Across his 40-year career, the British architect John Pawson has realized a vast portfolio of impeccably refined projects both large and small, whether a yacht, a Los Angeles hotel, or a door handle. Essential to his practice has been the production of books, including, in the case of his latest title, Making Life Simpler (Phaidon), one by his longtime friend the design writer and critic Deyan Sudjic, a book not only about his work and visionary eye, but also his life as a whole.
Though he’s renowned for his serene, minimalist structures—from the Calvin Klein flagship store in New York (1995), to an abbey for Cistercian monks in the Czech Republic (2004), to the Jaffa Hotel in Israel (2018)—Pawson is also a master in making serene, minimalist books. Beginning with his first, the aptly titled Minimum, in 1996, he has since published 11 more, including Barn (1999), about his restoration and renovation of a derelict 18th-century Dutch barn in the English countryside; Architecture of Truth (2001), a reissue of photographer and artist Lucien Hervé’s pictures of the 12th-century Cistercian Abbey of Le Thoronet in Provence; and A Visual Inventory (2012), featuring a curated collection of 288 snapshots by Pawson, selected from more than 250,000 he’d taken on his digital cameras by that time.
Here, Pawson discusses his affinity for bookmaking; his long, slow, peripatetic path to becoming an architect; a recent visit from Kanye West to his country house in the Cotswolds; and the life-changing impact Calvin Klein has had on his life and career.
Let’s start with your relationship to Deyan, whom you met for the first time in 1984, when he was the editor of Blueprint magazine. Later, in 2002, Deyan invited you to create a Venice Architecture Biennale installation, and of course, you went on to create the London Design Museum, where he was the director at the time. That museum is your ultimate collaboration with Deyan. Tell me about this forty-year friendship.
It’s been amazing. He’s seen every peak and trough in my life and career, both in my personal life and my professional life. He was there when I first met Calvin [Klein], physically, for the first time.
He was in the room with you two?
When I met Calvin, he said to me, “Can I see something you’ve designed?” The only thing that I could find was my own house under construction, and then Hester Van Royan’s apartment. When we went round there, Deyan was there interviewing Hester. There’ve been all these instances. We were in East Hampton when all the fuss with Martha Stewart happened—the fight with the neighbor [Harry Macklowe].
But I first met Deyan because I wrote to him, right at the very beginning, when I just finished Waddington Galleries [now Waddington Custot], and I invited him to see it. I’d never met him before. We walked around the gallery, and of course, I was so proud and pleased with it. But for a publisher or a critic, there’s nothing in the gallery to show apart from the art, and if there’s no art in it, there’s even less. There were just white walls and a floor, and a bit of light coming in. But he was very polite and diffident. He didn’t say, “Bollocks!” Later on, he found something to publish.
What was the approach to putting this book together? I think it’s interesting to think about how you transformed your forty-year friendship, which also includes so many interviews, so many conversations you’ve had together, into book form. And to do that in a way that captures your rich body of work.
He’s a good editor, for a start. It’s interesting what gets into the book and what doesn’t. It’s an illustrated book, so when he did it, I said to him, “Is this all?” Only fifty thousand words. I was counting the words. I was like, “This is about me. Can you not put some more words in?” Anyway, he stretched it to sixty thousand. But there’s so much you can’t put in, obviously.
I think it’s well-judged. I mean, he keeps saying to me, “Why didn’t you tell me that anecdote before? I could have put it in the book.” Actually, after the book had been written, Kanye, or Ye, coming to stay [at my family’s home in Oxfordshire] was not an anecdote for the book. Probably not an anecdote for any book, but….
Ye comes to the Cotswolds.
Yeah. [Laughter]
Well, I appreciate the nuance of the book—the kind only someone like Deyan, who knows you so well, could get. I should say this book is not simply hagiography; this isn’t, “Look at John on a pedestal!” Although perhaps, yes, the nature of this kind of book does do that a little bit. But I think what’s special is that Deyan captures a particular sensibility and spirit. I love how, early on in the book, he makes this distinction that you’re as fascinated about what happens inside your buildings as the buildings themselves. To me, that’s the kind of thing one can only come to when they look really deeply at what you do.
Yeah, I think so. The book came about because he proposed it to Phaidon—and to me, of course. Because we’re so close, I said yes. Obviously, if you think about it, it’s quite early [in my career] to have a biography. It’s obviously not complete, because my life isn’t complete. But I did learn early on with Phaidon, with my first book with them, I was saying, I want it to be this, and I want it to be that, and they said, “Well, hold on a minute. We are the publisher.”
