Stories by name

Colombo: When Channa Daswatte and I start talking, I don’t have the opportunity to ask a question first. Channa—one of Sri Lanka’s pre-eminent contemporary architects and a disciple of Geoffrey Bawa—is almost disarmingly generous with his time and his stories, and immediately launches into friendly conversation. It makes everything easier, in no small part because this...

New York City: I met artist Clayton Patterson in the early ‘90s when I was living with the godfather of street art, Richard Hambleton, and publisher Steven Neumann. I slept on the sofa in the living room, which Richard used as his painting studio. The place looked like an active crime scene. When Richard was broke,...

It’s the mid ‘90s, before Myspace, Facebook, cell phones, Google. Carla lives in San Francisco, Ed in Chicago. For the past six months they have been lovers across every media available to them: dial-up internet (poets’ listserv and email), landlines with their exorbitant long-distance fees, the US mail, and in person (aka ‘mere life’). To...

Flash floods in and around Jaipur, Rajasthan, created sudden chaos in 1976–77. The only way to get to Jaipur was by air. Defence Ministry PR chartered a helicopter for photographers to fly in and capture the havoc played by the floods. I was one of them. The helicopter only covered 250 kilometres and the flying...

Paju: There are so many stones in Choi Byung-Hoon’s home that you might find one bouncing off your foot. He has stones holding up his table, stones holding up the books on his bookshelf, and stones weighing down ultra-thin sheets of traditional Korean paper. There are stones in front of his door, stones in his...

London: Claudia Roden was a name well known to anyone who worked in food. Then the new wave of culinary stars arrived, and only in the past few years has there been a return to the grand writers who laid the foundations of contemporary food writing. Roden symbolises a rare period in history. Her two...

Depending on where your own interests lie, it’s possible to arrive at the life and work of Charles Perry in more than one way. Born in LA, in 1941, Perry’s known as one of world’s foremost experts on medieval Arabic cuisine, having majored in Middle Eastern studies at Princeton and then UC, Berkeley, and having...

One bright, spring morning, five years ago, we happened to be visiting a neighbour whose chickens were busily clucking over nests of chicks. We returned home with a cardboard box of fluffy black feathers and a love story that has lasted years. The first two chicks grew to be two roosters called Jean Jacques and...

Through life head first New York City: These are the facts: Christiaan Houtenbos, or simply Christiaan as everyone in the fashion industry knows him (the real stars in that world go by one name), is a maker. He is most recognised and celebrated for artfully crafting hair, but hand him a notebook and he’ll write you...

London: Coco Capitán has often said, will say again, that her work is just a reflection of her own life. Which is true—and which fact makes the ease with which it draws on themes of identity and selfhood, nods to art-historical ideas about pop and consumerism, and pinpoints the absurdity of our contemporary condition, all...

Sometimes things get complicated and don’t happen quite as we’d planned. This clearly depends upon the variables that you interact with. In this case holding a conversation with Enric Ruiz Geli has been more confusing than expected, to the point that when you get to talk to him, you can’t be sure whether you’re talking...

Verona: Carlo Rovelli writes bestsellers. But he doesn’t write detective stories, family sagas, or other kinds of novels favoured by the general public. Rather, he’s a physicist, and in his books—like Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, translated into over 40 languages—he explains quantum physics, the theory of relativity, and the history and role of science....

A romanticist modernist Stockholm: Carl Johan De Geer is, at the age of 72, one of the most established visual artists in Sweden. Strangely enough he still keeps an outsider’s perspective on life. Born in Canada into an aristocratic Swedish family of diplomats and members of parliament, young Carl Johan moved to Copenhagen, Brussels and Warsaw before...

Korean memories, Italian reality Torre Orsina: Chung Eun Mo is a Korean painter. She lives in Torre Orsina, a village on top of a hill near Terni in Umbria. I have known her a few years now and every time I go to her place I am impressed by the perfect ease with which she mixes...

The way we live with it all Introduction by Sean Kinnerly Portland: Chris Johanson and Johanna Jackson live their art. For them, art extends beyond the production of saleable objects to everything they do: riding bikes, growing food, doing yoga, being a positive part of their community and hanging out with their dog Raisin. A visitor...

I bought the flat when I was twenty. Twenty and sad. And lonely. I renovated it in a hurry, eager to get my own real home. I bought fake oak from Ikea, everything from the kitchen to the bed was in this disgusting material. When I was younger I used it as my studio too,...

At the language school you made fifteen dollars an hour tutoring kids, adventurous housewives, mid-level corporate strivers, and everybody in between, almost all touchingly driven to improve their English. Two hundred Yuan for one hundred minutes, not bad, though later it was revealed the school charged six hundred Yuan, taking a big cut. Whatever, pretty...

The gloomy reaction to the terrible murders of the Charlie Hebdo journalists raised the banners of freedom and democracy. But France’s largest rally since the end of the Second World War came with many unanswered questions. I’ve been living in Paris for 20 years as of this March. Elein Fleiss, who created Purple magazine in...

Know thyself Paris: There I was, facing Christophe Lemaire and Sarah-Linh Tran. Because of my background, not being a fashion journalist, I thought of asking them questions about the fashion system itself, such as how it operates, to eventually find out that their work, the house they live in and their approach to life is solid and...

