Ever since the Ghanaian British architect David Adjaye and I first met, in 2011, in large part because of our many intersecting interests, we have forged what I consider to be my longest-running interview: a kaleidoscopic series of conversations, probably numbering around 30 or so and spanning 12 years, about life and death, cities, architecture, landscape, art, light and shadow, the built environment, “luxury,” nature, culture, memory and memorials, Japan (particularly Kyoto and the Katsura Imperial Villa), Isamu Noguchi, racial politics, Blackness, the African diaspora, slavery, colonialism, trauma, the climate crisis, and so much else. Extending out of this dialogue, David wrote a beautiful foreword to my book In Memory Of: Designing Contemporary Memorials (Phaidon, 2020).
Along the way, in late 2018, during an interview for Town & Country magazine, in Miami’s Design District, David mentioned the notion of alchemy to me for the first time, describing how certain material junctions can form “an alchemic power.” Almost immediately, I thought, Alchemy should be the title of a book about how David chooses, uses, and combines materials, and the architecture that results. That book, Alchemy: The Material World of David Adjaye (Phaidon), is out this week.
Here, in an interview recorded when we began the project in earnest, in the summer of 2020, we discuss our respective definitions of the word alchemy, his approaches toward choosing and using materials, and why he doesn’t feel ready to talk about the spiritual or sacred nature of his buildings just yet.
Spencer Bailey: Let’s unpack the word alchemy.
David Adjaye: Why don’t you start by defining it?
SB: In my mind, it’s basically when materials combine to create a sort of magic—when something larger than the materials results.
DA: I would say, for me, alchemy is the art of transformation, to change one state into another.
SB: We talked a bit about this when we did that Town and Country interview, but how does this alchemy idea manifest itself in your work?
DA: Almost from day one, what was interesting for me was the potential of how the built environment has been industrialized. This inheritance of industrialized materials and preindustrialized materials creates an opportunity, as an architect, to no longer think in any singular way. It creates the opportunity to understand how to negotiate the presence and meaning of each of these conditions, and how to use those as a kind of encyclopedia. Or as a field that now has the opportunity for new combinations and new relationships, both traditional and technical, manufactured or not manufactured, to somehow create a newness or a new way of seeing. I’m super fascinated by that. My entire practice is about the negotiation of meanings and re-meanings of material.
SB: Expanding out a bit, how do you view alchemy from an urban-design perspective?
DA: The projects that have always profoundly affected me have a kind of alchemic effect in the sense that they radically transform, through an assemblage of material or materials, a reading of place, a reading of atmosphere, a reading of inclusivity or exclusivity. The trick for me has been recognizing this potential of the power of architecture when it comes together. Its transformatory power—its alchemic power—is to then see how one is not just waiting for that moment, but how one is able to work with that at every opportunity. How do you not wait for the moment of magic, but make the magic happen every single time?
SB: Science, of course, also underlies alchemy. What do you think about this junction of science and art? In architecture, where do the two fields meet?
DA: I’m pre-Copernicus. I have no separation of science and art. I find them equally creative and equally aligned. I have no sense that somehow one is logical and one is intuitive. It seems absurd to split these two things. Both are intuitive, both are creative, both are logical, both are methodological. I’m afraid I’m one of those people that doesn’t see any difference between this at all, even though I know there’s a huge history of this rupture. I just missed it somehow.
SB: Tactility—and connected to that, an engagement of all of the senses—is also central to alchemy. Your work does that. At every project I’ve visited of yours I’ve always felt this dynamic relationship to the body, where it’s not just about what you’re seeing; it’s about the bodily relationship to space.
DA: The body is essentially a sensing organ. It’s a mediator of some internal energy and external phenomenology. I’m obsessed with this idea that the body is able to sense things that are beyond sight, and can feel things beyond sight, and that science is just trying to work out what the words might be. But it’s real. When I go to an amazing place, I have feelings that I can’t even start to describe in terms of logic. They become supernatural. I’m always interested in this idea of supernatural feelings, that somehow there’s something more than is understood naturally.
Logic, for me, is a beautiful system of negotiating, but it’s not the only system. It’s one methodology. I’m interested in testing how to awaken the senses of the other characters in the arsenal of [human] sensing. It may be a little bit cheeky of me, but I’m obsessed with this idea.
I’m continually interested in that awakening in people. And why am I interested in that? Because I’m interested in that idea that there’s a sense of a supernatural self that has a kind of compass that’s about a civilization and a history and a story which is shared and collective and magnificent. That’s probably the most articulate way I’ve ever explained it. [Laughs]
SB: Good thing we’re recording. [Laughs]
Well, that got me thinking about the spiritual nature of your work—not necessarily in a literal sense, but in this larger metaphorical sense. It’s not so surprising that you’ve been chosen to design major spiritual spaces [such as the Abrahamic Family House in Abu Dhabi and the National Cathedral of Ghana].
