That’s why when I came upon photos of the new RIXO location in the Marylebone neighborhood of London, I was instantly captivated and had to learn more about the unique design concept and those behind it.

RIXO is a contemporary clothing boutique specializing in bohemian sundresses and vibrant prints. Their new Marylebone location brings the whimsical energy of their clothing to life, with brightly colored architectural motifs organically illustrated all over its otherwise crisp white walls. The saturated color palette and hand-drawn line quality create a pop-art-like look, infusing the space with a playful take on classical design elements. Illustrator Sam Wood developed this aesthetic in partnership with the design studio Cúpla, helmed by Gemma McCloskey. I reached out to Wood and McCloskey to learn more about the process behind their design concept and what it was like bringing such a fresh take on retail space to fruition.

(This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)

What was the development process like for this distinct store design concept?

Sam Wood: The initial process was driven by Gemma. She approached me after seeing some of my work with Claridge’s and other clients in the UK and asked me to devise something bold and colorful that told the story of RIXO in a distinctly new way.

GM: When I first stumbled across Sam’s Instagram page, his use of color felt really bright and fresh alongside his beautiful, fluid style. I knew instantly Sam would be perfect for the new Marylebone RIXO; his handwriting lent itself to enveloping the whole space while still allowing it to breathe.

SW: After I had taken a look at the other RIXO stores and got a feel for their story, it was a pleasure to bring something of Marylebone to the space and interpret that in my own line. I spend a lot of time in the area because a local gallery I work with is down the road, so I’m always roaming about looking at the mishmash of architecture from Gothic Revival (which was the basis of the alcoves) to Neoclassical (which was the basis for the floral details). I hope the eventual style reflects the multiplicity of the area and is a playful reference to how I see things existing alongside each other.

What was the rest of the collaboration process like?

GM: We had an initial meeting where I discussed the concept, design, and materials being used in the space. One of the threads from our concept for Marylebone was this nod to classical London architecture; therefore, creating illustrated paneling with a whiff of Jean Cocteau was the foundation of the design. Within this framework, it was important to give Sam the breathing space to be creative, and it was exciting seeing him embrace the concept and bring his own stamp to the design. 

Once we had reached the final internal designs, we decided we needed to use these on the external windows to fully embrace the concept. When Sam was actually onsite doing the mural, it was a very fluid process, and we would discuss colors and tweak a few things with the benefit of actually being in the space. We also added in some of the pendants which sit centrally in the space and look great.

Did you first map out the design digitally and then bring it to life on the store walls? What was it like free-handing the motifs? Nerve-wracking, exhilarating?  

SW: I am a stickler for being analogue early on; I work on full-scale drawings on paper, which gives me an idea of how the motifs will work at scale as well as the tones and quality of line. The client does not always see these, but they are an essential part of how I conceive of a design and have the confidence to execute it. After this, I can mark up the digital renders to hone the design so the client can get a full idea of the vision.

A great deal of forward planning and preparatory drawing goes into making sure that when I put the pen on the wall, it’s all where it should be. That’s an essential collaborative exercise, in this instance, with Gemma, who was fantastic to work with. Building sites are often chaotic places, which is a far cry from my day-to-day in the studio, so yes, it’s a heart-in-mouth moment every time with the first mark on the wall, but I do get a kick out of it!

Is this markers-on-walls technique a style you’ve done before? Or was it specially created and executed for this particular project?  

SW: I’ve used Posca markers for years in various contexts, they have such a nice uniformity of tone, which is ideal for bringing to life a design which needs to keep its clarity and “poppyness.” I used them for the first time in a mural context last year for Bryan O’Sullivan Studio, painting a celestial ceiling which is still on show in their gallery on Brook Street Mayfair.

Ordinarily I use a brush and acrylic when doing murals, so it was fun to what is possible with these works in the medium.

How did you feel at the end of the process after drawing your last line, stepping back, and seeing the completed store? 

SW: It’s always a moment of thinking, “Is it finished now?” There’s always the possibility of another line, filling out this corner, or changing that line. I habitually look for flaws in a work, and the “finished product” is always an opportunity to see how everything has worked together. It’s a strange feeling to hand the thing over— after a couple of days of the room being yours, it now belongs to the client and, of course, the public, who interprets it in their own way. That’s why I love working so spatially— the works sometimes divide people, but once I’m finished, that’s down to the viewers.

What sort of experience do you hope shoppers have when stepping into this RIXO store? What sensations do you hope they feel as they move about the space you all created? 

SW: So much of what I do is about storytelling and creating places where people can escape in some way. Here, the murals are front and center in the design and are a key part of the store’s identity. I hope anyone coming into the space gets a sense of the layers of detail that go into evoking the story that RIXO wants to tell, as well as how my own journey as an artist marries with that.

GM: We want the shoppers to feel invited like they’re stepping into someone’s living room at home. We didn’t want a sterile interior, which can sometimes be intimidating for a shopper. There is also a sense of escapism with the store, which we hope the customers find uplifting.

The designer of USModernist’s new refreshed identity, Alexander Isley, says he was given a gift when he was asked to do this job. It brought him back to the fundamentals that Vignelli captured as his signature, while extending its range into the present.

Here, Isley talks about his reverence for midcentury architecture and how he expressed that through his color palette, typography and the “Butterfly Chair” mascot.

I understand there is history for you with George Smart, founder and CEO of USModernist. How did you get involved with this client?
George Smart (known in some circles as “Mr. Modernism”) go back a long way, to around 1970, to be exact. Our fathers were partners in an architectural firm in North Carolina. My dad headed the Durham office, and George’s father headed the Raleigh office. So we knew one another as children from the occasional beach trip and birthday party, but didn’t get to see each other a lot.

George and I kind of lost touch over the years, but when he started what was then called the NCModernist website, I became a fan. (North Carolina is home to the largest number of residential Modernist houses in the U.S., after Florida and California, due to the influence of what was then known as the NC State University School of Design.)

I had no idea …
We reestablished contact a few years ago, and George asked me to create an identity for their “Moon over Modernism” series of house tours and fundraisers.

As the scope and influence of the organization has grown, they assembled a national advisory board and made the decision to upgrade the visual presence of the organization. That’s when George and Chief Advancement Officer Michela O’Connor Abrams (past CEO of Dwell, among other accomplishments) asked my studio to get involved.

What is the actual reach of USModernist in terms of its archival holdings? And where is it physically located?
USModernist is America’s largest open digital archive of Modernist houses. The organization presently documents over 20,500 iconic houses and 130 important architects, and over 4.3 million pages of architecture and design magazines, all online. They add about 1,000 pages of content daily. I still have no idea how they do this, but they clearly have a very efficient scanning operation. 

Among some contemporary scholars there is controversy over the use of the terms Modern and Modernist. So many things are called Modern, when they are actually “contemporary” or “Postmodern.” Is USModernist real Modern, Retro Modern or, ahem, faux Modern?
When I think of a “Modern” house in the U.S., I think of something designed between the late 1940s and the end of the ’60s that follow a specific aesthetic and philosophical approach. In terms of housing I think most people get what it means: flat roofs that leak.

The archive includes houses completed up to this day, so it’s probably not a good idea to think in terms of eras but rather approach. On their homepage, USModernist has a nice description of what they mean by “Modernist house.”

Back to your role—what is the context for your visual concept?
When I first saw the existing logo, built around the BKF “Butterfly” chair, I had some questions. Why not a house? But the more I thought about it, the more it kind of made sense. If you were to show a house, which one would it be, and what would you be excluding by being specific?

I think the use of the iconic chair as the signifier for Modern was an inspired choice, and one that I can’t take any credit for. All we did was clean it up and develop a more consistent typographic system.

As part of our work, we also developed a series of associated identifiers for the organization’s events and programs, all using a limited palette of typefaces and a consistent use of red and black.

Red is a trigger color. It represents more than Modern. Do you have any feelings about the color?
Red is bold, simple, and when combined with black, seems to me to be a pretty easy choice to make. 

Color is of course subjective, but when I see it in this context I don’t feel a sense of danger or anger or other feelings that might come from seeing red. In developing the new website and communication pieces, I leaned into the red and black, and took cues from Modern master Massimo Vignelli’s theater posters as the foundation for a way to organize information in a formal, easy to understand way. Red and black were famously good enough for him, so they were good enough for me, too.

Personally, I love the look you conceived. Was it love at first sight for the client?
They were very excited and told me this was even better than they were hoping for. I see our work here as more of a refresh, building on the ideas that were already in place. Sometimes the role of a designer is to avoid the temptation to scrap everything and start anew, but rather to build on what’s good and make it better.

In this case, ours was an act of appreciation and preservation—very much in keeping with the ethos of the organization.

You have a lot of components already. Will the graphic scheme grow in any way?
We provided a simple foundation of elements that will allow the look of USModernist to remain consistent as their reach and offerings continue to grow.

I look forward to the expansion of the look throughout the website and email outreach materials and, of course, tote bags and caps. I’ve been inundated with requests for the baseball caps, so we need to do something about this.

The NAD’s latest exhibition, Sites of Impermanence, is set to delight art and architecture enthusiasts as it showcases the works of newly elected National Academicians. Running from February 8 to May 11, 2024, at the Academy’s new permanent location in Chelsea, this exhibition promises a journey through the diverse and thought-provoking creations of eight exceptional artists and architects.

National Academy of Design 2023 Induction Ceremony

Each Academician brings a unique perspective and approach to their craft. These creatives explore contemporary issues through sculpture, drawing, architecture, or interactive installations while delving into the rich tapestry of history that informs their work.

One striking aspect of the exhibition is its exploration of impermanence in various forms. Through a lens of time and space, the artists and architects invite viewers to contemplate the ever-shifting nature of our world. Sanford Biggers and Willie Cole repurpose materials laden with historical significance, infusing them with new cultural and spiritual meanings. Richard Gluckman expands upon existing structures, adapting them to meet the demands of contemporary society.

Top Images, Bottom Left, Bottom Right: Sites of Impermanence | Photo: © Etienne Frossard. Courtesy of National Academy of Design; Bottom Middle: In Tension: The Function of Body in Space with Torkwase Dyson and Sarah Oppenheimer, February 21, 2024 | Photos by Rebecca Smeyne

Others, such as Torkwase Dyson and Carlos Jiménez, delve into pressing ecological and human-centric issues, urging us to reconsider our relationship with the environment. Mel Kendrick‘s sculptures offer a meditation on the passage of time and our perception of place, while Alice Adams explores the intricate layers of architecture and the human body.

Sites of Impermanence | Photo: © Etienne Frossard. Courtesy of National Academy of Design

Central to the exhibition’s premise is Sarah Oppenheimer‘s manipulation of architectural space, challenging visitors to question their own agency within the built environment. By blurring the boundaries between human, object, and architecture, Oppenheimer prompts a reevaluation of our impact on public spaces.

Sites of Impermanence opens the door for cultural dialogue and introspection. Curated by Sara Reisman and Natalia Viera Salgado, this showcase underscores the National Academy of Design’s commitment to fostering artistic excellence and pushing the boundaries of creative expression.

Founded in 1825, the National Academy of Design has long been a champion of the arts in America. With a membership comprising some of the nation’s most esteemed artists and architects, the Academy continues to serve as a beacon of inspiration and reflection. Exhibitions like Sites of Impermanence reinforce the transformative power of art and its capacity to shape society.

Visitors to the National Academy’s Chelsea location are invited to embark on a journey of discovery and contemplation. Sites of Impermanence asks us to explore our place within the ever-evolving landscape of art and architecture.

In my last post, I talked about typography as poetry, describing my brief exposure to commercial art through my neighbor. At the time, I mentioned my interest to some of my older friends. They discouraged me from pursuing commercial art because “it was a male-dominated field.” Today, like other professions, graphic design—formerly known as commercial art—is mainly composed of women. Data USA shows that 53.7% of American graphic designers are women.

On that note, I am sharing a small selection of the female designers I have admired. When I started in design, I did not know much. Thus, I studied others’ graphic design work and sometimes other design areas like architecture.

One of the first female designers who caught my attention was Rosemarie Tissi. I specifically remember her work for „Offset“ for the printing company A. Schöb, in 1982 (back of a folder—second image down).

I looked at the typography of this image for hours. I was fascinated with how Tissi used these big, chunky letters to create the offset printer and her use of color and negative space. In a word, I was mesmerized by how the O captures the eye and moves it from the F to the E by gradually changing the color tone and playing with size. She uses the strong horizontal the T provides to arrange the letters, making the eye move from O to T seamlessly. One still reads the word offset; nothing more is needed to understand it. Tissi takes advantage of the natural eye movement from left to right to connect the word and image in our mind organically. I was and still am fascinated.

The second female designer whose work stopped me when I saw it was April Greiman’s. I had the opportunity to see her talk in Carbondale, IL, in 2005. I have never forgotten that talk. There was a desire to search in Greiman’s narrative as she told the story of her career, which resonated with me profoundly. I wished I had talked to her afterward. Her work would leave me speechless. The elements dance in the space in almost every design she creates. I had not seen work like that when I started to study design. I remember learning the grid and alignments, but Greiman’s work turned on a lightbulb. The page becomes a stage for the performers in her work. Her ideas about how design works on a printed page influenced me the most in my perception of space, page, and type.

Jennifer Sterling has influenced the way I see and perceive typography. The typography in her work is like something that floats on the page, like a lightweight feather that moves and turns. Her work is experimental and pushes the limits of the page and even motion. We expect to see the letters moving in a certain way, but in her work, the typography can and will take unexpected turns. Sometimes, Sterling incorporates shapes and elements to enhance ideas and the typographic movement.

Architect Zaya Hadid’s work makes me look twice. She passed in 2016, and it is a loss. You should visit Hadid’s website to explore her designs. This quote from her site summarizes how I feel about her work and why I admire it:

…the beauty and virtuosity within her work is married to meaning. Her architecture is inventive, original and civic, offering generous public spaces that are clearly organized and intuitive to navigate

Zaha Hadid

Below is one of Hadid’s designs: the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University. The building seems to want to levitate or fly away. It is simply impressive.

My interest in these designers stems from an admiration for defying the constraints innate to the materials they use playfully. Whether paper, digital, or spatial, these designers don’t just capture the movement in a frame; it feels like the designer is mentally dancing with their design at that moment. There is an organic and symbiotic dialogue between the design and the designer. These works are not void of meaning or purpose or are frivolously pushing the limits. These works result from a deep understanding and even acceptance of the constraints and limitations. Rather than succumbing to those, they embrace these parameters to birth work that seemingly defies its nature. Yet, it is not a rebellious defiance. It is a dance of give and take, a dance of conversation, and a dance of creation.

Of course, I can mention more designers. There are many others who have shaped the way I think about design in one way or another. However, these four designers have what I look for in my work in common: movement. When I started to study design, it was their work that captured my interest, and it still does.

Alma Hoffmann is a freelance designer, design educator, author of Sketching as Design Thinking, and editor at Smashing Magazine. This is an edited version of an original post on Temperamental amusing shenanigans, Alma’s Substack dedicated to design, life, and everything in between.

Header image © Alma Hoffmann; cyanotype painted with watercolor and ink, quote from Adam Crews.

The real estate developers Tom and Fred Elghanayan, founders of TF Cornerstone, knew they had to beautify the view to command luxury rents. They turned to Karlssonwilker for this deceptively simple, yet incredibly complex challenge.

Over the next five years, the designers—whose client list includes an international roster of museums and other design-forward organizations—figured out how to transform the wall into a dreamy cloudscape with winged creatures flying above, a little tsunami and the city skyline below, and poetry throughout. Now, each apartment that faces the wall has a remarkable and unique view. If a unit faces the street or the Hudson River, the tenants can enjoy the mural from the building’s courtyard garden, gym, or hotel-like gathering spaces. Nonresidents can view it from across the street, where this formerly desolate part of town—home to auto showrooms and repair shops as well as the Department of Sanitation—has transformed itself to serve residents with upscale coffee shops, a Pilates studio, a preschool, even a pet daycare center.

All this took time to come about. Karlssonwilker submitted design proposals that featured fields of grass, meadows of flowers, and verdant forests. There was a lengthy exploration of robots that would scale the walls, shoot paint, and change the vista with every 100-foot climb and descent. At first, the developers felt the $2 per square foot cost to get the robots in motion was reasonable. Still, complications ranged from potential insurance liability to the need for approvals from the Public Design Commission, the Community Board, and the Department of Sanitation, whose wall it technically is. “Ideas are not always bought by the client,” explained Karlsson, “but we keep working until an idea we love is loved by the client, too.”

The designer-client discussion soon turned to this: What would be there if the wall didn’t exist? Well, there would be sky, clouds, water … and the NYC skyline—a view one would never tire of. And the color scheme? It needed to be soothing, offensive to no one, pleasurable to all.

I recently had the pleasure of joining Karlssonwilker partners Hjalti Karlsson and Vera Yuan at the property and taking a tour led by TF Cornerstone principal and SVP Zoe Elghanayan. Every client meeting should be like theirs: a relaxed discussion, a look at the past and the future, and an analysis, in this case, taking in views of the mural from apartments on different floors and discussing such issues as where to extend the mural and in what year the paint might need a touchup.

Left: Client meeting in an apartment kitchen. L-R: Hjalti Karlsson, Zoe Elghanayan, Vera Yuan. Right: The meeting continues in the garden space between the building and the wall.

When the four of us sat down to chat, my first question was, “How did you meet?” Elghanayan’s response: “Through a referral.” It’s a truism that the most exciting projects come to designers not by waiting for the right clients to discover them, not by cold-calling, and not by falling for email pitches promising lists of fabulous prospects, but by referral.

