Ayşe Erkmen

Ayse Erkmen, Luminous, 1993-2015 
Installation view, SMAK, Ghent, 2015 Photography by Dirk Pauwele

Unhooked meanings transcending the worlds of architecture and spatial design

Ayşe Erkmen (born 1949, Istanbul, Turkey) is one of Turkey’s most important visual artists.  Her practice has long examined the social and political implications of physical space including infrastructure, urban planning and architecture. Currently based between Istanbul and Berlin, Erkmen transcends the world of architecture and spatial design and pushes the boundaries when it comes to the transformation of both indoor and outdoor sites. On Water, 2017, a beautiful installation that debuted at the international open-air exhibition, Sculpture Projects, in Münster, Germany, is one example of Erkmen’s visually striking site-specific installations and demonstrates the importance of the audience in the completion of some of her artworks. 

NR joins the sculptor and artist in conversation to discuss the influences that have informed her practice, how her work pertains both in Istanbul and Berlin and how it engages with specific histories and culture. Erkmen delves into the nature of a certain leitmotiv present in some of her work and the concepts behind Plan B, 2011, Pond to Pool to Pond, 2016 and On Water, 2017.

Ayşe is a beautiful name. I have read that it means happily-living one. Would you say you are? 

I think so too, Ayse is a beautiful name and I am grateful to my parents for giving it to me. It not only means happy but also moonshine and life, a very popular name, short and modest, shared by all generations and all social groups. Yes I am a happy person in general with lots of anxieties which strangely do not prevent me from being happy.  Actually I believe that anxieties are one important  ingredient of happiness. Happiness without worries would be a kitschy one.

You are recognised as one of the foremost Turkish artists. What does this mean to you? 

I don’t think I understand myself as one of the foremost Turkish artists. Actually I would not like to be known as a Turkish artist but I guess one cannot escape its origin. I like the fact that I am from Istanbul though, for having had the chance to being very familiar with this amazing, vicious city, an opportunity like my name, something that happened to me. My fame is kind of strange. Young artists know me very well and they appreciate me as I also appreciate very much this fact of being popular among young generations. I had been teaching in Germany for quite some time and I am hoping that I have had some influence on this. As to the  fact of being collected, earning money, being the muse of art fairs, etc.. this is not me. I guess, I have a special place in todays art context: people seem to like my work but they don’t know how to place it in their lives. I am hoping that the reason is that I am giving them something new that they have not yet known, they haven’t seen or did not think about before, therefore not confirmed yet!

Let us Cultivate our Garden (Group) (curated by Fulya Erdemci and Kevser Güler). Cappadox Festival II, Cappadocia (Turkey), 19.05. – 12.06.2016. Exhibited work: Ödül / Prize, 2016. 142 Site-specific installation Photo Credit: Murat Germen

You are currently based between Istanbul where you were born and Berlin. How do these two cities inform your practice? Do you see any correlation between the two?

I have to quote musician/artist Ahnoni here who once said: “I want to go but I don’t want to leave” on a similar situation of living in multiple places. I feel exactly like that, always looking forward to the other place but sad to leave the place I am in. Istanbul being a difficult city as it is, makes me happy by just being there, the shout of its seagulls, the smell of the seawater, the honks of the boats, even the most serious conversations ending with chit-chats, its noble stray animals and endless variations of life style.

Ayşe Erkmen – Half of (Solo). Galerie Deux, Tokyo (Japan), 14.09. – 22.12.1999. Exhibited work: Half of, 1999; Photo Credit: Artist archive

Berlin a contrast but a good companion to this city; being so peaceful, easy and quiet if it were not for the official gray recycled envelopes of bureaucracy which one receives frequently. There, the small talks do not continue long and conversations turn into culture and art which is wonderful. Berlin is a city with so many venues of art, music, theatre, etc that knowing that they are always there one neglects them and gives too much a rain check. Berlin is a city that supplies too and pampers its citizens whereas Istanbul does this only by being there in that location that every time it angers or disappoints the blue sky and the seagulls appear out of nowhere.

Water appears as a recurring element in your work. Why this leitmotiv and what is your relationship to it?

“Water is something I can’t escape as an art location whether it is given to me or chosen by me, be it a river, the sea, a canal or a small pond. I always have the strong feeling that I should not lose this chance of being on water or using water as material whenever I can catch the opportunity.”

Skulpture Projekte Münster, 2017 (Group) (Catalogue) (curated by Kasper König, Britta Peters, Marianne Wagner). Stadthafen 1, North side: Hafenweg 24, South side: Am Mittelhafen 20, Münster (Germany), 10.06. – 01.10.2017
Exhibited work: On Water, 2017
Site specific installation: ocean cargo containers, steel beams, steel grates, 6400 x 640 cm walkway
Photo Credit: Roman Mensing

These fortunate offers make the recurrence in my work, unlike other repeating elements like animals, like stones and rocks, archival images, etc that are much more of a choice of mine. Water is not stabile, it moves and makes things move, It has power to create unexpected occasions and coincidences. I am looking for these instances that surprise me as moments that I do not have much control over.  In some works I made buoys in water move balls on land which directly relates to the unpredictable movements of water’s effect on land. This makes continuously changing sculptural moments. In my work this is in general what I am looking for.  Things that happen without the artist’s intention, water is chance. 

“Besides there is the beauty of water that one cannot ignore although I would not want to be in a position of getting advantage from such a glorious appearance. I try to be  as neutral as possible mixing it with contrasting technical vehicles that are invisible, unwatched companions of water.”

Could you delve into the concept for Plan B, the installation at the 2011 Venice Biennale, that transformed the Arsenale exhibition venue into a room for purification?

Plan B was prepared in a very short time, I still cannot imagine how we could achieve that project in four months only. Fulya Erdemci; the curator was selected in December before. She had to think which artist to choose for about two months. After being appointed by her I had to think what to do  for a while but it did not take long as at our first location trip I saw that the place given to us as pavillon location at that time had the only window that opened to the sea/canal unlike the other rooms in Arsenale. This window to water told me that I had to find a way to bring it into this room one way or other. The canals of Venice that surrounds the whole city gave me the form and informed me that the room should be like the city itself surrounded by water. On the other hand the water needed to have an aim to come into this space. The most common thought about water is to drink it. There came the final idea.

Plan B (Solo) (Catalogue) (curated by Fulya Erdemci). 54th Venice Biennale, The Pavilion of Turkey, Artigliere, Arsenale, Venice (Italy), 04.06. – 27.11.2011
Exhibited work: Plan B, 2011
Installation: water purification system, pipes, pumps, cleansing machines painted in specific colors according to their function
Photo Credit: Roman Mensing

Then we found a very sophisticated water distilling company in the middle of Germany. Fulya travelled from Amsterdam, me from Berlin, we visited the company and started working to make the plan B exhibition. In four months time realised the work, we made an extensive catalogue edited by Danae Mossman from New Zealand together with Fulya Erdemci and we also made a wonderful tote bag designed by Konstantin Grcic. Our idea was that if people would not want to make the effort to come to our space almost at the end of the Arsenale, would definitely come to get their beautiful Grcic bags! And it happened! We met in London at Danae Mossman’s flat to make the interview for the book. Danae was living in London at the time, Konstantin from Frankfurt, me and Fulya from Istanbul but were in Berlin and Amsterdam at that moment. We met many times, travelled to Venice and to other cities, had lots of fun, all of us from different parts of the world. 

Plan B was created from one unit of a mobile water purifying machine rented for the duration of the biennial. This device was dismantled, its pipes between units  prolonged according to the proportions of the given space, heightened to various levels depending on the advice of technicians and at the end of the installation, we even added minerals for the sea water to became tasty mineral water. The pipes came into the room from the canal and went back to the canal. My first idea to make the visitors drink the water was given up and the title therefore became Plan B. Fulya Erdemci and I had a last minute thought that making people drink water out of this work would be a too easy gesture and make the work too popular and take it out of its real content.

Your work as a sculptor and artist transcends the worlds of architecture and spatial design. Have you ever wanted to also become an architect?

I never thought of becoming an architect. Architecture and design always  has purpose and function. I was and am still interested in purposelessness. I am always trying to achieve the most unhooked sense that aims to make the work be far from serving a reason or expectation.

U2 Alexanderplatz (Group) (Catalogue) (curated by “Arbeitsgruppe U2 Alexanderplatz”, Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst e.V. [NGBK]: Christoph Bannat, Uwe Jonas, Annette Maechtel, Tine Neumann, Barbara Rüth and Birgit

Anna Schumacher). Alexanderplatz, Berlin (Germany), 27.09. – 29.10.2006. Exhibited work: U8, 2006. Intervention: existing speaker, computer, sensor, two CDs (As each train pulled into the platform of line U8, dramatic-sounding music was played for the time it took the train to come to a stop. Two pieces were played, both in the fashion of trailer melodies used for television series.) Photo Credit: Artist archive

Each of your work engages with specific sites, histories, cultures and societies. How does your work respond to the situations you face?
A very good question and a very commonly asked one. Everyone asks me how my work responds to the site, its history, etc..The situations I face in a place is a very important part of this procedure. For example one of my most site specific work “Half of” for a gallery space of one room only (Galerie deux/Tokyo) was inspired simply by just the plan that was sent to me to introduce the gallery. Plan included the walls as well that when you folded the plan it became the maquette of the space.  This was my simple inspiration for the work I made there which was consisting of five maquettes hanging from the ceiling, one by one becoming smaller, each one being half of the previous one . All was made effortlessly out of rice paper and wooden sticks by competent Japanese hand-workers. 

Every work that engages with specific sites needs its own agenda which can be totally different each time and not necessarily with the expected inspiration. Sometimes it is history but a historical place can also get an artwork that has nothing to do with that because I also can have my kind of plans at the time which I want to realise urgently. Of course I feel the most successful when the work looks as if it had always been there or when I spend very little or no effort to make a work sparkle in the space or the best for me would be if I bring nothing to the space and only use the given elements of a space like my works with elevators for instance.



Pond to Pool to Pond, 2016, Japan and your most recent exhibition in Istanbul, I Insist, 2022 are other examples of your site-specific installations.  How do you channel the premises of the spaces you use into your installation to reveal the space’s previously concealed features?

Pond to pool to pond in Nara, Japan is another version of a water cleansing work. In this exhibition each artist had been given a Temple in Nara to work with. My Saidai-ji Temple had a small pond which was dirty, almost like a swamp with lots of mosquitos. My aim was to clean  this pond and to be able to do that, I installed a pool next to it. The shape of the pool was very much following the borders of nature placed in between trees and holy rocks.  Between the pond and the pool, I installed the water cleaning and pumping system, much simpler than the Venice one because this time it just had to clean the pond. The pipes were installed to go inside the pool and the pond, the cleaning pumps were working continuously and carrying the dirty water back and front. In about a few hours both the pond and the pool were crystal clean and frogs started coming to the pond. The much needed balance of nature came back here and a bright blue colour of water with an unusual shape.

Art Projects at 8 Shrines and Temples – Travelling over 1300 Years of Time and Space (Group Exhibition) (Catalogue) (curated by Toshio Kondo, Art Front Gallery Tokyo). Culture City of East Asia 2016, Nara, Saidaiji Temple, Nara (Japan), 03.09. – 23.10.2016
Exhibited work: pond to pool to pond, 2016
Site-specific installation: already existing pond in site, connected to pool constructed out of wood, concrete, mortar, water and connecting pipes, cleansing and pumping machines
Photo Credit: Keizo Kioku

“I Insist” is an exhibition that follows another exhibition titled “Ripples” in the same gallery and uses the leftover material of the previous show. The previous show Ripples was about the unfair gentrification of an area in Istanbul and also about making a first show in a gallery that is part of this gentrification. I cut out rectangles off the new plaster walls of the  clean, white cube like gallery space and hanged these wall pieces from the ceiling. The left over wooden panels on the walls at the back of these cut out plasters had white small circular traces created by chance.  Aside from this I made a sound piece out of the reading of the names of all the shops and studios on the street leading to the gallery giving reference to the fact that these  places will soon be the victims of this gentrification and will be gone in a short time. This was the sound of their archive, music of memories.

In the five years later exhibition “I insist”, I painted these leftover panels that had been hanging before; each one a different wall colour, each one a different size, handled with their cracks and breaks together and hanged them side by side on the walls of the gallery as if this is how they should behave, as paintings like what a gallery is for.

As can be seen in these three examples I have used the nature of one location/Saidai-ji Temple /Nara whereas I have used the politics of an area/ Dolapdere/Istanbul and in the third exhibition I have used politics of art /Gallery Space.


On Water, 2017, a beautiful installation that debuted at the international open-air exhibition, Sculpture Projects, in Münster, Germany took two years to be realised. People use it daily and the vision of passersby crossing the river whilst seemingly walking on water provides a beautifully striking scene. The public becomes an actor in this surreal scene. Could you talk more about the installation and its concept revolving around urban transportation and displacement?


The idea of the “on Water” installation came from the idea to be on Water. This was my second time of being invited to Sculpture Project Münster. My first contribution was moving sculptures on air by helicopter. The title of that work was “on Air” also giving reference to broadcasting. From being on air the first time around, I thought to be on the ground the second time would be too normal a gesture. In between the two exhibitions (1997 and 2017) I had taught at Kunstakademie Münster, therefore knew the city pretty well including this dead end/one way channel where a lively atmosphere was always existent; on one side art studios, galleries, restaurants, bars etc.. on the other part more industry and offices.  

Skulpture Projekte Münster, 2017 (Group) (Catalogue) (curated by Kasper König, Britta Peters, Marianne Wagner). Stadthafen 1, North side: Hafenweg 24, South side: Am Mittelhafen 20, Münster (Germany), 10.06. – 01.10.2017
Exhibited work: On Water, 2017
Site specific installation: ocean cargo containers, steel beams, steel grates, 6400 x 640 cm walkway
Photo Credit: Roman Mensing

As it is clear from the images I made a plan to make a bridge that goes under the water and connects these two shores that people experience the magic of walking on water and to have the miraculous and mystic image of people effortlessly standing on water.

Not only people of course, dogs, bicycles, ducks were also there. Some moms and dads were teaching swimming to their kids. People had the chance to chat on water. It became too popular always full of visitors. The walk on water was slow and thoughtful which made kind of ceremonial and somber at times.



Do you like for the public/audience to interact with your artworks? It feels in some instances such as in that the audience completes the artworks.
Yes, sometimes. In the case of “on Water” without the audience the work would have been invisible. The same goes for the work Shipped Ships where once people of Frankfurt were passengers in boats coming from Turkey,Italy and Japan. These two works and some more carried the risk of being unseen if not for the visitors.

“For some works lack of participants is not a problem. Mostly I like the audience to interact with works hoping they fulfil and feel my purposelessness.”


How influential is the audience’s perception of the themes you explore, to your work?

“I must say it is not very influential. I actually believe that the perception of the audience of the themes I explore should not be strong. I would rather give the audience something that they have not experienced before therefore their judgment as well as mine should not be accurate.”


