Jonah Takagi on Media as the Place Where the Practical Meets the Personal | The Slowdown - Culture, Nature, Future
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Jonah Takagi. (Photo: Erik Benjamins. Courtesy Marta)
Jonah Takagi. (Photo: Erik Benjamins. Courtesy Marta)

Jonah Takagi comes across as laid-back and casual, but the truth is, he keeps pretty busy. The bulk of his time is split between New York City, where he runs his namesake design studio, and Providence, Rhode Island, where he teaches a Herman Miller–inspired furniture design course at the Rhode Island School of Design. When he’s not designing or teaching, he’s up in the foothills of Vermont’s Green Mountains, developing a newly acquired plot of land, or back at home in Brooklyn, engineering his own tube amplifiers and other hi-fi audio equipment.

Brimming as his schedule is, none of what he does truly feels like work to him. In fact, Takagi has never really bought into the work/play dichotomy; instead, by his very nature, he has always spent his time oscillating between the realms of music and design. Born in Tokyo and raised in the suburbs of Hartford, Connecticut, Takagi grew up playing bass guitar in a local third wave ska band before going on to earn his B.F.A. in furniture design at RISD in 2002. Hearing the music scene calling his name again, he began playing with indie rock bands upon graduating and devoted himself to the touring life for the following seven years. In a joint stroke of practicality and renewed passion, Takagi returned to furniture design in 2009, establishing his own brand, and has since gained international recognition for his furniture pieces and homewares. This Saturday, March 11, in his first-ever gallery exhibition, “Brut Vessels,” Takagi will debut Brutalist-inspired glass objects, along with other work he designed during a recent residency in the south of France, at Los Angeles’s Marta Gallery.

Takagi’s media habits don’t stray far from this work-as-play M.O. He largely consumes content that informs his smorgasbord of life pursuits and interests, whether it be residential architecture books that inspire the house he’s designing on his land or Japanese tube amplifier magazines that teach him new configurations for the equipment he’s tinkering with. Like the work he does, none of this material is dry or tedious to him. “It’s all very practical, but it’s also immensely personal,” he says. “The [things I consume] are all things that I’m very passionate about, and they take a lot of energy and reflection.”

Here, we speak with Takagi about what this outlook means for the content he reads, watches, and listens to.

Pieces from Takagi’s “Brut Vessels” exhibition at Marta Gallery in Los Angeles. (Photo: Erik Benjamins. Courtesy Marta)
Pieces from Takagi’s “Brut Vessels” exhibition at Marta Gallery in Los Angeles. (Photo: Erik Benjamins. Courtesy Marta)

How do you start your mornings?

Well, I wake up, and typically, I’ll look at my phone. I dive into The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal apps. I’ve always read the Times, especially T magazine. The Wall Street Journal’s been pretty interesting to me lately, although I tend to avoid the whole opinion section.

Then, usually, it’s coffee. I recently got into the AeroPress. I’ve struggled in my adult life trying to find the best way to make coffee in the most effective way. I’ve tried everything—French press and Moka pots and pour-overs—and I’m now into the Aeropress. There’s a bit of a ritual aspect to it, the grinding and the filter and waiting and plunging and the whole thing.

Then, I just get right to work. Sometimes I’ll turn the radio on. I listen to NPR in the morning. It helps to fill the space and get my brain moving. I work from home, and it’s been that way for most of my career as an independent designer, punctuated by moments when I have a studio. But more often than not, I’m just here.

Where do you get your news?

I don’t know if this is embarrassing, but I used to love Gawker—rest in peace. It’s this thing that I read that was sort of irreverent and snarky, and even though it’s been years since I was relevant, I feel like I’m constantly looking for something to scratch that itch. I also was a rabid reader of The New Yorker, but I moved around a lot in the pandemic, and I don’t have a subscription anymore. I read it religiously for years.

I’ve never gotten on board with Twitter or any of those other platforms. I do engage in social media, but at this point, it seems like more of a professional tool.

Which social media platforms do you use?