As it happened, Anne Pasternak, the director of the Brooklyn Museum, had commissioned Karlssonwilker to design an anniversary book for the organization she previously led, Creative Time. The designers invented what they called the Real-Time Recording Machine, which, driven around Manhattan on a glass-walled truck, captured snapshots of sounds, colors, and people’s comments that were applied to individual covers so that each book, like the works of the artists Creative Time champions, was a unique work of art in itself.

TF Cornerstone realized that if Karlssonwilker could come up with that, they could devise something equally original and valuable for them. They were the only design firm consulted.

“Karlssonwilker has been a pleasure to work with, and I don’t feel that way about everyone,” Elghanayan said with a smile. She is especially keen on the poetry. Tucked into the mural’s composition are 16 poems, six in the public domain, including works by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Walt Whitman, and ten written especially for the project by mambers of the Poetry Society of New York. “We collaborated with the Poetry Society to choose local poets to write up to 200 words that celebrate New York neighborhoods and their history and architecture,” Karlsson explained.

“I’m a big fan of image and text combinations in art,” Elghanayan pointed out. At TFC, we’re so inspired by the city, and the poetry adds an important dimension. It’s a story wall. I was so proud to bring the local poets here for a tour,” she added, pointing out how the art program throughout the interior of the building continues the theme of image and text. “In many ways, the mural enhances and supports the art program,” she said. “It also enhances TFC’s reputation for going the extra mile to enhance the quality of life for residents.”

“Storytelling has been an ongoing motif in Karlssonwilker’s” work, Yuan noted. “Without the poems, it wouldn’t be the same wall.”

“Hand-painting the Trade Gothic typeface was challenging,” Karlsson recalled, but we worked through it on-site with the painters.”

If the design process was lengthy, the painting process was speedy. A rigging was set up. The outlines of the mural were printed in vertical strips. Holes were popped through the outline and transferred to the wall with charcoal. A team of painters from Artfx Murals, responsible for some of the most spectacular outdoor murals around New York City, worked on it at full tilt for four weeks straight.

Every major design project begs answers to questions like: What has it accomplished for the client’s business? Has it helped raise the company’s profile or revenues and made it easier to accomplish its goals? Has it inspired others to pull off a similar sleight of hand?

“The mural has helped reduce the amount of turnover in units that would have been facing a blank wall,” Elghanayan said. “Feedback during apartment tours has been positive. In fact, bad weather appears to increase how well the mural is received, which speaks to its success as an extension of reality. Karlssonwilker accomplished a phenomenal design feat that can’t be easily copied,” she emphasized, “and if someone tried, I imagine it wouldn’t be as successful. Also, given the grand scale of the wall, I don’t think too many others would take on the beautification challenge that we did.”

If you’d like to see more of “The Mural at the Max,” visit karlssonwilker.com or drop by 606 West 57th Street and take a look for yourself. (And, on a hot summer day, swing by Karlssonwilker’s studio in Ridgewood, Queens, and get some very special ice cream.)

Header photo and additional photos in story provided by author.

That would be a crazy idiotic scenario. These are landmarks, for God’s sakes.

Well, in New York idoCity it seems that architectural preservation is not as much of a priority as one might imagine, at least for developers of influence. For the Empire State Building, the jewel of the city’s skyscraper skyline culture, has indeed been eternally ruined by a staggering, as yet unfinished 860-foot residential tower. “While some view these towers as symbols of progress, others see them as monuments to the ever-widening wealth gap,” states the New York Post.

As a kid living in Stuyvesant Town, if I strained my neck out of my bedroom window, I could see the Empire State; the view has long since been obstructed. From my wife’s former office facing North on Fifth Avenue, the building was in full view until an apartment building entirely blocked it. And a friend who bought a converted loft in the west twenties with a “Balcony view of the Empire State” as a selling perk lost it when the Virgin Hotel reached the fifteen floor mark.

New York is historically a city on the rise—just look a that horrendous jumble of steel and glass at Hudson Yards—but the squeezing of towers into narrow footprints because the engineering enables excessive monetary rewards is disrespectful to the city and its citizens—and looks ugly, too.

One thing I’ve learned for buyers to take note is that in the canyon streets lined with large buildings, the automobile engines during the day and garbage trucks at night reverberate at virtually the same annoying levels. And the higher one goes, the louder and more terrifying are the wind gusts that cause the towers to bend back and forth.

Dr. Lanteigne is a Principal of Research at Steven Winter Associates (SWA), where she’s developed a new resource aimed at helping practitioners embed equity in the design of the built environment. Introducing the Building Equity Standard (BEST). Aided by her background in public policy, Dr. Lanteigne created BEST as an antidote to the Universal Design school of thought. “The truth is, considering all people at once doesn’t genuinely enhance the lives of anyone,” she says. Because while it might sound like a swell idea, designing for “everyone” is impossible, considering the innumerable differences within the human race. Humanity can’t be treated as a monolith, where we flatten and simplify nuance and variety between humans in the name of equality. Instead, we should strive for equity within design, where marginalized identities are acknowledged, celebrated, and specifically designed for.

Upon hearing about BEST, I was eager to speak with Dr. Lanteigne directly to learn more. She recently gave me a primer on her research and opened my eyes to some of the pitfalls of Universal Design and the ways BEST attempts to address those gaps. Our conversation is below.

(Interview edited for clarity and length.)

What’s your background in the field of equitable and inclusive design? When did you first realize that Universal Design isn’t the solution?

I’m unique in the architecture world because I have a background in public policy; I started my career doing disability policy work. I was essentially given a portfolio of all of these cases of non-compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. It became apparent that compliance and accessibility were really important, and non-compliance was a huge problem.

From there, I just snowballed into understanding not only the legal requirements but how little they do in terms of affording accessibility. I learned about the idea of going above and beyond what was required by law and code to enhance experiences for people with physical disabilities, sensory disabilities (hearing and vision), different cognitive abilities, and how people process information. That interest early on in my career made me curious as to how we create spaces that go beyond disability inclusion, looking at marginalized groups based on gender, LGBTQ identity, race, religion, or if you speak English as a second language. So, how do our environments shape our experiences, and then what are the design strategies to achieve those more equitable environments?

I took an illuminating disabilities studies course in college where my professor framed disabilities as socially constructed. People are only disabled because the world around them isn’t built for them, which is what creates an inability. Learning that definition was mind-blowing to me.

I love that you just shared the Social Model of Disability with me! Not many people know of it or even understand it. It describes a key shift; it’s not an inherent problem with the person. It’s how the environment is designed (or not designed) to adapt or support people of different abilities.

Can you give an example of a Universal Design concept that typifies how most of our designed world doesn’t meet marginalized people’s needs?

The curb cut is the most classic example of Universal Design (which is boring, but it gets the job done). It’s a classic example because its intent is to support people in a wheelchair and people with mobility issues, but at the same time, it also supports somebody pushing a stroller or people carrying rolling luggage, bikers, and young children. The premise of Universal Design is that one design strategy can be cross-cutting, so it supports disability inclusion, but it’s also beneficial for everyone.

This terminology is like “design for all” or “design for everyone,” which started in the 1970s and 1980s, maybe a little before, but we still see it today. The reality is that one design certainly can’t benefit everyone. Realistically, that’s impossible when we look at this from an equity lens—which is just beginning in architecture. Right now, there’s this idea of one design for everyone versus having an equity perspective, which is making sure that we’re prioritizing marginalized groups’ and marginalized communities’ needs. Those are two different things.

Universalism says one for everyone. Equity says we’ve got to shore up these gaps and make sure we’re designing spaces for overlooked groups that have been underrepresented in design forever. We’re just beginning to see spaces that say, This is designed by and for the LGBTQ+ community. That’s important to me because I identify as a member of that community. These places use design strategies that reflect a safe space; we surveyed the community, and that’s reflected in that design. We’re not going to say it’s also designed for everyone. It’s a nuanced difference, and it’s still hard for the architecture industry to get behind because there’s that “usefulness” of architecture that people want to fall back on. This idea that, yes, it’s for a specific group, but it’s still good for everyone. That’s an interesting, ongoing debate. I don’t think Universal Design is wrong or bad. Equity is just a different way to look at it.

Can you point to an example of a design or concept created with the BEST framework?

BEST is still really new, so it has yet to be applied. However, the research I did to develop it is based on four case studies that tapped into various marginalized communities, listened to what those communities were saying, and summarized and synthesized that into this resource.

One of those case studies was the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian American Experience in Seattle, Washington. The architects and the museum worked hand-in-hand with the AAPI community in Seattle to make sure they were designing a culturally safe and celebratory space that also captured the Asian immigrant experience. So, you see a lot of very specific design strategies in that project. For example, artwork that captures both the beauty and difficulty of the Asian immigrant experience. The community also wanted to maintain certain aspects of historical design that they felt told the narrative and story of immigrant experiences, so there are a lot of historically preserved artifacts and pieces. And then something as little as the community wanted a celebration room. Before the museum, there wasn’t a space to gather and celebrate, so they included this beautiful, celebratory space. These strategies directly reflect what the community said they wanted and needed.

Another one of the case studies was the memorial at Harvey Milk Plaza. The team there has been working to revitalize the Harvey Milk transit stop in the Castro District for many years and surveying the community to figure out how this space can not only work to honor Harvey Milk as a civil rights and LGBTQ+ rights leader but also how can it better celebrate the community.

This project is still ongoing, but really interesting design elements there speak to supporting ongoing activism for LGBTQ+ rights. As an example, there’s a pedestal at the corner that the community wanted to keep to elevate and raise the voices of the LGBTQ+ community physically. It’s a unique strategy that might not apply to all projects, but it fits here. These kinds of unique design projects are what I built BEST around, and I hope it will be used to create in the future as new projects begin to adopt it.

What are your long-term goals for BEST? What’s your dream scenario for seeing BEST implemented across the architecture industry?

Right now, it’s in a piloting phase, which is exciting, and we are actively looking for the right partners to begin building this. Those partners can look very different. They can be university academic partners, community-based organizations, or tenant representation organizations. A broad brush of stakeholders is going to help expand BEST.

My ideal hope, whether it’s with BEST or whether it’s just with equity in general (though I hope it’s with BEST), is that we get to a point where equity is considered an integral part of the design process, just like sustainability is, and just like how healthy building is beginning to be. Right now, we’re very far away from that. I hope that as BEST continues to grow, it will become a resource that is robust enough to be an industry-adopted standard, like LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), like WELL, like Enterprise Green, etc.

Six curatorial partners directed the exhibition’s 13 public artworks, created by independent designers, art studios, university design fellows, and a high school design team. View the complete list of participants here.

Exhibit Columbus is unique because it engages in an international dialogue connected to the biennial exhibition structure while exploring the challenges that cities around the globe are facing today. This year’s cycle, Public by Design, de-centers the idea of singular artists and curators for art and architecture and, instead, turns the focus on the friction of public art and architecture with the community. With this focus, the installations got their inspiration from curatorial questions such as: What is civic identity? How does nature connect us? How do we interpret the past?

We wanted to demonstrate the basic idea that the best work is built with a broad belief in the collective power of community work and engagement.

Bryony Roberts, 2023 curator and former Exhibit Columbus Miller Prize Recipient

Public by Design opened to huge crowds on the weekend of August 25. Free events included a public walking tour narrated by the artwork creators, community games, live music, dance performances ranging from Bollywood to swing to salsa, and a 15-minute history of the Black Experience performed to gospel, seventies soul, and hip-hop. A public dance party capped the opening weekend’s festivities.

Exhibit Columbus 2023, Public by Design, will be on display until November 26, with additional projects and events occurring throughout. Visit exhibitcolumbus.org for the full schedule.

All photos are copyright Hadley Fruits.

Historians Richard Cahan and Michael Williams spotlight these architectural jewels in black-and-white photographs taken between 1933 and the present by the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), a Depression-era WPA documentary project that still exists. “We didn’t just pick pretty buildings, but structures that play a part of U.S. history: slave quarters, plantations, Indian dance halls, ballparks,” assert the editors, whose book examines how buildings and building styles fall out of fashion, and ultimately gives new life to what is lost.

I spoke to the editors about the eerie beauty of this architectural endgame.

When I visited Detroit over a decade ago, I was at once saddened and shocked by the ghostly aura of the dying city. And yet I was also enraptured by its post-apocalyptic abandonment. I called it architectural decay porn (or ruin porn) and it was a vicarious return to a gilded past. What was your motivation in collecting these images into a book?
Most of the photos in this book predate the phenomenon of ruin-porn photography. The photographers working for the federal government’s Historic American Buildings Survey did not set out looking for that kind of imagery. Their job was to document structures across America that mattered. As many as half the buildings they photographed have been demolished over the past 90 years. The victims of urban renewal, neglect or indifference. These were the buildings we were interested in—because they now only exist in photographs.

One of my favorite books is Lost New York by Nathan Silver, which shows now-demolished vintage structures. His book and yours come to the same subject from before-and-after perspectives (and yours is broader in geographic scope). What is it about rotting architecture that is so appealing?
There are many reasons we’re attracted to these scenes. Certainly, they can be very beautiful. Buildings take on a haunting, ethereal quality that is almost magical as they are taken down. And cameras love the drama of these spaces. Some photographers, like Chicago’s Richard Nickel, who worked for The Historic American Buildings Survey briefly during his intense photo career, saw demolition as an opportunity to create powerful photographic statements about life and death by documenting buildings under siege.

I recently saw the 1948 film Berlin Express, filmed on location in Berlin and other German cities that were bombed by the allies into landscapes of ruin. In contrast, your book shows the humanity of dereliction. Do you believe there are human stories to be shared through these images?
Definitely. We tracked down the story of each building because without the stories the book is merely a cabinet or curiosities. We learned, for instance, that young architect Denise Scott Brown was the first to stand up for Los Angeles’ Richfield Tower before the skyscraper was razed in 1960s. We found out why a Native American dance lodge was submerged beneath an artificial lake in North Dakota. And we told the bizarre story behind Manhattan’s Bogardus Building. Its historic cast-iron panels were carefully removed during demolition to be re-erected somewhere else. But most of the metal put in storage was stolen by scrappers, who valued it more than New York City.  Every bridge, neighborhood, mansion and movie palace has a story to tell, and each says something about the larger American story.

Another book, like yours, that seduced me, was about Ellis Island. It reveals the remains of American history through ruins. Is nostalgia the driving psychological trigger?
We hope our book is not nostalgic. Each building we chose because they have something to say about today. We’ve all seen these buildings—the Kon-Tiki Room in Kansas City, the Deluxe Arcade in Pittsburgh, the Holiday Bowl in Los Angeles. We hope it’s more of a poem or elegy. It’s not a celebration of the old but a warning about what we’ve lost and continue to lose.

What surprised you, moved you, or struck you most by the images you collected?
So many books on lost landmarks focus on masterpieces. We’ve included a lot of them: New York’s Pennsylvania Station, the ultra-modern Dodge House in West Hollywood. But we’ve come to realize that common stores, rowhouses, schools and factories also play key roles in the design of cities and rural areas. We should think twice before they are removed.

How would you compare relics like the Roman Forum or other ancient ruins to these younger, less-distinguished places?
These buildings mean more to us because they tell the story of America. We get to see Ellis Island, which you mentioned, plantations, slave quarters, steel mills, fanciful dream buildings, even elevated lines that make up our story. America is more democratic (we hope) than ancient Rome, so our ruins tell a different story. It takes beautiful, classic pictures like these to help us slow down and look.

How do you feel about historically preserving these structures? Should they be resurrected?
There was a stated reason for most every one of these building to be torn down. They were deemed to be too small or too tall. They were called old-fashioned. They got in the way of a new highway or a new neighborhood. But as one preservationist warned about the destruction of a Maryland train station that we fell in love with: “There will, of course, be no second chance to rectify such a mistake.” We look at these buildings and keep wondering what a lost opportunity. We find it hard to believe that many of these buildings could not have been converted into thriving new places.

Which five images are the most significant for you, and why?
The Granada Theatre. One of Chicago’s most ornate movie palaces, it was razed before a strong effort could be made to save it. In its last days, the open ruins were toured by those who loved it. Mike [co-author Michael Williams] was one of them. These photos are particularly heartbreaking.

The Richfield Building. The Art Deco masterpiece was in perfect shape, layered with exquisite detail and ornamentation. The building was an LA landmark and not even 40 years old. One always asks “why?” when a significant landmark is torn down, but this one is truly inexplicable. Marvin Rand’s pictures are spectacular and tragic.

The Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. Jack E. Boucher, the most prolific photographer of the Historic American Buildings Survey, took this M.C. Escher–like image looking up the grand staircase. We never made it there, and now we wish we did.

The Republic Building. Photographer Richard Nickel had a way of roaming through buildings that were doomed. He took dozens of photos of the skyscraper in Chicago’s Loop, including this one of mannequins soon to be removed. He later died in the demolition of the Chicago Stock Exchange.

The Ulysses S. Grant Cottage. Photographers for the Historic American Buildings Survey did not generally take action shots. But they arrived in Long Branch, New Jersey, just in time to photograph a tractor using chains pulling Grant’s summer White House off its foundation. It’s the cover of our book.

Snelling is an artist in the purest sense of the word. Like any true creative, her artistic practice is central to her soul and isn’t something she can just turn off at the end of a 9-to-5 work day. Each of her projects informs the rest and weaves into the next, creating an atmospheric body of work that feels like its own mini universe. While she has a particular affinity for constructing small-scale sculptures of buildings that often incorporate video, lighting, and sound, she’s also created life-size room installations that have shown at galleries around the world, along with her other work.