DA: I’ve been busted! [Laughs]
SB: Could you talk about the spiritual nature of your work?
DA: I don’t know if I’m ready to do that yet. I’ll have to be at least 60 before I can talk about my spirituality.
SB: Okay, but phrased differently—
DA: I will talk about the common collective.
SB: The idea of the sacred, too. Can you touch on that?
DA: Hmm. When I’m 60. [Laughs] It’s a slow process. It’s like wine. It needs to mature before you can open the bottle.
I want to use my words right now very precisely. I’m searching for a collective sense of ourselves. I’m searching for a way in which we can reach past what we see in ourselves and to see something that unifies us as human beings on this planet.
I like the fact that my work is different from other people’s work. A lot of folks think, Well, I don’t know what the references are. I don’t know what you’re doing. I like the fact that it’s outside of the language that’s controlling the message of how architecture is. Some people just discard it. They’re like, “Oh, I don’t know, it doesn’t quite fit the whatever.…” What I want is for the work to create a kind of translation or a transformation. I’m profoundly interested in using architecture as a way to dissolve barriers.
SB: Could you talk a bit about not just how you choose materials, but also how you use materials?
DA: Yes. I’m almost convinced that any rule that says you can’t do something means that it’s something you can do. When somebody says, “This is anathema,” I’m like, “Ooh, interesting….”
When I started making black spaces, people thought I was crazy. And when everybody was obsessed with deconstructivist or Modernist windows, I went into ornament. But when I’m talking about ornaments, I’m not talking about decoration. I’m talking about the cause—light—and effect, and talking about it very scientifically. I’m talking about methods of mathematically cutting light into darkness, and creating spectral effects that engage emotions out of the body and activate sensations within people.
I know I’ve gone a little bit wide here, but I hope you understand that I deeply, instinctively believe that we all collectively share certain hardwiring. The city has coded us to just look and read things a certain way, but we’re able to activate much more because we’ve experienced so much as the species has evolved on this thing we call a planet, which has itself evolved. There’s much more complexity in us than we think.
If you look at my work, I’m obsessed with mimicking what the planet does. I’m in praise of what I call the “supernatural power” of the planet: the way it creates alchemic color, spectral effects, atmosphere; the way it creates compression moments; the way it creates lightness and weight.
SB: In the context of architecture—and in the context of your own work—how do you think about language and poetry? In asking this, I don’t want to get hyperbolic and say, “Oh, your work is so poetic, David.”
DA: Don’t make me throw up. [Laughs]
SB: I do feel like that there’s an underlying quality to your work, though, that really has to do with elements of what might be called poetry.
DA: I would take that.
SB: It’s a fine line to toe.
DA: I love poetry as a creative construct. I don’t read poetry, so I’m not one of those that’s going to recite [Geoffrey] Chaucer to you. But I’m interested, deeply, in the construction of poetry. My understanding of the construction of poetry is that it assembles and disassembles the meaning of words into new emotions and conditions that throw you into new translations that you just can’t get from narrative. I deeply love that aspect of poetry. You can say the work is obsessed with this idea of constructing to get you past the language. But I don’t take inspiration, literally, from poets.
I’m interested in the poetic effect of Basquiat or the poetic effect of Miles Davis. Or Mozart. But also I’m very interested in how it manifests in the world from an acoustic to a material composition.
SB: In how architecture becomes visceral.
DA: I always feel like my buildings are journeys. When I say “journey,” I mean it. I feel like everything is a journey: What’s the metaphor of the thing? What’s the composition of that journey? What does that journey do?
In projects where there isn’t an overly social or collective agenda, it sometimes comes out in a very personal dialogue with a client who I really enjoy and who enjoys me. For instance, in Silverlight, which I did for an amazing couple, it became a dialogue between us. They allowed me to expand a series of compositions that I would mostly do in public buildings, but somehow it appeared in their house. They pushed me to want to explore with them the potential of all these material and light effects.
Each project is this testing of a series of conditions, and each really has also been a honing of my skills in being able to put together certain compositions. My houses have been used mostly as places to test specific conditions, but also absolutely solve the baseline of what the client wants. This has allowed me to gain confidence when I’m working on a bigger scale.
SB: I wanted to bring up the role of memory here. What makes buildings, in your mind, memorable or meaningful or enriching?
