercolor and colored pencil, and she usually keeps a pile at her side for reference when she's working on the computer. She has also started to incorporate hand-drawing into finished works, including the 40-foot-long wall piece she created last year while participating in the well-known Artpace residency program in San Antonio—her first extended stay in this country. As We Died, We Began to Regain Our Spirit features comic-book renderings of San Antonio landmarks, each with a human face, floating on cloudlike trails of green and blue. After printing digitally made images of the buildings on traditional Japanese paper, she collaged the sheets on a wall and added the other elements by hand, using watercolor and colored pencil. The result is a kind of Pop riff on Japanese screen painting.

In addition, she has begun making video animations, a natural-seeming step for an artist working digitally on a cinematic scale. Her first, City Glow, created in 2005 with animator Bruce Ferguson, is a seven-minute loop that plays across five screens. It's a surrealistic evolution sequence that opens in an Edenic forest, which gives rise to a city of glowworm buildings, followed by a nightmarish scene in a ghoul-infested cemetery, and, finally, a new dawn with fairies, a rainbow, and blue skies.

Schimmel acquired City Glow for MOCA from Aoshima's 2005 show at Blum & Poe and included it in his re-cent "Ecstasy" exhibition at the museum. He called it "one of the most extraordinary pieces of animation ever made by an artist, period. It's something Takashi could never imagine. The use of the sweeping horizontal composition and the movement and timing of it are absolutely breathtaking."

When I met with Aoshima in May, deadlines for her upcoming show at Perrotin were already looming. She admitted she was feeling a little behind. She had a tabletop model of the gallery interior that she'd started filling in with miniature works, which will be a mix of printed and hand-drawn images and at least one three-dimensional piece. Among the core elements is a large sculpture of a demon figure that, if the sketches she made are a good indication, will look like a cross between a creature by Mau-rice Sendak and one of Odilon Redon's Gothic noirs. She also promised "a pretty scary, shocking" wallpaper piece.

All great Pop artists—Warhol, Koons, and Murakami, of course—have a dark side, and Aoshima enjoys channeling hers. For this show she is defying those who want her to stick to the happy work and is making images of a world she says she really wants to create. It will be dark, but it'll still be cute.

Chiho Aoshima's latest work is at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Paris from September 15 to October 11 (76 Rue de Turenne; 33-1/42-16-79-79; galerieperrotin.com). Her video animation, City Glow, is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, through October 21 (5601 Main St.; 713-639-7300; mfah.org).

The Modern Art of Fashion

In the far northwestern corner of Massachusetts, the work of Sol Lewitt, on three floors at Mass MoCA, is the backdrop for, literally, much local color.

Text by Stephen Wallis

September 2009

https://www.departures.com/art-culture/art-design/modern-art-fashion

Sometimes it does take a village to make great art—and a departures fashion shoot—come to life. In this case, a former mill town called North Adams, Massachusetts, the unlikely home of the country’s largest museum of contemporary art, Mass MoCA.

Set on a 13-acre campus of 19th-century brick factory buildings, Mass MoCA has been, since opening in 1999, a unique playground for artists with very big ideas. And just in time for its tenth anniversary, the museum unveiled its biggest yet: a magisterial survey of Sol LeWitt’s signature Wall Drawings that occupies all three floors of the 27,000-square-foot Building 7.

Two dozen trained assistants, teamed with some 40 art students from local colleges and beyond, spent almost six months creating just over 100 of the Conceptual master’s works—from the austere line drawings of the sixties and seventies to the more lyrical bands of color and geometric forms of the eighties to the exuberant arcs and waves and blobs from his last decade, which look like coltish late-career exercises in pure pleasure.

LeWitt, who died in 2007, did not get to see the project through to completion, but his Wall Drawings—each of which began as a set of instructions or a diagram—were always intended to be executed by others. Intellectually rigorous yet accessible, this is art at its most collaborative, participatory, democratic. And it has never looked better than it does amid the partially sanded brick walls, exposed pipes, and ceiling beams of these industrial spaces.

Some have compared LeWitt’s Wall Drawings to music, with him as maestro and composer and his assistants the players. Featured on these pages are several of those who helped pull off this virtuoso performance as well as a few others who give this northern Berkshire community such great local color. They’re wearing classics, with some bold tones and a bit of pattern (how could we resist in this setting?). These are looks that will stand the test of time, certain to be just as stylish in a quarter-century, when LeWitt’s drawings are slated to come down. —Stephen Wallis

Mass MoCA is located at 87 Marshall Street in North Adams, Massachusetts. For more information on “Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective,” including time-lapse videos of the works being created, visit massmoca.org or call 413-662-2111. The exhibition runs through 2033.