I’m on Instagram [@jonahtakagi], and I do interact with it. It’s a really great source of inspiration for me, just consuming visual culture. And of course, as a promotional tool for my own work, I think it’s really great. For whatever reason, the algorithm really gets me. It’s a mix of bikes and stereo stuff and small houses, and the occasional furniture or hardware moment.

Do you listen to any podcasts?

On occasion, but I tend to listen to more music. Podcasts are difficult for me, because I have a hard time figuring out how they fit into my life. When I’m working, I really need to focus. I even have a hard time listening to music with words. I have to listen to something ambient, or jazz. Even just hearing people sing is a little bit distracting, let alone an engrossing story.

But my parents live up in Vermont, and I also have some land up there that I’m slowly working on developing. So my drives back and forth are moments when I dabble in podcasts. There’s this podcast Bandsplain, where the host, Yasi Salek, talks about these bands that are kind of culty or maybe mainstream, and just explains why they are the way they are. It’s everything from Phish to Dave Matthews Band, and I find that pretty entertaining, coming from a musical background. There’s also How I Built This, that NPR show. I find it a little redundant or repetitive—I always feel like it’s the same version of the same story over and over again—but it’s really fascinating for me to look at this broad context.

Any favorite TV shows?

I feel like everyone’s watching The Last of Us, and that’s been sort of indulging all of my prepper tendencies. At the root of it, it’s about a fungus that spreads throughout the world and turns people into things that resemble zombies. And it’s a story of a man who’s a father and in law school, and—no spoiler alert—this girl, and their trek across the United States. I’m only three or four episodes in, and they’re currently in Wyoming. I like it because the zombies are just backdrop to all of this other stuff going on.

I heard Party Down is coming back, which is one of my favorite shows, on Starz. I will watch that religiously. It’s about a catering company, and each episode is a discrete event that they’re catering. One will be somebody’s sweet sixteen birthday party. The next will be a funeral. And the next one will be the Adult Video News Awards. It’s pretty entertaining.

What books are you currently reading?

I think there are three versions of me reading, and they’re all very different. It’s all kind of goal-oriented reading. Certainly, my first area of interest at this moment is getting readings together for my course at RISD. The one book that I keep on going back to is a newish book about Herman Miller, called Herman Miller: A Way of Living. It’s hard to believe, once you open it and look at it, that something like this hasn’t existed, because it’s just this amazing document that talks about the pre–Herman Miller days when it was Michigan Star, all the way up through their merger with Knoll last year. It’s a coffee table book—it’s hundreds of pages long. It’s the type of thing where you can open up to a given page and have your mind blown, and you can close it and come back to it two weeks later.

The second version of me reading—which, I don’t even know if it’s considered reading—but I have some winter hobbies, like I make tube amplifiers for myself for listening to music. Some of them are behind me over here. So I have all of these Japanese magazines [about tube amplifiers]. I’m half Japanese, but I don’t read Japanese. So, again, I don’t know if you’d call it reading. This one, which is called something like Enchanting Vacuum Tube Amplifier—History, Design and Production: Volume 1—that’s probably a bad translation, but close enough—is from the nineties I think, or maybe from the mid-seventies. The author’s name is Isamu Asano, and he’s sort of the godfather of Japanese D.I.Y. hi-fi. He contributed all of these articles to the magazine MJ Audio Technology. It’s not quite reading, but I look at this, and point my phone at it, and Google Translate does its best to describe what it’s saying. It’s not the most pleasant experience of reading, but it’s interesting. I’m learning a lot and working on some new projects based on what I find.

The last version of the books I’ve been consuming is that I have some land in southern Vermont that I’m working on. My dad is an architect, and it’s something that I always aspired to be, but I didn’t have the bandwidth or the focus to be an architect specifically. Now I have this land, and I’m going to try to design a house. So I’ve been buying a lot of used books and some new books on architects that I admire. One of my pastimes is low-grade trespassing to see architecturally significant buildings. One time, I was out near the beach with some friends, and we saw a bunch of the work of this architect Charles Gwathmey, who is just really amazing. This book, Charles Gwathmey & Robert Siegel: Residential Works 1966–1977, is his best, or at least it’s my favorite Gwathmey book. I also have this book Houses and Drawings by the Japanese architect Kazuo Shinohara, who’s probably my favorite Japanese architect. So I have a pile of these books, and I keep them around for inspiration as I imagine this future home for myself in the woods.