The Oakland, California native is presently based at the Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. She first moved to the city after falling in love with it when she was doing a project at the Frankfurt Historical Museum in 2015, and now much of her work is directly influenced by it. “It’s definitely been inspiring here,” she told me of living in Berlin. “The art scene here is amazing because it’s so international. The scene in the Bay Area is pretty quiet, it feels like, but here, there are artists from all over coming in; there are really big shows and really small project spaces. And then you can hop to Venice or London really easily.”

Snelling currently has sculptures featured in “Suddenly Wonderful,” a Berlinische Galerie exhibition about West Berlin architecture in the 1970s. As part of the show’s mission to preserve and protect these historic buildings, she’s recreated Mäusebunker and Bierpinsel from her unique lens. “These are buildings I look at and I fall in love with them, and want to make them,” she said. “It’s interesting to try to at least capture places that might disappear. It’s really amazing to me that I can have any kind of influence over the actual future of these beautiful buildings; that’s something I didn’t realize I could even be a part of before.”

While we chatted through our computers from across the world from one another, Snelling showed me around her studio space, carrying my floating head from project to project, each in various states of completion. She brought me over to a sculpture of a large industrial apartment building that’s used for social housing located just down the street from her studio. Its windows were filled with media players illuminated with videos, bringing the sculpture to life with an immersive color and movement. She had even considered the back of the sculpture and added visual elements to make it compelling from all sides. “I kind of made the back its own separate piece,” she said. “There’s little details I normally don’t put, like images, but for this one, I wanted to make the back as interesting as the front.”  

Wood and plaster are the fundamental materials in Snelling’s toolbox, along with wall putty, media players, LCD systems, and even a tiny saw which she held up to her screen proudly so I could get a good look at it. “I use this constantly to cut windows and stuff. I hope they never stop making it!” she said. While she primarily uses these building materials now, she cut her teeth as a photographer, studying at the University of New Mexico with a major in art studio and a minor in photography. 

“I was really experimental with photography,” Snelling elaborated. “I was cutting up the negatives, tearing them, taping them. I was influenced by the Starn twins, Joel-Peter Witkin, Cindy Sherman, all these people. Then I started doing a collage series using old Life magazines, and one of the pieces was an apartment building with the front wall missing. Even though it was a two-dimensional piece, I made the rooms look three-dimensional using collage, and that made me think to build a three-dimensional house.” This was the jumping off point for Snelling’s fascination with creating small-scale buildings in her sculpture practice, taking her eye as a photographer and building those images with her hands. 

Snelling is also heavily influenced by film, and some of her work draws on her experiences growing up watching horror movies with her dad. This impact is clear from the film noir energy that emanates from so many of her pieces. “I liked almost every movie I saw and continued being a film buff as a teen,” she said. “Then, when I went to school, I took as many film history classes as I could.” One of her sculptures, “Motel,” is loosely based on the motel from Psycho. “That one had a little pump room in between the two bathrooms, and if you pushed the button, the toilet would fill in one and the shower would go in the other. I really like experimenting and trying to figure this stuff out. Something that always seems to come back and forth in my work is changing skills.” 

While each of Snelling’s pieces is a stunning work of art in its own right, they’re often connected by repeating themes, motifs, and ideas. A particular image or visual element will capture her attention, and she’ll experiment with it in different ways throughout her work. “I like to play with scale with the same subject,” she explained. “Maybe I’ll shoot a real motel that exists, and then build that motel. Or I might take the photo of the motel and put it in a video, or I’ll shoot the motel and put that in a film, and then I might end up blowing up the motel sign and making it into a life-size sign. So the subject repeats often, but in different forms, and it’s all intuitive. When I look at something and think about it, it illustrates how everything in life is not a set thing. It’s fluid and changes depending on who’s looking at what.”

Chatting with Snelling even for just a half-hour offers a media-player-filled window into her kaleidoscopic perspective. Bopping around from thought to thought and corner to corner of her studio, she was eager to share anything she could with me within the limitations of our laptop cameras. As my Zoom meeting timer ticked down, she came upon a few figurines positioned on a table she told me she recently acquired while vacationing in Bangkok. “I loved Bangkok, but I also realized I can’t really take a vacation,” she admitted. “I went to an island nearby and it was pretty boring, so I did some kick-boxing; I went to fights and I took some classes, and I think I’ll do a project on it. Just because I like it.”

Even through the pixels, I could see Snelling eyeing the figurines on the table with intrigue, the gears in her head already spinning. “These are crazy, I don’t know what I’ll do with them…”

Something tells me she’ll figure it out.

Thus, during a recent trip to L.A., the place I most wanted to visit was Plaza Mexico in Lynwood, a city about 40 minutes east of LAX. I learned about it in the June 4, 2023 “California Issue” of the New York Times Magazine, where a four-page story glowingly described it as “a phantasmagoric translation of a Mexican village.” The story included such phrases as “a taste of the old country,” “monumental, beautiful and heroic,” and “an invitation to celebrate.“

I was ready to celebrate. And right off the 105 Freeway, there it was: a shopping mall. At first glance, a California outdoor mall surrounded by parking lots. Walking around, my heart sank. Bits and pieces of Mexico scattered here and there do not make an authentic cultural experience, I thought.

But I looked more closely. I went outdoors, watched and listened. Couples were savoring quiet moments together. People were relaxing, enjoying the surroundings, and taking selfies and portraits.

Then I spoke with Vanessa Eckstein, the Argentinian-born principal and creative director of Blok Design in Toronto, which was headquartered in the Condesa neighborhood of Mexico City for nine years and continues to serve many clients in Mexico. “Coming together in parks and public spaces is part of our culture, of our sense of what’s important in life,” Vanessa reminded me. “It’s ingrained in our souls. It’s how we connect to each other. We share and celebrate with our families and with the larger community, especially during rituals and holidays.”

My visit was on an ordinary weekday, but pictures on the Plaza Mexico website make it clear that, since 2002, this place has been an important center for community gatherings and holiday celebrations for thousands of people who immigrated to California in search of a better life.

And everywhere, there is the promise of good food. So, in the upstairs food court, I started talking with other visitors.

“We come here all the time,” said Leslie, the young mom at the table next to mine. “It reminds us of the Zapotec culture of our parents, and we like the scenery and the architecture,” said her husband, Junior, rocking their baby in the stroller. “We live in Watts,” they said, three miles north (which despite various urban planning initiatives, remains one of the poorest, toughest neighborhoods in L.A.).

I stopped to chat with three teenage guys, Jordan, Misa, and Frank, also from Watts. “We love to come here, go to the gym, have some food, hang out, look around. It’s beautiful,” said Frank, offering me a hand sign that he said means friendship.

I worked up the nerve to talk to the men who’d been sitting on a bench the whole time I was there. “We come here every day,” said one of them, Ramón. “All of us live about three blocks away.”

I’d noticed that quite a few houses in the blocks surrounding Plaza Mexico were small and run-down with bars on the windows, but there are no bars on any windows in Plaza Mexico. The entire site was designed by architect David Hidalgo, a third-generation Mexican-American and graduate of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). Plaza Mexico is the product of a challenge he undertook “to design a shopping center in Lynwood in the style of a Mexican town” on the 25-acre site of a former Montgomery Ward department store. According to the Times Magazine story, Hidalgo grew up as a typical Southern California teenager, and found the essence of his culture by playing tourist, taking trips to Mexico, walking through archaeological sites, and meeting with long-lost relatives. “I brought all these elements into the melting pot of my brain,“ he said.

The result is the winner of several architectural awards, a place of solace, pride, and celebration, and perhaps, the key to a community’s revival.

Plaza Mexico is located at 3100 E. Imperial Highway, Lynwood, CA 90262. Open daily from 10 to 8.

All photos by the author.

Created as a whimsical summer retreat in 1872 by tea importer Joseph Stiner … the shape was based on the theories of Orson Squire Fowler, a phrenologist, who believed octagonal houses enclosed more space, allowed the sun in at all times, and permitted more views onto the landscape.

From the official description

The house was restored from ruin to a living embodiment of one of the most ornamental periods in American design history—the Gilded Age.

Here’s more, from the official Armour-Stiner website:

“In 19th century America, octagonal houses were a popular genre of building following the publication of a book, The Octagon House: A Home for All, by Orson Squire Fowler, a phrenologist, sexologist and amateur architect. In 1872, a simpler house was purchased by Joseph Stiner, a prominent New York City tea merchant. His alterations created the present structure. With plans to use the house as a summer retreat, Stiner added the dome and the verandah to create a classical, elaborately detailed ancient temple whimsically colored, detailed and decorated.

“In 1976 the house was acquired by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In need of conservation, it was the first house to be acquired by the National Trust. In 1978, it was sold to Joseph Pell Lombardi, a preservation architect specializing in conservation, restoration and historic preservation. Under the direction of Lombardi’s son, Michael Hall Lombardi has managed, researched and performed restoration work throughout the house, including the Egyptian Revival Room, basement, kitchen, greenhouse and studio, and much of the decorative surfaces.

“Armour-Stiner Octagon House offers a variety of limited-time seasonal tours as well as its classic tour. Reservations for one-hour guided tours can be made online during the months of April through December. Exclusive private tours are available upon request and create a magical experience for a group to share and talk about for years to come. For more information regarding private tours for individuals and groups, please enquire by email: tours@armourstiner.com, or by phone: 914-817-5763.”

Severin is a self-described color addict based in Stockholm, Sweden. As a multi-hyphenate colorist, designer, and photographer, her creative background is just as colorful as her aesthetic. She works across a range of disciplines, flexing her skills in interior design, set design, creative direction, and photography, with her love of color as the unifying factor in each.

After coming upon imagery of her recent exhibition “Dimensions of Colour” for FORMEX in Stockholm, I immediately gravitated toward Severin’s carefully considered, yet joyful aesthetic. I reached out to learn more, and Severin’s responses to a few of my questions are below.

(This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.)

Where does your love of color come from? Have you always loved color?

Well, where do things really start? Everything in life brings us where we are today, right?

So did it start in my early childhood, with a powder pink, wall-to-wall rug? That’s when I unconsciously understood what color and texture could do for a space. Or did it start when I got bad escalating eyesight at age 9? I was devastated, and thought I might lose it. Was it then? I got so obsessed with everything that was visually appealing because it felt so precious. I’m not sure, but I think it definitely plays a part.

Can you walk me through your creative journey to where you are today?

I graduated from Konstfack University of Arts and Crafts in Stockholm, where I studied interior architecture and furniture design. Afterward, first I was an intern, and then an employee at a great architecture studio in Stockholm. I slowly learned the profession, how to run projects, how to deal with clients, and about drawing architecture in general.

But I felt something was missing. It wasn’t only the creative freedom from art school— it was the conformity that was bothering and boring me; the idea about the Scandinavian grace with white beiges and greys. I needed a creative space, and we had this amazing material library in the cellar with lots of materials and colors that were sadly hardly used.

I started to do some kind of visual notes for myself— still lives, testing different combinations of materials and colors, exploring other aesthetics. I captured it with a very early smart phone and put it out on that new app called Instagram. I hardly understood I was posting stuff, hilariously enough— I only wanted to take advantage of those vintage filters to save the pictures to my camera roll. 

But soon, I started to get in contact and connect with other creatives and brands around the world. I took many baby steps toward fully freelancing in 2015 and starting my multidisciplinary journey, first through photography, re-inventing, and discovering shapes and colors from scratch. 

One of my first commissions was creating content for a Canadian shoe brand, doing a photo series on the theme of domestic science where I made a triangle of red cabbage with a lilac background and a cube of meat with a pink background. They paid me in shoes!

So from these smaller scenes, I moved my camera toward architecture and interiors. I got a real camera, and for a few years, I only took architectural photography around the world: in Guadeloupe for Air France, in Mauritius for a hotel designed by Camille Walala, in Spain of the iconic La Muralla Roja by Bofill Architects. I thought it was really liberating to not have to care about function or construction as when designing it. I could just focus on strong visual elements, outtakes angle, shadow play, colors, etc.

But after a while, I wanted to be more and more involved in the design in front of the camera, so I slowly came back to interior design, first by doing set design. One of my first projects was for a color collaboration for Montana Furniture. Through this, I felt I could come back in a new way to interior design and be as free, deconstructed, and abstract as I wanted. 

From where do you draw inspiration? Are there other artists, people, places, styles, or time periods that you look to or who have influenced you? 

Anywhere and everywhere. I can get just as much inspiration from an unexpected detail on a backstreet as from fine art in a gallery. But in general, I’m inspired by modern and postmodern architecture, art deco, playgrounds and games aesthetics, surrealism, graphic design, sunlight, and shadow play.

What project of yours are you proudest of and why?  

I would say “An Apartment of One’s Own,” the exhibition design I did for Sancal during Milan Design Week last year. I enjoyed the creative vision from the company and total creative freedom for me. Also the context (Hey, Milan Design Week!) and the level of customized design. I designed special terrazzo, marbled tops, the kitchen, the book cases, etc. It’s also what I’m proudest of because I dared to be so decorative. 

Then there’s “Dimensions of Colour,” the 250 square meter exhibition design and curation I did myself for FORMEX, Scandinavia’s biggest fair for interior details in Stockholm in January. The challenge was to find, pick, and display 200 products from over 400 exhibitors. I’m very proud of how everything came together, space-wise, [and how] perspectives and framings worked throughout the whole space. Also, in terms of color, every facade, wall, and niche had different colors to create different combinations. It all illustrated my forever, ongoing investigation of color. In terms of color theory, I always say, “Color is always relative, never absolute. It’s what you put next to it that defines it.” 

How do you hope viewers of your work feel when experiencing it? 

Confusion. New dazzling perspectives. Playfulness and beauty.

What’s your favorite color? 

It changes all the time… right now, lime-ish yellow.

But an all-time favorite is peach— delicate, social, warm, playful, yet sophisticated. 

One of the more striking differences between New England and Los Angeles that continues to bowl me over is LA’s uniquely eclectic architectural styles. From the Space Age-inspired Googie architecture of the mid 1950’s to the fairy tale charm of French Normandy apartment buildings, LA represents a tapestry of aesthetics, styles, eras, and cultures within almost any given city street.

Of course, protecting and preserving historic architecture is no easy feat in a city that moves at breakneck speed with skyrocketing property values. Developers looking to make a quick buck wreak havoc across the city, homogenizing old homes with the same soulless laminate flooring. Despite these atrocities, there’s thankfully a small yet mighty coalition of people and groups who’ve made it their mission to preserve LA’s architectural splendor.

At the top of this list are the heroes over at GLB Properties, a family-run property development and management company that specializes in architecturally significant and historic 1920s and 1930s apartments, homes, commercial buildings, and film locations in the city. GLB Properties creative director, designer, and brand manager, Ivana Rose Bramson, operates the business with her parents, who founded it in 1980. Together, the family stands guard for the history of LA by lovingly preserving, restoring, and celebrating their vintage properties.

Bramson has answered a few of my questions below about her relationship to this work and why LA architecture lights her up.

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Why is preserving and restoring these 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s LA buildings so important to you?

Los Angeles’ architectural history is so young (mostly under 100 years old), and many people are all too comfortable tearing it down. We at GLB Properties are caretakers of history, art, and architecture. 

Spanish Revival, French Normandy, Art Deco, and other Old Hollywood architecture is unique to Los Angeles, and it is a privilege to be able to keep it alive. Keeping this precious and impactful part of Los Angeles history relevant today is what I love most about my job. There’s a difference between reading about Old Hollywood and Los Angeles architecture in coffee table books and actually experiencing and living your life through it, letting the history and energy from the past inspire your life and lifestyle in the present.    

What architectural features from this era excite you the most when you come upon them in a property?  

There are too many architectural details from this era that excite me! In an Art Deco property, it might be the reveal lighting in the ceiling that visually makes it appear to be floating, or the way a wall curves from the living room into the dining room. In a Spanish Revival property, it might be the original stenciled wood beam ceilings in the living rooms, or the original colorful bathrooms where no two are alike. In a French Normandy property, it might be a functional turret that makes for a perfect reading nook off of a bedroom, or the original wedding cake moulding along the walls.

It’s the immediate impact of history, detail, and space. Sometimes dramatic, sometimes serene, and always filled with a sense of discovery. Living in and exploring a GLB Property is an immersive experience where there’s always something to see, discover, and be inspired by. 

What is it about LA architecture that sets it apart from other cities? 

The architecture from this era is a fantasy turned reality, a true Hollywood interpretation. In my opinion, this was the most exciting time for architecture (1920s-40s). Los Angeles’ architectural history is iconic and elegant, eccentric and whimsical, inspired by the Golden Age of Hollywood.  You just can’t get that anywhere else.   

What do you enjoy most about the renovation and restoration process? 

I love the smell of fresh cut wood as we are about to lay hand cut/hand finished chevron floors down, and the feeling when I look at a completed project. These projects can take anywhere from months to years. We never take the quick and easy route, and pride ourselves on meaningful restorations, renovations, and respectfully enhanced interpretations in some cases. I love watching a neglected or tired piece of architecture/art being brought back to life, whether it means being meticulously restored, interpretively restored, or updated to be relevant and useful, while still maintaining the integrity of the original architecture. I also love that I get to work with my parents who are both designers and incredibly fun to collaborate creatively with.

What are the biggest challenges you run into when standing guard for these old buildings?

