10 Questions With… Artist and Poet, Avery R. Young

This year’s edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB 5) centers on the theme “This is a Rehearsal,” curated by the Floating Museum, a local artist collective. Among the group’s principal members is Avery R. Young, who also happens to be Chicago’s inaugural poet laureate. Young played an integral role in choosing the title for the recent exhibition and his contribution to this particular edition is as much rooted in shared narrative as it is personal interpretation and response, implementing the backdrop of the vast Midwestern city as a stage for endless possibilities.

For CAB 5, the city plays host to a series of commissioned installations, recontextualized initiatives, and a robust program of performances that address the concepts of experimentation—practice as defined in theatrical terms—and trial and error, as a means of addressing challenges such as food production, water rights, land reclamation, revised histories, and even material processing. With this reasoning, architecture becomes a tool that allows us to test different solutions for grappling with today’s most pressing issues. Not everything needs to be presented as a finished result and is sometimes proposed as a step in an ongoing process, rough and open to feedback. Through instigations that play on recognized symbolisms and overlooked ubiquitous forms, we’re free to question the standards of what’s acceptable and what isn’t, and bypass the limitation of a fait accompli.

In a format true to his voice, Young spoke to Interior Design about his background and contribution to CAB 5, on view through mid-February in various locales throughout Chicago.

Avery R. Young Talks poetry, CAB 5, and More

Interior Design: How did you begin your interdisciplinary practice?

Avery R. Young: I began my performance poetry career in spoken word venues in Chicago. Most notably at Literary Explosion aka Lit-Ex @ Another Level Bookstore in Wicker Park. Performing poetry led to the opportunity to teach it, which led to the work of being a teaching artist for several organizations such as Urban Gateways, Columbia College Chicago [CCAP Office], Changing Worlds, and Young Chicago Authors. As a teaching artist with CCAP, I was introduced and partnered with artists from all types of disciplines and their respective genres, like Cecil McDonald, Tricia Patrick-Hershey, Sadira Muhammad, and my main man Guillermo Delgado. I am talking about dancers, actors, fiction writers, film makers, book makers, you name it. With literary spaces like Young Chicago Authors and Lit-Ex, my political and social awareness was informed and inspired.

In a space such as CCAP, I found myself learning a new art form, along with the students. But I pretty much stayed in the lane of writing and performance up until 2012 when I was an artist-in-residence at the Arts Incubator with Rebuild and UofC, where I began to explore all the materials I could use to craft a poem. I grew up Missionary Baptist, and I never really knew language, or poetry to be expressed / shared by page alone. The singing, the preaching, and the Holy Ghost are all materials used to tell a story about the divine amongst the wreckage. Church. The Black Baptist tradition of praise and performance is really the true foundation of my interdisciplinary practice. I invite anybody to a storefront on a Sunday afternoon when 2 or 3 are in the midst of touch and agreement. That organ and drum going ham. The hand claps. The foot stumps. The stained glass windows. The poetry. The choir robes. The shirt and tie. The hats and slips.  Being raised on all of that with the purpose of living a human experience to achieve spiritual atonement and reward. That is interdisciplinary at work, for sure.  And it really is the base of my art’s work. I don’t go to church. I bring church with me. My practice is to utilize my gifts and lessons to transform a space into a monument of work-ship and wonder.   

ID: What roles do spoken word, performance, and text-based visual art play in contemporary art?

ARY: What role does any of these forms play in any period of art. If you really want to know what went down in 535 B.C., 1722, or [in my Marvin Gaye n’em voice] 2093 … light years ahead, you will know from the poems. The spoken word, performance and visual text of those times are documentation of what people felt about what the world was putting them through. What they hated about it. What they loved about it. What they wasn’t too sure of. What they dreamed to be inside of it. The magic inside a human that aided them with the articulation of an experience they may not be able to explain and/or resolve, but they used language as the color to craft portraiture for the eyes, ears and heart. They created a sound monument. A living document of their imperfections and imaginations. 

