Issue # 16
Archive stories

Madrid: Fernando Higueras (Madrid, 1930–2008) was an architect of powerful temperament. Over his lifetime he generated an extensive body of work with a radical personality—one that kept him on the fringe of trends. Despite having an overly mischievous and uncomfortable character for the strict environment of the academic world, his work drew global attention. From…

David Douglas Duncan will be 100 years old next January. Over the last century he has seen a lot, most of the time through the lens of his Nikon. From the Battle of Okinawa to the Korean War and, yes, a lot of domestic scenes from the time he spent together with Pablo Picasso—from 1957…

In Berlin Berlin: Few people live out the maxim ‘the personal is political’ as completely as AA Bronson, whose art, life, and politics have always merged into one. Fearless, and transgressive best describe General Idea, the ground-breaking collective formed in 1969 by Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal. Together they brought the then unspoken topics of…

Slow and steady wins the race New York City: Matt Connors is an artist that splits his time between New York City and Los Angeles, while his work can be found in the collections of MoMA, the Walker Art Center, Dallas Museum of Art, and the Hammer. He has maintained a career that is more aligned…

Space and work Philadelphia: The night before our interview, Denise Scott Brown called. ‘Hello, Amelia’, she said, ‘This is Denise Scott Brown’. She hoped I didn’t mind her phoning so late, but was I driving from New York to Philadelphia? Which roads would I take? There’s a café she likes in town; could we break for…

Poetry by Arielle Holmes Arielle is a force of nature. Like gasoline to a match, she explodes stereotypes along her path as she goes. Androgynous, yet feminine, vulnerable yet deeply badass and down to earth, Arielle is a latter-day Eve, a contemporary version of our mother: the curious one, who got a very bad rap…

On being weird New York City: Gary Panter lives in Brooklyn, between Prospect Park and Coney Island, a perfect location for an artist who seeks quiet for his labour-intensive work, but who needs the noise of popular culture to feed his wild ideas. It’s also appropriate that he refers to the Victorian house he lives in…

The measure of all things Barcelona: A few months ago Ricardo Bofill told me about one of the last of Barcelona’s crazy bohemians. When I met him, I understood that definition. It came from a certain nostalgia for a specific generation, in which art and architecture were disciplines going at full throttle without yet knowing what their…

Isabel left me, she said she had the bug. I thought she had an STD but she meant the acting bug, a mutual friend told me. She moved to the big city to pursue a career in the theatre. What a laugh. I wrote her an email. ‘How can you leave Ibiza AND ME to pursue…

Everything that Philolaos didn’t like he designed Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse:As a kid growing up, your house defines what a house is, and coming to grips with the fact that other people live in structures that are radically different from yours takes time. Yurt-dwelling Mongolians consider their tents to be the quintessential home, as do McMansion-bred kids from Florida….

Growing up Judd Las Casas, Texas: When Flavin and Rainer Judd think of home, no single image comes to mind. The son and daughter of the American artist Donald Judd (to whom they refer as Don rather than Dad), Flavin and Rainer grew up in New York City and west Texas—but also all over the world…

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…

My house was built in 1921 in the neighbourhood of Guinardó, Barcelona. It’s of the noucentisme style, which was typical of the era. You can see this most clearly on its façade. The building’s previous inhabitant, a decorative painter, devoted himself to modifying and extending the friezes that were originally featured on the upper parts…

My great-grandfather bought the house in the ‘30s. Coming from a humble family in the nearby village, he was sent to the capital at age 16 and made his way at the Parisian department store La Samaritaine, like in a Zola novel. He went from sleeping on the counter in the basement, as an apprentice,…

The first time I ran away from home I was eight years old. The circumstances are unclear now, but it was almost certainly unjustified. Perhaps an argument about having to continue the piano lessons I dreaded so much, during which I was made to play scales over and over when all I wanted was to…

In 1982, Manoel de Oliveira, a 73-year-old Portuguese director, shot a movie entitled Visita ou Memórias e Confissões. He had directed six features by then, and at 73 he thought he was getting towards the end of his career—or the end of his life, for that matter. This film was meant to be a visit…

Concept by Ana Dominguez & Omar Sosa          

Introduction and footnotes by Flavin Judd Don had about 20 houses that he needed to furnish. They all needed bowls, knives, coffee cups, and other necessities of life. I think by anyone’s standards that’s a lot of houses, but Don liked things that he liked and he liked a good house, a beautiful structure, a…

Introduction and footnotes by Flavin Judd Don had about 20 houses that he needed to furnish. They all needed bowls, knives, coffee cups, and other necessities of life. I think by anyone’s standards that’s a lot of houses, but Don liked things that he liked and he liked a good house, a beautiful structure, a…