I know something about that. [Laughs] Of your work, I wanted to first bring up Neuendorf House, which was such a catalytic project in so many ways, fraught as it was with the Claudio Silvestrin situation. [Editor’s note: Pawson and Silvestrin were partners in a firm they founded together, but split up during the construction of the Neuendorf project.] But then came your book Minimum. Neuendorf, Calvin Klein, and Minimum were these tentpoles that happened early in your career. It’s interesting that a book, in that sense, is actually almost on the same plane as a building. Your books have become these sort of totemic things—particularly Minimum.
Talking about sales and things like that very early on, Phaidon explained that one thousand [sales] is a bestseller. Like everyone else, you think of J.K. Rowling or something—you think of millions being the norm. But Phaidon had the idea to make Minimum as a “mini” Minimum. They just did it. They said, “We’re doing this.” I was a bit surprised, because it was important to me, the size of the photographs and the quality of…. Of course, it went on to sell over a hundred thousand copies. So whatever criticism I had, I kept quiet.
My other books haven’t sold quite the same. The only thing that’s still in print is this one and the cookbook [Home Farm Cooking]. They reprinted the cookbook.
Not to be confused with your first cookbook, which came out in the nineties. Which I have. It’s incredible.
Oh, well, in New York, that became a bit of a cult thing recently.
Yeah, I saw The New Yorker wrote a piece about it.
Yeah, what she [New Yorker staff writer Helen Rosner] wrote was great. I don’t know her. But it’s so nice to have a young cook interested [in the book]. Yeah, that was an episode. [Laughs]
I’ve become a fairly close student of your work, and you and I have had several conversations and interviews over the past decade, yet there’s so much that was new to me in Deyan’s book. I especially enjoyed learning about the Gordon Bunshaft house in the Hamptons, which Martha Stewart purchased and then hired you to renovate and expand.
You didn’t know about that?
No! And how that project had so much promise, and turned into such a disaster.
The great thing about the human mind is that you forget. You park the not so successful episodes or the depressing episodes behind you.
It was such a special site, and such a special view. To have that pavilion of Bunshaft’s, and to be able to do a hidden extension around the back! But then you’re next door to Harry Macklowe. The irony is—I didn’t personally obviously meet him at the time, and he slightly overreacted to Martha Stewart coming next door to be his neighbor—but I ended up designing a yacht for him. I thought, I’m never ever going to meet this man. He’s so tough. Then we end up doing the yacht, [I end up] meeting his [now ex-]wife [Linda Macklowe], and visiting that amazing apartment [in Manhattan] with all the art that rivaled MoMA. It was like walking around MoMA on your own while having tea and cakes. Now all that’s gone up in steam, or air. It’s sad. How can you get divorced after all that time? “Nowt so queer as folk,” as my father used to say.
I did know the story about your connection to Calvin Klein. We’d spoken about that, how Ian Schrager passed him a small book featuring several of your projects, how Calvin literally came to London and called you at your studio. You thought someone was playing a practical joke on you, but no, it was indeed Calvin.
Yeah, that’s all true.
From there, he hired you to design his Madison Avenue showroom. But what I didn’t realize was how pivotal this commission was in the aftermath of your parting ways with Claudio Silvestrin, and how it shored up your firm financially, and also, eventually, once it was open, lent this halo-like glow to your work.
It’s no exaggeration to say I owe Calvin everything. I would even say I owe him my life, in a certain sense. Because it was so important to my career, but it also changed my life. Yes, I’d met [my wife] Catherine, I’d had children, which is really important, obviously. But just the way we’ve lived and the way things have happened have been because of Calvin.
I don’t think most followers of your work realize how by-the-seat-of-your-pants your life and career had been until you went out on your own at age 40. There’s this quote from Catherine in the book about your both meeting at a dinner party in November 1988. She says, “He told me that he was 40, had no money, and no car, and that he lived in a rented studio flat. I couldn’t believe it, but it was true.” [Laughter] I think there’s something so special about being able to capture that moment in time and think about John Pawson at 40 and John Pawson now, and wow, it does show the impact that Calvin had. But as you read along, it also shows the impact that Catherine has had.