You can look at the painting of the Mona Lisa, and say to yourself… “Ooooo and weeeeee, Leo did the damn thing!” But it’s the text and or a poem about her that keeps her from being just merely subject  It’s the language about who she was, and that moment came to be that lets us know who she was. She is then the art. Not just the fact she sat down in front of a genius, and he went to absolute work. The role of the spoken word, performance and text-based visual art is to say to us, “Yes! You may love the collage by Krista Franklin, but you gotta value her enough to compensate her right and on time. She eats, send flowers, laughs and cries, and all of these things go into whatever artifact came out of her hand. But her, y’all. Her be the art. She and a whole bunch of folk. Me, you all. I am the art.” Nothing else can say that louder than someone actually speaking and writing it down. Out! So it is written, let it be done.

ID: What is your philosophy in shaping the evolution of these disciplines as demarcations of culture? 

ARY: To quote a brilliant poet by the the name of Rudy Rae Moore in his role as the Disco Godfather, “Put your weight on it!” That is my philosophy of fixing, and/or maybe erasing the boundaries of this thing I do with poetry. Language can’t ever be merely a matter of ink and page. The page of a book is a representative of the sky in real time, and real life. The ink, or the poem is limb and love tumbling somersaults underneath it.I am using poetry, performance and visual text as a means to turn up the volume on that time in this life, when this happened and/or could, if we dream this way. I can’t do that on my tip toes or making myself feather. I gotta take this body and voice and spin it a solid foundation. Put my weight on it. I can growl or scrawl the hell outta preposition phrase. I promise.

ID: How does this thinking influence your position as an educator and mentor? 

ARY: The whole point of putting your weight on it is to let somebody know you’re in the building. You’re present. And your presence ain’t a half-assed one. It’s the dume-dada. I haven’t taught and or mentor as much as I have just been present and now share an experience with a student and/or mentee. Many times it was me teaching them the means to gain access to their language, but a lot of times its been a funeral. A baby shower. A wedding. Somebody’s mama birthday party. An album release. Their feature at an open mic. An opening to their art exhibit. Studio session. Brunch. I don’t understand making poems, but not making the time and space to be a stand in the gap for another human being.

ID: How did you help establish the Floating Museum? What is your role, if loosely defined, within the collective?

ARY: The Floating Museum was already established when I came on board. The foundation of the museum is Jeremiah and Faheem. The role then and the role now was for them to consider performance in a public art practice that is community centered. My work was asking them to consider all the materials needed to present performance and the language of the work, and I asked them to consider the idea of  working with community and IN communities.

ID: What was your particular involvement in selecting the theme of this edition of CAB5?

ARY: My role in the selection of the CAB 5’s theme was to be in support of Andrew’s naming of it. We have all taken turns with the names of the monuments, exhibits and programs. That’s the wealth of multiple director’s as opposed to one. We know each other’s wheelhouse.  All of the contributions were built on the conversations we had about design, and service, and how the Biennial occupies more of the city and instigate conversations about beautiful things all over the city. 

ID: What was your contribution in terms of selecting the exhibitors and participants; shaping the scope of commissioned projects?

ARY: We all divided the work up in looking at proposals, interviews, etc. I was a bit more involved with specific programming and contributions to the forthcoming catalog. (CAB 5 featured a number of performances that activated the various exhibition venues in different temporal ways).

ID: How do you view poetry/performance and monument making/ architecture in a conceptual sense as an extension of expressing and reflecting on public life in Chicago?

ARY: For me, as a person who makes work that is spoken and/or read, it’s important to understand to know the voice and the audience. It’s even more important to be inclusive of many voices and many different audiences. Other folk speak with the language of this question, others speak another thing. I am proud to say the CAB 5: This Is a Rehearsal is a polyglot space. The same way this city is. We miss the beauty of the city if we only see it segregated, as opposed to a collection of curated cultural milieu.

ID: How were you instrumental in determining the social and psychogeographic underpinnings of this year’s biennial?

ARY: I don’t know if I was significantly instrumental in that manner. What I do know is that inside of an architecture biennial, a poet, born and raised in this city, was a co-curator to a [an event] that up until me hadn’t had a poet nor Chicago native curate before. And then in the middle of it, I became the city’s inaugural Poet Laureate. I like to say I lent this biennial a chance to finally let a homegrown son help shape what it was going to say and hear.

However instrumental that could be, I know this work is a shared effort, it’s us leaning on each other’s expertise and then learning to consider details or concerns we do not have to confront in our respective fields. In these conversations that the Floating Museum have, we are constantly realizing that we have similar hallucinations.  We feel honored to work with a city that has such a rich and powerful cultural economy. 

ID: How did your expertise as a storyteller and as a deeply-rooted local come into play in this regard?