You have explored the use of acrylic in your very first works (Yellow Plexiglas Sculpture, 1969, Istanbul). Why did you choose this material in particular? Which other techniques and media have you set in place to use?
In 1969, I was a student of sculpture in the Academy of Art in Istanbul and I found these two pieces of plexiglass on the street. Plexiglass was for me a very advanced material at the time. I was fascinated. Without knowing much what I would do with them,I bent them and rolled them in a huge pot with hot water and placed one inside the other and participated in the school exhibition “New Tendencies” with this work. I placed it on the grass outside the exhibition room, maybe my first art in public space and to my surprise got the award of the exhibition with some money involved. This prize was not as important for me as these shiny plexiglass pieces. After the exhibition I recycled them to make other sculptures with the same hot water technique until the two plexi pieces broke down and disappeared. 

I have great  interest in material and have learned a lot from professionals who are experts on these materials. I like to work with professional people and I am mostly ready to change my forms according to their suggestions. Therefore I feel free to work in any media or technique as I wish or as my idea suggests.


What is your approach to form?


The same applies to form. I don’t have a strict or steady style. I have given myself the freedom to work in any material, style, or medium although I believe that I have a good feeling for form as I have had a very classical sculpture education for more than five years.

“I have learned a lot from one of my teachers Şadi Çalık who always said: ‘Forms should be outward rather than inward,  as if they are hiding something inside, as if the inside is pushing from within’”

Kıpraşım / Ripple, 2017; Untitled sculptures, 2017. Site-specific installation, deconstructed plaster walls, revealed wooden walls; 19 aluminium sculptures: variable dimensions. Photo Credit: Hadiye Cangökçe.

He always thought that although we dont see the inside, the inside of a sculpture is as important as outside which meant one should give the same importance to parts that are invisible as the parts visible. This stayed with me and applies to everything in life, in my opinion.



Your body of work shows a dedication to long-term researched based projects. What is source material for new ideas? What books do you like?


I like fiction books. I also like lifestyle magazines to be informed of what is happening. I don’t watch tv these days. I watch a lot of films almost one every night some days. I love to go to cinema salons, even queuing for the ticket or popcorn is exciting for me but I am not doing it so much anymore because of the lazy comfort we have inside our homes now. I also sit on my own outside in a cafe and have coffee and watching the daily life. When I am involved in a project like on Water for example, I make lots of unnecessary research. I am not a research artist in the sense to display the outcome of research or knowledge as an art piece.

This issue’s theme is IN OUR WORLD. In your eyes, what does our world need less and more of?


I will have to give a very classical answer, maybe too much like a slogan but as it has high priority and urgency in these times when we cannot say “Our World” anymore like in earlier years :

“More peace, equality and justice, less discrimination, racism, less starvation.”


What are you working on at the moment?


I am very happy to be working on two permanent projects one for Japan/ Shikoku Island at the tip of a jetty and one for Istanbul right on the sea close to a shipyard from 15th century. The work in Shikoku island is almost ready, for the Istanbul one we will start working in August and will be ready for the 17th Istanbul biennial in September. I am excited for both as they will again happen on water.

Credits

Artworks · Courtesy of Ayşe Erkmen

Okolo

Riding Around: From riding bmx bikes to shaping a multi-disciplinary design collective, OKOLO strives on collaboration and presenting the unexpected

OKOLO is a Prague based design collective founded by Adam Štěch, Matěj Činčera and Jan Kloss. They operate in a multitude of disciplines ranging in research, design, curation and architecture. Their key focus is delivering educative content and experiences through various mediums such as graphic design, illustration, publication and curatorial projects.

For this issue, NR is in conversation with Adam Štěch, to discuss OKOLO’s individual and collective journeys as a practice to this point, and to hear more about their ambitions for the future.

Adam, Thanks for joining me today. We’re lucky to have you for this issue and I’ve been looking forward to our conversation. I want to start by asking you about how you all met. I’d love to hear about your individual backgrounds and journeys, and how you came together as OKOLO.

Of course. We really appreciate it too. It started when I moved to Prague in 2005. I moved here to study Art History at the university, so my background is in Art History. I’ve always been a curious person. I’d always go around and try to meet people. At that time I was, of course, studying, but I was quite into BMX bikes, actually, bicycles in general. This is quite a strong connection between all of us. I went to my classes in university and after that, in the evening or afternoon, I always went to some skateparks or street spots to ride my BMX. One day I met this group of guys that were even younger than me. One of these guys was Matěj, Matěj Činčera, who was still in high school. He told me I’m interested in art and want to study graphic design. We realised we liked a lot of the same stuff. So we started to go out for beers and taking about doing some projects together.

“This lead to the idea of OKOLO coming around because OKOLO means “around” in Czech.”

We wanted to express that we were interested in the things that we find in everyday life, things that we like and admire . Whether it’s the design of bikes, furniture, artwork or architecture, anything. So we said, ok, let’s start some projects. We started to make t-shirts with some illustrations of real design objects on them. These t-shirts came with a text, with a story of what was on the t-shirt. So these t-shirt’s were a curated selection of some specific objects from design history. This was the beginning of our approach, and I think it’s still rooted in the same idea that we always want to present something from design history in a new way, through a new contemporary curatorial and graphic approach. Then we made our first issue of OKOLO Magazine in 2009. Basically that’s the year that OKOLO started, and at that point it was Matěj, My brother Jakub and I. My Brother was is crazy for bikes. He’s probably one of the most knowledgeable guys around bikes and bike design.

A few months after we met Jan Kloss. Jan wasn’t really from the BMX community but he was more into skateboarding and rap music. Both of these are also very close to me. I loved skating for its lifestyle, and we were all really into rap, groove, funk and soul. It was really great that we all met like this and had a similar vibe and sense of humour, and had the same values in our lives. What was important was that we each had different skills. I’m the curator. I’m the guy who writes the content and comes up with concepts for our projects. And Matěj and Jan are graphic designers, but slightly different from each other. Matěj’s much more into working with materials. He works with paper to create handmade installations, but also makes objects out of paper. He’s really skilful in this because his father was a packaging designer as well. And Jan’s more into the visual side of graphic design, not only creating logos but coming up with visual concepts for our books and visual features for our projects. So this is a perfect match, as each of us brought something different to the table. This allowed us to work independently as group and create everything in-house ourselves. This, I think, is our biggest advantage. But we’re really open as a collective, and do different projects on our own. I’m teaching and doing books with other publishing houses. Jan has a sneaker brand called PÁR, which means “pair” in Czech. Matěj is also teaching. So there’s projects that we do completely independently, but if there’s an opportunity for all our skills to connect and it would benefit a project, we always connect and do it together.

It’s interesting to hear how far back you all go and what interests your relationship is rooted in. I can visualise a trajectory of the different points and happenings that connected you all, it’s meaningful to hear how that relationship has built up to shape the dynamic you share.

Exactly! it’s really nice that we’re really good friends. We can really party together, we can see each other and hang out in any situation. It’s really like we’re kind of family. But In the last few years we don’t get to see each other as much. Jan has a family and Matěj lives a bit outside of Prague, so it’s nice that the bond between us is very strong.

It almost sounds like a mechanism that you’ve developed together, that you can rely on. It’s an established dynamic that you can activate when something comes around that you can all work together on. Even if you’re all doing different things and living in different places.

I’d say it’s basically a system, you know, If someone approached us with a brief, we already know how to process it, how to approach it and start developing concepts together. So it’s really an intuitive process for us.

We talked about your interest in BMX bikes, but I also wanted ask you about your lager brand and your exhibition about bottle openers. One of the things that I found interesting, which you touched on, is your approach to curating your shows. You seem to have a collective emphasis to re-introduce objects in a new context or alongside other objects, to give them a new meaning or narrative. Can you explain why you gravitate towards this approach when re-introducing these objects?

I think mostly the topics we are curating, we are choosing just because we love them. You know, for example, this bottle opener, this idea was born sitting having beer because we really love drinking beer, you know, and we laugh and have a good time during that. Also, this idea connected with the opening of our new gallery and studio space. So it was perfect idea to open our new space with the exhibition of bottle openers. Small things, you know, nicely designed, which have value and are everyday life objects. But they are really beautifully made and beautifully designed.

“For me as a curator, it is interesting to always choose a topic, do research and then show the broad spectrum of the topic. All the versions of all the incarnations of this topic as possible. It’s always based on this process of choosing something familiar, but to show it in a selection, which nobody would’ve put together.”

We like to really make this effort to choose different examples. Bottle openers or lamps or whatever, and to make a story, that somehow links in between them and then presents them in, let’s say, a fresh way. 

I’m coming from an academic background, but I’m not really academic. I don’t like it so much, this academic environment, which is very traditionalist and old school in many ways. We always wanted to educate, to bring this academic information, interesting information that is not well known, and to present it in completely not academic way. To present it in an almost new contemporary way to the public. Because our public or our people who follow our work and they are not academics, they are basically designers. But of course, designers, they do their own work and they don’t always have time to study books and read books as I do for example. So I always wanted to spread this information, which I have in my memory, in my design research, and to present this information in a catchy new way that is also understandable to people who are in the scene, but also people who are completely outside of our discipline. 

It’s almost like you’re creating a new vocabulary to re-introduce your research that feeds back into the system you talked about earlier.

It’s also very personal. We always have a lot of passion. It maybe can sound a bit cliche but the passion is the most important thing that you can have in what you are doing, whatever you are doing. It’s something that drives us. Even it’s a small exhibition in our gallery in Prague, where few people come to, or if it’s Triennale di Milano, like one of the most prestigious events in design. Basically, all our projects are on the same level, let’s say, because we love them all. We’re presenting this interesting information and stories of design through our personalities.

I think that reflects what you mentioned earlier that you love all your projects and that passion in a way is weaved through all your processes, whether it’s for bigger or smaller projects. 

I know one of your passions is modernist architecture. I’ve been following your instagram account for a while and you have a nice collection of modernist gems on there. Where did this interest start and how does modernist architecture as a global movement but also in the Czech republic influence the work you create. I’d love to hear your scope on why it was pivotal as a movement and how it has evolved through different happenings over time.

Mhm, I think the 20th century’s the golden age of design and architecture. It’s the time when all these amazing movements came from and they were really idealistic. They were utopian and were very optimistic. I think it’s seen and felt through the objects. I kind of miss a bit this idealism in contemporary design. This idea of a bigger goal, and to create really the new society, the better world. Modernism is basically about that. It’s the movement which originated as a tool, used to show us how our society could grow better. The tool that was accessible to more people and they could afford quality products which help them in their everyday life. So, this is what I think is really extraordinary about the modernist ideas. 

I’m kind of a retro person, so I’m not really as interested in contemporary architecture as much as the 20th century because there’s something in it, some special atmosphere, some charm, which really attracts me to it. You can tell these stories. You can read the stories. So for me, it felt natural that I focused on the 20th century design because you can feel the diversity of design. What was done in Scandinavia is different, and what was done in Brazil and in Japan is different, but everything is somehow connected under this big idea of of modernism. It’s like picking some chocolate from a bonbon. You don’t know which is better, and you want them all basically haha. For me, modernism is this period that I can really find so many beautiful forms, shapes and materials, and all its architects and designers across the world. And it’s basically an endless source of of stories for me. 

For 15 years, basically even more, like 17, 18 years it’s been a constant for me. A constant study of 20th century design and architecture. In my head I have a huge archive, and it’s something that you can always find something to explore, something new. I think in last ten years, and maybe because of our work a little bit, it’s got a popularity among the public, and suddenly you see that brutalism now’s quite trendy. People are travelling and taking photos. Now it’s become a thing our generation has started to re-discover, and it’s great that even the people who aren’t really geeks like me are discovering this, and they find some beauty in it. Social media and digital publications have had a big part in this as well. I think it’s a good time now to continue in this because it suddenly has much more of an audience than before.

Although at first, your instagram account focusing on modernist architecture seems separate from your work as OKOLO and from your separate studio account, once you look deeper you realise that some of your projects find their roots in this obsession. For me Mood-boards, and of course, your publication Modern Architecture Interiors are evidently bringing these two worlds together under one umbrella. I want to ask you about your process and experience of putting these projects together with Jan and Matěj.

You mean Mood-boards for Vitra?

Yeah exactly!

Yeah, that’s the perfect example of how we can connect our skills. Because the “Mood-boards” project came up because I was asked by a curator in Vitra Design Museum that they’re doing this exhibition called “Home Stories”. It was about interiors set in different periods and different countries showing the evolution of the domestic space. They asked us, so you’re a curator and a theoretician, but you work with your colleagues. Maybe you could do a project that will be on the edge of research and some form of artwork. So these mood-boards were really a great idea because I could connect my knowledge from visiting houses to them. We chose three houses, which were “Villa Tugendhat by Mies van der Rohe”, “Villa Müller by Adolf Loos” and “Villa Beer by Josef Frank” in Vienna. And I visited these houses properly once again to research all the materials which were used in them. Then we tried to get samples of these materials, as many as possible, and create some kind of collage out of them.

This part was more the work of Matěj, because he really was able to work as a sculptor, to put all these samples together in a nice collage structure, which you can put on your wall as an artwork. But if you read the caption that comes with it you find out that it’s an exact imprint of a real iconic interior. So this project is a really nice example of how we connect our skills. For example, this project took about ten months to complete, and for the first months I traveled all around visiting these houses. I took all the pictures and documented all the details. Then I also visited some experts who would really tell me, yes, this marble’s this kind of marble. It’s not Carrara marble, but it’s a marble from Switzerland or so on. I gathered all this information and produced this research and I passed it onto Matěj and he created these mood-boards as a visual and as our art piece. It’s nice that these projects have different timelines for each of us. Mostly, I always work in the beginning on the concept and on the research and then the work of guys is starting in the second part of the process, when they’re starting to do the graphics and how this research will be displayed or how it will be conceived. 

Regarding the book for Prestel – “Modern Architecture and Interiors”, this book’s kind of a Bible for me. It’s my little Bible. It’s 15 years of travelling and visiting architecture. It started with me travelling and visiting many, many houses. I always wrote some articles or made some small exhibitions about it. But I never put it all together. So in 2018, I started thinking, okay, I have so many buildings which I’ve visited, so maybe it would be nice to put everything together and do a really huge book. Then we met Lars who is really nice guy, Lars Harmsen. He is editor in chief of Slanted magazine. It’s a graphic design magazine. Very strong magazine.

Yeah I know it. It’s a great magazine.

Harmsen told me, Oh, if you have such a big archive you should do a book for Prestel. I have some friends there, I can connect you and maybe they’re interested. I reached out and they said they were interested. So we said, ok, let’s do a book and I started gathering everything, all my archive. I realised that I have maybe 1500 houses already documented and I selected 1000 of them. I decided to approach the book as a starter pack in the sense that you don’t have too much information there, but it can motivate you to find out more. So it’s kind of a crossroad for different readers, suitable for deeper research for every single reader. We decided to do a book layout that would be understandable, which would also be efficient. We discussed it together – as OKOLO, and we said, okay, let’s do one building per page from A to Z – in alphabetical order. Jan created this layout, which I found to be quite universal. Then everything was ready to print, and Prestel told us we can’t print a 1000 pages and we needed to reduce it. They said you have to reduce it by 200 pages. That was a really sad moment for me, so now it’s just under 900 pages. I also had some issues with copyrights. Of course, all the pictures are my own, but there are some architects like Le Corbusier or Frank Lloyd Wright, which charge you a lot of fees, so I quite often have to edit out a lot of these pictures I took because the fees would exceed thousands of euros. 

Yeah that’s always a bit frustrating. This book to me incapsulates such an extended period of time of research and a beautiful form of obsession, even if it’s a reduced amount. Hearing you talk about these two projects, you can understand how you individually initiate projects and later in the process come together to collaborate on the delivery of the project. They also highlight your relationship with the community of creators and collaborators around you. 