Object of Desire

By Stephen Wallis

March/April 2006

Lisa Yuskavage’s artistic terrain has always been the female body. It’s a landscape she has explored in her work with almost fetishistic relish, particularly the breasts. As she once remarked to fellow painter Chuck Close, “The whole world is obsessed by hard nipples.”

While you might have to look twice to find them, they’re there alright. Nearly passing as gently curving hills or melons, voluptuous breasts (and, yes, erect nipples) pop up incongruously amid fruits and vegetation in a pair of tapestries the artist has created with the nonprofit Art Production Fund. Titled, unapologetically, Tit Heaven, these paeans to the bosom are based on watercolors Yuskavage did in the early nineties, around the time she began painting the kitschy, stylized, self-absorbed nudes she’s now famous for.

“Because the disembodied parts are sort of hidden in the watercolors, it takes a little longer to see them,” says the 43-year-old artist. “But once you realize what you’re looking at, they’re pretty provocative.”

Translating the images into wool tapestries took six months of dyeing and hand-looming by a special fabricator in Guadalajara. The finished weavings are available in editions of three, at $30,000 apiece. (Yuskavage also collaborated with the Art Production Fund on a shower curtain featuring a pensive nude—done in an edition of 300, at $1,500 each). The artist, whose first New York show in three years will be held this fall at the David Zwirner Gallery, notes that tapestries were originally functional, “made to keep the castles warm,” Yuskavage says she likes to picture someone hanging hers in a cabin with a fireplace, “using them in the way tapestries were intended.”

Art Production Fund, 212-966-0193; www.artproductionfund.org

Teresita Fernández

Through her stylized, minimalist abstractions, Teresita Fernández taps into the natural world of our imagination.

By Stephen Wallis

March 2005

Santiago Calatrava: An Architect Spreads His Wings

By Stephen Wallis

May 2001

Tibetan Art

As the country itself has become the focus of broad public attention, Tibet’s rich artistic and spiritual heritage is inspiring growing interest among collectors.

By Stephen Wallis

March 15, 1999

Seattle Art Museum Sues Knoedler Gallery

By Stephen Wallis

October 5–19, 1998

Seattle Court Tosses Museum’s Knoedler Suit

By Stephen Wallis

November 15, 1999

Feliciano Sues Rosenbergs for Fees

By Stephen Wallis

September/October 2001

As the past several years have shown, sorting out claims made by Jewish families seeking to recover artworks stolen by the Nazis a half-century ago can be a messy and sometimes bitter business. But the rancorous legal battle that has erupted between Hector Feliciano, author of the acclaimed book The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art, and the heirs of dealer Paul Rosenberg has come as a surprise to most people who follow Holocaust restitution cases. The dispute has drawn attention to the issue of fair compensation for those who help families recover valuable looted artworks, while raising questions about the delicate boundaries between journalism and consulting.

Will Wynn Take All? Mirage Merger Raises Questions

By Stephen Wallis

April 1, 2000

Ciao Bellagio: Casino Gallery Closes

By Stephen Wallis

June 2000

Wildensteins and Critic Head to Court

By Stephen Wallis

April 15, 1999

French Court Rejects Wildenstein Claim, Again

By Stephen Wallis

June 2000

Dubuffet Fakes Make Foundation a Target

By Stephen Wallis, with reporting by Judith Benhamou-Huet and Charlotte Kaiser

June 1, 1999

A (Mostly) Private Affair

Amid growing collector interest and record prices, Old Masters dealers are increasingly moving upstairs—as well as out into less familiar areas of the art market.

By Stephen Wallis

The Quiet Americans

As the market booms for the American Impressionists and modernists, demand for genre paintings remains flat. The reasons have less to do with the quality and interest of the art than the changing tastes of newer collectors.

By Stephen Wallis

November 2000

The Natural

Arthur Dove’s intuitive landscapes led him to the nexus of abstraction and reality.

By Stephen Wallis

October 1997

Jacob Lawrence: Portrait of a Serial Painter

Following a tradition as old as Egypt, this venerable American artist tells the stories of some very modern human struggles.

December 1996

By Stephen Wallis