ARY: Inside these conversations I speak as a person who talks to the people and the people talk back to me. But that’s the case with all of the directors. People talk to Faheem, Jeremiah, and Andrew. Those people are Black, queer, rich, poor, artists, activists and a bunch of modifiers. So I have all this to say, I am uncomfortable with talking about how instrumental I am to anything, especially for an art exhibition that has traditionally had a certain type of constituency. Instead of being instrumental, I focus on being an instrument. I am an instrument that is known as a body. And if an architecture biennial can’t discuss and dream of ways space can be designed to include instruments of all shapes, sizes and voices, we don’t need it. Inside a choir, I learned the gift of staggered-breathing. That’s essentially people working to breathe together. This exhibition considers a bunch of different breathing instruments. I am honored to work with the team that agreed to make a breath spectacle.

10 Questions With… Robert Remer of Opiary

Founding principal of Brooklyn-based studio Opiary, Robert Remer, views design through a unique lens. His award-winning concrete planters, luminaires, and settees all stem from the easily uttered yet rarely fully investigated proposition of reconciling humans and nature. As he says, biophilia, or more aptly termed bio-awareness, constitutes much more than just bringing greenery inside. It’s also about crafting objects that invoke our planet’s most fundamental principles; facilitating this process of reconnection is as much an explicitly aesthetic task as it is an implicitly emotional one.

A team of skilled craftspeople help the trained architect and emphatic multi-disciplinarian realize a distilled yet diverse suite of products—the Drillium chaise and modular Spolia planter system among them—based on direct orders. It’s an artisanal business model that provides Remer with the time and space to also imagine custom indoor/outdoor installations for a wide range of customers. Whether developing a stem-like floor lamp or a carefully-oriented walking path, the designer looks to champion the essential transcendence of geometry, evolution, and materiality.

Robert Remer on the Importance of Bio-Awareness, and More

Interior Design: What led you to study architecture?

Robert Remer: I have always had a foot in two worlds. Though I was raised in the rural spaces surrounding the city, I’ve also somehow been based in New York City. Playing outside in the dirt and in the woods was hugely impactful on me as a child. I spent a lot of unstructured time experiencing nature. But I also spent time in Greenwich Village, so I got to see the cultural aspects of 1980s New York City life—everything from the music scene and the rapid changes in the built environment. I have always loved knowing both worlds and mixing one with the other. It’s what inspired me to study architecture.

ID: How did training with Alice Aycock at Yale University inspire you to eventually transition into material experimentation, sculpture, and product development?

RR: Alice had a subtle way of fostering the exploration and interrogation of form and meaning.  She introduced me to her cohort of 1960s and 70s-era artists and architects who were all incredibly influential in my development, notably Walter De Maria, Robert Smithson, and Donald Judd. Each of these talents transcended the traditional disciplinary definitions of art, architecture, craft, and design.

ID: When did you begin exploring the idea of biophilia? How do you define this term and how is this definition integral to your practice?

RR: It’s common sense today to say ‘people love nature and are attached to it’ but we do so from our place of extreme distance. As our spaces and lives become more technologically advanced and civilized, we are losing the perspective that innate force is both the source of life and its ultimate sink. It’s reduced to something pleasant we visit on the weekend. I do not think there is a way of getting away from this thinking without going back to a more natural state, which requires us to take in the dialectical quality of the relationship. This fundamental principle is what my work is all about.

Opiary is more than biophilia and attempts to be a bio-aware design company. We aim to make work that allows people to actually connect with nature. The unofficial motto is ‘no more dead objects.’ Our time poses new questions about this interaction, and it can be mapped out and experienced in the pieces my team and I develop. I have always incorporated nature in my projects, whether for sculpture or architecture, largely because of the demands it makes on the viewer or owner. It’s not just a frozen symbol but rather, a system in which there is constant curation and attention to singular moments and particular conditions.   

ID: What is the story behind the establishment of Opiary? 

RR: Opiary was founded in 2012 as a platform that could encompass the production and dissemination of the forms I was already creating. The term Opiary derives from the Latin opus arium or a “place for work.” It has a double meaning as my nickname growing up was Opie and it signified the place you can always find me. 

ID: How has the studio evolved to encompass both products and projects over time?