I guess this would be a great point to ask you about your ten year anniversary book. I found the layout of the book quite interesting and very much in tune with the story behind the process you just explained for these projects. Half of the book showcases your work as a collective. The other half your individual work and personalities, and also your relationship with your community and collaborators. Can you please speak about the story behind choosing this format and your experience of putting this project together.

For sure! The format was actually Jan’s idea. We had our anniversary party in 2019, and it was quite big. Many friends came and it was fun. After we said, okay, that’s it. We did a party. We won’t do a book. We were thinking about a book, but we said we have a lot of work and thought we didn’t have time to do a book. But then, like few months later, Jan came because he’s totally a workaholic, and said “hey, I was thinking we should do this book, let’s do this book! I have a really great concept. Let’s do two parts for the book. One part will be about our work, and the other part will just be about our life, our friends and the people we’ve met. I said, that’s great, I think we should do it! 

So we gathered all the projects we made, even some really small ones we almost forgot about. Also, we all went through our photo archives and found these crazy pictures from the parties, from the openings and from travelling. It was really great that each of us had different pictures from different memories and projects. I think this is what exactly characterises us. That we love our work and we can even sometimes show it off, you know, and that we did this nice book. But I think maybe even more important are these moments meeting amazing people that share the same values and the same interests as us, who have many stories to tell. So all these great people, it’s so joyful, and we’ve been very lucky to visit and work with such amazing artists and designers. It’s really something that will be in our memory forever. When we sometimes go out for a beer together, we always talk about them. these rare memories are very, very valuable to us. This book is perfect for when someone’s visiting our studio, and we’re like we did this book and you can see our projects. But the most funny thing is from the other side, where they can see our photos from the from the parties and from back in the days when we were much younger. You can see it’s not a really difficult concept to do this, it’s basically very basic. Maybe in general, We really don’t like very complicated curatorial concepts. I think we’re kind of straightforward in this way. 

It’s crucial this idea of going with what’s closest to you, because so often when designers try to showcase such an expanded period of their practice and careers, it becomes a very serious conversation. To me, this can result in over complicating the conversation and making it less digestible for a broader audience. 

Also, I think there’s a lot of value in the side of your book that exposes your personalities and interactions with your community over this period. As a reader, viewer, designer, or whatever, I find this humane side of your book much more tangible and relatable. I appreciate that you’ve opened up this side of your experience in such an honest and simple way, and dedicated such a big portion of this book to it.

It’s also visible when we go somewhere to do an exhibition or something, and we arrive and they see three smiling guys, and I think we have a bit of a charm. I think they can see the passion in us, that we are dedicated to what we love, and this somehow opens doors for us. That we’re authentic and we aren’t pretending something. We can be at some crazy posh design week party, and we’ll still act like us. Super chill guys from Prague that like to drink beers and hanging out with each other. We gravitate towards the same people who are authentic and true. I have to say I’ve been super lucky that the people I’ve collaborated with were all really good people, and I think this is something that truly imprints into your mind and into your heart. Sometimes, you know, there are so many pretentious things in our discipline. This is something I’m really not interested in, and as I get older and older I kind of get angry at these people, like what the fuck, be normal, you’re not the star, haha. 

I definitely get that haha! I think the reason you’ve connected with the people you have has a lot to do with where you stand individually and as a collective. Over time your position and work asks the questions that interest you and attracts like minded people and partnerships. As someone that is only at the beginning of that journey it’s inspiring that over 15 years you’ve managed to keep your values so close to you and how that’s surrounded you with a community of likeminded people.

Yeah, thank you very much, I really appreciate it! I really do.

Touching on your collaborators and relationship with your community, I want to ask you about your work with Maria Cristina Didero and the exhibition, Designers, and the publication, People, you created together. It’ll be great to hear about the research you and her did together, and how Matěj and Jan visualised this research.

It was funny. We were in touch with Maria, but very lightly. We knew each other somehow, and we were in touch via email. For our gallery in Prague, we always like to invite designers that we’ve met before to come and exhibit there. We’d say we don’t have any money, but we’ll cover your flight and accommodation, and we’ll give you this space to do some cool project together. We’ll have a nice opening and have fun during the party. Basically, all of these designers that were invited were like yeah why not, let’s do it! And when I see them again, sometimes years later, they always remember those memories, and say they had fun in Prague with us doing these projects. It was the same with Maria. We were like let’s invite a curator, instead of a designer. It would be interesting. So I wrote her an email saying that I wanted to invite her to prague for a lecture and an exhibition, and she said “yeah, I’d love to! But what is the exhibition that you want to do?”. I had a spontaneous idea and I said because you’re not a designer but you’re a curator and writer, you can showcase your writing. What if you choose your favourite designers that you’re writing about, and we’ll – OKOLO, choose a specific part of the text and we’ll make some graphic posters out of them. And she said I love it, let’s do it! So I kind of became a curator that curated a curator haha. I curated Maria’s writing and it was so nice. I shared this with Jan and Matěj and we decided to do some posters and visualisations of the designers work that Maria was writing about, and these came as a visual representation of Maria’s work. It was a really fun opening during Designblok – Prague-based design festival. 

A year after Maria asked us if we could do a version of this exhibition in Milano, and we did “People” as a catalogue publication for this exhibition. We added some more designers for this exhibition, and we created more illustrations. And also we completely changed the media. Instead of posters shown in Prague, we decided to to a special publication with these illustrations.  We did this for Mostro, which is the graphic design festival in Milano. We invited her first to Prague, and this resulted in her inviting us a year later to Milano, and it’s really cool that this lead to this project having some kind of evolution.

That’s really interesting to hear how this partnership lead to a friendship and an on-going collaboration. 

I want to finish by asking you about what you’re working on now, and also about what you’re looking forward to in the future.

The Triennale is the project we’ve been working on for the past year. It’s the official Czech presentation at the Triennale di Milano, which is a legendary event going since the 1930’s. The main topic is “Unknown, Unknowns; Introduction To Mysteries”.

We were asked by the Czech Museum of Decorative Arts, which is the organiser of the Czech Pavilion, If we’d like to curate something under this topic. So we created an exhibition that we’re opening next week, which is called “ Casa Immaginaria: Living In A Dream”. It’s about the phenomena of “Dreamscapes”. During the pandemic there was quite a rise of this new digital phenomena, of creating fictional interiors of fantasy-like living environment, as a form of visual perfection or even fetish. You can relate that we were sitting in our homes during the lockdown and we were dreaming and fantasising about these dream-like environments that we wanted to be in and escape to.

And I think that’s part of the reason why this Dreamscapes phenomena came about. So I got in touch with some of these designers that create these Dreamscapes, which mostly call themselves digital artists. I thought this was a great topic for the theme of this show, focusing on this idea of escaping to some unknown world through these images. We did this installation that we printed these large more than 2 meter format prints mounted on light boxes, presenting this new phenomena of Dream- scapes. We added real metal constructions in-front of the images which work as an extension of the fantasy world into our reality, which symbolise the border between reality and fiction. Also, we’re presenting some historical context of fictional houses and interiors, in a similar process to our previous curations. We made a catalogue as well, and next week is the opening of the show. It’s going to be a big event with the minister of culture attending, which we’re really excited about.

That’s super exciting, and it touches on a feeling that we all collectively experienced and a period we all went though. This imagination that came out of our isolation, and presenting this section of work in this format is introducing them to us in a new light.

Yes, exactly. So this was our last project and now we’re doing a museum exposition for the Czech furniture company TON, which was born out of Thonet. It is a company that is now based in the original factories founded by Michael Thonet in the 1860’s. They produce handcrafted bent wood furniture using steam. We are curating a retrospective of their portfolio. I actually did a book for them and that’s were this project started – the book was not an OKOLO project, it was done with their own graphic designers, but this exhibition is our collective project.

Credits

Images · Courtesy of Okolo

Nicholas Préaud

“I celebrate humility and simplicity in design, that which feels obvious, which looks like it should be rather than not.”

Nicholas Préaud’s fondness for furniture and product design brings him satisfaction on different scales in different timelines. The liberty and authority these designs lend him feed his creativity to break through the boundaries between what exists in the digital and physical world. In fact, some of his projects touch upon abstraction, works that only serve the digital altar. As he investigates, researches, and develops plans and methods to bring these digital works to life – together with Kei Atsumi – Préaud finds himself invested and knee-deep in his design and work principles, an indication of a positive intensification in his design, architecture, and construction research and development.

NR: A focus on design, architecture, and construction research and development: what made you pursue a creative studio on these themes? Where did this strong affinity for these themes come from?

NP: I am a Paris-based architect and designer. I pursued architecture studies in Paris and subsequently worked in several architecture firms such as DGT Architects, Lina Ghotmeh Architecture, Nicolas Laisné Architectes, and more recently Sou Fujimoto Architects in Paris. My background is purely architectural and bridges several practices such as smaller-scale furniture or product design, and construction R&D. My practice spans today from furniture design, interior design, architecture, and R&D (all designed to be built and used in real life) to more abstract and digital works of design meant to exist only digitally. Some projects such as Casa Atibaia are ways of bridging the gap between the digital and the physical world. Initiated as a digital architectural project, we are now working on bringing it to life in the years to come. 

Furniture and product design has always been a go-to theme for me to work on as it brings satisfaction on a different scale as well as a different timeline. As architects, we often get lost in never-ending processes due to political or financial parameters that are out of our control. Furniture design gives me more liberty and control over the creative process, and ultimately the finished product. Although my practice aims at a certain form of humility in the creative process, it is also progress-driven, which naturally leads me to invest time and resources in research and development. In the past two years, together with my friend and partner in this adventure, Kei Atsumi, I have designed and put together a manufacturing process for a joining system of architectural elements. We subsequently patented the design and process to bring it to life in the years to come. The joint system aims to allow for any architectural elements such as beams, pillars, or panels to be assembled to one another without any tools or a particular skill, a seemingly interesting subject for disaster relief construction for instance.

How essential is construction research and development in creating design and architecture?  Do they go hand-in-hand?

They most often don’t go hand in hand at all in my experience working in Parisian firms. In France at least, these practices are very compartmentalized. Architects work on design and engineers work on R&D. I would say that focusing on R&D applied to architecture makes sense when you want to go beyond the existing techniques and processes which exist and have been normalized. It isn’t essential, but it contributes to broader progress and helps create new techniques and expertise ultimately making the construction process more efficient and sustainable.

I want to learn more about your design process. Do you start with a single concept then go from there, or an already-envisioned product? Is it challenging to lay out the design plans? How many revisions do you go through?

I usually neither iterate so much during the design process nor do I start with an already envisioned product or project. A concept often emerges early on because it makes sense, and is then pushed further until completion.

“I believe there are as many valid concepts as there are approaches to the same project.”

It’s just a matter of it making sense to the final users of the space or product, and of course to you the designer. Depending on the scale and complexity of the project, iterations and revisions are nevertheless bound to happen. This is where engineering and construction knowledge proves useful in the design process. Accurate engineering can be taken into consideration early on in the creative process to avoid painful iterations. My architectural work has been and is for now on a scale not exceeding that of a private home. In this sense, once the wants and needs of the client and the natural context of the construction have been well understood, the design plans follow easily.

Do you prioritize functionality over design in your products? Also, would you say you practice the less is more philosophy? 

To a certain extent, I would say I do try to practice the less is more philosophy. I truly believe excellent functionality can be achieved without compromising on design. True utility often suffices to bring beauty out of any given design. In my work, I enjoy emphasizing the simple technicalities of how a given object, space, or building is assembled by revealing the sheer power of the forces at play. Functionality in some cases can also become overly complicated and fussy. Design that doesn’t seek to fulfill a specific given functionality sometimes brings out so much more, as theorized by James J. Gibson with the concept of affordance and perceived action possibilities of an object.

Noting the titles of your design products, there is a touch of East Asian culture in them. What lifestyle or philosophy do you practice that roots from East Asia? Is there a difference between the way East-Asian culture works and that of European and Western one?

My work is impregnated with many references to East Asian culture, specifically Japanese culture. Having been very passionate about the Japanese culture and architecture in my entire life, and having worked at internationally renowned studios led by Japanese architects such as Tsuyoshi Tane or Sou Fujimoto, I have learned a lot about, and continue to seek to learn about, how architectural design can entertain an essential relationship with its foundational natural counterpart. A simple relationship between the artifact and the untouched, and layouts intentionally designed to encompass empty space where anything can happen are essential to me, as opposed to Western architecture and its spaces impose a function on the user. The concept of ‘Ma’ in Japanese culture and architecture exactly points to this.

“The invisible aesthetic of Ma is portrayed by this energy filled with possibilities emerging from the design, an emptiness that reveals unforeseen functions.”

Let us talk about your architecture repertoire. There is a sense of calm in your designs, from the light hues of the interior to the arrangement of the fixtures and furniture.
How do you decide what color and style to use? Do you compromise with your clients’ briefs?

I tend to iterate much more on textures, colors, and furniture than actual sheer architectural geometry which comes more naturally to me. The sense of calm you are referring to probably comes from the essentialness of uncluttered spaces, once again not imposing function but revealing it. In terms of color and style, I would say I try to adapt as much as I can to the context of the design rather than imposing my own. I feel an architectural design is well rolled-out specifically when you cannot recognize its author through the style, but rather through the creative pro- cess which led to its materialization. In this sense, the creative process can lead you in so many different directions.
That is what is interesting to me; each design exists in its own context and with its own referential universe tied to it, not so much its author’s aesthetics.

“That is what is interesting to me; each design exists in its own context and with its own referential universe tied to it, not so much its author’s aesthetics.”

What has been your most challenging project so far? What and how did you learn from it? Also, how would you describe your work ethic through your projects? What architectural elements do you pay attention to?

My most challenging project has been and continues to be Casa Atibaia which I designed in collaboration with Char- lotte Taylor. This project encapsulates so much of what I try to push towards in my practice. Architecture that does not wish to disappear in its surroundings, nor shows off extravagantly either; architecture that exists through the multiplication of natural forces. Started in early 2020, the project was first rolled out as a way of putting forward ideas and our interpretation of Brazilian modernism. Having lived and studied architecture in Brazil, this project resonates so much with me. Phase one of this project which we rolled out in 2020 was met with great enthusiasm and gave us extra incentive to continue pushing for it to materialize. Phase two which will be released soon brings us even closer to this imagined dream-house and consists of a short film and VR experience allowing the viewer to immerse themselves completely in the design in a way the still shots didn’t let you. Phase three which we are very optimistic about will be rolled out in the coming years and will materialize through the construction of the house. We have been in discussion over the past year with clients who are also guiding us through the process.

A question on a title: is there a difference between an architectural designer and solely an architect or a designer?

There is no difference I know of or intended other than this title is the most broad-reaching one I could find on Instagram to define what I do, which is a broad scope going from object and furniture design, to architecture, to digital works, and research and development.

It seems that we have to look forward to your research and development content. What can we expect from you in the upcoming months?