DA: When they trigger that sense of being more than what you feel in your everyday life. That feeling that you get when a building activates another part of your mind or your sensing apparatus. It triggers either emotions or memories or conditions that really start to bring you into a kind of mood.
I can remember the emotion of seeing the pyramids for the first time as a young boy, and being utterly, jaw-droppingly like, “What the—!” It blew my mind. It was like pow. I remember thinking, Can anything ever pass this? I don’t think anything ever has, actually. It transforms your sense of yourself in your own body, being in a space so magical.
SB: Could you talk about architectural materials as a means toward creativity and pleasure? Materials can become a tool for promoting something that’s beyond the building itself.
DA: Absolutely. Materials for pleasure is a profound thing. Ultimately, one of the sensations of this effect is a pleasure from the physicality of things. Our sentient ability to gain pleasure from the assemblage of things may somehow be a little bit hocus-pocus, but it’s real, the way we have a pleasurable attraction to a composition.
I know when I look at, let’s say, a [Carlo] Scarpa moment, I’ll see one little element of a project—a material composition that he makes, or a compression—and it activates an entire investigation in me about something else. Or it might be an Oscar Niemeyer moment, where he endlessly does something that you just can’t believe could become so endless, and it expands another way—another infinity—that you want to create. Or seeing some detail that Eduardo Souto de Moura did on a building that nobody understands. Eduardo calls it “the joke.” He believes every architecture project has to have a joke. “If it doesn’t have a joke, he’s not a creator,” is what Eduardo used to always say to me. I know exactly what he means, and it’s not even about jokes; it’s about understanding exactly what it is you’re handling.
SB: This connects back to that poetry notion we were talking about.
DA: Voilà! Actually, Eduardo loves poetry and reads [Fernando] Pessoa. He can recite it to you.
SB: If we’re talking about alchemy, we also have to talk about the junction of light and shadow. Some of the most visceral responses I’ve ever had to buildings, including some of yours, have been when the light hits them in a certain way, or when a shadow falls, or you notice some sort of detail through the play of light. Can you explain this in understandable terms?
DA: I don’t know what else to say. [Laughs]
SB: Put differently, how do you approach the art and science of light and shadow?
DA: In the early work, it was very Disney—maybe Disney is the wrong word for this, but it was rudimentary, just models and light effects. I remember in my early projects, like the Sunken House or the Elektra House, playing with light bulbs and making physical models and really simulating effects and going, “Oh, my God, do you see how that’s working? Imagine twelve hours of that. That’s going to be incredible. That aperture has to be like that.” This was just before we were able to map everything with computers.
By the time I got to [the Museum of Contemporary Art] Denver in 2007, the technology had become so sophisticated that I could actually download the data of the sunlight in that particular one-mile zone for, whatever it was, a hundred years. I was then able to literally understand what I was doing with light effects. I simulated exactly what the conditions were going to be, and of course I can’t simulate every second of that, but I can simulate every hour of that, knowing that I can understand exactly what the effects are.
Doing that downloaded a ton of information into me that I now almost intuitively know—that if I do this, it will do that. It’s now so intuitive that I don’t even talk about it because I just know exactly what it’s going to do. People think you’re a magician, but it’s actually just a little bit of practice.
SB: Has your material selection process changed over the years?
DA: Continually. I don’t have a benchmark. Some people say, “Well, it’s got to be that stone.” For me, that can never be the case. “How does it look here? What does it do?” is how I always select materials. I never select materials from what it is. I select the nature of it. That’s the critical thing. After that, how it’s then manipulated, what opacity, what elasticity, what kind of texture is all through the lens of the place.
So how do I choose materials? I just choose. I go to a place, I sense it with my body and everything I have in me, and I say, “This is going to be about this.” I don’t know why. Well, I do know why, but I’m not going to tell you. [Laughs] That becomes the genesis of what the thing is meant to be. Once you move past looking at materials just as performance, you have an incredible opportunity to understand the beauty and the magic—or the alchemy, to use that term—of materials. I think that alchemy is really an ability to understand, what is the thing that is making me choose a material? I’m thinking about what has been nullified and what needs to be awoken.
SB: I remember when I walked into your London studio [in 2017] and there was this huge, disorganized pile of materials at the entrance. I have a photo I took of it. I’ve never gotten it out of my head, this amazing, beautiful mess of materials. There was incredible order in the disorder. There seems to be a highly specific material makeup within this wide selection.
DA: One thing to definitely misunderstand is that it’s not whimsical. It’s deliberate and about a certain effect.
SB: That’s one of the things I wanted to touch on: the psychological impact of the materials you use.