RR:  My team and I have always focused on making custom work. It started with sculpture and has since evolved to encompass furniture, lighting, and architectural finishes. We also provide clients with design services on how to incorporate a creative green layer in their projects.

ID: What is the significance of having set up shop and developed your career in Brooklyn?

RR: Move to New York City and it will change your life if you can figure out how to dance with the rhythm of the place, and do it as soon as possible because it only gets more difficult. I say this to every young person who has even the slightest inclination to try living here. That said, spending time outside of the city developing your vision is vital. Experiencing both the urban and the rural seems to be a theme in my life. I spent a lot of time in a 1918 uninsulated beach cottage—basically a wooden tent—in the Cape Cod dunes very close to nature as a counterpoint to my life in the city. Having both environments is critical to my creative thinking.

ID: How has your process of casting concrete and other material been refined over time, resulting in planters, furnishings, and custom installations?

RR: Concrete has been my chosen medium ever since I started working. It’s ubiquitous and easy to get your hands on as a young talent. I loved how it can be used anywhere, and as someone who has always been interested in breaking down the barriers between indoors and out, it’s perfect. Over the years the studio has expanded and refined how we use this material, giving us a wide spectrum of expressions. We can get super high-end finishes on pieces and also know they will stand up to the elements relatively well.

ID: Looking at your product range, how is the process behind the Drillium design different than the Spolia system?

RR: At Opiary we think in terms of form first and content second. For example, if we need a chair, it’s a form that holds a seated body. It needs to incorporate ergonomics and material science. And then there are some rules for how we design. For instance, materials need to be used essentially. If you can make the same form in wood or metal more easily, don’t make it in concrete.  Also avoid all superfluous details. When the form takes shape, let it be for a function, such as to form a vessel wall, in constant contact with that which it retains, whether that be soil for plants or upholstery for cushioning. The Drillium was specifically inspired by bird bones, aircraft construction, and 1970s steel racing bicycles. 

Spolia also starts with a form, a block for a wall, stackable rectilinear planter, and the same rules apply. Keep content essential, minimal, effortless, and provide room for free expression within the boundaries. It started almost as a game, eventually condensing into furniture and architecture. The name and concept for Spolia was inspired by the human habit of recycling architectural elements from past civilizations. Its name is the Latin root of our word “spoils” (of war). In everything, there’s always a place to experience nature.

ID: How much does experimentation and being able to scale your explorations factor into your day-to-day?

RR: Experimentation, close observation, and memorization are of course core disciplines of any practice and remain critical to that of my team and I as well.

ID: Could you take us through some of your most recent installation projects?

RR: We work closely with our clients to offer them highly customized, boutique pieces. Projects go through conceptualization, design development, production, and installation. We offer help to our clients at all stages, making the process as effortless as possible. For a modern residence in Greenwich [Connecticut] with a large roof terrace, we recently created a stroll garden meandering between different rooms. This space was formed by groupings of our planters, which also were adapted to grow on the walls like barnacles on the bottom of a ship, and a 40-foot Spolia wall that encloses a space with a fireplace, bench, and custom Spolia sideboards planted with a bamboo hedge. All of these elements were custom-designed and made in our studio for this space. It’s magical to see it all come together.

10 Questions With… John Sorensen-Jolink

After 10 years honing his skills as a professional dancer for some of the industry’s leading directors and choreographers—such as Robert Wilson and Twyla Tharp—John Sorensen-Jolink sought new ways to express his inherent understanding of the human body. Training as a woodworker, the New York-based multi-hyphenate realized furniture and lighting design offered the perfect next step to explore the principles of flow, balance, and shape he cultivated as a performer. Though one medium is more ephemeral in the immediate, both encompass the notion of process; refining skills and concept development through physical practices that ultimately manifest in a desired result, which led Sorensen-Jolink to establish his design studio Coil + Drift in 2016.

Carefully conceived chairs like the emphatically gestural Soren Chair and the corporeal Ren Table reflect a similar ambition to distill equilibrium, calmness, and effortlessness as that achieved in carefully calibrated movement. It all comes down to clear, pared-back intention. The dancer-turned-designer’s unparalleled approach is rooted in nature and order as well as exploration and intuition. It’s a practice that garnered him the ICFF Editors’ Award for Best New Designer and numerous other accolades.

Seeking out more space for introspective and reflection like so many of his contemporaries, Sorensen-Jolink began to transition from the hustle and bustle of urban life to the bucolic setting of rural upstate New York just before the Covid pandemic. The prolonged lockdown of early 2020 allowed him time to start imagining a life and career in a new context.