Speaking of which, I have yet to update my website as I am waiting on legal deadlines to communicate more broadly on the R&D aspect of my practice. For the past two years, my partner in this adventure, Kei Atsumi, and I have been developing a joint system that allows anyone to assemble and disassemble architectural elements without the use of tools and without any particular skill set. This joint system is sturdy over time and can be manufactured for panel or framework structures. No tools and no skills prove useful for certain types of constructions including but not limited to emergency architecture and lower-scale wooden homes. Two years of research and development have led to the successful patenting of the system in Japan, which we are now working on marketing and developing more seriously. As this is a slow process, I do not have a date for release but we are working to get it manufactured and on the market as fast as possible.

Our issue touches on the concept of Celebration. Some people seem to only revere design and architecture for their face value. For you, why and what should celebrate (in) design and architecture? For instance, in Casa Atibaia, you seem to celebrate the force of nature. Does nature drive your philosophy in design?

As mentioned above, and also just now by you in the clearest way, my work explores the relationship each design entertains with its surroundings and founding natural elements. As our culture and humanity tend to distance themselves more and more from the most basic and essential connections we still have with the natural elements, I feel the urge to explore and question how this can still happen on a very basic level. I celebrate humility and simplicity in design, that which feels obvious, which looks like it should be rather than not. A lot actually looks like it should not.

“I celebrate the designs whose creative process and formal results are more relevant than their authors.”

Continuing the theme of celebrating nature, you also collaborated with Charlotte Taylor for Coral Arena. How did this collaboration unfold? How can your collaboration fuel the discussion on climate change?

Charlotte and I were approached by the team at Aorist, which is a next-generation cultural institution supporting a climate-forward NFT marketplace for artists creating at the edge of art and technology. Together with the team at Aorist and OMA New York which is one of, if not the, leading architectural firms in the world, we produced a film that portrays the life of a physical artwork that will be installed in the future as a part of the ReefLine masterplan—it is a digital twin to a sculpture that will live and grow over time, depicting the sculpture as a piece of resilient infrastructure. Proceeds from the sale of this release will be donated to The ReefLine, an artificial reef, marine habitat, and sculpture park in Miami Beach. This project was our first meaningful jump into the NFT format and made sense to us creatively and of course, because of the cause it is supporting. We hope the film is viewed and appreciated by many, and that it helped educate the public about what is unfolding and what has yet to unfold in the years to come on the Miami coastline.

Credits

Images · Nicholas Préaud
https://nicholaspreaud.com/

Sanchos Madridejos

Sanchos Madridejos

Creating an identity, a system, and a language one fold at a time

The construction of a new system, a new process, and a new language marks the beginning of Juan Carlos Sancho and Sol Madridejos’ work at their Madrid-based practice Sancho-Madridejos Architecture Office, established in 1982. Gazing upon their architecture and design, the structure bends and folds, an inquiry on the limits of the materials. The flexibility of the duo’s minds materializes into products of architecture and designs that they have developed, a signature that now lines their ethos: the concept of fold.

The analysis of each item starts with what they call a base-fold – the foundation that contains all of a project’s required DNA – that generates a process tailored to the work, defining a line, an identity, and a language of its own. The spatial quality becomes elevated, enhanced by the structure’s relationship with light, orientation, or location that swings from one criterion to another. “From this starting point, many of the pieces are prone to a specific location or a specific time, bringing out variables from the context which we sometimes only discover later on. These processes are not linear since each step has a permanent effect on the rest,” the duo states. For NR Magazine, the concept of fold coincides with the concept of celebration.

NR: I would love to start with the idea you developed and grew: the concept of fold. How did it happen, and what kind of research did you have to go through to materialize this?

SM: We have worked with the concept of fold for the past 20 years. It all began with an interview with the sculptor Eduardo Chillida, during a walk in Chillida Leku, where his works are exhibited. He told us that ‘the fold creates a spatial, formal and structural unity’ and that ‘the fold creates spaces.’ This encouraged us to investigate the role it had to play in the field of architecture. 

In this part, could you guide us on how the concept of fold works?

A fold works as a formal-spatial unit. This is the core concept of a fold. Not everything that folds is a fold; it can also be a pleat.

The process reminds me of origami. Are there cultures that influence your work ethics and design flows? How do you infuse them into your projects?

A fold is not origami. It can seem like it, but it is basically the opposite. To fold is to generate a strain, an action, a cut on a plane, and study how it transforms topologically because of this action. It is easy to confuse them, but they are nothing alike.

You mentioned that your process touches upon a unique spatial quality that is enhanced by its relationship with light, orientation, or location. Without one or two of these elements, would you say your space would be incomplete? How essential is it to form these three elements into a single force?

“Form, space, and structure along with light, location, scale (the human being), and material, form the single conjunction of a fold.”

If any of these variables are missing, a fold is incomplete and does not work. They all carry the same weight and deliver specific qualities.

Could you elaborate on this statement of yours: These processes are not linear, since each step has a permanent effect on the rest.

These processes are laborious and take up a lot of time. In our office, we have around 500 different fold models with some of them very alluring, but not all of them are folds; some are pleats.

“A fold has, in the first place, to answer to mechanical behavior. It has to be structural and coherent by itself. Once this is the case, work can continue.”

As we focus on Celebration, I’d love to know how you celebrate creativity and architecture outside of your office?

There are several levels of celebration. First, seeing a finished work moves us, and that is the first celebration. This is best enjoyed among the people that have taken part in the design and the construction processes.

Taking photos of a finished building and participating in the photo essay also stimulate us as we get to see the project from other positions and points of view.

Friends and architects visiting a building enriches the perception of the project.

Finally, its use by the client is also a celebration, seeing a building in use complements its own meaning.

Credits

Images · Sanchos Madridejos
https://www.sancho-madridejos.com/

Abiboo Studios

“sometimes the planning is just a roadmap to set the initial building blocks for the society to evolve”

Science fiction is in at the moment. In October we’ll be trooping to the cinema to watch the film adaptation of the Dune saga, which is to sci-fi what Lord Of The Rings is to fantasy. The viral Ice Planet Barbarians Kindle novels, an epic romance series about blue alien boyfriends, has been picked up by Penguin Random House. Even on Netflix the new Korean drama Squid Game, which blends together horror and near dystopian sci-fi in a nail-bitingly binge-worthy package, is currently number one in the whole of the UK and worldwide. And in 2054 they are going to start building a sustainable city on Mars.

Oh wait, that one isn’t fiction, it’s actually going to happen. Or at least that’s the aim of ABIBOO Studios who have teamed up with SONet to design Nüwa, one of five cities proposed to be built on the red planet, with the first colonists set to arrive in 2100. Built into the slope of the Martian cliffs near Tempe Mensa, “the steep terrain offers the opportunity to create a vertical city inserted into the rock, protected from radiation and meteorites while having access to indirect sunlight.” The city will be connected via high-speed elevator systems, and everything from schools to farming to indoor parks will be available to the citizens. To get there you will need to spend one to three months on a shuttle and tickets will cost a whopping estimate of $300,000. No need to worry about the return fare though, once you arrive on Mars you will probably be there for good, so it’s certainly not a journey for the faint-hearted. NR Magazine joined ABIBOO founder and chief architect Alfredo Munoz in conversation.

Nüwa is an incredibly exciting project and it has been stated that the things that can be learned during the conception and creation of this city could be applied to issues on Earth. However, is there not a risk that these solutions will never actually be implemented on Earth, especially as there are already solutions to issues here that still haven’t been fully implemented such as renewable energy etc, and the majority of resources will be focused on the space race and cities like Nüwa?

So there’s obviously always a risk of the innovation not being implemented, but there is definitely the opportunity to implement it. And that’s where the learning that we can do by thinking out of the box and implementing it back on Earth is very valuable. Let me give you one very simple example. When we were working on the solution for finding the most efficient way to generate food on Mars, we developed hydroponics technology, which in concept is a technology that allows farming indoors. It’s highly efficient. It has been going on on Earth for a while, but recently it’s become quite common in the US.

It’s not possible to have an animal-based diet on Mars. The reason for that is that they require a lot of space, which obviously on Mars, it’s tricky because we cannot have them all outside in the environment. We need to treat that spaces where animals would be in a similar way that we would treat the spaces for humans, with the right pressure, the right oxygen. This is very expensive to build and very expensive to maintain. So it was not realistic to consider a diet based on animals. The team of life support experts proposed a solution that was mainly based on algae and insects.

When we analyse the area that we needed per person to farm the food that humans would need on Mars, we were talking about a little bit more than 100 meters per person. That means that in 100 meters per person, we were able to generate all the food that future Martians could need. Okay. Now, let’s look at Earth, on average, every person requires 6000 m² for farming. So if you compare a 6000 m² per person versus 100 m² per person, there’s a huge gap. That means that we could use more efficient technology for crops and for farming and we could reevaluate the type of diet that we have on Earth. It can liberate a lot of space on Earth where we can actually plant trees or nature. That could help a lot with climate change.

So, yes, there is always a chance that the technology that’s developed for space will not be implemented on Earth, but sooner or later, if it actually brings value, it will be implemented.

How do you think culture would potentially evolve within these cities on Mars and what might those new culture’s look like and involve? 

So culture is very connected to how we live in the cities. One of the key aspects for us was to create a sense of identity, a sense of belonging. When we designed the city, we were very clear we were not designing a temporal settlement. We were aiming to create a city where people will go and live and die, and have families. So a sense of belonging and identity is critical, and that is part of what we think will drive local culture.

Another thing that I think is very important is the sense of community. So Mars is a very harsh environment. It’s not like Earth, where we change our environment as per our needs. On Mars, we will need to adapt to the environment. So that means that in such a harsh environment, we actually need to rely on each other much more than we do on Earth. On Earth, we used to rely on each other much more. Then as centuries passed and culture changed especially Western culture, we became much more individualistic. But we think that given the harsh environments on Mars, society will have to rely much more on their neighbours.

“We will need to look after our neighbours and our neighbours will need to look after us. If that trust is broken due to the harsh environment and challenging conditions on Mars, everyone might be at risk.”

That has a critical impact on how culture would be, because again, we ambition that culture must be more gregarious, where people will be not so focused on their own self, but also where the sense of community will be even higher than on Earth.

I imagine that there would have to be some kind of like a law enforcement system or some kind of punishment system. How would that work in such a small community to rely on each other?

Definitely, and that’s something very interesting that we still need to explore. We are currently at the state where we conceptualise the main ideas of the city. We are currently developing it from the architectural and engineering point of view, and the schedules that we are talking about are quite large. We might be able to start construction of the city on Mars by 2054, which is almost 35 years from now. So there is a lot of other analysis that needs to be done in conjunction with a multidisciplinary team of experts that might add some of those questions that you are asking.

There is always the risk of somebody not behaving properly and that has to be included in the way that the city functions in the same way that we are thinking about hospitals, the same way we are envisioning a location. It has to be considered what type of law will run on Mars. Maybe this is an organic process. Maybe the first settlers will have to find a way to organise things with some inspiration from some things that work on Earth. But then at some point, the society will have to be self-autonomous over there, and they will make their own decisions.

For this project there were included proposals for economic models, forms of government and dedication systems and the question was asked “Since we have the chance to start over, would life on mars be better than on earth?” However Nüwa will still retain many capitalist elements, “We envision a system that will combine the private sector – we’ll have our own economy and currency that will incentivise entrepreneurship”. Why not implement forms of true socialism or communism, as capitalism is already failing us here?

Sure, innovation will be critical. Settling on Mars will require levels of innovation that we are not even used here on from people on Earth. So we are not aiming for the city to have huge differences of wealth. Indeed, we do ambition that people might have more wealth than others, but not the extreme situation that we have here on Earth.

And when we look into the past at communism, humans find a way to look into their own personal interests without looking for the good of people. Right. I live in the US. I appreciate capitalism as a way to encourage innovation, and I think controlled capitalism is something that facilitates innovation. What is not good is that when you have monopolies that take over the market and new entrepreneurs cannot provide the innovation, that is not true capitalism. However, on Mars, we believe that intellectual property and an opportunity to generate value to society should be rewarded through recognition in society and through wealth among others.

But have you not considered creating a society that wouldn’t use money? Because then you would do away with the issues of some people having more and some people having less. Instead, you could come up with other ways to incentivise people to be innovative?

There are a lot of opportunities to continue exploring in this space. So again, we are architects and scientists, but it’s important for us to have people from different fields to add value to the project. We worked with a multidisciplinary group of experts that went from astrobiology, economy, life support systems, planetary design. So we have a very large amount of people, but that was only the first step, right. There will be a lot of opportunities to continue evolving so, going back to what we were talking about, it could be possible.

And definitely, there is something to investigate with that. But we don’t see, at least as of now, the harm of rewarding it through a certain level of wealth, because ambition is part of who we are as a species. We are the human species, wants to strive for a better life and wants to strive for a better thing for themselves and for their community. We ambition that Mars could be a great gateway for the scientific community to be recognised as they deserve. And that is connected again with innovation, connected to culture.

We’ve seen designs for Nüwa but there are also four other sister cities such as Abalos City which would be located at Mars’ north pole and Marineris City in one of the biggest canyons in the solar system. How might the designs of these cities differ from Nüwa?

Yeah, so we did not expand too much yet about the alternative cities but I’m going to explain first why there are many different cities. One is access to resources. In our case, we ambition self-sufficient, sustainable cities on Mars. That means that we are not relying on resources from Earth to operate or build a city, only in the very early phases. The rest will all be constructed from local resources on Mars. There are a lot of resources on Mars but they are in different locations. Therefore, we need to have a small set of settlements to be able to access those resources. Secondly, we must consider safety or resiliency. What happens if there is a problem, an emergency or something that is not expected in one city and everyone is in danger? We need to secure everyone and move them. Somewhere far enough away so they can be safe. And if you combine those two situations, we thought that to create a safe, long-lasting culture and colony on Mars, we needed to split it. And in this particular case, we split into five different cities.

We think that providing an open platform for creating identity is important as well, so different cities will have different cultures Some of them might be very different from each other, and that again connects to the sense of identity. Why do some people like London and others like New York because they are different, right? It’s not only about the culture of the people living there, but also the physical environment that makes room for that culture. It’s all interconnected. So we think that a successful permanent colony on Mars will be divided into different settlements, and all those settlements should have some type of unique identity

As life on Mars would require 10x more energy to support than on earth it has been stated that, even with the aid of technology, life there would involve an intense lifestyle and settlers could be contracted to spend 60-80% of their working lives contributing to the city. One cannot help be reminded of the song The Fine Print by Stupendium, which went viral during the pandemic, that talks about indentured servitude to corporations in space. As the price of a one-way ticket is estimated at $300k and would no doubt require a loan for the majority of people, what would prevent similar such issues from occurring in Nüwa?

So I’m not aware of the reference that you were mentioning. That $300,000 was a very quick estimate to premature to know what will it actually cost? That number was more of an academic level calculation based on today’s numbers. Is moving to Mars going to be easy or cheap? No, but you don’t need to go to Mars. If you don’t want to go to Mars, feel free not to go to Mars. Some people decide to move to very remote areas, and some people prefer to live in a nice, comfortable place in the Mediterranean, it’s is a personal choice, right? We can all choose what we want to do with our lives.  So some people might be more inclined in going to Mars despite the harsh environments.

But it’s going to be an extremely tough life, probably not appropriate for most of the people that live on Earth. Those that want the sense of adventure, the sense of exploring a new frontier in what being human is, and to be pioneers in what is next for the human species. Those are the ones that might be willing to go to Mars and have a very tough life. Again, it’s not easy not only because of the amount of work that will be required.