Absolutely. She changed everything. She showed me that you didn’t have to lose money: One or two small steps, and the minus becomes a plus. Also, she allowed me to get on with it. I was able to leave the house in the morning, come back in the evening, and everything else was taken care of. But I’d also been very lucky with Hester [van Royen, my previous partner] the ten years before.
Let’s stay on the Calvin Klein commission for a moment. The store had this twenty-five-year staying power—until, of course, Raf Simons and Sterling Ruby intervened a few years ago. [Laughter] What do you make of that staying power, the fact that this piece of architecture could, in an ephemeral industry like fashion retail, become so long-lasting?
I try very hard with the work, generally, to make it ageless, or to make it as direct and as straightforward as possible so that it should stand some kind of test of time. Being realistic, you will always be able to date things.
The Calvin Klein store is interesting because I was there to make it happen for Calvin. That’s very clear. That’s true of all of my clients, really, but Calvin wanted it designed as he wanted it, and I was there to help him do that. He would have liked to have been an architect, I’m sure—or would have been, if things had been different. He had very strong ideas, and they weren’t what I would have done [had I been] left to my own devices. He had the magic dust or whatever it is, so he was able to sprinkle it.
I learned so much from him, on every level. Everything Calvin touched, whether it was the flower arrangement or the staff clothes, it was all done on absolutely the highest level. That huge backing was amazing. Working on more modest things, I realized what support I got from Calvin.
An interesting connection between Calvin and you, just going back and looking at your own family history, is textiles. You have your roots in Yorkshire’s textile industries; your grandparents had built businesses based on textiles or clothing there, and you even, for a time, worked in the family business. What was this like as a training ground for you, being surrounded by textiles?
It was huge. Because it’s all about material. Obviously, it’s about cut and design, but you start with the material and what you’re going to do with it.
It gave me an extraordinary grounding. My father used to go like this, when I was wearing something, and say, “Oh, that’s eighty percent wool and twenty percent silk.” And, “That’s in twenty-four hours” or “That’s in eighteen hours.” He knew the weight and the composition. Also, when he went to the factory, he could hear how efficient they were. He’d say, “Oh, the factory is running at a sixty-percent rating at the moment.” He could walk through the different departments and tell productivity and efficiency, just from the sound.
Then there was your time in Japan, where—again, something I didn’t know—you first arrived in late 1973, to learn and practice Zen Buddhism, but within twenty-four hours of arriving at the monastery, you found yourself, as Deyan puts it, “profoundly disillusioned.” Instead, you became an English teacher in Nagoya for three years. I wanted to hear a bit about this Japan journey.
[Laughs] You can’t believe that a 24-year-old could be so much like a daydreaming schoolboy. I’d seen this documentary about these Zen Buddhist monks practicing kendo on a mountaintop. It was filmed exquisitely. I thought, That’s me! I’m going to be doing kendo, and I’m going to reach enlightenment.
I’d lost my job with my father. My impending wedding had been canceled. All I could think of was escape. I arrived in Nagoya on Christmas Eve. Everything had failed in my life. But I was putting it into the back of my mind. This friend that I knew took me out to drown my sorrows. Then I said I wanted to go to this monastery, and he said, “Well, funnily enough, my father is a Buddhist monk. He has a local temple in Nagoya, but if you want to go to this fancy one, I can take you.” So we drove up. He said, “I’ll hang around tonight, just in case.” I said, “No, no, no, I’m here. Come back in ten years.” And oh my God, it was such a letdown.
But Japan proved fortuitous in so many ways. You got to see the temples of Kyoto and the Katsura Imperial Villa and its gardens. I’ve always wanted to ask you about Katsura in particular. Tell me about its impact on you and your thinking. Do you remember your first visit? I know you’ve been back since.
Yeah, it’s one of those ultimate buildings. But it is quite tightly controlled. You have to dig deep to go into your own world and just enjoy the very short time that you’re allowed to hang around outside or at the edge of a room. It’s like [Donald] Judd’s one hundred aluminum boxes in Marfa or the Pyramids. It’s hard to beat.
It strikes me that Katsura is also so photographic. Isamu Noguchi famously photographed Katsura. Even more famously, Yasuhiro Ishimoto photographed it. These photographs captured imaginations in the West in a way that transformed a lot of architectural thinking. Photography is such a large part of your practice, so I’m wondering, were you able to look at Katsura in that light, in a photographic way?