What artists or albums do you listen to most?

I’ve been pretty busy lately, so, as I was saying, I have to listen to instrumental music. For the most part, that’s been a lot of jazz, like the German label ECM, which is pretty jazz-centric. You can’t really go wrong with an ECM release, whether it’s a classic Eberhard Weber or something more contemporary. Bill Evans’s Explorations, I was listening to that the other day. When I’m outside of that work environment, it’s a little bit of everything, often contemporary music. I have a pretty big record collection. I like having people over and cooking dinner while we listen to records.

Music is just a huge part of my life. I play drums and guitar and bass. If I’m not listening to music, I’m wiring an amplifier, and if I’m not doing that, I’m maybe playing guitar. I have a friend, Jill Singer, who also did a Media Diet with you, and she mentioned in it that every night, for about a year of the pandemic, we spent ninety minutes a night doing this group-listening thing. It was four of us, from 7:30 until 9:00, every single night. We had this master playlist with tens of thousands of songs.

Any guilty pleasures?

I don’t know if it’s a guilty pleasure—I don’t really feel that bad about it—but a while back, I started paying for YouTube Premium, which has changed my life. I feel like I was wasting years of my life looking at targeted ads. I found these Japanese cooking channels, and you don’t even know who’s hosting it. One’s called Japanese Noodles [Udon Soba Osaka Nara] and the other is Mogu Mogu. There’s not that much information, but they just go to some restaurant—and these aren’t restaurants I’ve heard of—just some noodle place in a suburb outside of Osaka, and they go there and follow the owner as they roll up the metal grate. I enjoy cooking, so it’s entertaining to learn something, but it’s also coupled with A.S.M.R. vibes. I mean, there’s no music playing. It’s just the sound of kitchenware clinking and things bubbling, and it’s real work in kitchens. It’s not produced. The lighting is always a little strange. I’ve been watching those when I’m stressed out, or if I just need to relax.

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Kate Berry’s glowing personality transmits what she seems to desire most: a breath of fresh air, and time to care for her myriad plants; raise her 9-year-old daughter, Quinn; or host intimate dinner parties for friends on the garden-covered terrace of her Domino and of the food, wine, and travel magazine Saveur, Berry has interactions with media that, due to her demanding schedule, tend to be brief and light—and meaningful. She lives her work, which leaves plenty of time for creating media, but not so much for taking it in. As she puts it, “You don’t

Courtesy Thames & Hudson

Consider the flower. What image blossoms to mind? What emotion does it elicit? For centuries, flowers have persisted as Flora Photographica: The Flower in Contemporary Photography (Thames & Hudson), out August 30, editors William Ewing and Danaé Panchaud compose a selection of vibrant modern floral

The Wind and Water Bar mid-construction. (Photo: Phan Quang. Courtesy Thames & Hudson.)

Lush fruit trees bursting over a roof. A canopy of plants covering a facade. Intricate bamboo constructions spiraling frVõ Trọng Nghĩa: Building Nature (Thames & Hudson), readers get an inside look into how the celebrated architect has embraced two core themes throughout

David Wallace-Wells. (Photo: Andrew Zuckerman / The Slowdown)

The climate writer and essayist David Wallace-Wells has a knack for translating the unimaginable into the painfully realarticle for New York magazine and subsequent book of the same name, The Uninhabitable Earth, played a critical role in jolting the conversation, detailing the varied plagues and, finally, apocalyptic conditions The New York Times, who added him to their Opinion section, where he has begun a weekly newsletter to reflect on the latest in our Anthropocene Age.