So again, if somebody wants to go to Mars for a holiday, probably that person is not going to be welcomed by the community because that’s not a person who is going to contribute.

We do ambition again, that the city is owned by the people, not by corporations. Again, there is a lot of room for development on this, but we think it’s important for the citizens to own the city and to own the proceeds associated with potential trade that might happen in the city. Obviously, there would be a lot of trade going back and forth between Earth and Mars.

But yeah, it’s not going to be easy, or cheap, or safe. And it’s not going to be pleasant because the diet is going to change, and the environments that we are building, which we think is amazing and so spectacularly beautiful, but they’re different to what we are used to. We’re not going to see the ocean, or nature, or have the opportunity to walk around without the suit.

“It’s only for certain people in the same way that in the fifteenth century some people were willing to risk their lives to travel west. In America we had the opportunity to explore new frontiers, and that will be only for some people that want to do it.”

I’m curious because you said that if you don’t want to go to Mars you don’t have to. But historically speaking, a lot of settlers and pioneers were people who were forced to go. If you look at Australia, a lot of people who were settled there were often criminals. It was the same with America. So I wonder what kind of people you would imagine would settle on Mars?

In this particular case, we ambition more people with vision, people that have a strong sense of community, a high appreciation for science. Which, again, if you actually look into the background of astronauts, they usually have a very high appreciation for science and for exploration, for adding some contribution to the history of humankind.

But in that particular case of settlers in the past, it was always connected to commerce. If you look at the reason, maybe not in Australia, but in the America the main reason why people were willing to go was commerce. And that’s where we see there is some room for the private sector to add value not only to the scientific community, but also tourism and mining. So there are opportunities that will come, associated with commerce between Earth and Mars, that could support some people to go.

Could a city like Nüwa be built on earth and would it be a viable economically and environmentally sustainable alternative to cities we have at the moment? 

Yeah, so some aspects could be implemented on Earth. One of the critical characteristics of Nüwa is that is in a vertical cliff. One of the reasons for it is to compensate for the pressure, because the pressure outside on Mars is very low but we wouldn’t need to do that on Earth. Radiation protection is also very important, but here on Earth, we don’t have that problem.

The magnetism on Earth protects us from that radiation. But we see problems with climate change, with temperature rising. In some areas, the temperature is becoming so high and that’s going to continue to increase, so living on the surface might become very complicated in the future. So we do see some room to implement some of the solutions that we will implement on Mars. In that case, as of now, we are working on building a small version of the solutions on Mars in extreme environments on Earth.

So you build a small building in order to learn from it, to adapt, and change things as needed in order to be able to modify whatever is required. So you can continue improving the solution. So that is something we are currently working on. So we ambition building some parts of the Nüwa city here as a way to achieve an additional level of research and development. Also with the possibility of adding tourism, the scientific community could come and start experiencing on a very small scale how society could operate on Mars.

The interior living spaces are obviously quite uniform and modern in design. However, it has also been mentioned that maintaining the good mental health of the people within these cities is imperative. As humans find expressing individuality important would there be scope to customise their living spaces or would that require too many resources? The same goes for fashion and other things like that?

Definitely, that’s a very important point. And we are currently working on that aspect. We do ambition customisation. That is very important again, to the sense of identity. We want to feel a sense of belonging, but we also want to feel that we are not one among many.  We have our own personal taste that has to be respected.

Similar to how we do co-living here on Earth or when you go to a dorm. You have private areas that are small, but you can customise a lot in your own space. Then all the common areas are public where you incentivise the social aspect of the community and where you have much more space to enjoy than in your private space.

Also with fashion, we are now working on the next round of designs where we are thinking about how fashion could be. If you wait a few months, you will have more opportunities to see how things are coming together.

What other ways do you think people will be able to express their identities within the cities?

Arts. We are giving a lot of importance to that. We think that self-expression will be an essential aspect of society on Mars. Again, the advantage here is that Mars is not going to be in isolation. It takes 20 minutes to communicate between Earth and Mars, so there will be a lot of communication and interaction between the Martians and the people living on Earth. Right. So there will be a lot of room for again transfer of ideas because life on Mars will be so different, people on Earth can learn a lot from the experiences that Martians will have.

The use of AI and robotic technology will be integral to life on Mars, however, have you considered how people’s relationships with AI and robots might have changed in the future and how that might affect cities like Nüwa? 

Definitely. We are working a lot on the next wave. I was telling you that in a few months you will be able to see the next round of exciting solutions for colonies on Mars that we are working on. And this question that you are raising is very connected to that.

“We see that AI and robotics will be essential for the survival of Mars, and therefore the relationship with humans will evolve. To consider robots not so much as tools, but as an emotional beings that we relate to.”

In Japan is very common that they don’t see robots as objects as we do in the West but instead see a type of soul associated with the robots. And we envision that not only on Mars, but in the near future. The relationship between artificial intelligence and humans is going to evolve or transcend from a pure tool to an emotional connection. I mean, the movie Her is a fun example. As we will not be able to have many animals on Mars robots could become the next type of pet where we have a very close emotional attachment.

I imagine because it’s like such a harsh environment, having that companionship would be essential for the good mental health of the people there.

Definitely. We think that the tools that robots will provide will not only be rational, they can also be emotional. And the communication with Earth as well. Again, remember that we are talking about the hyper-connectivity among the citizens on Mars and with the citizens on Earth as well.

Do you envision people being able to control the robot from different cities as a sort of way of online dating?

That’s again is something we might need to see what happens organically. Sometimes we can’t plan. As architects, we are good at planning, but sometimes the planning is just a roadmap to set the initial building blocks for the society to evolve. The local architects, the local politicians, the local engineers and the local artist will have to find their own way to live. That’s the beautiful part, right? To leave it so open. That allows for innovation locally. And that rounds up our conversation about how important innovation is going to be for the future Martians.

Credits

Images · ABIBOO STUDIO
https://abiboo.com/

Ben Kelly

“Keep going, don’t stop”

One of the UK’s most influential designers Ben Kelly is perhaps best known for designing the interior of the famous Manchester nightclub, the Haçienda which was infamous in Manchester’s post-punk house and rave scene. Of course, this is only a tiny part of his extensive and varied career. Kelly has worked with big names such as The Sex Pistols, Virgil Abloh, Factory Records, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren. However, speaking to him one is reminded of their favourite university lecturer, sternly indulgent and ultimately kind to anyone who falls under the umbrella of the ‘young creative’.  He has the interview questions before him, he’s made notes and he asks questions. “What does NR stand for?” “How did you research me?” “What university did you go to and what did you study?”. It’s certainly a novel experience for the interviewer to find themselves becoming the interviewed, and that is only the start as NR Magazines joins Ben Kelly in conversation.

You originally wanted to be an artist before you went into design. If you had stuck to that initial career path what do you think your art practice would look like today? 

Well, that’s a simple yet complex question. Who knows what the answer is without having a crystal ball. But when I was applying for my postgraduate at the Royal College I was asked why did I want three more years of further education in the interior design department. My answer was I wanted to discover whether it was possible to mix together art and interior design to produce what I called art interiors. I had equal interests in those two subjects. When you’re a student doing interior design it’s frustrating because you never get to see an end product, it only ever exists as drawings and models. But I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to work with another student to redesign the student bar at the Royal College. I named the student bar the Art Bar and we had a neon sign made saying art bar which is still there today. That’s one of my proudest things that’s been left behind. We went about that project as designers and artists because we had carte blanche because we didn’t really have a client.

Fast forward, I ultimately felt that some years back I had achieved my goal of this combination of references to the art world within the discipline of interior design. Ultimately in the last three or four years, I have produced a number of art installations in 180 The Strand. So I have kind of achieved my goal in a roundabout way. Along that way maybe I was using clients to experiment with this notion of producing what I called art interiors. When we had a looser brief I took that opportunity to investigate those possibilities. I also now operate as an artist in the art world, all be it slightly obliquely, and produce interiors so that’s my answer.

You stated that you are inspired by Marcel Duchamp and that he has “pretty much inspired everyone in the creative world, some way or another.” How exactly do you think he has inspired everyone? 

Well, I scribbled down by default. That’s a complicated question but I guess my answer would be that it is an accepted fact, stated by Duchamp himself, that he either intended to or did change the way we look and think about art. If you move that on into the world of design and the broader world it’s unquestionably influenced by the thoughts, approach and activities of Duchamp. I think it’s bled into design and architecture sometimes in subtle, sometimes in obvious ways. It can be almost subliminal. So it’s there under the surface, not necessarily clear or obvious but I believe life had changed generally thanks that one man being on the planet and doing what he did. Without Duchamp, our lives would be different in a quieter way. It would be a poorer world. The thinking behind everything would be different and it would look different. It would lack subtlety and humour.

“Duchamp opened a new toolbox of thought processes and an application of ideas, a new language.”

So historically you go from Duchamp to Richard Hamilton, the artist who reproduced The Large Glass of Duchamp. Hamilton taught at Newcastle School of Art in the late 60s where Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music was a student. Ferry was under the spell of Hamilton who was under the spell of Duchamp. Ferry was equally influenced by Duchamp and the lyrics of his songs related back to him. When I designed the Haçienda I struggled to find a background colour for it because there were acres and acres of walls. I had an idea of that colour but I couldn’t grasp what it was. I eventually found it on an album cover by Bryan Ferry called The Bride Stripped Bare which is a title from a Duchamp artwork. So I enjoyed that connection. I told Ferry about that anecdote and his answer was “I’m glad I could be of help,” and off he trotted.

How has he inspired everyone? By default. By a subtle undertone of influences that other people, other designers, other artists, other thinkers who have drawn inspiration from Duchamp, and that seeps through the cracks.

How would you describe your identity in design? 

I don’t and I won’t and I can’t. I like to have an independent identity and not be associated directly with a given description, but I’m interested in the broader description of popular culture. I operate under that umbrella to a degree, but not all the time.

There are two quotes by journalists, which doesn’t answer your question but it sort of does. One is certainly my all-time favourite. In 1982, the same year I did the Haçienda, I did a hairdressing salon on the King’s Road called Smile. Smile was a really fashionable hairdressing salon they started in Knightsbridge and lots of fashion and music people went there. They took this property on the King’s Road one door away from Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s shop. My brief to myself was to design a hairdressing salon that looked the least like a hairdressing salon as possible.  In other words,  it wasn’t a typical hairdressing salon. So each styling position was different to the next one, they were all different and I used the colour orange. This journalist said, “Ben Kelly rescued the colour orange from the scrapheap of style”. It doesn’t get any better than that as far as I’m concerned.

The other one was about the Haçienda. A journalist referred to it as “the motorway aesthetic”, simply because I used cats eyes and roadside bollards in the scheme. So I leave what my identity in design is for other people to decide. That the job for other people it’s not mine. I just like to be independent and keep pushing boundaries. Going back to Duchamp, I like taking one thing from one world and another thing from another world and putting those two things together that have never coexisted before and suddenly something new happens.

You have stated before that you have been quite angry with people ‘sampling’ your work, but do you think that anyone can create anything truly original in this day and age? 

Well, your research has lead you to quotes where I’ve said I’ve been angry or pissed off or whatever and quite a lot of those things I’ve said tongue in cheek. I think I know what specific example is being referred to here. It’s very flattering if people copy your work. However, going back to the Haçienda, (or it might have been the Dry Bar, I can’t remember which one), but within weeks, not that far away, another place opened and it was almost identical to the piece of work we’d done and that pissed me off! It was incredibly opportunist of whoever that was.

Fast forward. I painted stripes on the columns in the Haçienda, merely as a method of making them clear as hazards as they were on the dance floor. So I took the language of factories and workplaces where hazards are marked as per British standard. But that simple gesture I made somehow found its way into popular culture and it’s kinda gone global, you see it everywhere. One person in particular had seen it, someone who became a friend and a collaborator.

“A man called Virgil Abloh put stripes onto garments for a label called Off-White.”

I didn’t know anything about Virgil or Off-White when it was brought to my attention. It seemed pretty obvious where the inspiration for that had come from. It took me by surprise at the time and I was kind of shocked.

It must have been quite frustrating to see that after spending so much time and effort coming up with the ideas.

Well it was just work, and I never thought it would go further than that. Yeah maybe I got pissed off but it took me a while to think about it and understand that it was absolutely no different to what happens with music and the whole idea of sampling. As I’ve said I don’t own copyright on stripes, that would be ridiculous to even think about, but ideas and copyright are so difficult to define. You end up being philosophical because,

“Virgil sampling something I did has paid dividends beyond what I could even imagine.”

It lead on to him and I collaborating, and becoming friends, and opening doors, and making other things possible. Now he’s probably one of the most famous men in the world and that’s not a bad thing to be associated with. It’s a funny old world.

Do you think the idea of copyright and people copying work has gotten more complex with the rise of the internet? 

This might sound contradictory I think it had become both more complex and more simple. Because I think we all now understand the idea of sampling. However, copying is a different thing and I will give you a couple of examples. There is a film called 24 Hour Party People which was all about Factory Records, the Haçienda and the whole factory scene in Manchester. It was directed by a man called Michael Winterbottom who I mostly think is a great filmmaker, a man with integrity, but they copied my design of the Haçienda. They had to rebuild it for the film and they approached me for help but as soon as I suggested a fee might be charged they disappeared. The film came out and they did an amazing job but they copied me. That design is my copyright and that’s all designers have. You only have copyright to protect your work so if it’s copied to the millimetre without your permission there’s something wrong there. I spent several years fighting it legally. I wanted to make a big thing about that and take it to the press to make a noise about how important the issue of copyright is but I was so exhausted by the time the distributors of the film settled out of court, I just wanted to let it go.

More recently Manchester City football club have done their version of Haçienda strips on their T-shirts and that really made me very angry. Nobody spoke to me about it and I thought they did a very poor job, I didn’t enjoy what they had done. Of course, they are one of the richest football clubs that there is, so how could I do battle with them? I have to be philosophical and say a bit of a poor show on their part.

So that’s the way it goes with copyright and sometimes it’s relevant and sometimes it isn’t. You have to be careful and young designers do get their work copied, particularly in the fashion industry. I don’t think that young people are sufficiently aware of how to protect their work. I always wanted to make a noise about it but I was exhausted and wanted to move on. However, I make reference to it where I can, like now, to bring awareness.

How has designing the Haçienda influenced your design journey and ethos? 

That’s a huge question for me. The Haçienda opened in 1982. Next year it will be the 40th anniversary of the opening.

“My quote is the ‘Haçienda never dies’, and it doesn’t.”

Its influence and story, it’s embedded in popular culture. It’s been acknowledged as one of the most important nightclubs for a whole host of different reasons. However, for me at first, it became the monkey on my back. It wouldn’t go away and people would only talk to me about having designed the Haçienda. Of course, I’ve designed many things, many different types of interiors, and many other things outside of interior design, and that kind of annoyed me. Then I stopped being annoyed and realised that it was a massive asset to me.

My interpretation of your question is, having designed the Haçienda, the slipstream that followed on from it has massively influenced, and lead on to, the majority of work  I’ve done ever since. I could say possibly 99% of what I’ve done since, in one way or another, there have been references to the Haçienda, or it happened as a result of Haçienda, or some intersection of those. Something to do with the  Haçienda has been a part of nearly every project I’ve done since. That might not be visible or legible or understandable but I know it’s embedded in there somewhere. So that’s fed into work I’ve done in many other disciplines, it’s been a big part of what I’ve done.