Recently, he opened a hybrid workshop/showroom in a converted Western Catskills garage. To inaugurate the new Jeffersonville, New York, locale this September, he launched the Loon lumaire collection. Comprising seven distinct pendant lamp concepts and one sconce, the collection harnesses rare materials like manganese bronze and gently-aged brass in geometric interpretation of natural forms, eggs and leaves among them. The simplified yet patented designs represent a transition in his aesthetic, one that is informed by the grittiness of the city and the serenity of the countryside in equal measure.

John Sorensen-Jolink Talks Design, Dance, and More

INTERIOR DESIGN: What prompted your move upstate and the re-establishment of your studio in a former car repair shop?

John Sorensen-Jolink: After 20 years in New York City, I hungered for a deeper connection to nature and was attracted to the idea of being part of a smaller community. I thought I would buy a weekend home in the Western Catskills, after renting a cabin there for years, but during the Covid lockdown I spent all my time in Sullivan County and realized that this community had so much going on. It was richer and fuller than I’d previously realized. The more time I spent here, the more I understood that the community might be well served by having new jobs that weren’t just tourism-based and with the cost of living being much lower than in New York City, I knew that my future employees would be able to live well and fully support themselves. Given all of this, I decided to move my studio to the Catskills and I haven’t looked back since. It’s been a wonderful move for me and the whole studio.

ID: In what ways have you programmed this space to operate as a workshop and showroom?

JSJ: The studio building is divided in half, with one part being the workshop and the other, a showroom and office. It’s separated by a wall with big sliding glass barn doors. We make all our lighting in-house now so it is not unusual to have someone sanding brass in the workshop while another person is leading a sales meeting in the showroom. The workshop has two big garage doors, which we always have open during the warmer months. Our showroom is by appointment but since it’s our studio, we’re always there. People occasionally drop by and we love welcoming and showing them around. 

ID: How has this new setting influenced the way you work and how you develop new collections?

JSJ: When we moved the studio upstate, we pulled production of our lighting entirely in-house.  Before, we worked with a local fabrication studio to make our fixtures. We now have much more control over each step of the process and have learned so much.  We have always had high quality standards but the level of craftsmanship, especially how our fixtures are engineered and how we create our finishes has grown by leaps and bounds since we’ve opened our upstate workshop. In terms of my creative process, as I design and develop new collections, everything has changed being upstate. I gave myself much longer to design Loon than ever before. We also took time to create prototypes and make changes to them and found time to play along the way. At the end of the process, it was hard to let it go and reveal it to the world but I knew the collection was ready and I think it’s the strongest work we’ve produced to date.

INTERIOR DESIGN: How does you dance background inform your design process? 

John Sorensen: When I first started experimenting with design, I used the language of dance and my understanding of movement to guide my practice because it’s what I knew.  Over time, I realized that this spatial awareness and specific dance vocabulary were shaping my designs in unusual and exciting ways. I observed that my work often changes shape as you move around it.  Experiencing the work in three dimensions—in real life—became valuable, especially in this digital age. I also think a lot about negative space in my designs, which is a concept often used in dance. Instead of just thinking about the physical form, I like to think about what is not there. The energy created when space is empty is often as important as the object itself.

ID: Take us through the inspiration and development of the new Loon collection.

JSJ:  I began the process thinking about planting seeds as a symbol of new beginnings. I have a wonderful book filled with detailed images of seeds called The Hidden Beauty of Seeds & Fruits: The Botanical Photography of Levon Biss, and I was deeply inspired by many of the seed shapes it documents.  After a period of sketching with pen and paper, I started drawing shapes in 3D using our modeling software. Eventually, I narrowed the shapes down to a handful, mostly because I was drawn to them for their form, or because I felt that they’d work beautifully as a functional light. Then we began prototyping, which took months and required purchasing and learning to use new machines (benders, cutters, etc.).  Finally we refined each piece and decided how they would be finished.

ID: How are these designs reflective of the environment in which you now operate?  