The Future Library Forest. (Photo: Rio Gandara. Courtesy Helsingin Sanomat)

“A forest in Norway is growing.” So begins the cryptic text printed on a certificate for the Future Library, or Framtidsbiblioteket, an artwork by Scottish artist Katie Paterson that, over the span of a century, cumulatively builds a collection of wri

Sound installation by Devon Turnbull. (Courtesy Lisson Gallery)

At New York’s Lisson Gallery, an unfettered approach to sculpture is the driving force behind a new group exhibition. OnThe Odds Are Good, The Goods Are Odd” presents the work of 11 groundbreaking New York City–based contemporary artists. In the exhibition, sculptures are a m

“Windy” spins on New York’s High Line. (Courtesy Meriem Bennani, High Line Art, and Audemars Piguet)

Rising from a patch of spiny ornamental grass on New York’s High Line park, a 9-foot-tall tornado spins in place, whirliWindy”, a new (and first-ever) sculpture by the Moroccan-born, New York–based artist Meriem Bennani, installed near West 23rd2 Lizards” (2020), made with filmmaker Orian Barki and launched on Instagram at the start of the pandemic, depicted the bewilderi

Baratunde Thurston at the Badwater Basin in California’s Death Valley National Park. (Courtesy Twin Cities PBS/Part2 Pictures)

“We think we invent things and create things and define ourselves by ourselves, but that’s not the whole story,” BaratunAmerica Outdoors, a six-part travel series that premiered last week on PBS. Thurston—a writer, comedian, and podcaster who has advised tThe Daily Show, and authored the best-selling memoir How To Be Black—has a knack for navigating nuanced conversations around race, culture, politics, and technology, framing these discussi

Cover of “Rocky Mountain Modern” by John Gendall

The jagged spine of the Rocky Mountains is too beautiful to mar. Yet over the years, developers and builders have manageBuckminster Fuller, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Eliot Noyes, and Eero Saarinen completed commissions in the Western United States, transforming it into a hub for architectural modRocky Mountain Modern: Contemporary Alpine Homes (Monacelli Press).

Alexandra Lange. (Photo: Mark Wickens)

A recurring theme in design critic Alexandra Lange’s work is unpacking how—and for whom—objects and spaces are designed.The Dot-Com City, and surveyed how kids’ toys and physical environments impact their development in her 2018 book, The Design of Childhood. The ways in which outdoor public spaces, with their basketball courts, playgrounds, and skate parks, fail teen girls wa story she wrote for Bloomberg CityLab—one of many publications she has contributed to over the past two-plus decades.

A still from Kandis Williams’s multiscreen work “Triadic Ballet” (2021). (Courtesy the artist and the Rosenkranz Collection.)

Time standards are one of the many seemingly invisible societal constructs we interact with every day but seldom ponder.Mountain / Time,” the show is a nod to both the local time zone in Aspen, Mountain Standard Time (MST)—which the writer and critic Kylehas hailed for its “apartness” and “sense of detachment from the economic and cultural centers of the nation”—and the conceptual d

Installation view of the “Hermès in the Making” exhibition in Troy, Michigan. (Photo: William Jess Laird)

Detroit is a city of craft. Of carmakers and Carhartt. Of Motown Records and Eminem. Of iconic midcentury design (Isamu Noguchi’s Hart Plaza and Dodge Fountain, buildings by Mies van der Rohe and Minoru Heidelberg Project. So it’s fitting that, following previous iterations in Copenhagen, last fall, and in Turin, Italy, last month, the Freits latest “Hermès in the Making” exhibition (through June 15). A playful, Willy Wonka factory–like presentation of the company’s know-how, the display offers “an o not to smile while walking through it. Divided into four sections—”A Culture of Traditional Craftsmanship,” “High-Quality Msecret!” Beyond, stations feature artisans in saddle-stitching, porcelain painting, gemstone setting, glove-making, leather wor

Photo: Carlo Banfi. (Courtesy Flos)

Emerging from the pandemic, the design industry, like most of us, has changed. The past two and a half years, which havean increasingly pressing climate crisis, have formed a solemn backdrop. In March 2020, almost at once, in the locked-down lives of many, the notion of “home” a