I think there have been other places, not necessarily photographic—I think it’s the [Ginkaku-ji] Silver Temple, where there’s one pavilion that’s the oldest tearoom in Japan, or the first one ever built, when they got the idea from China. That’s a hidden gem because you have to buy an extra ticket as part of the tour. It’s sort of a separate entity. Hordes of tourists pass it. But if you’ve got a ticket, you know you have to go off to the side alley, and then you get to this room.
At Katsura, you see the outside and you look into some rooms, but you no longer get real access. At the moon-viewing platform, you can’t go in and look out at the moon; you’ve got to look in and imagine yourself looking out. So you have to work hard.
During this time in Japan, you found a monograph on Shiro Kuramata that, as Deyan points out, would change your life. Could you briefly talk about your Kuramata connection and how that paved the way toward your architectural career?
Well, I didn’t go to Japan to study architecture. I just went to Japan. It was, in a way, the first stop of getting away from my problems—or avoiding facing them. But once I was there, I started to think about the architecture. I had a lot of free time, teaching English. Of course, I had been given Domus, the Italian architectural magazine, in the late sixties, when I was working up near Newcastle. At the art school in Newcastle, they had a library of Domus. Anyway, the one that I ended up getting, from ’68 or ’69, had Kuramata’s work in it.
It had been at the back of my mind that there was a living architect who was doing work that had as much of an impression on me as Mies [van der Rohe]’s work had. I was in this bookshop, leafing through the architecture section, and came across a recent monograph of Kuramata’s work. I thought, Oh, gosh, this is everything that had been in my mind, but that I couldn’t visualize. And I don’t know how I got his number. Because I know I’d written it in the book, the copy that I’ve got. I rang up and just said, “I’m John Pawson. Can we have tea?” Just as naïvely as thinking that I could become a Zen Buddhist monk.
You formed this incredible friendship with Kuramata. I enjoyed learning that the first—and only—time you made use of a strong color in an interior was painting the cornice pink in [Hester van Royen’s] Elvaston Place apartment. Which was a tribute to Kuramata and his chromatic palette.
[Laughs] Well, actually, it’s a bit more than that. I said to Kuramata—he’d come there—“Does it look all right?” He said it was fine. I said, “Are you sure?” I went on and on. He said, “Well, you could paint the cornice pink. It’d be a little less stoic.” So I did. The pink was completely him.
I was surprised to learn how much you bounced around different disciplines early on in your career. Your path to architecture is this extraordinary journey of trial and error and, in a lot of ways, rebelliousness. Pushing against the status quo—would you categorize it as this?
I don’t think it was deliberate. It’s partly to do with having been born in Halifax and Yorkshire, and that whole Methodist [upbringing]…. The landscape, the factories, my parents’ backgrounds, the straightforwardness, never gilding anything. It was just sort of telling it as it is, or doing it as it is. Later on, with Japan, I was looking at a much more sophisticated culture and architectural things. It kind of rubbed off, but it was always there. I think everyone has several sides.
I’ve always thought of architecture as being serious, because it’s not something you can make jokes about, and it hangs around forever. So getting to architecture relatively late was probably an advantage. I tried many other disciplines, like photography, and, like my father, dressmaking. So when I found that I could actually do something with architecture, then I was really happy. Then all my energy went into that.
Throughout your forty-year career, your practice has remained at a modest scale. Even as you’ve grown it, you’ve never had more than thirty people at your firm. How do you think about this forty-year stretch, and where do you see the next—
Forty years? [Laughs] Ahhh! I have no idea, to be honest. Obviously, I’ve thought a lot about it. The last forty years weren’t really planned. I just kept my head down. But as you get to this stage, you do think about the future, for once, and succession is obviously a thing. All this work is on the back of my colleagues. It’s been very much a team thing. The idea is to hand that over. It’s not retiring, but it’s transferring, I think. Who knows? You just don’t know what happens after 70.
In a way, do you see this home you’ve made for yourself and Catherine in the Cotswolds as part of this Making Life Simpler story?
There’s some quote like, “A man who has one home is something and then a man who has two homes has no soul.” There’s some kick in the tail of that quote.
You know, the story is that Catherine wanted a small cottage that we could lock up and go to. We ended up with an estate. I would’ve bought next door. Next door came up for sale, and Catherine wouldn’t let me. She said, “We can’t even cope with this.”
So what’s next?
I’d like to build a new seaside house. Everyone else is against it, because they obviously want me to concentrate on things we’ve already got in the office—or at home.
This interview has been slightly condensed and edited for clarity.
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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