There is an incredibly high cost to do things the right way when restoring these properties.  That’s why “they don’t make ‘em like they used to.” So I would say a big challenge is spending the money to do it right while trying not to break the bank! 

Another element to that is the potential for misuse before we acquire a property, or if someone lived in a space and didn’t care for it that well. We have experienced some disasters and they are hard to recover from and properly restore. The cost today to replicate far exceeds what it originally cost, and it’s also incredibly difficult to find craftspeople that can actually replicate a high quality of work. We wouldn’t be able to do what we do without the amazing craftspeople we work with. Many property owners cannot financially justify saving or replicating the architectural integrity of the property, as rents cannot return even a fraction of the cost involved.  

Do you have an all-time favorite GLB property or project from over the years? 

It’s very hard to pick just one! All of our projects have some element that’s epic and memorable. La Villa Allende in Miracle Mile was an incredibly time consuming labor of love and test of patience (a major repurpose of sorts). Every room has a different pattern of flooring and no bathroom is the same.  We turned a small leveled dirt yard into a multi-level summer courtyard destination with a pool and installed beautiful, mature landscaping. I feel comfortable saying there’s no home like it in the area. We used a mixture of terracotta, Zellige Moroccan tile, Malibu tile, and other materials to create an incredible living experience unique to Los Angeles. Every bedroom has French doors that bring the outside in. It’s an entertainer’s dream. 

Chateau Rossmore in Hancock Park and The Gothic Los Feliz are favorite overall projects too, but there are also specific homes, spaces, and apartments that really stand out, like a colorful revival bath we did at Las Ramblas on Sycamore in Hancock Park. It’s yellow, turquoise, pink, and black, and makes me smile every time I see it. Every project, small or large, is a chance to make an impactful architectural statement.  

Can you describe the ABODE series you’ve launched through GLB Properties? What inspired this endeavor? 

ABODE is a lifestyle series that I originally launched to feature our creative and talented tenants. In doing so, I realized the GLB lifestyle was bigger than our community of tenants, and so I opened it up to our Instagram community as well. We are so lucky to have a large community of like-minded individuals who love and appreciate this era of architecture as much as we do! ABODE features people in their homes in Los Angeles (and soon beyond!) who live in historic and architecturally significant properties (apartments, lofts, homes). As ABODE evolved, I started to feature local artists, creatives, curators, collectors, and entrepreneurs. I’ve always loved photography and connecting with new people, so this series is a labor of love connecting all the things I love to do: photography (film and digital), architecture and interior design, and meeting and connecting creative people. This series is incredibly fulfilling for me and I have so much fun doing it.

While the Mosaic Tile House is open to most through self-guided Saturday afternoon tours at $20 a pop, I am lucky enough to find myself personally escorted about the kaleidoscopic grounds by none other than the lady of the house herself, Cheri Pann. She and her husband, Gonzalo Duran, have lived at 1116 Palms Boulevard since March 1, 1994, when they bought the house in its original, ho-hum state. A grainy photo of the pre-tiled iteration of the house is displayed in a plastic frame on a tiled bistro table at the entrance of the front yard. The original house appears pedestrian and quaint, painted in what looks like a light moss color with red trim. While other buyers might have simply thrown on a fresh coat of paint or done a bit of landscaping work and called it a day, Cheri and Gonzalo had other ideas. 

“We bought the property to build our art studios,” Cheri tells me at the top of the tour. She has rust red hair and a big grin she flashes at the end of most sentences. “Then we started tiling it right away.” After 29 years of nonstop tiling, the Mosaic Tile House is now a veritable fortress of prismatic wonder, with completely tiled pathways, archways, walls, benches, and sculptures throughout. 

Cheri slowly leads me through the front yard, her delicate voice bouncing about the shimmering structures with the sunshine. I follow in awe. “I make all the tiles you see,” she says proudly. “Gonazalo makes the blue and white ones because his major in art school was illustration, and he likes to illustrate quotes; they’re everywhere. But mostly I make the tile and then he sets the tile and makes the form.”

Cheri and Gonzalo are both trained fine artists: Cheri’s worked in paint for the last 63 years, while Gonzalo specializes in painting and constructing automaton sculptures. “I have a Master’s in Fine Art from university, so that’s what sets this house apart from folk art,” she says. “Everything’s done through the eyes of painters. That’s what we both do, mainly.” Neither Cheri nor Gonzalo had any real experience in mosaic tiles before they started tiling their house together, but nevertheless, they felt compelled to do so. 

The intense love that’s shared between these two artists radiates from each tiled detail, from the love letters to Cheri that Gonzalo has painted onto his illustrated tiles, to the hearts patterned throughout the property, to the countless other tender moments embedded into the design. I ask Cheri how she and Gonzalo met. “He was working at [Culver City paint shop] Nova Color, where I was buying paint, and I reached over the counter and started kissing him,” she says directly. “And here we are, 31 years later! So it pays to reach over the counter and kiss someone.” I laugh nervously, replaying the recent interactions I’ve had with the shopkeepers at the art store in my neighborhood. 

“I guess for your generation, it’s really hard to meet people; you have to go online,” Cheri continues, her thoughts unspooling gently as we walk. “But, see, I have to tell you: there’s somebody right in front of you, and you have to just be aware when you go shopping, when you’re doing anything. I met him while he was selling paint, for goodness sake. It took a long time though, because he was a confirmed bachelor,” she admits. “It took him seven years to move in. We’d already built the studios and everything. I’d already been married twice though, so I didn’t care.”

Cheri guides me down a pathway to the side of the house as I haplessly take photos that don’t even come close to capturing the surrounding splendor. “I get a kick out of sitting down and watching people explore and have so much fun,” she says of people like me visiting her Mosaic Tile House for the first time. “Sometimes it’s kids, but mostly it’s adult couples. It’s also nice for me to get to look at it through somebody else’s eyes.” When she and Gonzalo first started hosting tours back in the mid ‘90s, they’d have about 15 to 20 people come each month. But since the advent of Instagram about a decade ago, that number has climbed to 50 to 150 visitors a month, all funneling through during a three-hour window on Saturdays. 

When guests arrive, they can take a print-out of features to find around the grounds, including an elephant with a chicken on top, a flying man, an iguana, a panda, and, one of Cheri and Gonzalo’s latest additions, a dragon. But otherwise visitors are encouraged to explore in whatever direction they’re pulled, choosing their own adventure. “I like it,” Cheri says of having strangers in her space. “I let them explore, and then they get what they get from it. But I’m always happy to answer questions, no problem.” 

We come upon a man quietly tiling one of the house’s already tiled walled. “This is our incredible worker Gerardo,” says Cheri. “He’s been with us for 15 years. He works here full-time. Gonzalo shows him which tiles, and he’s the one who actually puts the tiles on the wall now.” Each segment of the house features a carefully considered amalgamation of porcelain oddities, scavenged doo-dads, and pre-loved tchotchkes. A curvature of coffee mugs loops into the sky to my left, green glass bottles melted flat in Cheri’s kiln swirl in a pattern of concentric circles beneath my feet, and a large caterpillar bench protrudes from one of the walls.

Cheri excitedly brings me to a small mirrored box that’s been built into the wall by the caterpillar bench. “This is going to have shoes in it,” she explains. “We already had some shoes in it, but it got wet from all of the rain.” She then ushers me into her studio to show me the replacement shoes in question. “The only time I’ll take people inside the studio is if they really show interest in my crazy paintings,” she says as we enter a large room filled with tables covered in tiles in various stages of production. “But most people don’t even look at the paintings. They’re not religious; they’re just very personal. People don’t know how to deal with that.” Two of the walls in Cheri’s studio are covered in a series of brightly colored portraits— one wall features paintings entirely of Cheri, and the other is just Gonzalo. “These are all Gonzalo, from hair to no hair,” she says with her biggest smile yet. 

A menagerie of miniature shoe figurines is displayed on one of her work tables, which will be placed in the mirrored box in the wall. Like many of the building materials used in the house, these shoes were a donation. People bring items to Cheri and Gonzalo for their mosaicing, sometimes even in truckloads. “Social media works really well in that way too,” says Cheri. “You can say ‘I need this’ and you’ll get 400 pieces of it.” They also source supplies from the 99 Cents Store and Goodwill. 

Through a door at the back of Cheri’s studio is Gonzalo’s studio, where she and I find him hunched over a workbench while wearing a metal face mask and using a sparking mechanical tool. He greets us kindly, but is too focused on the task at hand for much more than that. “Gonzalo will work on a project for a bit and then just move onto the next,” says Cheri. “Men are so different from us. Haven’t you noticed that?”  

We move on to the back of the backyard beyond their two studios. Cheri shows me her hot tub that’s shrouded in a canopy of tiled arches. She uses it every night. We head back in the direction we came in, where Cheri points out a wall that depicts characters and scenes from Alice in Wonderland. As my tour with Cheri winds down, Gonzalo ambles out of his studio. He insists on taking a special photo of me in a strategically placed shard of a mirror. He tells me exactly where to stand, and positions my iPhone in front of the tiny mirror just so, so that he has the perfect angle to snap the picture. “Now you’re part of the town,” he says. “Hey, that’s a nice ring,” he adds as he hands the phone back to me, no doubt assessing how he’d be able to incorporate the aquamarine stone on my finger into his next project.  

The Mosaic Tile House is more than a house, and even more than a work of art: it’s a journey, a physical encapsulation of Cheri and Gonzalo’s love for one another, and their love for one another as artists. And for now, at least, that journey continues, despite running out of real estate. “He has more ideas, and I say, ‘Well, I don’t think there are many walls left here,’” Cheri says. She explains how they’ve consulted with architects in the past who have told them that they can’t tile above a certain portion of the house’s facade, so all they can do is paint. “We have to move and start with a new house,” Gonzalo jokes. Or is he?

Cheri and I have completed our loop of the grounds and find ourselves back in the front yard at the base of an orange tree. A woman walks by the house’s front gate on the sidewalk and compliments Cheri on her beautiful home. I ask her what her neighbors make of what she and Gonzalo have created. “Well, they like it, but almost no one on the block has seen the house,” she says. “They’re not drawn to mosaic tile; they take it for granted. Even the neighbors on either side of us hadn’t come here until finally they visited last year.”

“I’ll visit you anytime,” I tell her. And I mean it. It’s time to go, but I don’t want to leave. The Mosaic Tile House is an escape from reality; a magical realist dream world concocted by two abundantly generous spirits united by their love of art, each other, and an insatiable desire to keep creating. “We had no clue that this was what this was going to turn out to be— and that we would still be obsessed with it,” Cheri says, reaching up to pick one of the perfectly ripe oranges above her. I thank her for her kindness, and for so intimately opening up her home and heart to me. “Yeah, a little too intimate, huh? But I’m a sharer. Cheri the sharer.”

It’s hard to argue with this claim, as this discipline shapes civilization, boasts of godlike practitioners throughout history, creates timeless monuments, fuses art and engineering, and impacts much of humanity. At its best, it’s a superb balance of the practical and the poetic.

Furthermore, architecture is the only design profession that requires a license to practice. Curiously, you need a license to drive a car, but not to design one.

In the past, most graphic designers built careers by creatively exploiting two dimensions. The dawn of digital design in the early 1990s expanded opportunities that offer exciting audiovisual, motion, and screen-based experiences that, thanks to AI, now seem limitless. However, in most cases, the result remains two-dimensional. Graphic designers who work in the three-dimensional realm of exhibitions, retail environments, signage, and grand architectural projects enjoy an enduring physical product of their labor.

I’ve been fortunate to have worked with renowned architects such as Renzo Piano, Philip Johnson, and Kevin Roche on projects for The High Museum, MoMA, and the Jewish Museum. In this regard, my “tutors” in architecture have been the best.

From 1986 to 1989, I led a team that collaborated with the late I.M. Pei on the renovation and expansion of the Louvre Museum. That project was undoubtedly a career highlight and connected me with architecture on a massive scale. On a recent visit to Paris, I saw that much of the signage we designed for that project remains in use nearly 35 years later.

Current stars such as Jeanne Gang and Bjarke Ingles continue to design ambitious projects that defy the limits of form, materials, and construction. As a dedicated swimmer, one of my all-time favorites is the “Water Cube” aquatics center at the Beijing Olympics, designed by Chris Bosse and Rob Leslie-Carter. It’s a remarkable design that brilliantly marries rigor and theatricality.

Today’s architects deserve our respect, but they are not without sin. A concrete example is the recent damage to Manhattan’s skyline. In mid-town, a canyon of greed and power is emerging where spindly towers of increasingly soaring heights cast hubristic shadows on Central Park. Many of these properties are tax shelters for the super-rich and remain woefully empty. The result is a gap-toothed appearance when viewed from afar, with each new building trying to outdo the others in a macho slugfest that serves the few at the expense of the many.

A few weeks ago, I was in a meeting on the 60th floor of a building across the street from one of these new “needle towers.” As I looked at the grid of windows opposite me, I saw a bedroom in disarray, an empty room, a makeshift office full of boxes with the balance of the floor, the raw shell of construction. It looked like the perfect movie set for a hostage thriller!

In contrast, now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I am particularly fond of architects who design houses. Today, Tom Kundig of Seattle’s Olson Kundig Architects has been celebrated for his work in this realm. He understands that a house is also a home and he never loses a sense of domesticity in scale, siting, use of light, and material finishes. His work can be summed up in three words: ingenuity, precision, and elegance. I became a fan when I first saw his design for The Brain.

I like to visit historic houses when I travel and have documented a few in my journals like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre, and Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye. Luis Barragan’s home in Mexico City is like a shrine, a church, a village with visual delight at every turn. This sensually warm, materially rich, serene house is the perfect example of “humble” modernism. I took a guided tour of this residence in 2018, but photography was prohibido, so I did some line sketches in ink and eventually painted them in Barragan’s colors.

Several years ago, I considered purchasing land in the high desert of Nevada near Lake Tahoe. The parcel was flat and scrubby, but with a majestic view of the Sierra Nevada mountains: a perfect sanctuary. I played architect and imagined what type of house and studio I might build there, sketching a cross-shaped, shed-style structure that combined living and working spaces, a library, a central skylit gallery, and a lap pool. Any architect would probably look at my plan and say, “nice try for a graphic designer,” before providing a professional critique with countless conditions and considerations I had overlooked.

Regretfully, my “wild west” dream remains unrealized, but with the friendships I have built with many architects over decades, a future collaboration is only a phone call away.

Next month: “Design and 52 Assistants.”

Ken Carbone is an artist, designer, and Co-Founder of the Carbone Smolan Agency, a design company he built with Leslie Smolan over 40 years ago. He is the author of Dialog: What Makes a Great Design Partnership, a visiting lecturer at numerous design schools, and TED X speaker. A recipient of the 2012 AIGA medal, he is currently a Senior Advisor to the Chicago-based strategic branding firm 50,000feet.

Louvre signage photo by Philippe de Potesdad. Manhattan skyline photo by Rita Jacobs.

Of these distracted drivers, I think we can cut the building rubberneckers the most slack— and I’m not just saying that because I am one. Los Angeles is a sun-soaked mecca of architectural splendor, home to a rich tapestry of styles that range most notably from Spanish Mission Revival and Craftsman to Art Deco and Midcentury Modern, not to mention many others. At its worst, LA is a city filled with narcissistic pipe-dream-seekers, but at its best, it’s a stunning time capsule of aesthetics that need to be protected at all costs. 

None more so than the cult favorite, Googie. 

While you might not have heard the term “Googie architecture” before, anyone who’s ever stepped foot inside of a Denny’s has encountered it. During the Atomic Age of design, Googie took mid-century America by storm in the form of futuristic coffee shops, carwashes, and even churches. Bold, swooping structures, jaunty neon signs piercing the sky, and large outdoor eating areas all began popping up throughout Southern California in the 1950s, primarily to catch the eye of drivers passing by. 

The term “Googie” was derived from the Los Angeles eatery Googie’s Coffee Shop, designed by John Lautner on Sunset Boulevard in 1949. But Googie’s was just the beginning. 

Smash cut to present day Los Angeles. The California Coffee Shop style at the core of Googie architecture is still deeply embedded into the look and feel of the sprawling metropolis, most iconically represented in the chain Norms Restaurant, the Burbank burger joint Bob’s Big Boy, and the crème de la crème: Pann’s Restaurant, just a stone’s throw from LAX in Inglewood. While these buildings have stood the test of time, it hasn’t been easy. Relics of Googie architecture have endured thanks to the immense efforts of Googie obsessives at places like the Los Angeles Conservancy, who continue to fight tooth and nail to protect these masterpieces from real estate developers licking their chops for the buildings’ coveted locations.  

At the frontlines of this fight is LA native Chris Nichols, a senior editor at Los Angeles Magazine, historic preservationist, the author of Walt Disney’s Disneyland, and one of the foremost Googie-philes. Nichols has volunteered at the LA Conservancy for decades, where he’s served as the Chairman Emeritus of the organization’s Modern Committee. At the end of last year, Nichols ran the Googie World Expo in LA, which included a day-long bus tour of Googie landmarks on the west side of the city, and I was fortunate enough to be a participant. 

“I love this stuff so much,” Nichols told our gaggle of Googie fiends at the top of the tour, donning his signature suspenders and bow tie. “I’ve been suffering from Googie Disorder since I was a teenager.” We had all gathered at Armét Davis Newlove Architects (formerly Armét & Davis up until 1972) in Santa Monica, the heralded firm founded in 1947 that pushed Googie architecture to even greater heights after its initial inception. “John Lautner may be credited with doing the first googie building, Googie’s—which gave it its name—but Armét and Davis and then Armét Davis Newlove perfected the style, and really gave it the energy and excitement that we all love about it,” Nichols explained. 

