Issue # 20
Archive stories

London: It is hard to exaggerate the impact that Fergus and Margot Henderson have had on the way we eat today, in London and the world beyond. Their approach to cooking and eating is rooted in common sense and joy, two principles that were mystifyingly rare in the 1980s British food landscape, which was then...

Seoul: Na Kim is a very special character on the Korean art scene. She’s worked as a graphic designer at the very heart of the small-scale but prolific design studios that became an established trend in Seoul from the mid 2000s. And as an artist, she’s taken part in numerous exhibitions at major art museums...

Paris: Designer Julien Dossena worked in the studio with Nicolas Ghesquière at Balenciaga for four years before his appointment as the artistic director of Paco Rabanne in 2013. Charged with reviving the retro brand, the 35-year-old Frenchman has successfully translated the line’s ultramodern heritage into a womenswear wardrobe for today, featuring desirable, sportswear-inspired ready-to-wear and...

Hove: Maureen Paley knows how to make an impression. The American-born gallerist, one of the first to open an exhibition space in London’s scruffy East End (Interim Art, est. 1984 in Bethnal Green), understands the power of personality. Her Herald Street gallery (eponymous since 2004) is an extension of her precise, witty, engaging style: formidably...

Barcelona: I first met Maria Pratts in an elevator. I had come to visit one of her gazillion flatmates, the photographer Rafa Castells, in the now legendary Gran Via apartment that was shared by many of the artists shaping today’s underground scene in Barcelona. We took the elevator down together, and by the time we’d...

A conversation chaired by Jack Self Illustrations by Jim Stoten The smart home, no longer a futurist fantasy, is increasingly sold to us as a technological inevitability. Through product release spectacles and a myriad of consumer electronics shows, the smart home is a project rooted in the commodified self. As critics, designers, architects, and futurists, there...

Minneapolis: The artist Alec Soth is profoundly interesting. The human being Alec Soth is perhaps even more so. He recently shared with me the reasoning behind his propensity to occasionally wear comically bright yellow sneakers: ‘On days when I don’t want people to look at my face, I put these on so they look at...

New York City: When I arrived to visit the ground-breaking conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner in his West Village home, his wife, Alice, opened the door and invited me in before asking who I was. We found ourselves standing in the kitchen, which fronts the street, quickly finding things to talk about. On the wall behind us...

Concept by Ana Dominguez & Omar Sosa        

New York City: As both director and photographer, Jerry Schatzberg has been at the forefront and in the middle of every ground-breaking culture and every pop-culture moment since the late ‘50s—from his elegant and beautiful photography and fashion work for Vogue, Redbook, and Harper’s Bazaar in the early ‘60s to documenting the most important people on...

Valatie: We arrive at Camp Nest on a Friday at the end of February by driving up a private lane with Christmas lights still up two months postfact. Camp Nest is deep in Upstate New York and snuggled beside quite the literary homesteads—Edith Wharton, Edna St Vincent Millay, Herman Melville, John Ashbery—though more importantly, it is...

Matarraña: We’ve always been interested in the relationship between biographies and architecture. In previous issues we’ve talked about several houses intimately bound up with their owners—the architects that built these houses for themselves. Likewise, in this issue we want to talk about a house that is strongly tied to the character and careers of the architects...