Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2020 i Architectural Digest

“I have a lot of self-confidence. I believe in my eye, and I always have—maybe too much!”—Arne Glimcher One of the pleasures of editing AD’s December issue, which features luminaries from the art world, is working with innovative, unconventional homeowners and discovering what they envision for their environments. All of them can certainly relate to the statement above. Glimcher, the legendary founder of Pace Gallery, has spent the past 38 years personally creating a sublime sculpture garden at his East Hampton, New York, property, even though he admits that he once knew “zero” about landscaping. Artist Bosco Sodi, whose dramatic beach house in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, is featured on the cover, designed the structure to combine concrete, clay, and timber in a series of open-air palapas with traditional Oaxacan thatched…

A gleaming white essay in streamlined Georgian Colonial Revival, the 1936 Jay Paley house in Holmby Hills, California, is architect Paul R. Williams’s most glamorous creation, where columns rise, wroughtiron frosts, and wings spread. “But if you don’t address the hurdles he had to deal with, you don’t understand the history of African Americans in architecture,” says LeRonn P. Brooks, associate curator for modern and contemporary collections at the Getty Research Institute, which is preserving Williams’s archives in partnership with the University of Southern California’s School of Architecture. (The Paley estate was featured in AD in 1937 and again in the fall of 1968, after it was purchased by hospitality heir Barron Hilton.) Many clients were film-industry liberals such as Frank Sinatra and Lucille Ball, but the courtly Angeleno could…

“Makrosha is the Bangla word for ‘spider,’” says the New York City–based, Bangladesh-born designer, explaining the name of her new textiles brand. She relates to the arachnid, or what she calls “nature’s weaver.” Over the course of her career—which included three years as a textiles specialist for the AD100 firm Peter Marino Architect—she has spun a web of expert artisans across the globe, among them the Katu tribe in Laos, who entwine beads in their threads, and West African craftspeople who work wonders with cotton and raffia. This past January she launched her own collection of super-luxurious fabrics, produced in Senegal, Laos, Nepal, India, England, and France. They range from a fantastical, hand-embroidered pattern based on 17th-century French silks to a shimmery, raspberryhued ombré. Her mostly-to-the-trade business, which she’s operated…

IIn 1960, Pierre Baudouin, a master weaver at France’s L’Atelier Raymond Picaud, asked the painter Léon Gischia if he knew any artists who would like to make tapestries. Gischia didn’t hesitate: Alexander Calder. Best known for his mobiles and public sculptures, Calder had a studio in Saché, not far from Baudouin’s Aubusson base, and soon began developing designs in ink and gouache—in black and white at first—to be sent to the atelier and realized in wool. Working with textiles wasn’t new for Calder. “He made his own neckties,” reveals the artist’s grandson, Alexander S. C. Rower. “He also drew designs directly on canvas that my grandmother then hooked into rugs by hand.” Produced first by Picaud and later by Pinton Frères, the majority of the tapestries were made with Australian…

For Steven Holl, the November 21 opening of the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, feels like the final chapter of an eight-year book. In that time, his AD100 firm has designed a master plan and two other structures for the museum’s campus, which includes historic edifices by William Ward Watkin, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Rafael Moneo, as well as a sculpture garden by Isamu Noguchi. Nestled among them, the Kinder (pictured) marks the first dedicated home for the MFAH’s collections of modern and contemporary art. The trapezoidal concrete building is distinguished by a façade of glass tubes—what Holl calls “a cool jacket”—whose chimney effect reduces solar gain by 90 percent. Inside, a three-story atrium gives way to petal-like galleries, with a…

Like many New Yorkers, Rashid Johnson and his family left the city last March at the height of the COVID pandemic and settled into a weekend house on Long Island they had bought five years ago. Despite being away from his usual workspace, the artist found that he was busier than ever. He set himself up in the basement studio, where he worked on a series called Anxious Red Paintings, utilizing a new color he developed for the project. (These pieces and others are now on view at Hauser & Wirth in London through December 23.) “Under the circumstances, things have been pretty good,” Johnson says. “Between painting, Zoom speaking engagements, and my board work with the Guggenheim, I’ve been able to keep up with a lot.” The Chicago-born Johnson…

For 70 days while sheltering in place, photographer Jason Schmidt and his wife, producer and director Cory Jacobs, filmed their son, Jules, playing the euphonium throughout their Park Slope home. “We found new corners of the house to shoot each day,” recalls Schmidt, a longtime contributor to AD. Those nightly sessions—Jules in the stairwell, Jules by the fireplace, Jules on the roof—became a calming quarantine project for the couple, who have been collaborating in one way or another since they met shooting U2 for Spin (where she was a photo editor) in the late 1990s. The series now lives on the website of Cottage Eight Films, the content studio they launched five years ago. Pictures are at the heart of their Brooklyn home, one half of a so-called Kinko house,…

“In fact, we do not only produce luxury jewelry,” Jacques Cartier once stated. “I would say, monsieur, that jewelry like ours is as capable of adorning a woman’s shoulders with a dazzling necklace as it is of filling her handbag with a powder compact, a mirror, a small comb, and even business cards, all stamped with the same seal of originality and art.” That was back in 1929, shortly after the French jewelry house that his grandfather had founded began offering luxury objects and gifts through its newly created silver department. Today Cartier is building on that tradition with a new array of playful and highly covetable mementos, among them key rings with Cartier’s seal, snow globes, hand-painted porcelain vases with the iconic Panthère motif, card holders bedecked with the…

“I wanted a real sense of whimsy and playfulness, especially for the boys,”Callahan notes. in Vitruvius’s oft-cited dictum on the three virtues of good architecture—commodity, firmness, and delight—the concept of delight comes in third. Perhaps that’s because the first two principles might be considered essential prerequisites for the last, or perhaps it’s just that delight doesn’t always get as much respect as it deserves. At the historic Los Angeles home of architect Chet Callahan, there is certainly no shortage of it. A palpable sense of joy emanates from the house’s imaginative architectural restoration, its adventurous, decades-spanning interior appointments and art collection, and its glorious gardens. Built sometime between 1895 and 1905—the historical records are vague—the house, known as the Cummings Estate, is touted as the oldest residence in the neighborhood…

All products listed have been identified by the designer of each residence. Contact information was up to date at time of publication. THE LONG VIEW PAGES 56–65: Interior design by Lucia Corredor and Cecilia Tena of Decada; decada.com.mx. Landscape design by Maria Kalach; instagram.com/philodendro_mx. PAGE 56–57: All pieces from Decada; decada.com.mx. On daybed, fabric by Sunbrella; sunbrella.com. PAGE 58–59: All pieces from Decada; decada.com.mx. PAGE 60: Ping pong table designed by Taller Bok; instagram.com/tallerbok. PAGE 61: In kitchen, tile by OmmMosaicos; instagram.com/ommmosaicos. PAGE 62–63: In living room, all pieces from Decada; decada.com.mx. On sofa, fabric by Sunbrella; sunbrella.com. PAGE 64: In main bedroom room, all pieces from Decada; decada.com.mx. On bed, handwoven Oaxacan textile. PAGE 65: In children’s room, closet doors by Decada; decada.com.mx. On beds, Indira bedspreads by IKEA; ikea.com.…