Armét Davis Newlove is responsible for many of the most adored Googie buildings that typify the aesthetic, including Pann’s and the first Norms location on La Cienega Boulevard, along with the prototypes for chains that would soon pervade the rest of the country, such as Bob’s Big Boy and Denny’s. They’ve constructed over 4,000 Googie restaurants, and the firm is still operational to this day. “They’re producing what they’ve always produced: churches and restaurants! Those are their two specialties,” said Nichols. Modern-day franchises they’re currently working with are Wendy’s, Burger King, El Pollo Loco, and Dutch Brothers coffee shops. But this tour was all about the Googie heyday, which, according to Nichols, was at its peak in 1957, 1958, and 1959. 

The postwar boom hit Los Angeles in a flurry of expansive glass walls, flamboyant, seemingly floating roofs, and indoor-outdoor landscaping that came together in a style met with a mixed reception. To this day, people like Nichols have to fiercely protect the integrity of Googie, which has long been derided as “a little too commercial, a little too flamboyant, a little too western, and a little too American for serious consideration,” as Alan Hess writes in his landmark book from 1986, Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture.

“I was given a copy of Googie by Alan Hess when I was 17, and I said, ‘Wow! This is incredible!’” Nichols told us through a megaphone once we were on the tour bus, careening through the city. “I made my parents drive me around and show me all of these buildings. Then I called Alan Hess out of the phone book, who told me that the Los Angeles Conservancy was starting a ‘50s group that I should be involved with. So I went to the meetings and it changed my life! I met all of my best friends there, I met my wife there.” It was clear from the jump that the group on this tour was tightly knit, just like any group of pals united by a common interest. It just so happens that this crew was bonded by a deep and profound admiration for a niche architectural style pioneered in Southern California. 

The handful of stops we made on the tour ranged from a church to Mel’s Drive-In (of American Graffiti fame) in Santa Monica, but the crowning jewel of the day was Pann’s. “I love Pann’s with all of my heart and soul,” Nichols gushed as we ambled into the parking lot. “This is the greatest, best, most amazing Googie building in the world,” he continued. “It still has its original owners. It’s completely restored, completely intact. Completely beautiful and perfect. This is what I live for.” 

Pann’s was chiefly designed by the visionary Helen Liu Fong of Armét & Davis in 1958. She was just 24 years old when she was hired by Armét & Davis in 1951, shattering barriers as a Chinese-American woman in a white-male dominated field. But her skill was undeniable, primarily as an interior designer who designed many café booths, barstools, and counters herself.

It’s nothing short of a miracle that 65 years after it was first built by Fong and the rest of the Armét & Davis team, Pann’s remains a pristine beacon of authentic Googie architecture. Owner James Poulos has been intent to restore Pann’s throughout the years in ways that meticulously preserves its original Googie features, but not all restaurateurs are as thoughtful. 

“The biggest challenge is that restaurant owners are a unique breed who oftentimes are not interested in preservation,” another preservationist on the tour, Peter Moruzzi, lamented to the group. “Commercial buildings are difficult; they’ve always been difficult, and they always will be difficult, compared to residential. Residential, you have a single owner, and you can often find an owner who appreciates the property and wants to do the right thing. With commercial, there are just so many other pressures and interests. You have council people involved and neighbors— it’s just hard. It’s really, really hard. Restaurants in particular.”

The harsh reality is that the magnitude of classic California coffee shops make their upkeep unrealistic in modern times. “The economic changes in the last 75 years made it so that you can no longer have one person with a lot for parking hire Armét Davis and Newlove to come in and do something with custom artwork and landscaping and a giant neon sign—all of this expensive beautiful stuff—and still sell a hamburger for 59 cents,” Nichols said. Land values in Los Angeles have skyrocketed to such an exorbitant extent that it’s unsustainable to have restaurants take up that much square footage of property, not to mention the cost of staffing. Nevertheless, the fight for Googie respect and rescue wages on.  

As a 17-year-old, Nichols stood helplessly across the street from the original Googie’s Coffee Shop as it was being demolished in 1988. “I was on a pay phone with the LA Conservancy at a gas station,” he shared. “I called the Conservancy and I was like, ‘It’s coming down! What are you doing?! Googie’s is being demolished and you’re not here, I don’t understand!’ And they said, ‘That ship has sailed. You would’ve had to deal with that years ago.’”

At the end of the tour, Nichols encouraged all of us to write letters to cultural heritage commission meetings, attend the meetings, and call our council members to protect these landmarks. “That’s a big deal, and that stuff goes a long way,” he said. This lively, sold-out group gathering for a Sunday bus tour in November 2022 serves as a starburst of hope that there are still determined guardians of Googie architecture out there, committed to protecting this special style. But we can’t take any of it for granted. “The fact that any of these Googie coffee shops survive is remarkable in and of itself,” said Peter before we all returned to our 21st-century lives. “So whenever you see one, you need to go patronize it, because you don’t know how long it will be there.”

New York City is a mecca for Art Deco extravagance. But while the Empire State may be its centerpiece, Art Deco architecture is not exclusive to New York. Miami has its magnificent beachfront hotels, Hollywood its sumptuous movie palaces, and Deco relics can be seen in Washington, Seattle and Chicago, and in most major U.S. industrial cities.

A Deco hybrid known as “Navajo style” is prevalent in cities throughout the Southwest. And in many small, formerly industrial towns in the United States, Deco detailing is visible on pre-World War II buildings. Yet since Paris and Bruxelles are dubbed the capitols of Art Nouveau (owing to the profound influence of architects and designers who practiced the fin de siecle curvilinear style), New York City must be hailed as the Art Deco capitol of the world for its many monumental buildings conforming to this international, between-the-wars decorative style.

As host of the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, Paris was the epicenter of “art moderne,” as Art Deco was then formally called. This exposition was a collection of lush pavilions that celebrated a new ornamentalism, presenting the world with examples of the choicest stylistic developments in furniture, textile, fashion and graphic design. Despite this early French beachhead in what one critic called the “style wars,” New York City became the paradigm of two other stages of the moderne manifestation: the Skyscraper and Streamline phases. The former began in the early 1920s with a Postwar building boom, while the latter emerged during the Depression, reaching its crescendo at the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens. Despite the preference following World War II for architecture in the International Style, New York’s Art Deco legacy remains virtually intact.

These “orphan” photographs (from an ill-fated project) are lost treasures and the details therein are gems.

Have you ever wondered how malls got to be so ubiquitous? Are you intrigued by their widespread closure? Who still goes to malls, and what are their future?

Curbed architecture critic Alexandra Lange dived into all of this and more in last week’s PRINT Book Club, where she sat down with Debbie Millman and Steven Heller to discuss Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall. In this book, Lange unpacks the surprisingly long history of a modern institution and why it plays such a large role in how the average American city operates.

Lange revealed all kinds of wild facts about the mall in her talk— like did you know malls are 70 years old? Or that Santa has always been a fixture of them around the holidays? Did you know that the vast majority of an average mall’s land is devoted to parking space? Lange goes into detail about a wide range of surprising influences for the mall we know today, like playgrounds, The World’s Fair, and European streets.

If you missed out on the discussion when it happened, no need to fret! We’ve got a recording of the whole thing below. If you want to learn more about Alexandra Lange’s exciting research, you can buy a copy of Meet Me by the Fountain online or wherever books are sold.

Our first meeting of 2023 will take place on January 19th at 1 PM Eastern, when we’ll talk to Richard Poulin about his work on iconic graphic designer Rudolph de Harak. Watch this space for our official announcement, and don’t miss our Book Club meetings on the third Thursday of every month!

Historian Kenneth T. Jackson once wrote, “the Egyptians have pyramids, the Chinese have a great wall, the British have immaculate lawns, the Germans have castles, the Dutch have canals, the Italians have grand churches. And Americans have shopping centers.” In her new book Meet Me By The Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall (Bloomsbury), design critic Alexandra Lange unpacks the rise, fall, and future of this iconic American social mecca and consumer playground. For PRINT’s third livestream Book Club, Lange will discuss the design impact of shopping malls and their consequence on the American psychology and economy.

Other books by the critic and historian include The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids (2018) and Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities (2012). She was a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and received a publication grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. She has taught design criticism at the School of Visual Arts Masters in Design Crit program and New York University.

Don’t miss this exciting talk with a design expert this Thursday at 1 PM ET! Register for the call here and buy Lange’s book here.

“Each of my miniatures is a love letter to LA in 1:24 scale,” Wright states at the top of the website for his ongoing project, Small Scale LA. After moving from New Zealand in 2016, Wright became enamored by the historic architecture that endures in Southern California— so much so, that he endeavored to recreate them by hand with his newfound free time during lockdown.

As a fellow LA resident, I was completely captivated by Wright’s meticulously crafted miniature replicas, and had to learn more. Below, Wright and I discuss his journey and process within the magical world of miniatures.

What’s your art and design background? What brought you to miniatures?

I’m a purely self-taught artist. I didn’t attend art school or do anything in the field of art for the first 27 years of my life! Before I began making miniatures, I worked in marketing for an airline brand. But then in March of 2020, like many, I packed up my office and prepared to work from home for two weeks. In the months of lockdown that ensued, I decided to fill my spare time by attempting to create a miniature building. 

I had always been fascinated with miniatures. I loved seeing behind-the-scenes photos of movies from the 70’s and 80’s that heavily utilized miniatures. Anytime I came across a miniature somewhere, like in a museum, I would spend ten minutes staring at every little detail. 

It’s hard to describe what it is about miniatures that captures our attention so intently— maybe it’s the cuteness factor, maybe it’s nostalgia for a childhood spent playing with dolls or action figures, maybe it’s the feeling of control you get from being able to hold something that’s normally huge in the palm of your hand. Whatever it is, people started following my work on Instagram, and asking me to take commissions. From there, I became a full-time miniaturist, and I’ve never looked back!

What’s your typical process like for creating a miniature model of a given building?

I have a long list of buildings that I would like to create miniatures of. The list is always getting longer, as people make suggestions and introduce me to their favorite places around LA. Generally, I like to choose buildings that have some notoriety in the community, whether it’s because of its iconic architecture, or because the business itself is beloved.

Once I’ve made a decision on the building I’m going to recreate, I’ll gather as much reference material as I possibly can. If the building still exists, I’ll visit and take photos and videos from every angle and of every detail. While on location, I’ll sketch the building and add as many measurements to the drawing as I can. 

Back in my studio, I use a scale calculator to figure out what scale to build in (e.g. 1:24 or 1:32) to produce a final miniature that will sit comfortably on a bookshelf or side table. Once I have created a blueprint of the building in Photoshop, I’m ready to begin physically making the miniature. It starts with using a hot wire machine to cut insulation foam to form the general shape of the building. The foam is then covered with chipboard for durability.

Once I have the general shape of the building, it’s time to paint and texturize. A Stucco effect can be achieved with a textured spray paint, weatherboards can be created with strips of plastic, roofing tiles can be made from sandpaper sheets. Bass wood is used to delicately create windows and doors. Many layers of weathering are added with different colored paints and washes to create a realistic aged look. Finally, I 3D print any signage the building has, and attach it to the exterior. 

How long does it typically take to create a miniature building model?

When I first began making miniatures in 2020, one model would take about a month and a half. Now that I’ve refined my skills and have learned many new techniques, I can produce a miniature building in a little over two weeks— depending on the complexity of the building, of course. 

What are your go-to tools for producing these miniatures? What’s your studio set-up like?

95% of my work is done manually, completely by hand. As such, the most essential tools are things like razor-sharp Exacto knives, various glues, and my hot wire foam cutter. I also go through a mountain of painters tape! Photoshop is another important part of the process, since I use the software to recreate logos and signage that I then render in 3D for 3D printing. 

I’m really thankful to have a large, sun-filled space in my West Hollywood apartment that works perfectly as a studio. It’s usually a little messy, with paints, and knives, and various scraps of material laying around. Recently I’ve introduced a filing system with boxes to try to tame the chaos. 

What is it about LA architecture in particular that excites you so much?

Los Angeles has wonderfully unique architecture that was born out of an early obsession with the automobile. My favorite architectural style is “Googie,” and in LA, we’re fortunate to be a Googie capital of the world! Think of those iconic coffee shops like NORMS, or Swingers, or the brightly colorful car washes, or even the Theme Building at LAX— these are all examples of Googie! Their loud, Space Age aesthetic was designed to be eye-catching enough for passing motorists to stop and patronize the business. These fun, whimsical spaces brighten the cityscape and add so much interest to our neighborhoods. 

What’s your favorite building in LA?

The Tail o’ the Pup hot dog stand! It’s a perfect example of another of my favorite architectural styles: Programmatic. First popular in the 1920’s and 30’s, Programmatic buildings are structures that look like huge objects. For example, a bar inside of a huge beer barrel, a camera store with the facade of a massive Nikon camera, or a cafe inside of a giant teapot. 

After recently being lovingly restored and reopened in West Hollywood, Tail o’ the Pup sells great hot dogs from within an enormous hot dog-shaped building. What’s not to love?

It looked bad. It deserved rebuke. And it didn’t matter one bit.

As I wrote in a Bloomberg Opinion column:

Under a law passed in 1969, two years before Andreessen was born, every eight years California cities have to project the future demand for housing in several income tiers and specify where those homes might be built. The long, complicated and expensive ritual has produced many hearings and documents but not much housing. It offered too many loopholes.

Cities could lowball the numbers. They could identify theoretical sites in their plans but, when later faced with a real development proposal, impose delays and restrictions that required scaling down the project, increasing the sales prices or rents, or abandoning the whole thing.

“Housing element” plans didn’t have to make sure the owners of prospective sites were willing to sell. As long as cities went through the right motions, they faced no consequences for obstructing new housing.

Now they do.

California has toughened its approval process for the housing-element plans, and cities face fines of up to $600,000 a month if they don’t come up with an acceptable plan. The state can review at any time whether the city is complying with its promises. If not, it can require streamlining development permissions to keep those commitments.

Cities that fail to meet their obligations face fines of up to $100,000 a month. They can lose state funding. The state can even suspend their power to regulate land use.

That article discussed several different policy reforms that will bring more housing to Atherton. But the “housing element” hammer is what I want to focus on here. It’s coming down hard on cities in my own area. The threat to suspend land-use regulations isn’t theoretical.

Cities that don’t meet their deadlines face something known as the “builder’s remedy,” where the state suspends local zoning laws until the city comes up with a suitable plan. Any development that files for permission during the suspension gets a free pass. That’s what has happened in two of the most housing-short coastal cities in Southern California: Santa Monica and Redondo Beach.

In Redondo Beach, a developer filed plans to convert a power plant slated for decommissioning next year. The plans envision a complex including residential towers with 2,290 units, along with office, commercial, and hotel space. It’s the kind of large-scale projects current residents hate. Another 5,000 people might be able to live in Redondo Beach! The application was filed in August. The city had submitted a Housing Element plan in July but hadn’t yet received approval. Redondo Beach’s Housing Element plan gained state approval a month later. Litigation will undoubtedly ensue.

Meanwhile, in Santa Monica a dozen projects with nearly 4,000 housing units slipped in while the city’s zoning ordinances were suspended. They include a 15-story 2,000-unit building in a low-rise, mostly light-industrial area near Santa Monica’s eastern border with L.A. Nearby businesses include the headquarters of Riot Games. Santa Monica is a major employment center whose housing hasn’t kept up with its job creation, leading to major traffic jams heading to the freeways. As a resident of West L.A., just east of the 405, I feel the effects personally. Unless I can walk to my destination, I generally avoid going west of the 405 after 3:00 p.m. because coming back even a couple of miles can easily take 45 minutes. No afternoon eye doctor appointments for me.

A couple of weeks ago Matt Yglesias had a good Substack post looking back on a decade of the YIMBY movement. It traces some of the intellectual origins of the successful efforts to loosen regulations on housing, focusing mostly on the activist world. I’d ding it for giving short shrift to the academics at UCLA, USC, and Berkeley, whose empirical research has been important to understanding what the obstacles to new housing, particularly in California, are. Also important are Ed Glaeser at Harvard and Joe Gyourko at Wharton, whose housing research I first wrote about way back in 2002 and revisited in 2007, when I didn’t quite realize just how bad a mess California’s restrictions had made.

I have evidence from as far back as the seventh grade demonstrating my obsession with housing policy. In 1987, when Matt Yglesias was in elementary school, I published a WSJ op-ed titled “Tapping the Shadow Housing Market,” which I’ve just dug up and added to my website. It anticipates the recent reforms loosening parking mandates and restrictions on “accessory dwelling units.”

Unlike many of the housing-obsessed, I’ve never had the inclination to impose my personal lifestyle preferences on everyone else. I prefer dense, urban neighborhoods but defend the suburbs. I believe that building will follow demand and prices will send the right signals, resulting in a mixture of housing that reflects a mixture of tastes, budgets, and lifecycle stages—if, that is, regulators allow housing markets flexibility. Count me in the Market Urbanism camp, not the “everyone should ride a bike” school.

When I moved to L.A. in 1986, one of the things I most appreciated was the abundance of housing. I want today’s young people to feel the same possibilities I felt back then, including the chance to have their own space. And, like Matt, I think things are looking up:

Overall, though, I think the future is bright. Ten years ago, housing reform was considered a bizarre niche issue that nobody in the audience cared about and where change was politically impossible. Now, it’s a mainstream topic of discussion with real political champions, local activist groups around the country, and a blueprint for state-level change. More and more people also acknowledge these days that housing is just so central to the economy that you can’t treat it as a tiny quirky obsession of urbanists — anyone who cares about sustainable growth needs to care about housing supply.