DA: Oof. Here we go, Freud. [Laughs]
DB: Well, there’s this fast-emerging field called neuroaesthetics. I think that your work carries this emotional and psychological power. A social power, too. But I was wondering if you could speak to the psychological and emotional power of materials, this idea of the overwhelming feeling one can get from a material being used in a particular way.
DA: There’s no doubt about it that once you understand the effects and power of making form, you realize that you’re also manipulating a psychological dimension in the process. And that the combinations of certain materials—artists understand this really well—can be used to powerful effect. You’re able to use that material to either shepherd or distract a perception profoundly.
The psychological effects—or psychological power—of materiality is at the heart of the game of putting together materials. Essentially, it’s about psychologically trying to construct, in society, certain commonalities. That’s what I mean by the sensation of collective awareness. That’s a psychic thing. It’s an individual reading, but it’s a mental leap into that space. Material also has this ability to become the canvas that projects back at us things that we’re projecting onto it.
SB: As you were saying that, I was just thinking about my experiences at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and coming up from the dimly lit lower galleries and into the light-filled atrium.…
DA: I think that any good architect is a master of that psychology of materiality.
SB: Switching gears, I did want to bring up wabi-sabi, because I was just reading the book by Leonard Koren—
DA: I’ve not read it yet.
SB: I was like, “Holy shit, much of this is David’s work!” I know you have a Japan connection—your year in Kyoto during your studies at the Royal College of Art in the early nineties—but there’s a deeper connection to wabi-sabi, which is about roughness, material combinations, darkness, texture.…
DA: Voilà.
SB: I was wondering if you could speak to this roughness dimension, too, the idea of materials being something that aren’t necessarily polished or perfect, but almost intentionally imperfect.
DA: Intentional imperfection is an art form. I remember talking to Peter Zumthor when he came to see my Idea Store [in Whitechapel]. He said, “How can you accept this concrete?” I was like, “Because it’s beautiful.” He was utterly shocked, because it was shoddy work. I was like, “And there we have it. That’s why I go on this road and you go on that road.”
I mean, call it wabi-sabi. It’s interesting: Japan was very important to me because Japan made me let go of the value of what you think things are, and that was about really looking at Buddhist shrines and looking at concepts such as wabi-sabi. While there I saw a profound re-meaning of material within culture: what was considered to be “primitivism” in the West was there transformed into the most significant and sophisticated materials in the world. Earth, mud, sticks, thatch, and a few rocks amalgamated into an architecture that connected to the cosmos and revealed unseen interconnectivity between people and place.
Japan also allowed me to go back to Africa and really understand and look at animism and the effects of animism, because of the animist culture of the continent.
SB: It’s the idea that there’s an energy embedded in everything, right?
DA: In everything. And that form is about these contrasts—that to perceive form you have to create the right combination of contrasts, and that there is no such thing as too much or too little; there’s just combinations.
SB: It’s interesting that you mentioned Peter Zumthor because I recently read his book Atmospheres, based on a lecture he once gave, and while your work differs from his in many ways, I would say that the ideas in Atmospheres are deeply connected to your practice. Could you talk about atmosphere in relation to materiality and alchemy?
DA: There are very few moments in the world—and language sometimes can do it—where you can create collective agency and connection. Atmosphere is a moment when a collection of people—beings—engage in a singular experience from their own perspective, but somehow unified in that perception. It comes from the ability of sculpture or architecture to create compositions that really have this effect. It’s a kind of transformative effect. I think that’s what Zumthor also means by “atmosphere.”
SB: Could you speak to the social aspect of how you view materials? As a means for creating connections, for uplifting people, and helping knit together the social fabric of a place.…
DA: I’ve always been fascinated with seeing if I could move the discourse of materials beyond their performance and constructability and into the social realm: what a material is and how it profoundly affects human beings. It goes back to a deep feeling about the impact of material environments on humans: a forest, a cave, an earth structure. It’s deeply wired in our psyches.
SB: The notion of “climate moderation,” which we’ve talked about before, is also at play here.
DA: Peter Smithson was my teacher. I completely believe in climate moderators.
SB: As a climate moderator yourself, how do you determine the materials you choose, based on the climate of a place? Why, for example, the red-patterned metal façade for the Aïshti Foundation in Beirut?
DA: The red of Beirut…. To get that commission was really extraordinary. I never thought I’d work in Beirut. I happened to have spent a short time growing up in Beirut. It had a very large impact on me because it was just before the war. I remember being a young child sitting on the balcony, hearing the rumble of a column of tanks rolling in from Jordan. If you’ve ever heard that in your life, you will never forget it, because it’s like an earthquake. I heard shelling. I remember my father coming home that day and saying, “We’re leaving immediately.”