You worked on the set design for the PTB19 runway show. How do you see interior design and fashion working together in the future? 

Again with that project they came to me because the collection they showed had been partly inspired by the design of the Haçienda. For the set, there are subtle references to the design of the Haçienda which are
mostly some black and yellow stripes. I’d like to think it was done in a poetic and subtle way. It was great I really enjoyed doing that show.

But to answer your question, I have no idea, I can’t predict the future. Well, going back to Virgil, his last Off-White show was done virtually because of the pandemic. My observation was that he’d taken his inspiration for the set from a combination of two interiors. One was was The Barcelona Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe. The other was a set from 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick. So obviously you get this really heavy mix of references which is a kind of Duchampian. I know that Virgil, is as obsessed with Duchamp as I am, it’s something we share. So fashion and interiors, there’s no limit to that collaboration. I expect to see really rich pieces of work coming out of that combination of design disciplines and industries. People like Virgil are in the luxurious position of leading the way because they have big budgets and can work with the best people in the world.

But if you put all that to one side and bring it back to young people, who’ve left college and are trying to find a way of being creative, that’s where my interest lies. The future belongs to them and it’s the hardest environment to be operating in right now, my sympathies lie hugely with young people. But finding a space, finding backers, finding a budget, being able to just go to a nightclub, is almost unaffordable.

“To buy a drink in a bar is almost unaffordable so new ways have to be found. They have to be super creative, and sidestep the mainstream and find another way.”

That’s why punk was so great, it was two fingers to authority and invent your own ways of doing things. It didn’t last that long but the spirit and the ethos of it is still there. I’m looking forward to the revolution.

Has Covid affected how you approach your art practice, and if so how? 

Well yeah, that was interesting when covid hit and the lockdowns and the poor handling of it by our government. I’m very lucky because I’m sat here talking to you from my studio in London, but I have another, bigger, studio on the south coast. So I went and isolated down there and the phone stopped ringing, well it’s emails and texts these days, but that all stopped and went quiet.

I had been asked to design a piece of artwork as a print, but the pandemic put a stop to the exhibition happening. So I’m sat there in my studio and I thought “I won’t make it as a print, I’ll make it as a painting”. It was to do with the language of the Haçienda, and I thought “Oh I could do another one” so then I did another one and another one, and I did maybe fifteen or sixteen of these paintings over the first and the second lockdown period. It was fantastic, it was like therapy, it was another form of expression. I’m hoping that some paintings I’ll be able to show in an exhibition. So the pandemic physically affected my art practice in that it made me sit down and make some paintings which I enjoyed. It will lead on to me doing more of that kind of work. Something that I independently drive forward, there isn’t a client or a brief, it’s just me. So I have the pandemic to thank for that.

What advice do you have for young creatives looking to work in design? 

Be independent, is my advice. Keep going, don’t stop. Mistakes will be made but you learn from those mistakes. You will fail at things, but failure teaches you an awful lot. When I started it was so much easier, because my first projects were done for people who were friends or like-minded people. Now it’s much more complicated because everything costs more money, there’s less money around and the internet changed everything. We need to find a way for young people to operate. For young creative people in the art world to find space to do what they do and add richness to our lives.

“Richness is being removed, the oxygen is being sucked out, and we need to fix that.”

Are you working on any projects at the moment and what plans do you have for the future? 

Well, two things. I have done a collaborative project with a photographer called Eugene Schlumberger. Using Kickstarter we have funded a book called Haçienda Landscapes. The story there is I stumbled upon his work on Instagram. I kept seeing these photographs that I thought were really beautiful and really just compositionally well thought out and I realised that they were referencing the Haçienda. This guy was finding the language of the design of the Haçienda out in the post-industrial landscape in the North-East of England, with all the ruined factories and machinery with hazard stripes. I messaged him, we started talking to each other and eventually met up in London. I said we need to do a project together and it should be a book called Haçienda Landscapes. I’ve also been taking photographs over the years of things that kind of reference the language of the Haçienda but mine were more snapshots. His are quite thought out, carefully composed and it makes a really nice kind of contrast with these two different sets of photographs. We’ve been very successful so I hope we are going to produce a thing of great beauty. The other is an exhibition at 180 The Strand which has turned into the most amazing alternative art space. The owner of the building is someone I’ve known for a very long time and they’ve commissioned me to do a couple of installations there. It’s going to be called ‘Columns, Revolving Mirrors and International Orange’.

Credits

Images · BEN KELLY

The Ranch Mine

“Our identity is the fuel behind the best design and architecture”

Architectural studio The Ranch Mine draw inspiration from the rich history of the pioneers who settled in their local state of Arizona in search of a better life. “We chose our name to honour those that have come before us, the humble ranchers and miners, who have paved the way for our opportunities for prosperity today, and to serve as inspiration to design spaces that afford us the opportunity to imagine what’s beyond what we see in the present so we can strive for new experiences.”

In 2018 The Ranch Mine was approached by a family who owned a large plot of land in Phoenix, Arizona to create a home “in which their family could grow and create.” One member of the family is a ceramic artist and The Ranch Mine drew inspiration from the ancient art of pottery when designing the property. The name Foo House is derived from the Chinese character ‘Fu’, which means good fortune and luck, as a nod to the client’s Chinese heritage.

Phoenix is located in the northeastern reaches of the Sonoran desert and is known as The Valley of the Sun. With dusty-grey board marked concrete, orange weathering steel, and shades of olive and cream Foo House embodies the spirit of the desert with a sprawling and airy design. NR Magazine joins The Ranch Mine in conversation.

How do you think identity informs design and architecture?

We believe that identity is both the reason for design and architecture and the result of design and architecture. Our identity is the fuel behind the best design and architecture. Architecture is a reflection of who we are, our time, our place, and our culture. Who we are and how we live shapes the form and function of the spaces we create. What is really fascinating to us is that who we are is inextricable from where we have been and where we are. We shape the built environment, and it, in turn, shapes us. This is why it is critical to continue to infuse the identity of people into spaces, and design for opportunities to grow beyond who we are and what we see today.

Foo House is influenced by the ancient art of pottery. How did this factor into the design specifically?

We are fascinated with history and love how pottery has played a critical role in most societies in human history as well as our modern-day understanding of those societies. So we broke down what makes pottery interesting to us, and how could we take those principles to inform a new piece of architecture. The design emerged as a home that is rigid in structure while malleable in use, precise in form while imperfect in texture, and varied in volume while limited in materials.

Are there any new technologies in architecture that you are particularly excited about?

One of the most exciting things about architecture is the development of building science, and how we can use new materials to improve tried and true ancient ways of living. The newest technology that we are excited about is a company based here in Phoenix called Source that has created a hydropanel that is the first renewable drinking water system. It creates drinking water from the air through the use of solar energy. Living in a desert where water is a precious resource, this is very exciting to us.

Given the issues of rising temperatures around the globe and the location of Foo House was this something you had to consider when conceptualising the architectural design of the property?

Phoenix is definitely at the forefront of dealing with extremely high temperatures and has been for a while. Studying the sun, the most powerful element here is where all our designs begin. Foo was designed as a large courtyard house that follows the sun’s day arc, shielding the interior from times of extreme heat. Courtyard houses have been effective ways of living in the desert dating back 5000 years to Kahun in Egypt and possibly earlier. They are self-shading, providing a space to either embrace or escape the sun at all times of day throughout the year.

Other than the ancient art of pottery were there was there any other influences or inspirations that you drew on when working on this project?

We always draw inspiration from our clients, who in this case were a very “hands-on” family, starting with their professions but leading to their kids playing musical instruments, gardening and raising chickens, and making robots. We wanted to go beyond just making a pottery studio and maker space to satisfy the “what” of the scope. We wanted to build on the essence of these items and make an entire home that reflected their family values. So the design uses a combination of the hand made and materials meant to patina and change over time, in an aesthetic some might consider wabi-sabi, that embraces the journey, the imperfections of hand made, and the transitory nature of our world. The other major inspiration in every project is the site, and its location in this world. We are fortunate to have incredible weather for the majority of the year in Phoenix. While the headlines talk about the high heat which can be intense, about 7-8 months a year you can basically live outside.

We wanted to create a home that everywhere you are in the house has a direct relationship with the exterior, and we wanted to create a lot of different types of connections, not just one big opening. The main living space has double-height glazing that faces north towards the courtyard. It has sliding glass doors that open it out onto the covered patio towards the outdoor kitchen, fire pit, and pool beyond. It also has a lofted area that provides skyline views to the south and views of the Phoenix mountain preserve to the north. It provides a different perspective of the landscape. We also created glass connectors between the volumes of the house, so the landscape sort of tucks in around the house, and you are constantly aware of it as you walk from one area of the house to the next. The bedroom wing has smaller openings that frame the olive grove or high windows that look towards the sky. Using exposed aggregate concrete blurred the transition as you step outside and areas where the glass is fixed, the new desert landscape comes right up to it.

What were some of the challenges you faced when working on Foo House and how did you overcome them?

The first challenge is that the house is located in a pretty busy urban area, less than a half-mile from 10+ story towers. To create an oasis-like refuge, we shaped the building to create a large central courtyard, using the building to shield the areas that faced the busy part of the city. The second challenge was overcoming the fact that buildings are generally by their nature static. We wanted to find a way to activate the house to meet the dynamism of the family and their passions. Our approach to doing this was two-pronged. The first was to design the building to be noticeably affected by time. We did this by using materials that would patina like the rusting siding or soften the board-formed concrete joints as well as using vertical floor to ceiling windows that face due south that act like sundials throughout the day. This is most noticeable where we shifted the hallway around the stairwell and added a steel brise soleil to highlight the solar pattern in the hallway. The second way we did this was by creating a campus-like plan, where you walk through communal spaces, outside and inside to get to more specific places. This creates casual exchanges.

When creating a family home like Foo House what are some important aspects to bear in mind?

When creating a family home, the first thing people often think of designing for is durability. While this is of course important, it is not the main driving factor for us. When designing family homes we focus on flexibility over time, spaces that inspire creativity, and a variety of spaces in which you can connect with each other, with extended family and with friends, as well as opportunities to disconnect.

The site contains a chicken coop, a citrus grove, a stone fruit grove, and raised planting beds for growing herbs and vegetables. Are there any other methods of sustainability used on the property?

The house is designed to primarily use stack ventilation in the bedrooms and main living area to use the diurnal temperature swings to help passively cool the house. The house opens up primarily to the north for indirect natural light and uses the height of the volumes to shade exterior spaces for outdoor living. The U-shaped form of the house creates a large courtyard, creating a bit of a microclimate. The roofing is a combination of white-coloured foam or corrugated metal to reflect the radiant heat from the sun. The property used to be almost entirely grass and we changed it to primarily desert and native vegetation on drip irrigation, heavily reducing the water consumption on the property in combination with low flow water fixtures throughout.

What advice do you have for young creatives looking to work in architecture?

Find out who you are first. Then put that out into the world. Once you do it will attract people you want to work with. You are uniquely you. Your identity is your gift to the world, it is the one thing you do better than everyone else. Share it.

Are you working on any projects at the moment and what are your plans for the future?

We have about 30 residential projects in the works currently. We are excited that about 1/3 of those projects have taken us into new climates, new states, and outside of the country. Each new location continues to hone our research practices and understanding of place.

Our plans for the future are focused on continuing to grow our residential practice, designing homes that expand people’s creative potential and liberate them from the confines of convention. We look forward to more projects locally as well as projects that take us to new places, new people, and introduce new challenges.

Ludwig Godefroy

“the relationship with the emotions you will feel in a space is the very essence of a project”

Raw concrete, old brick and pale gravel glow under the golden light of the sun in Mérida, the capital city of Mexico’s Yucatán state, which is considered as the centre of indigenous Mayan civilisation. When designing Casa Mérida, architect Ludwig Godefroy asked the question “How is it possible to build architecture that reflects and considers the Yucatán identity, to make this house belong to its territory? In other words, how could this house be Mayan?” Inside the decor is as simple as the outside, with wood, stone, and pops of blue which mirrors the turquoise swimming pool at the back of the property.

The site itself has rather odd proportions for a house, it’s only eight meters wide and eighty meters long, resembling a road or pathway more than a traditional plot of land than a home. However, Godefroy has turned this to his advantage, inserting open patios between the buildings to create traditional airflow cooling concepts in a city which is known for its extreme climate and high temperatures. He also references a Sacbé, which is the name for the ancient Mayan road system which would connect the indigenous people’s of the land. “Those straight lines used to connect all together the different elements, temples, plazas, pyramids and cenotes of a Mayan city; sacred ways which could even go from one site to another along a few hundred kilometres.” NR Magazine joins the artist in conversation.

How do you think cultural identity influences design and architecture?

Definitely, it does according to my way of thinking. I always look around me and since I arrived in Mexico, it’s been now 14 years, my architecture changed, became heavier, made out of concrete, stone and tropical wood. Mexico changed my way of designing, I started to look at prehispanic architecture and mixed it with my personal taste, the bunkers from Normandy (where I was born), my European education and background working with OMA and Enric Miralles / Benedetta Tagliabue.

But now, I definitely consider myself a Mexican architect and not a French or European architect anymore. Mexico is the country where I live, it’s my inspiration, and it’s made out of Mexican references and Mexican moments of life. The way I’m building right now is also Mexican, more handcrafted and less industrialised, always integrating locals knowledge and details coming from Mexican vernacular architecture and ways of building it.

My architecture became a bunker from Normandy on the outside, protecting my personal Mexican pyramid on the inside, both connected by the use of vernacular simplicity; vernacular simplicity from my fisherman village in Normandy being, in a way very, close to the vernacular simplicity of the Mexican countryside where I build.

Do you think there is much to learn about sustainability from indigenous’s cultures like the Mayans and which of these methods were used when building Casa Mérida?

It’s a very complicated question, the context of our lives radically changed, and the globalisation as well. But definitely, our relation with nature is the one that suffered the most. I don’t think we have to feel ashamed of building, I mean I’m an architect and it’s my job, but probably what I’ve learned from indigenous cultures and, in my case, more specifically from pre-hispanic civilisation legacy is: what do we want to feel inside of our buildings, how can the atmosphere of my architecture can remain sacred and sensitive?

According to my thinking, the relationship with the emotions you will feel in a space is the very essence of a project, which means once you created emotions in architecture, you don’t need much more. You can naturally step back to more simple architectural elements, made out of simple but massive materials, with the ability to get old instead of getting damaged by time. I want to run away from the “everything throwaway mentality” of our modern society, getting rid of the unnecessary, creating timeless spaces which will slowly change under the action of time, ageing being part of the architecture, an architecture which will get covered by a new coat of materiality: “the patina of time”.

Are there any new technologies in architecture that you are particularly excited about?

Not at all. I really love technology, I need the internet non-stop, computers and smartphones but I still remain a peasant. I was born in Normandy, in a fisherman’s village and I still like what’s most simple in life. I still like to push and pull a switch to turn on and off the light, I don’t need my fridge to tell me what to buy, and I still like to open the curtains myself in the morning. I like the wind, I like the light, I like the heat, I don’t need much technology around me, only music. I enjoy waking up in the morning to prepare a nice black expresso coffee and go to my garden to observe the plants, the trees, the birds and the lizards; it’s my process to start working on my projects every day, contemplation.