This essay was originally published on Virginia’s Substack. Header photo by Kara Peak.

In fact, mid-century lodging stood in direct opposition to many of today’s wearisome temples of monotony. These buildings buzzed with charming architectural details, like spunky signage and shag-carpeted conversation pits. Pools glistened with frolicking guests, decks lined with color-blocked tanning chairs, and large aluminum umbrellas, and interiors were adorned with vibrant floral patterns on curtains, couches, and carpets.

Fortunately, those of us who pine for the character of this bygone era can explore the project Dead Motels USA. Since 2018, retro motel enthusiast E. Hussa has dedicated themselves to lovingly archiving these vanishing roadside relics through found postcards and photographs. Below, Hussa and I discuss the project and reflect on their effort to keep these architectural gems alive, long after they’re gone.

What was the genesis of the Dead Motels USA project?

I have to attribute my interest in motels to my mom. She was a big traveler, and as a kid, going away for vacation was the highlight of every summer. We frequented New England, and for some reason, each motel we stayed in is ingrained in my memory.

One of our favorites— the American Motor Lodge in Sturbridge, Massachusetts— was abandoned for years after it closed. Over time, I realized just how many motels I stayed at were gone or fading away, and decided to research it. After collecting postcards of each, and finding their current state on Google Street View, I had enough “then and now” comparison photos to turn it into a website. A year later, I created my Instagram account, and it has consistently grown since then.

What’s the mission of the project?

To give life to these forgotten motels, long after their “no vacancy” sign has turned off for the last time. 

To archive how they looked, why people stayed there, their ultimate downfall, and redevelopment. 

To highlight changes in American regional tourism, architecture, and travel trends. 

To push for preservation, or continued use of the older motels we have left, especially those that are architecturally unique, or have historical significance.

To spark a sense of nostalgia.

What is your personal background with this sect of American history, and how did that lead you to such an obsession with old motels? 

I’ve wandered around a lot of abandoned motels, and I’ve vacationed at a lot of living motels. The only expertise I had was spending 25 years being a customer and an explorer of these places, prior to creating my website in 2018.

When researching, I have found that the topic itself is never-ending, and there is an infinite amount of information and photos about defunct motels. The book The Motel in America by Jefferson S. Rogers, John A. Jakle, and Keith A. Sculle states that in 1961, there were an estimated 60,951 motels in the U.S. By 1987, that number had dropped to 40,424. I’m sure it’s much less now. That’s a lot of dead motels, and I’ve taken it upon myself to find them (or what’s left of them) for my project.

What is it exactly about the aesthetic of old motels that you love so much?

Each one is so unique. Today, we have a handful of chains that all look the same, no matter where you are. They all share a gray, white, or beige color scheme, and have the same mass-produced furniture, signs, etc.

50 years ago, your local mom-and-pop motel wouldn’t dream of being ordinary, and actively tried to be the most unique, attractive lodging site in town. I love the well thought-out, creative aspects of vintage motels (signs, keys, etc.), and simultaneously dislike the generic chain motel/hotel properties of today.

What’s your process for curating the motels you feature?

I usually start with a postcard and attempt to locate it on Google Street View. Most of the time, I find a dirt lot or a new Walgreen’s built on its spot. If I’m lucky, I’ll find a motel, or the remnants of a motel, and can compare it to the postcard I have. I also use archives, like the Library of Congress online photo catalog.

Sometimes, I stumble upon a motel while driving around or traveling. These are my favorite finds because, more often than not, they are totally neglected and forgotten about, which makes them the most fun to research. You really have to dig into local libraries or historical societies to find out more.

Why do you think so many people today are still so captivated by old motels?

Aesthetics and nostalgia; longing for a happier time, or romanticizing a time we never knew. I feel this especially rings true now, as we’ve seen a motel revival happening throughout the country. Business is booming for motels that embrace the vintage look, like the Starlite in Kerhonkson, NY, or the Koolwink Motel in Romney, WV.

What have we lost, in a greater sense, with the loss of these old motels?

We’ve essentially traded unique, sometimes themed, mostly family-run, and affordable stays for commercialized, cookie-cutter lodging. I think the same story can be said for many industries in the US, but for tourism, we are rapidly losing what makes road trips and summer vacations memorable. Who honestly remembers their last stay at a modern Hampton Inn as a core travel moment?

Does it take an emotional toll on you at all to sort through all of these once-lively buildings that are now defunct? How does mining that material make you feel?

Yes and no. I’ve always had a strong emotional connection to certain buildings or places, and I do feel a sense of loss when a unique motel is demolished. But I also feel a sense of pride in being able to share so many of these locations with such a wide audience.

Do you have a favorite old motel that you’ve featured?

It’s hard to pinpoint just one, and my answer definitely changes from day to day. I do love so many of the old Poconos resorts. Back in the ’50s and ’60s, the Poconos were known for being a honeymoon destination, but many don’t realize that they had a huge variation of resorts that were trying to attract so many different types of people. The three most popular— Penn Hills, Pocono Gardens, and Mt. Airy— were couples resorts. Fernwood was for families. Unity House was a union-owned resort. Tamiment started as a socialist camp. Hillside Inn was Black-owned, and featured in Green Book.

ALL of these hotels are closed now. 

The whole area is fascinating to me, and I’ve spent a lot of time vacationing here, and exploring these long-forgotten places.

But something like India’s Sanchi Stupa— a temple from the 3rd century BC believed to house the ashes of Buddha— hits a little different compared to something built mere decades ago. The US was founded in the 1700s, so it’s a baby compared to some other countries, but people existed in North America as early as 20,000 years ago, long before colonial settlers arrived and claimed the land for their own. With that in mind, it sometimes feels like history has been swept under the rug in favor of shiny, new buildings that exude strength and greatness, but not much else.

So what can be done in the United States to ensure old architecture and new building developments honor the past and maintain a city’s character? If the population of America continues to grow (even at a slower rate than previous years), why shouldn’t its cities focus on uniform high-rises and condos? And when is it appropriate to demolish a building?

While these are all complex questions, the problem is not exclusive to the United States. Cities around the world struggle in their own ways with historic building preservation.

In Vietnam, concrete, glass, and steel structures are gradually replacing the iconic buildings that made Saigon “the Pearl of the Far East.” In the late ‘90s and early 2000s, Hanoi’s Old Quarter saw a drastic drop in French and European-style buildings. This was a symbolic gesture in the aftermath of Vietnam declaring independence from France in 1945, but while that history may be challenging to face, it is also a fact of their past.

For building preservation in the US, federal protection seems like an obvious solution. This can come from the National Register of Historic Places, but earning this status “places no restrictions on what a non-federal owner may do with their property up to and including destruction.” The designation protects the building from being demolished by a federal agency, but otherwise, anything is fair game. That means rules and regulations are established most often on a local basis, and these can vary widely based on resources and demand from city to city.

In Boston, for example, buildings (as well as memorials, monuments, and parks) can be designated as historically significant in one of two ways, either individually or as an area of the city. On the flip side, the historic river town of Cairo, Illinois, has seen a steady decrease in population, and the lack of demand makes it challenging to raise the kind of funds necessary to preserve abandoned buildings.

In Tennessee, Nashville History on Tour CEO David Ewing explained that the city’s individual buildings cannot be protected; instead, protected areas are designated in city blocks.

“There’s a quasi-judicial board called the Metro Historic Zoning Commission,” Ewing told me. “Those are appointed by the mayor and approved by our city council, and those people hear cases in one of these districts. These districts have to be introduced by the Metro Council, and usually they’ll only introduce a district if a majority of his constituents and property owners want it.”

These laws mean that owners give up property rights to ensure that buildings don’t get torn down, replaced, or redesigned into something more modern. Ewing also said that the district protection dictates the scale of the buildings, so a high-rise won’t pop up in a place where there were previously only shorter buildings.

“We had the NFL Draft three years ago,” he continued. “If you look online at pictures of the NFL Draft, there’s this district of three and four-story buildings, and there are 200,000 people in the streets, and people on the rooftops, and it just looks like a cool, fun entertainment district. We wouldn’t have had that if we didn’t have the overlay, because most of those buildings probably would have been torn down in the last five or six years, and tall, glass, modern buildings would have been put there. It just doesn’t have the same vibe, and the same feel of that.” Ewing admitted that, as a historian, he’s always looking at the past, and that the architecture of Nashville changes day by day.

This sense of ephemerality sadly rings true for the US as a whole, where many historic buildings have been threatened or demolished. During the Trump administration, Arizona’s UNESCO-honored Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument saw catastrophic damage from controlled blasting in order to build a border wall. In Washington, the landmark status of a 60-year-old school affiliated with the region’s Native American population wasn’t enough to stop Seattle Public Schools from demolishing it. Stories like this, along with the homogenization of modern cities, can make it feel like America wants a pass on the past in favor of a fresh, sanitized start.

The land that eventually became the United States has a deeper history beyond what began in 1776, and it’s not a particularly pretty one, born from colonization and oppressors claiming what they want as theirs. Since this past is a source of pain for many people, its preservation requires nuance, work, and careful consideration of what to keep or demolish. So what can that work look like?

Last year, a community in British Columbia pushed for the demolition of a building that housed a residential school, colonial institutions that aimed to strip indigenous children of their identity. Students were forbidden from speaking their native language, forced to conform to the culture of their oppressors, and often experienced assault and abuse. These schools started popping up in Canada in the 1880s, and the last one didn’t go out of service until the 1990s.

The community for the school in the Lower Post didn’t want this constant reminder of dark history, and locals fought for decades to have it taken down. “The residential school was a place of abject loneliness and unspeakable trauma for children forced apart from their families,” said B.C. Premier John Horgan. Residents got to determine what would be built in its place, such as a memorial, to go along with a newly constructed community center nearby. While the past can’t be undone, the people here can at least work towards a brighter future.

In this situation, the solution came from restoring power to the people, rather than a government prioritizing a bottom line with urban development goals. While federal government protection might be nice, the truth is that historic preservation in the United States is a relatively new concept. In an article for The Washington Post, Roger K. Lewis wrote, “Fifty years ago, few Americans talked or thought about ‘historic preservation,’ a term never heard when I studied architecture in the 1960s. Historic preservation was neither a public policy issue nor part of America’s architectural, planning and real estate development culture. Historic-preservation laws didn’t exist.” It might take a while for action to take place at the widespread rate it’s needed, but for now, protecting historic places happens more effectively on a local level.

Local politics doesn’t always offer a level playing field for folks, but communities can still make a difference outside of local elections, too (especially when armed with knowledge on how to be a preservationist). Ewing mentioned that one of the reasons Nashville’s famed Ryman Auditorium survived a bid for destruction was due to a group of like-minded people banding together. Individuals initiated that change, and as a result, the Ryman is one of the most well-known venues in the music industry. Every state has resources like community organizations, historical groups, developers passionate about preservation, and State Historic Preservation Officers that strengthen the protection of historic buildings.

Every individual place is inevitably different, but the people who live there should ultimately have a say in the design of a town or city, as well as what historic buildings should remain. After all, who better knows the history, character, and quirks of a place than the people who actually live there?

Header photo of Nashville, TN by David Ewing of Nashville History on Tour

But the one in the news these days is Donald Trump’s very own Obersalzberg, known as Mar-a-Lago.

Did you know that the current full-time residence of our demagogue-in-waiting is a private club, from which the Trump Corporation extracts tidy sums from its members and guests? Whatever! It also has a illustrious design history. Despite the former POTUS’ storied bad taste, the compound and its buildings were designed to exude elegance and celebrate the wealth of an age.

Many people have seen the occasional aerial photograph of the property, but how much do we know about the legacy of Mar-a-Lago? For inquiring minds, here is a short synopsis.

The lavish interior was designed by Marion Sims Wyeth, known for his range of Art Deco, Mediterranean Revival and classical Georgian, French and Colonial mansions. The exterior was created by the great Joseph Urban, a prolific and innovative Austrian-born Gilded Age illustrator, designer, architect, and one of the most significant set designers of the early 20th century. He was a member of the Wiener Werkstätte and sold furniture and textiles in its New York showroom. Not solely a master of ornament, it was Urban who designed New York City’s gem of modernity, the Tishman Auditorium at The New School (the venue for many an AIGA, Type Directors Club and Art Directors Club event). He designed buildings throughout the world, from Esterhazy Castle in Hungary to the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York. The New York Herald-Tribune wrote that Urban “did more than any other man to revolutionize the American sense of design … he had a feeling for color and material so original that they did much to remake the American stage, revitalize American architecture and contribute a new impetus to American industrial design.”

Who knew that the boor of design, D.J. Trump, would be blessed with such a palace of aesthetic beauty.

The ultra exclusive club, an adaptation of the Hispano-Moresque style, is situated in the heart of Palm Beach, fronting the most beautiful two acres of direct access private beach on the East Coast. It’s just not fair.

The property, which translates as “Sea to Lake,” (Sea by the Lake) is also hurricane-resistant, the structures are anchored by concrete and steel to a coral reef, and comprises approximately 20 acres of perfectly landscaped lawns. A National Historic Landmark, the former Marjorie Merriweather Post (once Mrs. E.F. Hutton) owned it before The Trump Organization. It also features six championship tennis courts, a full-size croquet court, a chip and putt golf course, a state-of-the-art fitness center, and the most coveted entertaining spaces: the elegant White and Gold Ballroom, and the ultra sumptuous Donald J. Trump Grand Ballroom.

Just about 40 years ago, architect Jeff Shelton was overcome by an unshakable urge to build a giant pencil. 

Shelton was a senior in the School of Architecture at the University of Arizona at the time, fast-approaching graduation and the great unknown outside of college. “I’ve had an obsession with the pencil my whole life,” he shared in a blog post on his website about the project. “As far as I’m concerned, all ideas seep from the tip of a pencil. In 1983, my pencil fever spiked, and a voice inside me said I HAD TO BUILD A GIANT PENCIL.”

Shocking to no one familiar with his character, Shelton did exactly that. Along with some architect buddies and his future wife, Karin, he constructed a 72-foot long replica of a No. 2 Ticonderoga pencil and then hung it up from the ceiling of the Centrum at the School of Architecture. “We put a lot of love into that,” he told me over the phone, four decades later. “My wife and I used our bed as the eraser— we folded it up!” 

The Giant Pencil is emblematic of the audacious architect Shelton would become. “I just get obsessed quickly, and do stuff without asking questions,” he said with a cheeky grin I could feel through the receiver. This attitude has served him well over the 30 or so years he’s worked in his hometown of Santa Barbara, California, where he’s designed 61 buildings.

Shelton grew up in the hills of Santa Barbara as the youngest of four boys in a family of artists. His dad was a jazz musician who played the piano and trumpet every day at home. “It was always an improvisation of something,” said Shelton. “I guess that sort of passes on. Whatever I do, it’s not unusual— it’s just what we do as a family. We all do something odd.”

Over the years, Santa Barbara has evolved from Shelton’s home into his architectural playground, as he’s never ventured too far for his work. “I’ve kept it local. Early on, I had two little kids, so I didn’t really want to leave, and I kept getting jobs right next to my office. There was really no reason not to stay here. I was fortunate,” he told me. He’s fully embraced the idiosyncrasies of the city, including the Spanish revival design requirements of downtown, put in place to honor its origins.

“The whole so-called ‘Spanish history’ here is interesting. First it was the Chumash that were here, then the Spanish took over, then the Mexicans took over, and then the Americans stole it. Everyone’s stolen from somebody,” explained Shelton. “A lot of architects here complain about the design requirements, and I say, ‘Well, you’re in the wrong town then.’ What bothers me about the way some people treat it is they try to copy some Spanish thing. They usually just beige it all out and turn it into this boring thing. I love Southern Spain, but what’s so great about those buildings is that they were built by hand. They were mainly built by non-architects; just by people putting up these villages. You can see everybody’s handiwork in every one of those buildings, and there’s tile and ironwork. So I take those elements and keep them alive. I don’t just copy something, I keep things going forward. We’re not Spain. That’s bullshit.” 

In addition to the influence of his creative home environment and the history of Santa Barbara, Shelton told me that the sensibilities of his free-spirited neighbors made a lasting impression on him as well. “I got turned on by the beatniks and hippies living right next to us who were building houses out of bottles, mud, adobe, and used materials,” he said. “That idea of creating a nest for your family was really inspiring.” This handmade, human element permeated Shelton’s personal aesthetic, and is infused within each and every detail of his many impressive projects. 

“My question is, why isn’t this exciting to everybody? Humans building nests; humans building homes,” Shelton said of his affinity for that handcrafted look and feel. “All my drawings are done with either ink or pencil, and that shows. It comes out of a human, onto the paper; it’s delicious. We strive to build it the way it ends up on paper, and it’s built by hand— it’s not a catalog building. People put their heart and soul into it, just as I do into the drawings and ideas.”

Preserving the human touch in his work is central to Shelton’s ethos as an architect. There’s an indelible warmth and playfulness imbued into his designs as a result, from every organic archway to each loopy staircase railing. “This architecture is a reflection of humanity,” he said. “We’re getting so animated and specialized that we forget there’s a human. I strive to make sure that in the shadows or the color, there is some sort of celebration of life. And it all comes from a pencil to me; that ends up reflecting the whole way through.”