Beirut comes back to me in fragments. I went to the international school there. Beirut was this incredible place in the Middle East that was supposed to be super developed, super sophisticated. It was marked by these red terra-cotta roofs. When my father was alive, when he talked about Beirut, it was the red roofs of Beirut and the art deco part of the city. Well, that’s all gone now because of development. There are hardly any red roofs left.
When I did the project, I talked to the client [Tony Salamé] and said [of the ornamental red aluminum façade], “This is really funny, this little ‘joke.’” For my father’s generation, Bierut was all about the red roofs, and for me, it’s a concrete jungle. But for me, it’s also about the sea, and this memory of Beirut being the city along the sea….
SB: I’ve always felt that Goethe’s “Architecture is frozen music” quote is false, but I do think that there’s a beautiful rhythm to your buildings, including at Aïshti and the Ideas Stores.
DA: Rhythm is deeply embedded in the work. It’s a recognition of forms, proportions, and systems that are not Eurocentric. It’s the clue to understanding how my work connects to other knowledge systems in the world, specifically African knowledge systems. If you look at my libraries [the Idea Stores on Whitechapel Road and Chrisp Street in London, as well as the Francis A. Gregory Library and William O. Lockridge / Bellevue Library in Washington, D.C.], you’ll know that I’m steeply and deeply embedded in those rhythmic systems. When I say something is beautiful, I’m acknowledging a similar relationship to a body of knowledge. It looks surprising to people who don’t look at that, but anybody who does will see it very very clearly.
For me, when people ask, “How is your work African?” I always laugh and think, Well, clearly you don’t have eyes, because you can’t see what’s so blatantly in front of you. My compositions and the way I work—and the forms, even the tonalities—are all about a different knowledge. That’s what you’re calling rhythmic. It’s the relationship to Africa. That form happens in sound, it happens in form, it happens in material. If we’re going to talk about alchemy, we have to talk about Africa.
SB: Great, let’s. How do you view alchemy in the context of Africa and the diaspora?
DA: Alchemy, in the context of Africa, is very normal. It’s part of the way in which creativity operates. It seems unusual in the West, because it’s not the normal way in which it happens—it’s much more logical and organized [here]. Whereas the notion of transformation, or transfiguration even, is a very African thing: You take something, and you transform it into another state, and then it becomes creatively admired.
SB: I like this idea of alchemy being something that’s deeply rooted in a culture.
DA: Alchemy is profoundly about the moment when human beings confirm a kind of engagement with nature that then becomes art.
SB: Let’s finish on the climate crisis. How are you thinking about it through an architectural lens?
DA: The precipice we now face is so present and clear. When I was a young architect, it felt further away. It felt like it was still “out there.” But the precipice is so very near. The trauma of this precipice is that it requires a joined-up ability to put on the brakes.
At once, I’m completely distraught at the juggernaut that’s been created by architecture, and our inability to find a way to transform it, but at the same time understanding that there is incredible technological innovation. Nanotechnology, which allows us to understand how to sequester carbon materials, would not even have been a conversation thirty years ago. We’re now talking about that for perhaps the most destructive material: concrete. That science is maybe about ten years away, so we’re right on the edge of cliff-jumping, or not.
There’s also a conversation about balance: mass-made versus mass nature. We know that both of those are at a tipping point. It’s now established that there’s almost more mass, give or take a decade, made in the world as there is mass on the planet. These two are really disturbing moments, because deeply rooted in my thinking about the ecology of making is to strike a balance and be with nature.
SB: How is this thinking playing out in your work today?
DA: I’ve become really obsessed with mud and rammed earth, and things that can decompose back. I started posting [on Twitter and Instagram] things like termite mounds. It wasn’t just because the form looks like towers. It’s this idea of a mass made from exactly the thing that’s on the ground, constructed into a form that creates the habitation. Then, when the community goes, when the queen mother dies, it just dissolves back into the earth. There’s something so deeply, profoundly powerful and edifying about it. That’s a lesson architecture needs to grapple with.
There’s one view, which is, Oh no, we’re worried about the scarcity of materials, and then there’s another view, which is: We need to move away from this idea of what I call the “prejudice of materials.” I’m interested in: Can you use mud to make a high-rise?
SB: Too few architects seem to be thinking along these lines.
DA: It’s maddening. This is the most pressing thing: how to make an architecture that simply goes back to the earth.
This interview was condensed and edited for clarity from two conversations, recorded on June 9, 2020, and July 29, 2020, during the research phase of Alchemy: The Material World of David Adjaye (Phaidon), out this week.
