Issue # 11
Archive stories

Learning to See Arles: As I drive to Arles I realise I don’t know much about the person I’m going to meet. Of course I know his work extensively; he’s one of the most prolific photographers in the world, THE interior photographer. For the last 30 years he has photographed everywhere and everyone—for sure the homes...

Concept by Ana Dominguez & Omar Sosa            

Across the pond and back again New York City: It was a particularly cold and sunny January morning. I arrived a few minutes early. Not wanting to be a bother, I sat in the lobby and waited, allowing for a chance to properly admire the large, fluted wooden columns one can find in an art deco...

One morning while eating breakfast, a picture of the Queen Mary II coming into New York Harbour in The Times got pointed to and we all agreed: how could anybody look at that hideous behemoth and think it’s anything but an unsightly apartment building turned on its side, possessed of no more elegance than a...

When chance turns into history Milan: When Santi Caleca first opened the door of his Milanese apartment, shared with his wife Aurora and their two kids, he uncovered a magical world to me. His is an apartment that witnessed a particular instant in the history of Italian design, its most radical and perhaps, its most exciting...

The inadequate spectator Austin: A native of Chicago, Michael Smith emerged in New York in the late ‘70s, performing in both non-profit art spaces like The Kitchen and Artists Space, and in small nightclubs and cabarets. Smith is one of the first artists not to be afraid to confront the forms of television entertainment. His entire...

Bricks and mortar, blood and tears Amsterdam: When studying the work of Maurice Scheltens and Liesbeth Abbenes, their gesammt portfolio of photographic works, Maurice’s earlier photographs and Liesbeth’s tapestries, as one would do before meeting them for an interview, you could be tempted to get some preconceived notions about this Dutch couple and their very Dutch...

New York, New York New York City: I met Dike Blair in college, in the western United States. He looked like a New-Yorker: short hair, white T-shirt, khaki pants, cigarette—an artist. He moved to New York City several years before me and lived in the East Village during decades of unprecedented change in the world, in...

Through the trees Mae Rim: Although his production studio Kick the Machine keeps its offices in Bangkok, Apichatpong Weerasethakul lives in rural Mae Rim, Thailand, a half-hour drive from the quaint but vibrant northern city of Chiang Mai. Apichatpong—‘Joe’ to his friends—has steadily earned a level of international acclaim for his unusual, seductive films, including Tropical...

Loving the living room Manker: Imagine a big, stylish lounge with warm-hued walls covered with large-scale paintings, pedestals with sculptures, sleek armchairs and sofas. I could have been talking about any elegant living room, but this is actually the work of the German artist Anton Henning. Discovering his installations, for which much thanks goes to a...

A conversation chaired by Daniel Morgenthaler Zurich: Once we’re all up in the cloud, what will become of our books? Lovis Caputo, one half of design-slash-art duo Kueng Caputo; Lars Müller, publisher of books on design, architecture and other things; and Alexander Schärer, nowadays the S in USM, met in Zürich’s Corner College to talk about archives,...

There are houses which, seen from the outside, appear small. Then you go inside and it is as if you have stepped through an enchanted doorway. Behind the door, everything is vast. Inside, the seemingly small house suddenly becomes as large as the cosmos of a life that has blown open boundaries. A blending together...

Archival material courtesy of The Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura In the 1960s Ricardo Bofill set up the Taller de Arquitectura (Architecture Workshop) by bringing together a multidisciplinary group of architects, engineers, sociologists and philosophers to create the basis for what would become his career. After several residential projects, the Taller de Arquitectura set out...

Sad to leave New York City: When people ask me how long I’ve lived in NYC, I never know what to say. I first fell in love with the city in 1975, when as a 15-year-old, New York represented a great opportunity and ‘a sea of possibilities’ to me. I needed the freedom to be whoever...

Every night I save the water from my daughter’s bath and carry it bucket by bucket to the backyard, where I transfer it into a watering can and do my best to soak our lawn. The lawn is dead, but I am certain that this bath water will bring it back to life eventually. As...

Allowing journalists into your home is never a simple matter. Has it ever happened to you? We’ve actually become specialists on this topic. Once you’ve worked in fashion for quite some time and you always have people over, you generally receive this kind of text, email or voice mail: ‘Hey Ramdane, Victoire. We would like...

The dominatrix I ask the dominatrix if she ever brings the men she dates back to her apartment. ‘Here? Oh God, no,’ she says. ‘I mean, just look at the place. I couldn’t. Any man in his right mind would run for the hills’. The dominatrix, Dee, stands with her back arched in a pair...

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...

Like most people, I don’t know a lot about my brain and how it actually works and I’m not sure that I want to. I think that even neuroscientists don’t know that much about the brain. They can run experiments and make presumptions about areas, relations and interactions of and between those areas, but they...

I live with my mum in this small apartment with tatami floors. We moved to Tokyo two years ago when I was 14, from Berlin where all the apartments are huge and cheap. Therefore it was hard for me to adapt to living in a tiny room with less privacy. Just like it was hard...

JR arrives with a bag of slips and panties. She’s petite and adorable, with an unexpected Jersey girl accent and a lot of flair. Nelleke looks like a beautiful, young Kurt Cobain with freshly-coloured (bright) ginger hair! The inspiration came from a dream catcher above her bed in which she confides over Helping Heart Tea....