JSJ: The Loon collection is divided into two bodies of work: Ridge and Foundry. Ridge uses bent and soldered brass to create a repeated shape that is deeply inspired by leaves and birds. The form has a spine down the middle and is symmetrical. To me, it feels very close to the nature that surrounds the studio. Foundry takes its inspiration from trumpet flowers, which hummingbirds love. Both the bird and flower could be seen as delicate, but I think they’re also very strong, so I made the shades out of thick and heavy sand-cast bronze and iron. With Foundry, I was thinking about what is natural or wild. Changing the shape of metal with heat and pouring it into forms to make shapes help me play around with what is perceived as strong. I love the idea of referencing a delicate flower and a super fast little bird and making something very heavy.

ID: How are these new product ranges reflective of your preoccupations with form and materiality? 

JSJ: I am very interested in the art of creating patina finishes on metal. Our team has become very good at making hand-applied “living patinas,” which is a process of chemicals reacting to the material. The patination process happens quickly when you first wash the metal with chemicals but it keeps reacting very slowly over time because we do not cover the material with a lacquer, and instead only use a protective wax sealer. For Loon, I wanted to showcase what we could do with patina and add some new. We were able to develop exciting new finishes to our offering. Our verdigris patina is a great example of this, with lime greens and pinks layered over deeper browns and tans. We’re just beginning to explore but it already provides a taste of what’s possible.

ID: Why was it important to work with cast bronze magnesium, cast iron, Corten steel, and plated aluminum for this latest collection? 

JSJ: Manganese bronze and cast iron are not materials that are usually used in lighting but they lend themselves well to being sand cast. I was very drawn to the process of sand-casting because of the rough and rugged surface texture that comes with it, but also the weight of the cast material. Also, there is a local metal forge one hour from us that my friend and neighbor, the artist Lucy Pullin, collaborates with to cast her stunning leg sculptures and I was thrilled by the idea of working with them as well.

ID: How have the core principles of your practice been adapted to this new context?

JSJ: So many things have changed over the past two years but our core values have not. Instead we’ve used our values of honesty, order, exploration, gathering, intuition, and nature, which I’ve written about in detail on our site, to guide us as we develop our production workshop and create new work. Our values of staying close to, and honoring, the earth is a big reason we are located where we are now.

ID: What are you hoping to develop next?

JSJ: We’ve just begun the hiring process to bring on a third employee, who will join our fabrication and logistics department, so if anyone is curious about a life in the Catskills, please consider applying. We will spend a lot of time this year developing and honing new systems that will make our production more efficient. Our sales have grown dramatically this year, so we will also be adding a sales person to our team next spring. We have some very cool creative projects coming up this year that will allow people to experience Loon fixtures in person in new ways. Some will be through video and images, and in other cases, as part of hospitality experiments that are still under wraps. Let’s just say, I’m going to lean into my background in performance and dance to engage new audiences and introduce more and more people to Coil + Drift and everything we do.

Tadao Ando Puts His Spin on the Annual MPavilion Initiative in Melbourne

Self-taught Japanese architect Tadao Ando has long been a staple of the trade. His unique brand of “critical regionalism” centers on the empathic idea that by carefully rooting a pared back modernist structure in its surroundings, you can provide visitors with unparalleled spiritual experiences. Much of his concepts stem from Zen Buddhism, which had long influenced his home country’s culture and building practices. Since beginning his career in the mid 1970s, Ando has adhered to a core principle of the philosophy, expressing simplicity through inner contemplation rather than outward demonstration.

For the Pritzker Prize-winning architect, it is all about framing empty space, bringing in ample amounts of natural light, and celebrating the formations and scales of the site’s immediate natural features. This approach—as evident with such seminal projects as the 1979 Row House in Sumiyoshi and 1989 Church of the Light in Osaka—is often achieved on a proportionally monumental scale and through the use of incredibly smooth and pristine anchor formwork concrete. Ando is able to replicate the use of this ubiquitous material to exacting standards, regardless of where in the world he’s working as evident in his designs of innumerable museums, residential blocks, and office buildings.

One of his most recent endeavors takes form in a different typology: The conception of a temporary monument staged within Melbourne, Australia’s scenic Queen Victoria Gardens. Ando is the seventh world-renowned architect to do so. Staged each summer (November to March), MPavilion is realized by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation with the aim of fostering better engagement between the discipline and the wider public. The platform’s goal is to spotlight the contemporary zeitgeist of architecture to a local and national audience. Sister initiatives, like the annual Living Cities Forum, brings together leading voices and innovative practices from around the world to discuss timely topics such as displacement, cooperative housing, and the inclusion of indigenous expertise in architectural practice; an issue that is particularly relevant in the Australian context.

