Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2017 i Architectural Digest

Fernando Mastrangelo’s world is awash in icy shimmer—crystalline sconces, crushed-glass tables, mirrors coated in sweeps of sand. But at last spring’s Collective Design fair in New York, one wall-mounted work departed from the artist’s usual granular-material palette. Closer inspection revealed it was, in fact, a wool-and-silk rug. The installation offered a sneak peek at his latest creative endeavor: Reverence, a series of 12 floor coverings with storied manufacturer Edward Fields. “I wanted it to be as sculptural as possible,” Mastrangelo says of the collection, which christens him the first contemporary designer to join George Nakashima and Raymond Loewy on the brand’s exclusive roster. Known for mixing unexpected materials such as sugar, coffee, sand, and crushed crystal with resin to cast sculptural furniture, Mastrangelo started this project the same way he…

A t Milan’s Salone del Mobile in 1971, Florentine architect Lapo Binazzi assembled polyurethane pieces into a Doric temple, queued up his sound track, and pressed play. “Our dream was to ruin the temple to the ground, to the sound of an earthquake,” remembers Binazzi, now 74 and still based in Florence. The practical application of the remaining chunks of columns and pediment? Chairs and tables for college students. Such playful destruction was a fitting metaphor for the time, as the world convulsed with student protests, worker revolts, and creative outbursts like Pop Art and rock ’n’ roll. In the mid- 1960s, young architecture students across Italy began channeling their revolutionary ideas into provocative furniture, interiors, artworks, and installations that challenged the prevailing less-is-more modernism and rampant consumerism of postwar…

“What are today’s global challenges? How can you make an impact?” These are the questions Kunlé Adeyemi recently posed to a crowded room at New York’s Center for Architecture, questions that continue to guide his innovative design practice. Since founding his firm, NLÉ, in 2010, the architect has studied how two of the world’s most pressing issues—urbanization and climate change—are converging throughout coastal Africa. “People are crowding into cities, cities by rising water,” he reflected. “In order to create coexistence between humanity and the environment, we must build differently.” Adeyemi has pioneered just such a model, developing floating architecture partly inspired by one man’s humble dwelling in Lagos, Nigeria. “I do not know his name or when he built it, but it is one of the most relevant works I…

It’s an overcast afternoon, and industrial designer Peter Bristol is invigorated. Never mind that he’s arrived to work straight from the airport, having flown to Seattle from New York, where he exhibited his latest lighting designs at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF). “I didn’t sleep or use my laptop—I just sketched for hours,” reflects Bristol. “There are enough thoughts to occupy the trip.” As the creative director and head of industrial design at Oculus VR, Bristol is no stranger to challenges, working on groundbreaking devices like the Oculus Rift virtualreality headset as well as its attendant controllers, sensors, packaging, and branding (everything related to how we physically interact with VR in real life). But Bristol is also an independent lighting, furniture, and product designer, known for employing state-of-the art…

When artist Marc Hundley was invited to take a booth at the sprawling Frieze New York art fair last summer, he re-created his Williamsburg, Brooklyn, apartment right down to the art he fantasized was on its walls. “I wanted to make the space comfortable,” he says, “so people would connect.” The same sentiment prevailed when Hundley set out to design furniture. The artist first built pieces for his friend the creative agent Justinian Kfoury, who had bought the beach house built by the renowned arts patron Morris Golde in 1957 in the remote and fashionable community of Water Island, off Long Island. (Michael Kors has a house next door.) Golde famously hosted creative cohorts there, including playwright Edward Albee, and poets W. H. Auden and Frank O’Hara, who was visiting…

Alexander Groves and Azusa Murakami, the husbandand- wife founders of Studio Swine, are always down for an expedition. Speaking from their London home, the designers recall one of their farthest-flung trips to date: a voyage deep into the Amazonian rain forest to visit an enclave of rubber tappers. Getting there required two planes, a six-hour drive, and, when roads became unnavigable, a cattle caravan through the rain forest. Then the couple spent four days studying the material that they would transform into ebonite (a plasticlike substitute for ebony wood) and use for their Fordlandia collection of chairs—so named for Henry Ford’s deserted manufacturing town, another stop on their journey. “If you can support their economy, you support the forest,” says Groves, who explains that because rubber-producing trees have been exported…

Richard Petit and Stephen Hunt borrowed the curious name of their Los Angeles–based design firm from British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the pioneering duo behind such classics as Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes, who wrote, produced, and directed under the banner of The Archers. “They were intensely collaborative and experimental, and they always pushed the boundaries of their medium,” Petit says of the homage. “Stephen and I didn’t want to use our own names—or anything with the words interiors or architecture—because that would limit our purview. We’re interested in everything visual, and everyone in the office has a stake.” Considering their loyal following among L.A.’s young creative set, including some of Hollywood’s leading lights, The Archers’ fanciful cinematic name seems apt. “We’re all crazy cinephiles, but it’s…