Rising temperatures are becoming an increasingly huge issue and you designed Casa Mérida specifically to combat high temperatures without having to use AC. Do you think housing around the world will begin to implement techniques like these in the future or will the majority continue to rely on AC?

No, I don’t think so!  I also understand there are parts of the world where it’s almost impossible to survive without AC, and Mérida, Yucatán is one of those. Casa Mérida is a house designed for pleasure, it’s a vacation house, it’s easier than a main residence, or an office space. I made a project based on natural crossed ventilation to avoid the use of AC, thinking if you offer the option to live in a well-ventilated space, maybe you’ll help people change their minds.

My vision of architecture focuses on changing people habits, rather than looking for technological improvements, towards a more simple way of living with fewer necessities, to minimise our impact on the ecology of our planet. It’s basically what vernacular architecture does and always has done, I’m not inventing anything, but just trying to go back to basics.

You kept elements of the old house including the front facade and the old buildings ‘bones’. Do you think this kind of perseveration is vital when modernising homes like this one?

Yes, I love it. I always think you belong to a permanent work in progress. There were people before you on the construction site you’re working on, and there will be people after you. I see architecture as a palimpsest, when you clean up the lamb parchment, the previous story will never vanish 100%. There is always something remaining from the past story in the back of the new story you are writing on top of your palimpsest.

You have stated that Casa Mérida reflects Yucatán identity, in what specific ways does it do so?

I always design my architecture as a peasant would. I always draw short structures, using short beams, between 4 to 5 meters long; dimensions I know any mason in the world is able to build without any specialised skills. I know this way everything will be local, starting with the workers. A house in Yucatán has to be built by people from Yucatán, It´s for me the first step to start belonging. I want my architecture to respond to local techniques, the stone, the wood I use will always change according to the region where I am building. As I said before, my architecture is always playing with temples and pyramids references. In the case of Casa Mérida, the house is organised along a Sacbé ”white way”, the Mayan roads that used to connect temples and pyramids together, ending in the swimming pool which looks like a concrete cenote.

Blue textiles have been used to mirror the house’s swimming pool which is inspired by cenotes. This reminded me of David Hockey’s swimming pool series, is there any connection or inspiration there?

To be honest no, but I really like the idea! Hockney’s work is beautiful, and I like the way it’s simple, almost naive sometimes, it matches with my architecture I guess.

What challenges did you face whilst working on this project and how did you overcome them?

I would say the concrete. Mérida is not a place where people are used to rough concrete. Rough concrete is something more common in Oaxaca state or Mexico City. So we had to learn together with the constructor in charge, explaining to the workers what we wanted to reach. For a mason rough concrete is unfinished, they don’t catch the beauty of it at the beginning. We had to explain it to them.

But definitely, our concrete is not perfect, This is part of something I totally accept, having un-perfect concrete, trying to get better and better during the process of building. Accident is part of my aesthetic, I always tell my clients to stop looking at Tadao Ando, we won’t make a Japanese concrete, we will make a Mexican concrete, rougher than the Japanese one, A perfectly un-perfect concrete.

What advice would you give to young creatives who are interested in architecture?

Don’t buy books and magazines on contemporary architecture. Only buy books and magazines that were published up until the 80s. This way, with those references, you won’t be tempted to literally copy them, you will have to reinterpret them, so this way you will make them yours.

Are you working on any projects at the moment and do you have any plans for the future?

Yes, right now I’m finishing three houses, one outside Mexico City, one in Puerto Escondido Oaxaca and another one in Mérida Yucatán. I have also one hotel under construction in Puerto Escondido Oaxaca. I’m about to break ground for a new house in Mérida Yucatán, a house/Airbnb hotel close to Huatulco Oaxaca, and another house/Airbnb hotel in Roca Blanca Oaxaca. Meanwhile, we are working on three new projects in the conceptual phase in the office.

Sophie Hicks

“Architecture appears to be moving towards helping human beings live, work and experience their lives better. And if that means the building looks like shit, then so be it!”

While still a student at the Architectural Association, Sophie Hicks founded her London-based architecture firm in 1990. The practice started out designing private housing, and by leveraging her insider insight, it is safe to say that Sophie Hicks has become one of fashion’s favourite architects, with her firm designing stores for the likes of Acne Studios, Chloé, Yohji Yamamoto and more.

Hicks became a chartered architect in 1994, prior to which she worked as a fashion editor for Vogue and for the iconic designer, Azzedine Alaïa. Hicks’s relentless efficiency has allowed her to lead her practice with extensive experience in the fashion world. Particularly strong on design, her approach is both conceptual and practical, and is highly attuned to the zeitgeist.

Outside of her fashion clients, Hicks’s residential projects embody the spirit of their surroundings, and champion honesty and boldness of materials. Subtle yet meticulously considered details are typical of Hicks’s architecture, which is best characterised by her discreet, restrained and durable ways of working.

NR Magazine speaks with Hicks about the ins and outs of her career, and to learn more about what distinguishes her identity as an architect.

What inspired you to change career path from fashion to architecture? 

I think it two things, really. I was very excited about being in the fashion world. From the age of about 17, when I entered it, it was very exciting. I enjoyed being a stylist and identifying new trends and fashions, creating pictures, and putting teams together, but I got to a point where I saw the fashion cycle coming full circle with the types of images and models coming out, and I was only about 26. I felt that it was too soon for me to be getting stuck into a cycle. I didn’t want to be part of a world that was going around in circles.

What I really wanted to do was to be creative and to create something myself. With photography and styling photographs, you are in effect, being creative but you’re putting together teams like a director. You’re grabbing clothes, putting together teams of photographers, models, hair, makeup and inventing a story, but you’re not actually taking the photograph or designing the clothes. I’d always been interested in architecture ever since I was a teenager, and I just decided to completely change paths and see if I could be an architect and create things myself that would affect how people experience the world.

Was that scary? The fashion world is such a dynamic and intimidating place to work in. Was it a shock moving into the world of architecture? 

Yes. I quite like having new and different experiences, and I quite like taking risks. Towards the end of my fashion career, I was working for Azzedine Alaïa doing a set of photographs with him of his previous collections from the start until that point in the mid-80s. We were recording all his collections for a book that he eventually bought out. So I was dressed top to toe in Alaïa – the tailored pieces, not the slinky ones, but I was pretty sharply dressed. I’ve never been so smart since.  I swanned up to the Architectural Association for an interview looking like something they’d never really seen before.

They asked to see my portfolio, and I told them I didn’t have one, only my fashion sketches. In those days at fashion shows, you weren’t allowed to photograph the clothes because they were kept embargoed until they actually got into the shops, so if you were an editor, you sat there sketching in your notebooks. You had to sketch extremely quickly because the models would come by quite fast. I showed them these books, and I was sitting there in a black tailored double-breasted suit – I think they just thought I was mad. I heard afterwards that they really didn’t think I would stick it, but they didn’t realise that if I decide to do something, I do it.

But they offered me a place, and on day one, I knew I shouldn’t walk in there all dressed up, so I decided to go completely under the radar and became unnoticeable. You had to absorb yourself and become a chameleon. It was about the second term, when someone turned to me and asked, ‘You’re not that Sophie Hicks who used to be the fashion editor at Vogue, are you?’ and I said, ‘well, yes, I am actually.’ and she said, ‘why do you look like that then?’ it was all quite amusing. I just really enjoyed drawing and making things. We did a lot of work in the workshops – we would weld, cut, saw, and make models. I loved all of that. We did a lot of expressive drawings, which were pre-computer, and I’m not a good drawer by hand, so I’d make a lot with clay, plaster, carving, printing, and etching etc.

We would talk a lot about our ideas. And the Architectural Association is brilliant at teaching design, and brilliant at teaching you how to think. I’m an external examiner there now, which I’ve been doing for the last four years, and it’s amazing how they get their students to think – to a level that I don’t think you get in other schools.

It’s a bit like if you were thinking about conceptual art, I suppose. Thinking about what the concept is, what the meaning behind it is and why you’re doing it. Absolutely everything needs an explanation when you design, and it’s got nothing to do with aesthetics until you know why you’re doing it, then the aesthetics happen naturally. Of course, some people do their aesthetics better than others – some people have an elegance, and some people don’t. But if there isn’t a reason behind why you’re doing something, then I don’t think it’s very meaningful.

I’ve always thought that film directors have a very interesting job, with the way they approach a project and how they set up a team and choosing all the people who are going to gel as unit. It was Grace Coddington who taught me how to set up a team when you’re doing a fashion shoot. The psychology of a group is incredibly important. I took that kind of thinking with me to the world of architecture: thinking broadly, out of the box and about how to set up an architectural project in a way that is more likely to be successful.

What inspiration do you draw from other engineers and architects – particularly with Félix Candela and Paulo Mendes da Rocha? 

They worked brilliantly with concrete. Recently, I’ve used quite a bit of concrete in buildings I’ve made. I think Félix Candela was probably the most brilliant user of concrete who has ever lived. He mathematically worked out how to create very thin, reinforced concrete shells that were very elegant and incredibly clever. And if you can do something very clever, why wouldn’t you? He also did this because he was designing quite simple structures like bus shelters and churches for communities in Mexico. The budgets were very tight, and I believe he even designed some churches without windows. Because of this low budget, he used less concrete, so the building was less expensive. Because of that, he designed these extraordinary floating canopies and canopy rooves, where the geometry is really his invention. His brilliance as an engineer allowed him to do that. There are some wonderful photographs of this, one in particular which has workman standing on top of this mushroom-like roof. It’s about 10 or 15 metres high and incredibly thin. It’s just a brilliant demonstration of history.

Paulo Mendes da Rocha’s buildings in and around Sao Paolo have an incredible force to them. They’re raw and feel very dynamic, as they have so much embodied energy, in that they are incredibly still. The thing about him which I find very interesting, and which I feel reassured by, is when when I hear about architects of his stature that did what I do, which is having an office of one. An architect of his stature, you would expect to have an office of quite a lot of people, but he maintained a very small office. I’ve never had a big office – I’ve had an office of about 10 people perhaps, and I found that I wasn’t properly designing myself. I was spending too much time looking after other people and checking their work.

Everything froze with the crash in 2008, and I felt like I really needed to get back to basics. What I really wanted to do was design buildings, and what I really wanted to do was actually be the one doing the designing, not passing it down. I’ve got the most brilliant kind of situation now, where I work very closely with my colleague Tom Hopes, and we work very well together. He’s very strong on construction, and I’m very strong on design. He’s teaching me construction and I’m teaching him design – we do both and understand both sides. My aspiration would be to continue to work in this way, and to continue to work in the way that Mendes da Rocha worked. That involved only bringing in other team members for a project when you need to, so you don’t have everyone in the office all the time.

The most recent building I did was a house in Northamptonshire, and it was a reasonably big team. We did all the drawings here, with about 10 or so people, but it worked very well because the quality of the design and the detail was that bit higher. We work very closely as a team and get much better results, I feel. But it’s an unusual way to work, so I’m always encouraged when I read that someone like him created really interesting buildings with that same process.

What do you value most about a living space?

That it’s really comfortable, and not just literally. It’s important that you feel relaxed, calm, and able to be yourself in and around it. The word ‘comfortable’ might have the wrong connotations because it makes you think about sitting on squishy chairs, but it’s not that. It’s a kind of feeling – feeling yourself.

When I design for other people, I want to find out what makes them feel right. If I’m designing a house for somebody, I want to know everything about how they live, how they behave, what makes them feel comfortable, and what kind of impression they want that building to embody. With the house that I designed for my daughter recently, which is called House Between Two Lakes, it was really important to her that it wasn’t a show-off-y house. She didn’t want a flashy house. She didn’t want a house that was obtrusive. She wanted something that was the opposite of a designed house, which is why we made something that sat very gently in the landscape, and that is very streamlined.

As the theme of this issue is identity, I thought it would be interesting to know if you’ve ever had kind of ‘identity crisis’ with a project?   

That’s a difficult one, because architectural projects are very long and very complicated, and they involve an awful lot of solving problems. These problems might be thrown up by the environment or by the building problems that crop up during construction. If you’re working on a project where you’re solving problems, an identity crisis is less common.

There’s initial design that you tend not to go forward with until you’ve got the concept sorted out. Projects don’t go ahead if you can’t get that right. It’s a difficult question for me to answer. I know it sounds as if I’m not admitting to self-doubt, but that’s not it. As an architect, you’re a servant of the client, so you need to understand what they’re all about. If you don’t understand what they’re all about, the project tends not to go forward. If you are trying to understand what they’re all about, you carry on until you reach a point of agreement, and during that process, there are often moments where you doubt if you’re ever going to get there. There are multiple points in time where I would be searching for the solution that would embody the character or the ethos of a brand, or the character of the person or thing that they want to embody in the building. It might be some sort of feelings or atmosphere, and I might be struggling to understand what they really mean. And even when I do understand, I have to then find a way of translating that into a built form.

There is a kind of lightbulb moment when you get it right. It happened with the Chloé shop early on for Phoebe Philo. I was struggling with what to do for this luxurious brand, and for its new, young, dynamic designer. She’s got great ideas and a contemporary way of looking at things. At the end of the day, it’s a Paris luxury house, and had stores on fancy shopping streets. I thought about what we could do to bring the spirit of that young designer into the shop environment in a way that would feel how I think she feels about her designs. I really thought we weren’t going to get there. I really didn’t know what I was going to be able to suggest, and then suddenly, we had riots in Bond Street. There were some demonstrations, and the shop fronts were boarded up, and that was my lightbulb moment. We used railing and raw plywood like you would use to protect your front window. We put that inside the shop and used it as the finish for the walls. There’s a real beauty to basic plywood. Not fancy plywood and beautiful veneer, just the bog-standard shuttering with lots of faults in it. I wanted to bring that into this luxury space and offset it with the pink marble and gold-plated metal fittings that Phoebe was working on. We gave it a kind of spin that would tell the kinds of rich women who are going to come into shop, that there’s something else going on here. The spirit of the place is just a bit more rooted in reality.

Your Acne Studios flagship store has a very forceful and distinct presence, reflecting the studio’s designs and aversion to conventional Swedish design. What were the other influences behind this project?

When working with a fashion client or a brand, they have very distinct characteristics and their brand identity is important to them, so it’s about finding an architecture that will embody that character and ethos. When I have a new client, I go and study that person, or that group of designers.

I’d never been to Sweden before Acne Studios contacted me, so I spent a long time shadowing Jonny Johansson during design meetings, hearing how he spoke to other people and absorbing how he works and how he makes his choices. I also spent quite a lot of time travelling around Sweden and going to the islands to gather information in my mind about Swedish light.

One of the most important things for that Seoul flagship store was the kind of light you get in Sweden. In the summer, you get a very strong and completely engulfing flat light. Light is very important in Sweden, because for many months of the year they don’t have a lot of it, and then they have a lot of it all at once in the summer. Something I noticed from studying Jonny and the other Swedes in the office, is that they were very private and keep their cards quite close to their chest. Seoul is a very dynamic, outgoing place in comparison. I thought if I were going to make a building in this very dynamic city for a brand whose culture is much more reticent, then I would like to make the building sit as a quiet, almost brooding monster. Monster isn’t quite the right word, I know, but there’s something very still about the concrete frame within that building. It’s very grounded and permanent, but then it’s held inside this misty white box. With this misty white box, you get no hint of what’s going on inside until you enter. I also had no idea that the light was going to be as good as it was until we built it. I thought it would be nice, but it really is extraordinary. All the daylight comes through this white polycarbonate material, and it makes you feel as if you’re in a white cloud. It’s quite odd and does strange things to your perception. I think that aspect of it is the Swedish part – this sense of unreality and dreaminess that is present in Sweden, particularly in the islands, that are so silent. It embodies that quietness of the Swedish character.