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In the whirring, flashing, globe-spanning machine that is American popular culture, Memphis, Tennessee—population 620,00Memphis Blues” was a key evolutionary link between ragtime and jazz; just over 50 years later, Bob Dylan namechecked it with his semiStuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”; 15 years after that, a group of radical Italian designers in Milan, listening to the Dylan track while thinking up a
If there’s anything that Christopher John Rogers cares even more deeply about than clothes, it has to be color. Since establishing his namesake fashion label in 2016, tGossip Girl, red carpets (Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, and Rihanna have all donned his dresses), and into the illustrious halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (two of his dresses were featured in the Co
As I was reading Katy Kelleher’s beautifully written new book, The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Essays on Desire and Consumption (Simon & Schuster), I found myself returning to a conversation I once had with the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister, who in 2018 himself published an astute book on beauty. “If you’re in an environment that is lacking beauty,” Sagmeister told me, “you are becoming an asshole.” Cheeky as his
When the artist, performer, and poet vanessa german was selected to design a temporary memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., as part of the “Beyond Granite: Pulling Together” exhibition (on view from Aug. 18 through Sept. 18), she quickly found herself turning to a catalytic moment in AmericaMarian Anderson’s 1939 Easter Sunday concert at the Lincoln Memorial. Attended by 75,000 people in the then segregated U.S. capitol, with millions more listening on
Defying the pull of our digital, largely two-dimensional age, the New York–based stylist and shop owner Beverly Nguyen tVogue, Opening Ceremony, and La Garçonne; as an assistant and later studio director of the stylist Kate Young (the guest on Ep. 3 of Time Sensitive); and now as a professional stylist herself, Nguyen has in recent years plunged headlong into a new sBeverly’s NYC. Lining the shelves of the specialty market are wooden spoons, brooms, baskets, and pepper grinders—many of these itemsextra virgin olive oil.
“All too often, we humans push papers, ideas, or money around at a monotonous pace with no time for rest and even less tLook: How to Pay Attention in a Distracted World (Riverhead Books). The result of decades of research and time spent thinking and writing about the subject of observatiLook spans a vast range of theories—from philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of embodied perception, to psychologist M
Designing a truly great building is no easy feat. Among many things, it must be cognizant of history, responsive to the Tate Modern—a former power station transformed into an art gallery in 2000, then extended in 2016 by the Basel, Switzerland–based a
As head of curatorial at the Design Museum in London, Priya Khanchandani sees her role as that of a “cultural observer.”
For the past 15 years, the architect, curator, and writer Pedro Gadanho has been raising alarm bells about the urgency tEco-Visionaries,” a 2018 exhibition he co-curated at the Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology in Lisbon, Gadanho is at the forefClimax Change: How Architecture Must Transform in the Age of Ecological Emergency (Actar Publishers, 2022), brings together his most recent research and thinking to profound and potent effect.
“I have collected lines (and they have collected me).”
As we head into the summer, we scouted the globe—from London to Dallas to Miami to New York—to select what we feel are tArt Basel Miami Beach in December): “Joan Didion: What She Means” at the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
As far as architecture career paths go, Lina Ghotmeh’s is a bit of an anomaly. In 2005, at age 25, while working in Londreceived the Grand Prix Afex, a prestigious French architecture prize. Around that time—project complete—Dorell, Tane, and Ghotmeh shuttered DGT and
The astronomer Chris Impey’s latest book, Worlds Without End: Exoplanets, Habitability, and the Future of Humanity, explores the implications of the fact that there are, by his rough count, a mind-boggling four billion Earth-like planthe latest episode of our At a Distance podcast, adding that, “We’re not gonna go there; the energy cost is insane. We have to look after this planet.”
Norman Teague has a global outlook, but the artist, designer, furniture-maker, and educator keeps his work close to homeAfricana” furniture and homeware collection from 2021 incorporates hand-carved details that reference African tribal carvings, a
In the ebb and flow of history, civilizations have long endured through sculpture, the distillation of a society’s valueBeyond Measure,” an exhibition of new and early works by the British artist Thomas J Price (on view through Aug. 20), presents monuments of a subject almost wholly excluded from the sculptural canon: the casual
If there’s one book I’m going to be shoving into peoples’ hands for years to come, it’s the recently released collectionNot Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility (Haymarket Books)—which is why it’s our pick for The Slowdown’s debut Book of the Month column.
The Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, the curator of the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016, was on hand last week for the debut of the Biennale’s 17Davos Baukultur Alliance, a new global initiative from the organization that aims to advance eight core principles it deems essential to a prosphis celebrated half-built house developments, Aravena’s words were as stirring as ever—only now, their impact felt strangely, eerily different.