Shelton understands that his philosophies are unique, and maybe even relics of the past, but that’s what makes his work all the more important. Modern architecture is too often crisp, eerily precise, and laser-cut. “Some people might say, ‘Come on, luddite, get with the system.’ Well, look at the buildings that are done without that thought process,” he said. “You can feel it— or you can’t feel it. It ends up destroying a town or a city. Things can be sharp and well-done modern, absolutely. They need to be seductive though. They need to be done in a grand way, to entice people and encourage people to live and celebrate life. I happen to be doing it this way, but there are many other ways of doing it.”

In a sea of cookie-cutter mediocrity, the refreshingly raw and whimsical quality of Shelton’s work has captivated many. ​​“People see stuff that I believe they’re starved for,” he explained. “I think that’s some of the reaction to my work. It’s like, ‘Wow, I’ve been starving for all of these years. Look at the crap architecture that I’ve been fed in these malls and this urban planning.’ There’s great stuff out there, don’t get me wrong, but in general a lot of crap gets put up that doesn’t care about your moment.” 

“I liken it to listening to an over-produced album, but then you go and hear the same person live, acoustic in a little coffee shop,” he continued. “My god, you can’t repeat that! That one moment, the crispness of it, the one take. So I call my work the acoustic version— let’s keep things acoustic here!”  

Another way Shelton is able to build such distinct, fully-realized worlds within his projects is by exclusively using his own creations for the other design elements in the spaces. “Everything you see, we design,” he told me. This includes original light fixtures, textiles, tiles, and even iron work that his brother David helps bring to life. “All that crazy stuff, that doesn’t get done without my brother,” said Shelton. “I would still have fun architecture, but it wouldn’t look like this if it weren’t for my brother, because I wouldn’t attempt certain things.”  

Tile design became one of Shelton’s many obsessions, thanks to his fascination with repeatable patterns, tessellations, and triangles. His tiles are asymmetrical, and designed so that each one can be laid out in any direction. “The patterns are alive,” he said. “If I gave you forty tiles, you would lay them differently than someone next door.”

True to form, Shelton is adamant on ensuring that the lines of his tile designs remain handmade, and not over-refined at any point in the production process. “Early on, when I started having my tile designs made for buildings, I would get phone calls from the manufacturer, asking me if it was okay to ‘straighten out and fix my patterns.’ I would tell them, ‘Whatever you do, do not fix anything. Make it like it is when I send it to you.’”  

In this way, Shelton harnesses complete control over every last detail of his projects, never compromising his vision by accepting a limitation. “I can sit here, and if I need a new design, I just sketch it up, send it out to our manufacturer, and tell them not to straighten the lines out,” he said. “It’s easier that way; I don’t have to go to stores.”  

Shelton offered me advice at the end of our conversation. “Don’t let inspiration go once you’ve got it,” he said. “You’ve gotta write it down fast, no matter where you are, or what the timing might be. You’ll catch up to everything else, but this idea might slip away if you don’t at least sketch it out and get it going.”

He is a graphic designer, filmmaker and archivist with a passion for the most exquisite artifacts of the past. And that’s a fact! At 86 years old, Schwartzman and his wife, Isolde, continue to circle the globe in search of monuments to the most alluring decorative styles.

From time to time, he will send me a book proposal. His latest, Miami Art Deco, is right up my street. I love my infrequent visits to the Deco capital of the East Coast, where I feel like I am on a permanent movie set of a futuristic city. It is unreal. But as these photos attest, reality is the key word.

Portentously, Schwartzman shows the currently maintained Deco facades along with vintage hand-tinted photographs of the structures. Portentously? Well, if climate change is not reversed, this book, as yet not scooped up by a publisher, will be the only record.

For now, however, enjoy the jewels of Miami Beach.

Recently, while deciding whether to hunker down in New York City or travel to Rome, I splayed out an old portfolio of de Chirico’s reproductions and imagined being transported into his surreal Roman landscape through an imaginary combination of Star Trek’s pre-VR holodeck and contemporary virtual reality tech. (If it can be accomplished for van Gogh, why not other artists too?) Instead of allowing VR to conjure his rationalist vistas, however, I surfed the web and stumbled by chance upon an Italian town that I had never heard of before: Tresigallo. It’s among the most fascinating examples of Italian rationalism—part urban utopia, part failed Fascist experiment. Built between 1927 and 1934, Tresigallo is a veritable tableau vivant of a de Chirico ideal metaphysical city. With 4,700 inhabitants in the province of Ferrara, the region of Emilia-Romagna, it boasts special design offerings from a (permanently) bygone epoch.

If you are a modern architecture lover, typographic signage spotter or a de Chirico connoisseur and you are blessed to be in Italy this summer, visit Tresigallo (you can thank me later).

I saw this firsthand last year when I visited Georgia, a country on the Black Sea with Russia to its north. As a traveler from the United States, it was easy to be fascinated by Soviet Architecture: a stark reminder of a time I didn’t have to live through, in a place I don’t reside. The people who live there have a more complicated relationship to these structures though. While certain buildings in these former Soviet Union countries may have architectural merit, and stand as a reminder of the past, others feel uncomfortably out of place. But what is that line between preservation of the past and perseverance towards a better future?

Soviet architecture refers to construction in the Russian-dominated USSR, which, at its height, controlled 15 republics. Generally, people recognize three main eras of Soviet architecture: avant-garde (from 1917, just before the USSR officially formed, to 1932), socialist realism or Stalinism (from 1932 to 1955), and late modernism (from 1955 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991).

While each era has its own unique elements brought on by various political shifts, Soviet architecture is often recognized by its harsh, brutalist style that liberally incorporates concrete and mosaics made from tiny pieces of tinted glass. Some are almost absurdly massive, while others look futuristic, or monolithic, but all of these buildings were built with a message in mind.

“Architecture can be a tool to direct people on how to live, to show them their importance, or completely disregard it,” said Ana Chighitashvili, an Architect at Tbilisi firm Khmaladze Architects. “In my opinion, it intentionally or unintentionally showed people the power that the state had over them.”

Chighitashvili admitted that she likes some of the architecture from this time period, and sees value in maintaining them. “If we take the famous building of the Ministry of Highways as an example of Soviet architecture, it is undoubtedly exceptional,” she continued. “The metro stations in post-Soviet countries are good examples of timeless and important architecture, and also the work of the famous Georgian architect Viktor Jorenadze is astonishing.”

While tourists will easily encounter these types of buildings on tours of the city, locals interact with Soviet architecture in much more personal locations: their homes. Many people in Tbilisi live in identical post-war apartment buildings (also called khrushchyovkas), many of which were built under communist chairman Nikita Khruschchev. “They wanted to build them quickly for a prompt solution,” Chighitashvili explained. “Today, even though they can be a little interesting because of their history, living in these buildings, especially in their original state, is not desirable. It shows people a power that the state had over them that, today, is not that relevant, but we’re still living in these buildings, so it still has an impact on us and how our community is shaped.”

Ia Gebrandze, a tour guide and tourism professional in the country of Georgia, lives in one of these apartment buildings with her family in Tbilisi. Her dwelling is 130 square meters, while the typical space usually measures to an average of 50-80 square meters. Her family, as well as the 64 others in her complex, have made the home their own, but the outside still appears basic and uninspiring.

“In regards to the Soviet period, they were trying to make the same standard of living for everyone; as simple as possible,” Gebrandze explained. “You’ll see it in all post-Soviet countries. And I honestly don’t think that people are really happy with the architectural style, or the standards of life from that period. And because of the ties to Russia, well, it’s a very unpleasant feeling. Or it’s also anger.”

Gebrandze explained that she and her family were refugees who arrived in Georgia because of Russian interference in the Caucasus region. When you take into account the 2008 invasion of Georgia, not to mention current events with Ukraine, it’s easy to understand why Eastern Europeans don’t exactly feel fond of their Russian neighbors.

But as Chighitashvili mentioned, some Soviet-era buildings are truly unique; if they were to be demolished, Georgia would not only lose a piece of history, but something of architectural value. Some should remain.

Some architects and designers are proving that it is possible to breathe new life into public structures without heavy interference. The firm Adjara Group partnered with MUA – Architecture & Placemaking to turn an old sewing factory into Fabrika Hostel, which has become a cultural hub and hangout for locals and visitors alike. Adjara Group also constructed the ultra-chic Stamba Hotel out of a Soviet-era print house that retains its original façade and incorporates salvaged printing equipment in the interior design. Tbilisi transport authorities recently initiated construction on an abandoned cable car, and the designer intends to refurbish the staircases inside, rather than destroy them completely.

But the question remains of what to do with the residential buildings. Concrete was commonly used to construct Soviet architecture, especially uniform housing structures. Nikita Krushschev actually used his first major speech after Stalin’s death as an opportunity to emphasize the benefits of concrete. The material didn’t cost much, its accompanying tools were readily available, and it was easy to prefabricate slabs of it, which meant even unskilled laborers could complete a given construction job.

But concrete ages poorly without proper upkeep, and it’s both incredibly challenging and costly to demolish. Funding issues aside, some residents like the renovations they’ve put into their space, and want to stay in the place where their family has lived for decades. Gebrandze said most buildings have at least five floors and up to sixteen, which raises the issue of where to house people waiting for apartment updates.

In 2014, the Georgian City Council announced a project to replace 800 Soviet-era apartment buildings, but Tea Tsulukiani, the country’s Justice Minister at the time, seemed skeptical of its merit. According to the Georgian media site Agenda, she said, “one of the hardest challenges for the ‘ambitious project’ would be to provide all residents of khrushchyovkas with new apartments.”

Tbilisi’s mayor, Kakha Kaladze, also announced a project that would gradually place residents in newer housing— with the keyword being “gradual.” While this sort of undertaking would certainly increase the quality of life for residents, it can’t happen overnight.

“I am sure that many of the owners who have those old apartments would prefer to have new ones, but it costs so much money to demolish it, and to bring the investors to build the new ones, that it seems impossible at the moment,” said Gebrandze. “I don’t know what the future will be like.”

For better and for worse, Soviet architecture is part of Georgia’s history. But while some buildings act as a testament to what a city or country has gone through, others represent an outdated way of life that somehow still affects people every day.

Chighitashvili reiterated that while some buildings should be preserved, others should be refurbished, transformed, or taken down entirely. Meanwhile, she hopes that the city can move on to build more new, modern buildings. “The aim of Tbilisi should be to move away from the Soviet Union as much as possible,” she said. “Going back to that, and having a sentimental approach towards it, would be devastating for this country.”

Check out photos for their process and finalized designs below.

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In 2022, we had the great pleasure to realize a course with Domestika around typographic identity and graphic systems. In this course, we created from scratch the visual identity of Contigo, a company that reconditions and fits out maritime containers to transform them into living spaces: bars, restaurants, reception areas, offices or even hotel rooms. We combine typographic design and advanced graphic design to offer an industrial client a rich and demanding visual system. This course, available in 6 languages, will take you through the history of Brand Brothers, our methodology, our inspirations, our way of working, all punctuated by many anecdotes.

Explore our case study, and visit our online course to find out more! https://www.domestika.org/fr/courses/3244-branding-innovant-creez-une-identite-visuelle-complete/brand_brothers

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En 2022, nous avons eu l’immense plaisir de réaliser un cours avec Domestika autour de l’identité visuelle typographique et des systèmes graphiques. Dans ce cours, nous avons créé de toutes pièces l’identité visuelle de Contigo, une entreprise qui reconditionne et aménage des conteneurs maritimes pour les transformer en des espaces de vie : bars, restaurants, lieux d’accueil, bureaux ou même chambres d’hôtels. Nous combinons ainsi design typographique et graphisme pointu pour offrir à un client industriel un système visuel riche et exigeant. Ce cours, disponible en 6 langues, vous plonge dans l’histoire de Brand Brothers, notre méthodologie, nos inspirations, notre manière de travailler, le tout ponctué de nombreuses anecdotes.

Explorez notre cas d’étude, et rendez-vous sur notre cours en ligne pour découvrir la suite !
https://www.domestika.org/fr/courses/3244-branding-innovant-creez-une-identite-visuelle-complete/brand_brothers

“The goal was to create a building form that would be instantly recognizable, creating an icon and using the highest digital and technological tools to develop a building that represents the future,” explained Shaun Killa, Design Partner at Killa Design, the firm behind the design and architecture. “The primary inspiration was to create a form that represents the UAE Prime Minister’s vision of the future where the physical building embodies floors with exhibitions that represent our understanding of the ‘future’ as we know it today, and possibly for the next few years. In contrast, the void represents the ‘unknown’ of the future, and people who seek the unknown, innovate, and discover new horizons and ideas that help guide humanity towards a better future.”

The project that became the Museum of the Future began near the end of 2014. Killa was invited, along with more than 20 other architectural firms from around the world, to participate in a competition to design the building. A few weeks into the competition, he still didn’t feel like he’d landed on a design that aligned with what the Prime Minister of Dubai envisioned. Once he had only three weeks before his proposal deadline, Shaun sat down and tried to picture something that had a more progressive feel to it.

“After many sketches late that evening, I drew the first sketch of the Museum of the Future, which described its landscape podium, the torus museum, the Arabic calligraphy, the museum section, as well as its planning,” Killa said. “The following morning, I sketched further details of the building for the 3D massing to evolve. After numerous reiterations and markups of the renderings, plans, and sections, the final boards were submitted to the Prime Minister’s office. After two months I received a call to present the Museum of the Future at the Prime Minister’s office, to his Excellency Gergawi and all the ministers, after which I was told that the design had won, and the following morning would be the initiation of the project.”

It took over a year to perfect the design alone, and the team worked to ensure the building process happened as efficiently as possible. As Killa Design worked, they fine tuned the algorithms to keep the interior and exterior relationship consistent with the floors, structural skin, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing. From concept to construction, Building Information Modeling played an integral role: they used BIM to create all drawings, Virtual Reality clash detection, and for on-site real-time building sequence and deflection tolerances.

“During early design phases, the team used complex 3D modeling software, such as Maya and Rhino,” Killa explained. “They used it to set the calligraphy onto the building’s surface, move each letter to adhere to the ancient rules of calligraphy, and avoid over one thousand steel diagrid nodes to ensure none were placed in the center of the windows. The project was tendered and awarded to the main contractor, who then took five years to build the project. We supervised the museum with particular focus on the steel diagrid system and the stainless-steel façade system.”

The installation process lasted more than a year and a half and stood out to Killa as one of the most challenging parts of creating the Museum of the Future. The exterior features over a thousand panels that cover 17,600 square meters, and high tech procedures were required to put them all together. They utilized aviation software construction technology and automated robotic arms that went through a sixteen-step process to produce the panels, with each one containing four separate layers. Thankfully, the precision has resulted in a truly striking structure that lines right up with the museum’s mission.

“Here, technology and creativity are in total harmony, giving us a glimpse of real and virtual worlds combining to create something entirely new,” Killa said. “The Museum of the Future has been one of the most stimulating projects I’ve designed, as it is a highly public cultural building, hyper unique in its form, and technically complex in its execution.”

For instance, the building’s exact number of panels pay homage to digital technology by referencing the kilobyte, a basic unit of storage for computers that consists of 1,024 bytes. Killa Design further emphasized the museum’s focus on technological innovation with a sustainable, structural surface powered with 4,000 megawatts of solar energy. Purposeful quotes on the future from His Highness Sheikh Mohammed add an especially compelling look to the exterior of this oblong, metallic structure.

Although the museum looks stunning, their focus isn’t solely on displaying beautiful artifacts in simple white spaces; instead, it intends to become a center for creativity and hope that combines exhibits, immersive theater, and interactive attractions. Its programming and events will answer the not-so-simple questions of what life will look like in the years, decades, and centuries to come, with a physical form that’s sure to inspire just as many possibilities.

Town Visuals is a 3D architecture studio that develops images, infographics and videos for real estate agencies, architects and investment funds, with special emphasis on the premium & luxury market.

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Town creates high-quality renderings with a great level of detail and reality for residential, commercial or business projects, being a key partner in the real estate sales process.

The studio, which has a consolidated portfolio of clients in Madrid and Malaga, and who have also developed projects in other regions of Spain, such as Galicia or the Balearic Islands, is one of the main premium 3D architecture studios nationwide.

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Town, whose practice started only a few years ago, came to fagerström to develop a new visual identity that would reflect the quality of their work and allow them to make the leap to larger and more challenging projects globally.

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The new brand highlights the studio’s ability to model reality and make us dream, building new imaginary worlds from scratch and making us visualize things long before they come into existence.

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The logo plays with perspective and spatial projection to link the brand with the company’s activity. The iconic letter T, formed by two non-intersecting strokes, seeks to generate a sensation of depth, creating volume from two dimensions.

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On the other hand, the wordmark uses a font whose strokes seem to be formed by folds, which gives the new brand a three-dimensional feel.

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SEE THE FUTURE.

As we observe Earth Day on the horizon, Ronald Lu & Partners (RLP), the award-winning architecture practice known for its future-ready designs, shares five ways that architects are reshaping the built environment to benefit both people and the planet in high-density, subtropical climates.  

From incorporating the natural world into urban spaces to developing sustainable water management strategies, these methods highlight how architectural practices can improve our relationship with the Earth.  

Biophilic design

Central to RLP’s philosophy, biophilic design is a concept that connects buildings to the natural environment through direct and indirect uses of nature. Now imperative for designing architecture in high-density urban areas, the benefits of biophilic design are numerous from cooling cities and reducing stormwater surges to particulate matter filtration, amongst many others.  