So it’s kind of in opposition to Seoul, but then all the air conditioning and all the services, we had piled up on the roof. All the rooftops in Seoul are a mess of air conditioning units, so we did that as a nod to Korea, but in a very neat and tidy way. This also allowed us to keep the space inside the building free, without any dropped ceilings or internal surfaces hiding anything. I don’t like finishes and I don’t like hiding things, so I don’t like having to build internal walls to hide services. I like the internal finish to express the structure of the building.

How did you go about combining both Japanese and Parisian aesthetics and design principles with your Yohji Yamamoto store?

I knew Yohji anyway, as I’d seen his first shows in Paris when I was working at Vogue, so I knew how he was when he landed in Paris. He landed with this extraordinary new vision that was completely different from anything that had come before. I knew how he’d been incredibly shocking to the Parisians and the world of fashion entirely. I also knew how he’d become comfortable over the years in Paris and opened one of his design studios. He had a big office in Paris and worked quite a few months of the year there, so I knew he’d become much more embedded in Paris than say Rei had – she was much more Japan-based.

When I was working on his project, I basically shadowed him. But with him, he didn’t like anyone close, so I’d be observing and studying from a distance. He’s a very private person, and Japanese shopping culture is very sophisticated. They don’t like to show off. It feels very wrong to put a mannequin in a window for a Japanese client.

I decided to include glimpses, and he was open enough to be able to show glimpses into the store from the windows, so we used a kind of Shoji screen. We played with the idea of things on axes, like in formal French gardens. You get glimpses through the screen, and as you get closer, you can see into the shop. We included without heads, so basically had all the dresses floating in the space. And when you entered, you’d have a series of glimpses that would start from a kind of corridor of wooden folded screens. As you move down this corridor, the view suddenly opens up, and that’s when you can tell a story about menswear and womenswear. It was all to do with opening up really, which I think is a very French thing, and then through showing his clothes in a progression – that’s how I tried to make the link between him and Paris.

What qualities of materials do you think lend the most atmosphere to a space? And what do you enjoy working with the most?

For an interior space, I like the structure of the building to be expressed internally. I want to be able to see what the structure is, and it’s the expression of those structural materials that I think gives character and atmosphere to the space. That’s one reason why I don’t like decoration. With House Between Two Lakes, we had one or two internal walls, as we had to divide the space somewhat, and it needed a surface finish. I hate decoration so I didn’t know what to do.

Because the roof is made from precast concrete planks and the floor is cast in situ concrete, decided to do something related to those two materials. We used render with some pigments to give it a more interesting colour, and it was very important to me that the sand and cement render was done by the plasterer. I would have hated it if someone else came to do a clever finish. We wanted to keep any expressive movements. We chose the colour to relate to the earth. That piece of land was a brick quarry at one point, so we chose this brick red colour. This was the only way I could find to do a finish that would be as far away from decoration as possible.

I’m also slightly allergic to tiling in bathrooms, so we put a waterproofing agent into the mixture, and put it in all the bathrooms. I’ve done tiling in other projects, I’ve done lovely marble bathrooms and stone-clad bathrooms, but for the House Between Two Lakes, it is a house in the mud. It’s unbelievably wet there. The house is supported on pairs of steel piles, that go something like 16 or 18 metres down into the ground to anchor it into the mud. You basically want to smear the mud on the walls. Fancy things wouldn’t make sense – it just doesn’t read visually.

Is there anything you consider to be an architectural faux pas?   

I don’t know about faux pas, but over the past decade I’ve noticed a tendency for architecture to be sculptural, or a tendency for a piece of architecture to be a bold statement about form and glamour. That is something I don’t feel comfortable with, so I’ve been biding my time hoping this moment will pass, and I think it has.

This year’s architecture biennale in Venice was very much on a different track. Architecture appears to be moving towards helping human beings live, work and experience their lives better. And if that means the building looks like shit, then so be it! I much prefer that. Of course, they never do, because if you make a building that really functions beautifully for human beings, then by definition, it’s going to work and be a wonderful piece of architecture. I think it’s a great moment for architecture to get re-grounded and not be concerned with making a flash statement.

Some of the South American projects are fantastic. They’re more left wing and democratic. They have a history, that is not so far buried, of making buildings to serve the people. I’ve been sucked into this world of clients who aren’t really serving the people. I know that most of the projects I’ve been commissioned to do are projects that may be wonderful, and I may be pleased with them, but they are projects that aren’t necessarily needed. You don’t need a fancy store. I happen to enjoy designing a store, because there’s an intellectual exercise of trying to identify what the ethos of that brand is.

I think brands are moving more towards the social and cultural changes that we’ve experienced in the last two or three years. They are recognising them, reacting to them, and bringing something of them into their shopping experiences. I watch with interest to see if any of the big luxury brands react to this, but at the moment, I haven’t really seen anything that makes me think that they’re willing to break the mould and allow people to shop in a different way. I have various theories about it, and I’ve had a couple of potential clients in the last year who might have gone for it but didn’t in the end.

How important is sustainability to you? 

It’s very important. I’m very ‘waste not want not’, so it is in my nature not to throw things away – I like to reuse, and I like things that are very durable. What I’ve realised is that I’ve been creating buildings in the last 4,5,6 years, that are going to be incredibly hard to demolish. They have these big concrete frames that express a kind of solidity which I love to use in contrast to a lightness. I like the solidity and I like the delicacy as well.

The Earls Court House that I built for myself, has a basement which must be, by definition, constructed out of concrete. So, I decided to bring the concrete up to grow out of the ground and combine it with the delicacy of the glass. Mass concrete is incredibly comfortable to live in. It very slowly and gently absorbs heat or the cold, which means that you have a very constant temperature, so you can avoid using lots of electricity for heating. It’s very sustainable for electricity usage, because what you don’t do is use a lot of electricity for heating.

When you manufacture concrete, you use a lot of energy and you disturb the land because of the quarrying, so it is disruptive, but if you if you use concrete, and you don’t intend to demolish your building, it quite quickly becomes sustainable. I think there’s a balance. I think until a building has lasted a certain number of years, it’s not sustainable, but once it’s been in for a certain time, and you factor in the reduced energy usage, then I think it’s reasonably sustainable.

With the House Between Two Lakes, I reused joinery and doors from previous buildings that had been demolished and stored. The bronze front door for example – I think it’s quite rare for architects to reuse old parts in new buildings like that.

I think in the future, what I would really like to do is make a building where we use materials that are available very close to the site, whatever that might be.

What do you anticipate for the future of your work? 

I’d love to do housing development, rather than one-off housing. I would love to be approached by a developer who wants to design some sort of group of houses that is particularly suited to life now – perhaps family life.

Discover more here sophiehicks.com

Practice Architecture

“It’s this kind of interdisciplinary weaving together that is going to make change happen”

Founded in 2009, Practice Architecture is a London based firm adept at delivering various acclaimed cultural, community and residential projects. The firm has established itself as one that creates exceptional structures with a strong sense of place, and has a hands-on approach, getting involved from a design’s inception through to a structure’s completion, and help to curate both space and the activity it houses.

For their innovative Flat House project, the firm worked alongside hemp farmers and with sustainable methods of construction to construct a zero-carbon home in Cambridgeshire from prefabricated panels, all in just two days.

Their smaller scale Polyvalent Studio project was created within the parameters of the caravan act, meaning in most contexts it does not require planning permission. It was designed by students from London Metropolitan University and constructed within just 12 days, exemplifying the possibilities of low embodied energy design and the benefits of a collaborative working process in the industry.

Practice Architecture is currently working with food growing workers cooperative OrganicLea in developing a 10-year plan for the expansion of the infrastructure at their main site Hawkwood. The project will deliver substantial new educational buildings and volunteer spaces alongside a large community hall and kitchen, and the project will be built from natural materials as a self-build, working with the volunteers on site.

NR Magazine speaks with Practice Architecture to learn more about these projects, how they incorporate sustainable methods into their practice, and their ethos as a firm.

What inspired you to start working with cultural and community projects?

We started making things in London in a very informal way. We worked a lot with our peers and what we were doing was really part of a broader DIY culture within our community. In the absence of institutions that spoke to us, we made our own spaces in which to explore our own culture. This kind of work was only possible under the provision of it being temporary, but serendipitously, almost all the places we built in this era are still here.

We made our buildings in a very hands-on way, going on site ourselves, with friends and volunteers to build a project and used very basic tools and equipment to do so. This experience continues to feed into the work we do now, our understanding of materials and the way we design with others.

More designers are using hempcrete at the moment, and I’m familiar with artists using it on a small scale with pottery and sculpture, but nothing like on your Flat House project. What was the process like when building with this material on a larger scale?

The process began with the drilling of the seeds in the 30 acres of field that surround the house.  This was overseen by Joe Meghan, a hemp farmer who had supported Steve Baron the client and founder of Margent Farm in getting a licence and specifying the appropriate subspecies of plant.

Hemp is a very resilient crop, with long tap roots that help to rehabilitate and condition soils that have been degraded through industrial farming practices. It has a short growing season of 3-4 months, after which we were able to harvest the seed and stem and process it into usable oil, fibre and shiv (the woody core of the stem).

The project makes use of each element of the plant, with the oil being used by Margent Farm in health and body treatments, the fibre being made into a cladding and the shiv into the hempcrete insulation. Each element of the plant went through a different process, with the fibre being felted and blended with a sugar resin and the shiv being chopped and mixed with a lime binder.

We designed a cassette-based construction system using structural timber with hempcrete to form an insulated panel, refining the construction details with Oscar Cooper from Lignin Builds. The panels were constructed in a factory and dried before being brought to site and lifted into place over two days. The cladding was made a few miles down the road with the impregnated hemp fibre matt pressed to form corrugations. The cladding is very easy to work with as it’s light and can be cut using a simple hand saw. We were lucky that with so many elements of experimentation, everything went very smoothly, and the building came together as anticipated.

Aside from sustainability, what were the other aims and inspirations behind your Flat House project?

We wanted to demonstrate how, what are often thought of as traditional materials, can be applied in a very contemporary way using the latest construction technology. The project celebrates the simplicity of its construction and how few materials went into making it. The key thing with Flat House was not just to develop a building, but to develop a whole system that could be replicated at scale across the country.

The project has led to the establishment of Material Cultures, a research organisation that explores natural materials in the context of offsite construction. Could you talk a bit more about that?

Yes, Material Cultures is now doing the work of scaling up these ideas and applying them to large scale housing and commercial projects. We are working with a variety of clients and housing developers – people who are interested in doing things differently. Alongside this, we carry out research projects with a number of universities, developing full scale mock-ups and looking at the broader cultural context of the work we do.

Material Cultures is exploring how regional specificity and a relationship to regenerative agriculture might shape the evolution of new housing typologies. The low carbon construction industry is still relatively embryonic, which means working across many fields and disciplines simultaneously to make things happen. That’s why we are really excited to be working with Yorkshire and the North East and ARUP to develop a regional strategy for a transition to a bio-based construction economy.

It’s this kind of interdisciplinary weaving together that is going to make change happen.

What does collaboration mean to you as an architecture firm?

For us architecture has always been as much about process as it is about built form. The design is material and construction led, which means really understanding how something is put together. 

“Each project is an opportunity to connect with different disciplines and expertise, to learn and test something.”

We have been really lucky to have amazing long-term collaborators such as Henry Stringer – one of the most inventive makers of things – and Will Stanwix who has over 20 years’ experience of working intuitively with natural materials.

We generally make places directly with the people that use them, whether that be through getting everyone on site during the build or developing genuinely engaged co-design processes.

How do you go about balancing space and intimacy with a project?

We are really interested in spatial qualities and the different ways in which we are acted upon or made to feel by a building. We look to create balance, often pairing close and intimate spaces with more open ones. Material plays a large role in this. Arriving at the Straw Auditorium project in Bold Tendencies you move from the harsh open floor plates of the concrete carpark into an intimate womb like space, enveloped by the tactile warmth and smell of an organic material.

What inspired you to work with cellulose-based materials for the Polyvalent Studio project?

The Polyvalent Studio project was developed with David Grandorge and students at the London Metropolitan School of Architecture. The project was a continuation of Practice Architecture’s work exploring natural construction at Margent Farm and shares a lot of the material technology developed with Flat House.

The building is designed within the caravan act meaning it can be moved in two independent modules and that it could be built without planning permission. It touches very lightly on the ground with timber footings that penetrate the soil line. These are made from Accoya, an acetylated timber product that can far outperform other timbers and represents exciting opportunities for the substitution of traditionally high carbon materials in exposed areas.

The studio was designed and built by students at London Metropolitan School of Architecture. What was it like working with students and completing the project in such a short space of time?

Building the studio together with the students was a really amazing experience. They brought so much energy, passion, and commitment. It is mournfully rare for architecture students to get an opportunity to use their hands and build things at scale.

“Building things is one of the most direct ways to learn how to design things, and the lack of genuine understanding of construction by architects is what leads to many tensions between professions.”

This project was established within the context of your research into natural materials and low carbon construction techniques like with Flat House. What other kinds of innovative solutions to sustainable construction are you hoping to work with?

We are always looking to learn about new materials. Currently this means exploring innovative straw and mycelium construction and looking at the role of chalk within structural and civil engineering projects.

With the theme of this issue being Identity, I’d love to know how you feel the firm incorporates sustainability and education into its identity.

For a long time, sustainability was something we did by default, but we didn’t really talk about it or have a way of articulating what we were doing. We saw our work as predominantly socially driven and about process – and the architecture and materiality as a means to an end.

It’s been interesting over the last few years to begin redressing and articulating an underlying intentionality behind our approach to how things are made. Underlying the design is a deep concern for how the things we make fit within a broader cycle and ecology of things. Where do the components come from and where do they end up? How can we be resourceful and responsible? It’s been great to begin to articulate these things and situate what we have been doing within other conversations around things like regenerative agriculture and the logic of global supply chains.

How important is adaptability to you?

We want to make buildings that can respond to their users. This means they need to be able to adapt and evolve. You can design in a way that either makes this very difficult or enables it. By keeping structure exposed and close to the surface and making the construction legible, it empowers residents and users to add, change and adapt.

Working with a food growing cooperative, your Hawkwood Plant Nursery project also champions natural materials and community collaboration. Could you talk a bit more about the aims for this ten-year plan?

It’s really exciting to be working on a number of large-scale food growing projects in London. These kinds of spaces are so important and so different from other types of green spaces such as parks.  They offer the opportunity for a genuine connection to soil and to land – one that is mutually nourishing and that brings you into contact with most important natural processes that we all depend on like the water cycle, photosynthesis, composting and soil formation.

Hawkwood and the other Market Garden City project Wolves Lane are leading the way in setting a precedent for socially and community focussed food spaces. We are looking to embed genuinely circular principles in the project, working with the resources available on site and integrating locally sourced natural materials wherever possible. The principal being that anything we are bringing onto the site can ultimately return to those natural cycles itself, in the form of mulch and compost.

Credits

Images · PRACTICE ARCHITECTURE
http://www.practicearchitecture.co.uk