It’s a peculiar political moment for globally minded creatives, and for emerging talents in particular it takes some chutzpah to establish oneself internationally. Architects Eduardo Cadaval and Clara Solà-Morales didn’t really have any other choice. Born an ocean apart—he in Mexico, she in Spain— the two met while studying at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, eventually launching their own studio in 2003 after stints at New York practices. They began working out of a tiny Manhattan apartment but soon enlisted collaborators in Barcelona and opened their main office there. They now have a satellite team in Mexico City, too. “We started almost naturally,” reflects Cadaval. “On both continents, we answer with the same strategy: Say the most with the least.” As their firm has expanded to 12 people, he and…

No matter how grand a house was, Mongiardino never forgot that a family was going to make a life there. earlier this year my mother and I were sitting in my London living room making plans for the upcoming christening of my cousin’s daughter, to be held at Villa Ronche, our family home near Venice. With her typical attention to every tiny detail, she asked me what scent we should use to perfume the rooms. Without hesitation, I replied, “Gardenia.” I believe every house has a scent of its own and that it’s one of the things that make it into a home. In this case, gardenia reminded me of my late grandmother Gina’s personal fragrance. She passed away a little over a year ago, and I guess I automatically…

SPECIALTY: Chinese porcelain and works of art from antiquity to the early 19th century. HISTORY LESSON: Snow-white, hard-paste ceramics— a.k.a. porcelain—originated in China more than 1,000 years ago. But Europeans didn’t develop a comparable technique until the 1700s. A-LIST REQUESTS: “Herbert Hoover collected blue-and-white porcelain, and Martha Graham had a passion for small jade objects,” says gallery owner Steven Chait. RARE FIND: A 17th-century porcelain model of a Dutch ship. “Because of the sails, the figures, and the ropework, it would have been incredibly hard to make.” TOP DRAWER: “Blue-and-white porcelain from the early Ming dynasty (around the 15th century) is considered among the finest ever made.” CLOSE UP: The wine pot (left) is not actually porcelain but enameled copper, used to imitate porcelain in the 18th and 19th centuries.…

When French architect Joseph Dirand began his career, he was obsessed with minimalism. Under the scoured spell of everything from writer Curzio Malaparte’s shockingly spare clifftop villa on the isle of Capri to British reductivist John Pawson’s sun-splashed architectural severities, the impressionable young designer-to-be began by exploring the possibilities of what he calls “the blank white page—I had to start there.” Today the scruffily handsome designer to the stars (Kanye West is a fan, as are myriad anonymous corporate chieftains) and leading labels (boutiques for Alexander Wang, Rick Owens, Chloé, Balmain, Givenchy, and more) has set aside that jejune fascination to develop a distinctive language that is restrained in its elements but opulent in spirit. “My work has evolved from minimalism to much more narrative,” says the designer, who is…

Eighty-one years ago, Walker Evans came to Hale County, Alabama, to photograph the region’s crushing poverty. These days, tourists come to photograph its architecture. Since 1993, students from Auburn University have been designing and building structures that improve the lives of residents while adding a contemporary edge to the local mix of mobile homes and antebellum houses. In Newbern, a town with fewer than 200 residents, they have produced a firehouse sheathed in polycarbonate panels that shimmer every time a car goes by, a town hall made of cypress timbers, and a public library in an old bank building that had been unoccupied. When visitors walk through the library’s front door, “they marvel at the creativity inside,” says Alfreda Howard, Newbern’s former librarian, of the space designed and built by…

“My favorite moment is right after a garden’s installed,” says Lara Zureikat, Jordanian landscape architect and associate director of Amman’s Center for the Study of the Built Environment (CSBE). Within hours, butterflies flit out of nowhere, bees buzz in, and birds perch. “That’s when a garden isn’t mine anymore. It takes on a life of its own.” At the Palestinian Museum in the West Bank town of Birzeit, the fauna materialized on schedule, but significantly, so have thousands of people. Though the prismatic structure by Heneghan Peng Architects was completed last year with lofty goals and empty rooms—internal disagreements delayed exhibitions until this September—visitors could luxuriate amid the plants that Zureikat had assembled on the grounds, a permanent collection of the vegetal sort. Terraces hemmed with fieldstone dominate the ten-acre…

Her tennis buddies call her Mighty Mouse. This is the kind of disarmingly pleasant thing one hears constantly about Tory Burch: She’s fun. She’s funny. She’s a great athlete. She loves children, even yours. She’s irreverent, informal . . . and so on. But when you roll up to the front door of Westerly, the enormous 1929 Georgian house in Southampton she bought nine years ago and has been decorating with Daniel Romualdez ever since, none of that seems possible. This is not by any outward appearance the house of someone who giggles—this is the house of the father-in-law you never wanted to meet, and who never wanted to meet you. Or the intimidating banker in a blackand- white movie you’d rather die than borrow money from. Think The Philadelphia…