RLP’s new workplace concept, Treehouse, is an eco-conscious integrated system that aims to reconnect the sacred relationship between humanity and nature. It is a net-zero and wellness-focused workplace which features visual and spatial biophilic elements throughout, such as interior green walls and roofing, facades, water features and nature themed materials and furnishings. The space is airy and welcoming, with ample natural light and a soft sea breeze from the east coast, reigniting the affinity with nature.

Urban biodiversity

The need to rewild megacities, where biodiversity is in rapid decline, is critical. Since the pandemic, cities across the globe are beginning to recognise the importance of providing urban habitats that can support biodiversity and realign human interests with nature. Hong Kong’s Victoria Dockside is a remodelling development of the former New World Centre, designed as an ‘active hill’ of green terraces and extensive urban greenery. Greenery covers over 30% of the 11,500 sq. m. development, providing improved ventilation along surrounding roads.

Achieving carbon neutrality

To limit the devastating effects of climate change on the natural world, we need to do more to decarbonise our lifestyles, our cities and our atmosphere. A target of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050 has been agreed by over 130 countries, and it is essential that every country, city and company adopts net zero strategies to slow down the rate of global warming.  

RLP’s pioneering Zero Carbon Park (ZCP) was the first building in Hong Kong to produce zero carbon emissions – something which is notoriously difficult to achieve in a hot and humid climate while still ensuring the users are comfortable. Open to the public, ZCP is a visitor education centre and houses a green office for the Construction Industry Council, a demonstration home for low carbon living, a multi-function room, Hong Kong’s first urban native woodland, along with other outdoor landscaped / event spaces. It is to set a world-class example in Hong Kong for low-carbon, highly energy-efficient buildings, acting as a teaching tool and a living platform for sustainability.

Design for extreme temperatures

By 2050, the number of people affected by rising temperatures will skyrocket by 800% to 1.6 billion, and high-density cities will see extensive environmental, social and economic impacts. Today, higher temperatures means higher energy usage to cool buildings down. Hot weather damages curing concrete, decreasing its strength and durability, and higher humidity levels degrade and corrode equipment. This means architects must incorporate adaptation strategies into projects in the form of better building design, which include climate-responsive site planning and nature-based solutions such as natural ventilation and greening.  

Better urban ventilation can provide cooling through breezeways, air paths, non-building areas, and building porosity and setbacks; as well as alternative shading and cooling methods like canopies and water features like spray parks or splash pads. Greening also plays a considerable part in cooling cities – green roofs and walls create enhanced insulation that reduces energy loss and heat gain. Trees and other urban vegetation for example creates shading and cooling through evapotranspiration.

Sustainable water management 

Cities are increasingly being designed with urban water management strategies which mimic the natural processes of soil, known as sponge cities. This technique works to absorb rainwater surface runoff, which is then naturally filtered by the soil. Infiltration of the runoff allows aquifers to replenish and receive waterbodies to regenerate, eliminating sources of malodorous water and restoring natural habitats.

Vienna was the largest seat of power in the Austro-Hungarian empire, a joint region which dissolved just after World War I. Although the country only became independent in 1955, the capital city has long been an influential hub for creatives, thinkers, and dreamers. It’s the home of famed composers, psychoanalysis, art’s Vienna Secession movement, and incredible architecture.

While Vienna knows how to honor its past, you’ll find plenty of modern-day creatives making their mark as well. With that in mind, it’s easy to plan a trip that blends time-honored spaces with new, exciting culture.

What to Do

Vienna has over 100 museums, so you can find world class art tucked in every corner of the city. You’ll have your pick in the MuseumsQuartier, a hub of cultural institutions ranging from fine art to music, architecture to fashion, and theater to photography. The open space is dotted with places like the Leopold Museum and the Architekturzentrum. It also offers plenty of room to relax, hang out, and ponder which exhibit you’ll visit next. Not far from the MuseumsQuartier, you’ll find Albertina Modern, the city’s newest museum for modern and contemporary art. The building itself has been around since 1868, always as an institution for art. After the city restored the space to its neoclassical glory, it formally opened as a new museum in 2020.

Graphic designers and typeface enthusiasts should make a point to visit the Stadtschrift showroom. Since 2012, this archival space has collected letterforms, signage, and other historic signs of Vienna’s past. If you can’t visit the showroom, you may also encounter one of their wall shows while wandering the streets. Throughout the city, you’ll find building façades with a wide range of lettering, from thin, graceful scripts to thick, ‘70s-style signage.

Walk around the Vienna University of Economics and Business campus and you’ll encounter buildings by an impressive array of global designers. Here, you can spot the work of architects like Zaha Hadid and Hitoshi Abe, which makes it a perfect spot for architecture buffs. The structures’ bright, subdued colors, sharp angles, and gentle curves combine to create an energizing effect.

Don’t forget to put the Museum of Applied Arts, or MAK for short, on your radar. MAK has been in Austria since 1863, and was originally known as the Imperial Royal Austrian Museum of Art and Industry. This institution specializes in arts, crafts, and design, with a roster of exhibits that rotate throughout the year. A permanent exhibit, the MAK Design Lab, is unsurprisingly, a must for design lovers. It uses hundreds of objects to present a thoughtful look at how design has the power to shape our world, enhanced with the MAK Lab App. On your way out, make sure not to miss the well-curated gift shop.

You’ll encounter no shortage of boutiques and local handicraft stores in Vienna. You can purchase fine, locally-made ceramics at feinedinge*, a tableware and home accessory shop. They craft delicate, dainty pieces, with an emphasis on sustainability that includes using nearby suppliers and recycling unfired porcelain. Discover statement pieces you won’t find anywhere else at UNIKATESSEN concept store, featuring new and vintage fashion, furniture, and other unique pieces. You can enjoy relaxed wandering and window-shopping on Neubaugasse, a street in Vienna’s 7th district. This destination is ideal for anyone who’d prefer to avoid big-name stores and purchase local goods instead.

Eat and Drink

Viennese coffee house culture has been an “Intangible Cultural Heritage” since the 17th century, so no trip to the city is truly complete without experiencing it firsthand. If you try to imagine a coffee shop there, Café Sperl is likely just the spot you’re envisioning. This historic cafe from the late 1800s has a well-maintained, warm interior with mouth watering homemade cakes. Adlerhof has a stunning interior, and it’s a prime spot to see Thonet chairs in action. Michael Thonet created these icons of furniture design in 1859, and they have since become synonymous with coffee shop culture. Why view them in a museum when you can sit in one yourself?

Dining options abound in Vienna, and The LaLa stands out for its refreshing, healthy lunch options and insanely stylish space. The rosy, pink restaurant feels a little like a fever dream, and its sleek serif wordmark and meticulously tiled floors make it a chic dining destination. Even if you don’t stop in for a full meal, grab a smoothie to take on-the-go while you sightsee.

The Palmenhaus delivers with a creative menu and gorgeous physical space between Hofburg Palace and Burggarten. Here, you can dine amongst lush flora and bask in the natural light filtering through the windows. This 140-year-old structure has gone through a few iterations, and a recent multi-million dollar renovation made it the extravagant, statuesque spot it is today.

TIAN Bistro is the spot for vegetarian haute cuisine, with food that looks like a work of art. The comfortable seating area, wooden tables, and abundant nearby greenery will make you feel like you’ve just sat down on someone’s patio for a meal. The menu won’t steer you wrong, and the highly-recommend multi-course tasting menu provides an innovative take on fresh, local fare.

Vienna stays busy late into the night, so grab a drink at Barfly’s Club. This recently reopened bar is a local legend, and the decor will make your Great Gatsby dreams come true. This glamorous art deco spot is resplendent with leather seats, moody lighting, and green marble. With over 100 pages of cocktails, you’ll certainly want to go for a second round. The iconic Sacher hotel’s Blaue Bar is another spot to indulge in the glitz and glam of the city. The sophisticated spot invites you to enjoy impeccable service and divine decor, like brocade walls and sparkling chandeliers.

Where to Stay

At night, rest your head at Hotel Josefine in Vienna’s creative 6th district. The second you step inside, you will think you’ve just walked into a Wes Anderson film. It features a healthy dose of art deco and surrealist decor, a laid-back lobby, and lovely personal touches throughout the rooms. Enjoy downtime with a retro Roberts radio, or rest against a traditional headboard made from Viennese woven cane.

Check into Hotel Karasinski for a truly one-of-a-kind hotel experience. This tiny Superbude hotel only houses 2-3 people at a time, with unique design and decor by Laura Karasinski. The room features charismatic vintage furniture and personalized welcome note from the designer herself. This intimate experience is as close as you can get to staying in a local’s home, while still having all the benefits of a hotel.

If you want the marriage of luxury and a central location, consider the Park Hyatt Vienna. This century-old building used to be a bank, and the hotel manages to convert a once-stuffy financial space into sheer elegance. This spot is perfect for lounging on particularly exhausting travel days. Enjoy a glamorous day of downtime at the unique Arany Spa, tucked within the bank’s former vault.

We’ve heard about slow fashion and slow food as an opposite philosophy of today’s frenzy living rhythm. “Slow” attitude is about taking the time needed to create something genuinely well made. This is the mindset of Jade and Victor’s architecture studio. Innovative, perdurable, and meticulous spaces solutions thoughtfully conceived by a professional team that shares the passion for a slow way of life. We embraced and connected with their viewpoint to create their new identity, translating those values into visuals.

Project Credits
Photography: Salva López
Atipus Barcelona

A proficient landscape photographer can do wonders to convey the majesty of a well-constructed building. Thankfully, they often share their intimate understanding of a structure’s incredible details on social media. Today, I’ve listed five architectural photographers who skillfully capture the kind of beauty we often take for granted.

Nour El Refai | @nourelrefai

This Egyptian photographer has a knack for showcasing the peaceful stillness of a space. You’ll likely want to leap into the screen while looking through his luxurious, refined photos. Refai has been shooting professionally since 2005, and his client list includes big names like Western Union and Booking.com. You can also find his work in iconic publications like National Geographic and Architectural Digest.

Dario | @dario_trivino

If you’re a fan of splashy palettes and detailed line work, you’ll adore Dario’s photos. Their rhythmic look and vibrant colors might make you wonder if you’re looking at architecture at all. The striking geometry of Dario’s work adds a surreal, dazzling effect to scrolling through his feed.

Meghan Mathews | @meg_mathews_

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This Barcelona designer and photographer constructs deeply nostalgic images with stunning lighting. She often shoots during the golden hour, which adds an especially captivating feel to her scenes. A scroll through her feed reveals a keen eye for light, color, and composition that extends beyond her architectural photography.

Andrés Gallardo Albajar | @andresgallardo.photography

Albajar’s account reveals the whimsical details and romantic components that make captivating architecture. He has a talent for highlighting intricate designs in a way that feels approachable and digestible. This self-taught photographer has been featured in publications such as Architectural Digest, National Geographic, and Playboy, among many others.

Kim Høltermand | @holtermand

Høltermand’s expressive, moody photography prioritizes composition, space, and light. His love of sci-fi cinema shines through the otherworldly textures and almost bleak colors of his work. Høltermand is a master of framing potentially overwhelming design elements like stadium seating and making them feel effortlessly minimalistic.

But not all subways are created equal. The Soviet metro stations, by comparison, are showplaces—some are like palaces, as if designed for the Czars of old, but they were, oddly enough, created for the workers of the world. A new book documenting these breathtaking caverns is arguably the best photo book of the year, so far. CCCP Underground: Metro Stations of the Soviet Era by Frank Herfort (Braun Publishing/Benteli Verlags) is a gorgeous design, photography and architectural document of one of the great wonders of the pre-World War II industrial world.

As Senia Simarnova writes in her splendid introduction, “In his work, Frank Herfort for the first time presents not only the stations of the world-famous Moscow Metro, but also the underground structures of St. Petersburg, Kiev, Minsk, Baku, Kharkov, Dnipro, Volgograd, Kryvyi Rih, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk, Samara, Tashkent, Tbilisi, Yerevan as well as Budapest, Prague and Bucharest.” Herfort’s photos show he knows his way around these architectural marvels.

“Thanks to the sharpness of the author’s eyes, the viewer discovers details invisible to the average person, surrealistic combinations, and plots full of tragedy, guided by a red thread that connects the marble and bronze images of different cities with the utopian ideals of a collapsed empire,” Simarnova writes.

The Soviet system may be dead, but the Russian metro system stands as a monument to hopes and dreams of a workers’ paradise that failed to come true.

I should have been aware of him since I am a member of MoMA’s design and architecture acquisitions committee. My only excuse is that it was not presented under the the design or architecture banner. Whatever the jurisdiction, not to have known of Bodys Isek Kingelez is embarrassing, to say the least.

Kingelez is “one of the unsung visionary creators of the 20th century,” writes curator Sarah Suzuki of this native of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “Kingelez’s practice,” she continues, “though unquestionably appealing to curators, critics and art historians, has presented them a maddening challenge.” It is obvious on first glance to see why. “In collapsing the boundaries between sculpture, architecture and design, it eludes the categorization and classification on which institutional collections rely, and in its lack of known art historical precedents it evades the genealogy that we love to document and trace.”

One of the scholars who has studied Kingelez (1948–2015) recalls that on first seeing Kingelez’s work, he “was struck by its similarities to the architecture of Michael Graves.” He is totally Postmodern, which is interesting since he never ventured to another city besides Kinshasa and did not know what a city looked like.

He modeled his fantasies on the present and recent past, “and in the fabric of the city around him, inspired equally by colonial architecture, the ambitious buildings of post-independence Zaire, are idioms that typify national building styles.” His work—which uses the artifact/output of modern consumer culture, and points a way forward, aka Afro-Futuristic vision—explores if “new cooperative ways of living and working were possible, and the most mundane of materials could become technically precise, inventive and elegant objects.”

Of himself, Kingelez says a visionary is “someone who dreams of what doesn’t exist yet.” His work triggers many visions, and while the exhibit has come down, the catalog, from which these remarkable images are reproduced, is alive and available for the present.

Prefaced by architect Moshe Safdie, with commentary by Pulitzer Prize–winning architectural critic and educator Paul Goldberger, this compilation presents an impressively told and generously illustrated narrative of Gericke's output. I asked that he introduce the uninitiated to his solid body of design.

So much of your work relates to architecture. How would you describe your relationship to three-dimensional space?

As a graphic designer working in multiple dimensions, there is a thrill to spontaneously creating something in a few days that’s shot out instantly into the world, seen, and then gone. There’s also confidence and power in spending many months carefully shaping visual identities to distill big ideas into small yet hardworking icons and images that are spread far across popular culture through many mediums. Equally rewarding, maybe the most fulfilling, is working for years as a small member of large and complex teams to design lasting, sometimes essential, and hopefully memorable parts of places that will be with us for decades or more.

Graphic design in the dimensional world mandates different outcomes. What is your primary concern when designing for interiors and exteriors?

Unlike the more typically ephemeral realm of two-dimensional design, environmental graphics are embedded in the spaces they inhabit often for years, if not decades. Often complex and content-rich, these programs need to be carefully coordinated with architects, planners, designers, clients, institutions, public agencies, makers and implementers to convey the image and understanding of an experience.

From tall super-towers to massive transit hubs, from rowdy sports venues to high-tech campuses, from quiet retreats to immersive indoor and outdoor experiences, each must have a purpose-led graphic approach that has a unique dialogue with its environment and audience.

What do you consider your most important work in terms of its long-term impact?

My long and valued relationships with architects have enabled me to create the identity and environmental graphics for large urban-scale projects. Their ability to have a positive, populist and lasting impact is especially significant to me.

They include programs for the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site, with SOM’s One World Trade Center, the largest structure in North America; Moshe Safdie’s immersive Jewel in Singapore, with its indoor garden and massive waterfall; New York’s Hudson Yards, with Thomas Heaterwick’s wonderful Vessel climbing structure; and my hometown’s Titletown park that’s adjacent to the Green Bay Packers legendary Lambeau Field.

They have enabled me to contribute to public experiences, as they capture the understanding of a project’s unique context, the quality of its culture and the essence of its place.

Signs and wayfinding are certainly not ephemeral, but do you consider your work as having timely style(s)?

Many would say sometimes this type of work is a vehicle for a designer’s self-expression via a client’s assignment and need. I find the “expression” ultimately comes from deeply understanding the context, expanding the parameters, observing as much as you can, challenging the given constraints and asking a lot of questions. The style is a complete result of the unique attributes of the project.

What has been the most challenging project, and why?

Our work at the World Trade Center was challenging. It began in the days after the tragic events of September 11th, with the design of what became known as the Viewing Wall—a transparent structure, rich with content, to protect the site. The design process needed to be inclusive and designed to help people understand the work underway in Lower Manhattan, and remember. We needed to take into account the needs of the Port Authority, the concerns of the victims’ families, downtown business owners and residents, and the complex politics of rebuilding.

It continued for two decades, with programs that included the temporary Path Station, built in the active heart of Ground Zero, to restore transportation to Lower Manhattan. Then major projects for the permanent Path Transit Hub and the five new massive towers: One, Two, Three, Four and Seven World Trade Center. Each project required enormous teamwork, logistics and coordination. Every aspect was extremely rewarding.

How much of your concern is the sustainability of the work?

We consider and integrate sustainable and cultural practices as a core part of the design, rather than applied as an afterthought. These considerations can inspire ideas and become part of what is unique to a project. We're committed to creating engaging places that are sustainable, welcoming, easy to understand and have a positive impact on everyone’s social interactions within an experience.