Issue # 19
Archive stories

Milan: Alessandro Mendini is the idiosyncratic, devilish, prismatic Marcel Proust of design—a living legend who’s played a crucial role in so many important adventures of Italian and international design, including the Alchimia and Memphis movements. Memphis was not only one of the most influential design experiences of all time, but an entrepreneurial adventure, a communication...

Point Reyes: Leonard Koren and I first met over a lunch of soup and salad at the Lucid Art Foundation in 2010. At the time, I was familiar with his book Wabi-Sabi: For Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers. The book is a part of our family library, and along with Leonard’s deft synopsis of a...

A conversation chaired by Alejandra Smits We’re moving through a cultural moment in which terms like ‘privacy’, ‘nudity’, ‘marketing’, or ‘gender’ are being questioned. For artists of all disciplines, the only way to reinvent these concepts is by moving towards them, like scientists carrying out trial and error experiments until reaching an answer. We sat down...

London: Penny Martin is one of the founders and editor in chief of The Gentlewoman, an independent biannual women’s fashion magazine. The Gentlewoman is an intriguing, compelling voice in an otherwise stale market. You might be well acquainted with it already, and it’s likely you are familiar also with her previous work as editor of...

Bernard Rudofsky (1905–1988) and his wife, Berta, constructed La Casa, a home in the small town of Frigiliana, Málaga, Spain, towards the end of the ‘70s. Rudofsky was a multifaceted character—architect, theorist, designer, curator, professor, entrepreneur—who generated an influential discourse based on his observations of the way human beings inhabit and satisfy their vital necessities....

New York City: I was walking down the street one day with my friend Malcolm McLaren. Richard Hell was across the street walking in the opposite direction, and didn’t see us. Malcolm turned to me and said, ‘Modern people look the way they do and dress the way they do because of Richard’. Malcolm went...

Barcelona: Life starts with food. When we are born, everything is blood and milk, he says. Nourishment is a crucial part of the growing process, but for the Spanish artist Antoni Miralda, food is a lot more than just mere fuel. His work talks about the symbology of a piece of meat, a loaf of bread,...

Concept by Ana Dominguez & Omar Sosa            

New York City: Barbara Nessim defies categorisation and I think that was her plan all along. Born in the Bronx in 1939 to hard-working parents—her father was a postman with a side business importing and exporting raw perfume materials, and her mother worked full time as a fashion designer—it’s clear where she developed her work ethic....

Tokyo: When the Hillside Terrace complex was first commissioned by the Asakura family in 1967, the most prominent structure in the area was the family’s traditional Taisho-era home. This structure still stands, but today it is surrounded by the sequence of mixed-use low-rises that Fumihiko Maki designed over a 30-year period, both leading and responding to...

New York City: Kim Hastreiter founded Paper magazine to give voice and a platform to a generation of New Yorkers who were recreating the world their way. She and I met through mutual friends and became close through Kim’s fantastic salon-style dinners, where she opens her apartment and her extensive worldview (and actual view of...

New York City: The classic aspect of film editing is the splicing together of two separate unrelated images to create a new meaning out of the result. The meaning created is invisible as it’s just a perception, not an actual thing. The meaning is in the cut, not in the actual images themselves. This is also...

New York City: On the Upper East Side of Manhattan, through a posh façade and up five flights of stairs, artist Curtis Carman, the charismatic life partner of Flawless Sabrina, greets me and ushers me through a jam packed room that has elements of both a nightclub and a study. He delivers me to sit...

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...

Looking at the list of movies a cinematogra- pher has worked on is sometimes a blunt discovery of why your favourite movies are in fact your favourite movies. The cinematogra- pher, also called the director of photogra- phy, is the person on a movie set who physi- cally holds the camera, as well as being responsible for...