Maria Cristina Didero. (Photo: Stefan Giftthaler)

The concept of the Golden Age was first introduced by the ancient Greek philosopher Hesiod, around 700 B.C., in a refereDesign Miami Basel (June 14–19), taking place at the Swiss city’s Messeplatz. Organized around the theme “The Golden Age: Rooted in the Pa

Cover of “The Trayvon Generation” by Elizabeth Alexander

How do the generation of Black Americans who grew up in the past 25 years reckon with the tragedies that play out in theThe Trayvon Generation (Grand Central Publishing), poet, educator, and scholar Elizabeth Alexander—who currently serves as the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the largest humanities philanthropy in the UnEp. 52 of our Time Sensitive podcast)—explores these questions, and others, by meditating on race, class, trauma, justice, and memory, and their influences

Installation view of “Plastic: Remaking Our World.” (Photo: Bettina Matthiessen)

In the early 1860s, an advertisement in The New York Times offered $10,000 to anyone who could invent a new material for billiard balls. At the time, elephant ivory was the matercamphor, a waxy substance found in the wood of the camphor laurel tree. Though celluloid would later prove to be less than idea

Rendering of Drift’s indoor drone performance, “Social Sacrifice” (2022). (Courtesy Drift and Aorist)

Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs (one-of-a-kind digital assets created using blockchain technology), have divided the art woEp. 59 of our Time Sensitive podcast), see them as pathways to a promising future, while others express concern around the sky-high price points and carbon emissions they generate.

“Between the Mountain and the Sky” by Maggie Doyne

At 35, Maggie Doyne is the mother of more than 50 children. One is her biological child, who lives with Doyne, her husbaBetween the Mountain and the Sky: A Mother’s Story of Hope and Love (Harper Horizon), out last month. Through telling her extraordinary story, she demonstrates the life-altering power of

A ramen bowl by Taku Satoh. (Photo: Hiroshi Tsujitani. Courtesy Nacasa & Partners Inc.)

Eating ramen is a multisensory experience: the fragrant steam coming off of the broth, the slurping sound of enjoying thThe Art of the Ramen Bowl” (March 18–July 5) that’s on view at the Los Angeles location of Japan House, an initiative with additional hubs in Londonburi, the porcelain receptacles in which ramen is traditionally served, and renge, the compact, teardrop-shaped spoons that often accompany them, made by 30 leading artists, architects, and designers.

Anicka Yi’s “Biologizing the Machine (spillover zoonotica)” (2022), on view at Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca. (Photo: Agostino Osio. Courtesy the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca.)

Anicka Yi’s intoxicatingly sensory installations don’t just surround the viewer—many of them literally permeate the body, their sEp. 14 of our At a Distance podcast), in which three industrial steel tanks saturate the air with an aroma concocted by fusing secretions from carpenter an

Integrative nutritionist Daphne Javitch

Integrative nutritionist Daphne Javitch helps people develop their versions of a healthy life—a potentially daunting tasDoing Well, Javitch, a former womenswear consultant at Theory and Uniqlo, offers private health and career coaching as well as groEp. 46 of our At a Distance podcast.)

Installation view of “David Byrne: How I Learned About Non-Rational Logic.” (Courtesy Pace Gallery)

Thick, wobbly lines branch out across a wall of Pace Gallery’s global headquarters in New York. Follow each stroke to itwomen, grandpas, and singers craning toward the ceiling, and donuts, hairs, and holes reaching into the ground. Part absurdist diagram, part heart-melting poem, and part consciousness-shifting artwork, thiDavid Byrne: How I Learned About Non-Rational Logic” (on view Feb. 2–March 19), a restorative survey of drawings the musician has made over the past two decades.

Skyscraper Page website

With their audacious, gravity-defying forms, skyscrapers have captured the public’s imagination for more than a century.Skyscraper Page, a zany website with a skyscraper discussion forum that has spread to some 100,000 threads. But what’s the point of obs