Issue # 21
Archive stories

Concept by Ana Dominguez & Omar Sosa            

New York City: A few years ago, Katie Stout was asked to create a bedroom as part of the Curio program at the Design Miami fair. The word ‘curio’, however, didn’t even begin to describe the results. Something straight out of a teenage girl’s wildest fantasy (or worst nightmare, depending on where you grew up),...

Brussels: Sitting in a French restaurant in New York for lunch with Nicolas Party, we started by talking about how to deal with a cold. It’s the height of cold and flu season in New York, and Nicolas has just got back from Brussels, having stopped by San Francisco and maybe Dallas. He told me...

Rotterdam: Rotterdam is a rough industrial city. Yesterday was cloudy, and it looked grey and flat; the light made all the buildings look exactly the same. As well as the best architecture, they have some of the ugliest buildings in the world, and the fog doesn’t make it better. I thought, ‘How can anybody live...

Los Angeles: The painter Henry Taylor was in Tokyo in the middle of March for his solo art show ‘Here and There’ at Blum & Poe, Tokyo. He arrived from Los Angeles just two days before the interview. And, of course, he was jet-lagged. We decided to move outside to get some fresh air, away...

New York City: I first met Danny Bowien in Chinatown, New York, exactly a year ago. A dear friend of mine and contributing editor of this magazine, Jim Walrod, had recently got to know Danny and was going on about ‘this nice chef guy with chartreuse hair who’s covered in tattoos’ that I needed to...

London: I first met Lina Scheynius on a sunny day in Paris in 2008. She was strolling down the Canal Saint-Martin with her best friend, Amanda, and the combined height of the pair, who are often mistaken for each other, made me assume they were models. Shortly thereafter, I was introduced to Lina’s photographs, and...

New York City: I had long heard the almost mythical stories of the life Peter McGough led with his collaborator and one-time partner, David McDermott—their super-dandified, mega-queer, and pointedly bratty meddling with time, class, style, and life/art conventions were handed down to me as legend upon arrival in NYC as a young gay artist. But...

London: 2018 will witness the celebration of a special golden jubilee by the British artist and aesthete Duggie Fields: in autumn he will have inhabited the same rented apartment in the inner West London neighbourhood of Earl’s Court for 50 years. And just as Fields isn’t an ordinary dweller of the discreet and genteel mansion flats...

Seoul: Hong Seung-Hye, a Seoul native born in 1959, has built a world of irony. Within that world, we find something deeply gentle yet firm, sentimental yet cold, playful yet serious, chaotic yet orderly—brazen amateurism side by side with the bold abstract spirit of modernism. Her best-known work, the ‘Organic Geometry’ series begun in 1997, endlessly...

There was one faux pas growing up as Nicola L’s grandsons, and it was instilled into us early and with fervour: we could absolutely not refer to her as grandmother. Or grandma, or grand-mère, or anything that would suggest she could possibly be old enough to have offspring with offspring of their own. Nicola takes...

Florence: Lapo Binazzi is the soul and cofounder of UFO, one of several Florentine groups that changed the way people approached architecture and design (a word that didn’t yet exist) during the second half of the 20th century. They were part of the so-called Italian Radical Design storm, which also included works by Superstudio, Archizoom, Remo...

Private and public space in music A conversation chaired by Ekhi Lopetegi Music has always been considered the art of time. Some philosophers have also thought that it’s the most sublime form of art because, by itself, it expresses no words or images; it is pure sound. But it’s also true that since ancient times music...

Paris: Pierre Le-Tan is one of the most famous atypical artists. Not just for his cross-hatch drawings with light hints of watercolour, which have been published on the cover of the New Yorker and in the most elegant magazines, but also for his mysterious personal aura. Pierre is wrapped in his own legend, protected by a...

Ghent: The work of Maarten Van Severen (1956, Antwerp, Belgium) has always been significant for us. In fact, he’s always been present among the pictures we have in our studio. He produced a series of brilliant designs in a short but very intense career, up until his death in 2005. The reason for bringing his...

Los Vilos: Juan Grimm is the leading landscape architect in Latin America and has now made a name for himself worldwide. Despite a dazzling career, he exudes simplicity and sensitivity, two key characteristics of his work. During the week he lives in an apartment in Santiago de Chile, but on the weekend he drives two and...

San Francisco: From the early ‘70s to the late ‘80s Armin Hagen Baron Freiherr von Hoyningen-Huene pursued a lifestyle that very few had attempted before or have attempted since. Armin dedicated all his time exclusively to the pursuit of sexual satisfaction and streamlined every action, decision, and all creative output to be in the service of...

Tokyo: Working as a graphic designer in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and then becoming a painter and contemporary artist in the ‘80s, Tadanori Yokoo continues to send Japanese creations out onto the world stage, expressing his strong sense of individuality to his heart’s content. In 1972, his solo exhibition ‘Graphics by Tadanori Yokoo’ was held at...