            We’ve all enjoyed the childish game of making a stack out of seemingly inappropriate materials, and though it might be more for kids, it’s nevertheless a lot of fun. For most of us it’s an occasional pastime, but for Apartamento it’s a duty, involving serious research, lengthy shopping trips,...

When asked to photograph apartments in Beijing I had delusions it would be fairly easy. ‘Hey, I’m taking pictures for this magazine Apartamento of people’s apartments, would you be into that?’ Fairly straightforward, but like many things in China, actually not. Besides living with their parents or saying they were ‘too busy’ (a very popular response...

Concept by Ana Dominguez & Omar Sosa            

Barcelona: We’re talking about creativity in times of crisis. Participating in the conversation are: Fernando Amat, owner of the Vinçon stores and interior designer, the entrepreneur of illumination, Xavier Marset, and Jordi Tió, the talented architect of the Casa Camper hotels in Barcelona and Berlin. The trio meet in the terrace of the Casa Camper hotel in Barcelona....

False figuration Leipzig: On a quiet Saturday morning in the middle of August Christoph Ruckhäberle and his girlfriend Henriette open the door to their Leipzig home for us. It’s a five bedroom flat in a four storey building called Schumann House, built in 1869, about ten minutes walk from the city centre. Except for a little...

Control tower Tokyo: Like beavers gnawing at tree trunks to turn their habitat into sophisticated shelters, Cyril Duval, a.k.a. item idem, tends to transform any place where he spends more than a few consecutive hours into an ode to his sophisticatedly exuberant self. Tellingly, any hotel room quickly wears the stigma of his obsession for...

London: He’s only two years out of art school, but 25-year-old British–Ghanaian photographer Campbell Addy is already well known for making searing portraits that resonate in the mind’s eye long after you’ve looked away from them. Powerful and poised, his photographs probe into established ideas around beauty, identity, and masculinity, writing a new narrative which...

Stockholm: Cristopher Nying is not just the cofounder of Our Legacy, one of Europe’s most prized and respected menswear labels, he is also one of the few individuals I have met during my life who have such an exceptional sensibility and ability to see unexpected connections in ordinary things. I remember the first time I visited...

New York City: Artist Chloe Wise’s social media tactics might make her a lightning rod among her peers, but positive or negative she seems to thrive off the energy. She talks quickly, and when she pauses, it’s generally to laugh. Her unsinkable attitude and humour have served her well in navigating the demands set upon...

Archival material courtesy of The César Manrique Foundation This time, we’re headed to Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands, to visit the houses of César Manrique (1919–1992). For the first time since beginning this series of conversations, we’re going to discuss the work of a figure who has passed away. It is for this reason...

From above the shop London: While the traditional bookshop feels the urge to recreate a new retail landscape for selling books in today’s economic climate, we sense a prominent resurgence of the highly independent bookshop. And no one else seems to translate this fable of rare book selling better than the Irish-born London-based Conor Donlon. Conor...

San Francisco: I’ve known Cecilia Chiang since before I was conscious, which is to say: this 100-year-old doyenne of Chinese cuisine has been a fixture in my life for as long as I can remember. She is family. And someone whom my mother, Alice Waters, has considered a mentor and friend for close to 50 years....

lives in a cottage in the middle of New York City As the editor of the ultra-chic downtown fashion magazine V, Chris Bollen made what could have been something strictly to look at into something equally compelling to read. Chris gave V both heart and intellectual punch, interviewing heavy weights such as Gore Vidal, Joan Didion....

On a freezing Thursday evening in late January, I met food writer Claudia Roden, cafe and shop owner Leila McAlister and artist Georgie Hopton for a conversation about food. Seated in Claudia’s snug kitchen in Golders Green, London (and fuelled by plenty of delicious Spanish nut cake), we discussed foodie families, hospitality, and how we...

Concept by Ana Dominguez & Omar Sosa            

Five years ago, when I moved to China I rented this apartment in City 21 Millenium; a residential housing project in the heart of old Guangzhou, that overlooks the river of this massive pink and green city that is always covered in a purple tinged pollution cloud—a sign of continuous productivity from the province’s 800,000...

Rachel Chandler’s building is a classically tiny New York City tenement walk-up, which is located in what is still a neighbourhood-y and charming part of Soho. Her building, she says, is inhabited primarily by old people who own ferrets. I see someone that could definitely fit this description as I exit later, and wonder about...

There is no shortage of people who are willing to take the time to write customer reviews, and clearly websites like Yelp and TripAdvisor have become successful businesses because there is an abundance of interested readers. Customer reviews love to tell us what restaurants and hotels are going to be like, how many stars they...

My boyfriend and I have always shared a long distance relationship. He had his own set of keys to my apartment, and could come and go as he pleased, but he never actually lived here. His toothbrush resided next to mine in the cup on the edge of the bathroom sink and yet any mail...

Curation: not just the occupation of certain people that work in a museum, library, or archive of some sort; there’s also the curation of places and personal objects. Deciding to keep the relevant, to throw away the irrelevant, and to put objects into a new constellation. Arranging them in a way that would generally seem...