Three weeks have passed since our Milan Design Week exhibition “Take It or Leave It,” in collaboration with the Italian architect and designer Paola Navone, during which she gave away hundreds of items she had collected or designed over the years, from Indian metal spoons an
As the design and interiors director of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Tom Delavan adheres to a schedule of nonstop, high-intensity days that consist of writing, overseeing photoshoots, porDomino, Delavan also operates his own interior design practice, drawing on three decades of immersion in the worlds of fine anBeni Rugs called Archival, which launches next week.
Across his 40-year career, the British architect John Pawson has realized a vast portfolio of impeccably refined projectMaking Life Simpler (Phaidon), one by his longtime friend the design writer and critic Deyan Sudjic, a book not only about his work and visi
Everywhere I went during this year’s Milan Design Week, there seemed to be a palpable feeling that the Salone del Mobile design and furniture fair, now in its 61st year, is sputtering, or, at the very least, puttering. While it unquestionabAlcova, which this year took place at a former slaughterhouse, and spaces in and around the city’s Brera neighborhood, long a GUBI presented its latest collections this year, or the Bonacossa Tennis Club, where the Milan-based designer Cristina Celestino created a pop-up restaurant with the food collective We Are Ona. Many architects, designers, and journalists I spoke wi
One thousand numbered objects, 623 lottery drawings, 591 “Take Its,” 32 “Leave Its,” and a smattering of trades therein,Take It or Leave It,” in collaboration with the Italian architect and designer Paola Navone, and it was no placid affair. But of course it to give away hundreds of items she had collected or designed over the years, from Indian metal spoons to indigo textiles to ceramic
Daniel Rozensztroch has a rare knack for subtly telling stories through objects. The world of the Paris- and Nice-based
The Slowdown’s first-ever public event, the exhibition “Take It or Leave It,” made its debut yesterday at Milan Design Week. Organized in collaboration with the Italian architect and designer Paol
Radical by nature and a rule-breaker at heart, Paola Navone has been on an endless self-described “treasure hunt” for thArchitettura Radicale, and then went on to join the Italian radical design groups Alchimia and Memphis. From the early 1980s to 2000, she liv
Entering “The Yanomami Struggle” exhibition at The Shed in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards, I find myself standing before a vast arrangement of photographs, s
Nearly 150 years ago, on April 14, 1876—the eleventh anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s death—Frederick Douglass spoke befDouglass said, “I warmly congratulate you upon the highly interesting object which has caused you to assemble in such numbers and spi
For Lesley Lokko, plurality comes naturally. Born in Scotland to a Ghanaian father and a Scottish mother, and moving freThe Laboratory of the Future,” she’s bringing exactly this outlook to the main exhibition. On view from May 20 through Nov. 26, the six-part presentAfrican Futures Institute in Accra, a new architecture school and research institute that, as with her Biennale show, positions Africa as a labor
Jonah Takagi comes across as laid-back and casual, but the truth is, he keeps pretty busy. The bulk of his time is splithis namesake design studio, and Providence, Rhode Island, where he teaches a Herman Miller–inspired furniture design course at the Rhode Island Sc
For the past 20 years, Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, has been teaAwe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life (Penguin Press).
Few people in history have managed to maintain an image as precise and immutable as that of the late fashion designer Ka
From its classic swoosh logo, to its signature Air Jordan silhouette, to its legendary “Just Do It” tagline, to its recent 50th anniversary video short by Spike Lee, Nike knows how to expertly engineer and craft its brand down to the tiniest detail, and how to subtly zoom out and in
Marina Koren, who covers science and space exploration as a staff writer for The Atlantic, realizes her job doesn’t sound real. “But I promise it is,” she says. “When I tell people I’m a ‘space reporter,’ they
When Janet Malcolm first wrote for The New Yorker in 1963, her debut wasn’t in the form of the piercing prose she became known for, but instead a slim poem titled “Thoughts on Living in a Shaker House.” On the surface, it may seem an odd starting point for Malcolm, who would become one of the foremost writers about—andNew Yorker staff writer until her death, on June 16, 2021, at age 86. But the poem’s lines are indeed pure Malcolm: plainspoken, cu
Anne Helen Petersen resides on Lummi Island, a small land mass in the Puget Sound seven minutes off the coast of WashingThe Tome, the island’s newsletter, which arrives in their (physical) mailboxes once a month.
When the Covid-19 pandemic arrived, and with it, the lockdowns of March 2020, I sat at home in Brooklyn Heights, alone,
The old’s been rung out, the new’s been rung in. We’re now all looking out on the year ahead, thinking about what it migthe tide turning on travel restrictions and peace of mind slowly being restored to the masses. 2023 is forecast to be the year when, for better or worse, travel will make a full return to its pre-pandemic patterns.
It’s a late afternoon in early November, nearing dusk, and I’m sitting with Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times architecture critic, inside the West Village outpost of Daily Provisions, a café from the New York City restaurateur Dawrote about another Meyer establishment, Union Square Cafe, unpacking the implications of the then-new location and layout of the l
That the first work of art I saw during this year’s Miami Art Week was a newscast seems somehow appropriate in our precaage of misinformation and sped-up media ecosystem?” the artists behind it, from the civic-engagement coalition For Freedoms, appeared to be asking. “And really, what’s t
What’s the purpose of a museum—and who decides which objects are worthy of value, attention, and care? These two questioYoung Lords and Their Traces” at the New Museum, the Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates’s first-ever museum survey exhibition to be staged in New Y
Home is unequivocally where the heart is. But in a world that far too often embraces soulless or downright bland furnituSight Unseen, comes in.
In February 2009, some 500 miles above the Siberian tundra, a defunct Russian satellite and a U.S. communication satelli
While the Danish design firm HAY is just celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, it has achieved a rarefied place in
It’s a serene, bluebird-sky day, a slight chill in the air, and I’m walking with the Paris-based, Austrian-born designerSculpture Gallery, a transfixing space of light and shadow built in 1970 that’s home to works by artists including Michael Heizer, Robert
Ever Heard of Noh Theater? Our Primer to Three Major Productions Arriving in New York City This Fall
Two winters ago, I picked up a copy of Penguin Classics’ Japanese Nō Dramas, a volume of two dozen translations by Royall Tyler I’d been meaning to read since tearing through Yukio Mishima’s Five Modern Noh Plays a decade previous. I had moved into a New York City gem (an apartment with a fireplace), and with Covid cases skyrocketi
As changes in weather patterns, economic realities, and public perception have triggered a wave of climate consciousness over the past few years, renewable energy sources have enjoyed a newfound level of attention, no longer relegated to thlong-sputtering industry of solar power. Factoids like how an hour and half worth of sunlight hitting the earth could provide the world’s total energy consumption in a year have been employed to tease out the industry’s transformative power for decades. Now, with technological advances makincheaper and more efficient than ever, it seems better poised than ever to take on a greater role in weaning humanity off of its fossil fuel and coal depende
Since 1997, when she founded her eponymous (now shuttered) gallery, Elizabeth Dee has been a fixture of the New York artIndependent Art Fair. An elegant, tightly curated event that remains an outlier in its efforts to elevate overlooked, underrepresented, and
What does it mean to revisit a photograph? When a camera shutters, it locks a moment in time, forever trapping the imageGathered Leaves, the latest book by the Minneapolis-based photographer Alec Soth, whose work has long documented lonely souls and fractured dreams in spaces across the United States. In Gathered Leaves, Soth revisits five of his previous books, including in its pages new notes, annotations, text excerpts, and even photo
In 2016, a stampede of people flooded the streets of Taipei, stopping garbage trucks and buses in the wake of their single-minded pursuit. What unifi
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
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
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
As the director of archives and brand heritage at the Michigan-based furniture powerhouse Herman Miller—now known as MilIni Archibong.
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.
“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
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
Earlier this year, Burkina Faso–born Diébédo Francis Kéré became the first African, and the first Black architect, ever
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
“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
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).
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.
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
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
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
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
In her new book, Generation Dread, author and researcher Britt Wray delves into the psychological consequences of the climate crisis. Combining scientifi
May’s colors, textures, and sense of renewal seem to be essential ingredients in Paris-based artist Alexandre Benjamin Navet’s exuberant work. A self-described “spring and summer boy,” his expressive drawings—often made in watercolor or oil pas
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
In 1938, two years after completing one of his first realized public artworks, “History Mexico,” a sculptural, colored chis namesake museum in Long Island City, Queens, which he founded in 1985).
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
Think about the last time you felt a sense of awe about the world. Perhaps you were hiking among trees in a lush forest,
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.
A sobering 2006 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization laid out the striking impacts industrial animal agriculture has
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
For most of the 20th century, breaking a sweat was seen as unladylike. Popular opinion considered working out dangerous
One afternoon in February of 1966, Stewart Brand took half a tab of LSD, sat on a rooftop in San Francisco’s North Beach
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 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 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.)
Born in Grandin, North Dakota, in 1904, the artist Clyfford Still was among the first generation of Abstract Expressioni
In a single word, how does the future make you feel? A towering sculpture by architect Suchi Reddy, founder of the New Y
Darrin Alfred, the curator of architecture and design at the Denver Art Museum (DAM), has wrangled subjects as mesmerizi
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.
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