The Making of Tadao Ando’s MPavilion 10 Installation 

Over the past decade, everyone from Dutch firm OMA to India-based practice Studio Mumbai and Thai studio All(Zone) have realized their own civic structure designs; meeting the open yet clear criteria of offering their interpretations of the site and facilitating public interaction, and working within the constraints of the same 63.5 x 63.5 foot plot. The vastly different interpretive concepts have addressed everything from adaptability to the transformative use of local building materials.

The central structure plays host to hundreds of events—everything from movie screening to food installations and even Zumba classes—that directly stem, to some degree, from each architect’s central proposition. A slew of commissioned furnishings, textiles, garments, musical scores, texts, performances, and culinary experiences are developed by local creatives in a similar vein.

After a five month run, each Mpavillion is disassembled and relocated to specific sites through the city and the state of Victoria with the continued mandate of serving as goras. For example, Australian architect Glenn Murcutt’s 2019 design now serves as an outdoor classroom at The University of Melbourne. 

Given Ando’s understanding of site specificity and implicit nature of spatial interaction, it seemed fitting that he should develop MPavillion 10. “Ando’s architecture is remarkable because it radically affects the way we perceive the world around us,” said Naomi Milgrom, philanthropist, founder of her eponymously-named foundation, and commissioner of MPavilion. “Like Ando, I am passionate about architecture that promotes public life and encourages social interaction. It’s our 10th edition and so it felt right to bring him into the fold. His work is so influential but it’s never been seen in Australia before. It’s something very different.”

A Structure Designed to Exist at One With Its Environment

Ando worked closely with local superstar Sean Godsell—the architect behind the first “kinetic” MPavilion erected in 2014. “Unlike the past editions where the designs have been relatively open, including my own, Ando’s seems to be more closed off,” he said. “Enticing, seducing, and holding visitors, the structure prescribes a three step process of encounter. They arrive, contemplate, and then leave.”

Seemingly impenetrable for its exterior, the pavilion’s crystalline cast-concrete walls are pierced by precision-engineered 55 foot-long apertures that suggest the possibility of infiltration. Lined up on a direct axis from the entrance of the NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) museum across the road, an entry point emerges from the two-offset-squares layout. Inside, one is greeted by a 47 foot-wide column-pedestalled circular canopy, and a pool dividing half of the “interior” space. The shallow basin element mirrors the verdant greenery in its vicinity. It’s a reflection of natural and artificial light changes throughout the day. From strategic vantage points, the same windows frame other monuments in the park, as well as the cityline in the distance.

Though constructed as a singular sculptural statement piece—completed with a near-monochromatic palette of materials—MPavilion10 plays on the complexities of exteriority and interiority. “I imagined an open-air structure that became one with the environment irrespective of its propriety,” Ando says. “It’s a space that provides the same comfort of shade under a tree and the hardships of the rain blowing into our faces. It is a space that reminds us of what it means to live in our awesome world.”

How Ancient Geometry Creates Architectural Order

The architect references the ability of ancient Egyptians in using geometry to create architectural order and the role this branch of mathematics played as the foundation of Greek philosophy. “It is the expression of human reason and the pursuit of ethereal space,” he adds. “With the circle and square, emptiness is given form. The emptiness, in its silence, lets the light and wind enter and breathe life into the space. The emptiness provokes a chance encounter between individuals and engenders dialogues.” Though temporary, the design exudes a sense of timelessness.

For Ando, this spatial proposition materializes as a larger message about the discipline of architecture and placemaking itself. “In this modern age of computers and technology, architects and designers must rely on their instincts and the power of the human imagination,” Ando concludes. “With the development of artificial intelligence and machine learning, it is only a matter of time before the entire process of architecture is mechanized. However, while standard, copy-paste architecture will be able to be produced quickly with little human supervision, spaces that inspire hope with physical and emotional depth cannot be constructed so easily. These types of spaces cannot be rationalized or quantified because they facilitate connection between human beings. Consciously or unconsciously, people will always have a desire to gather in these [environments].”

This Design Duo’s Home/Office in New Delhi Exudes Warmth

Interior and furniture designers Brian DeMuro and Puru Das distinguish themselves by deftly translating age-old Indian craft techniques and iconographies in spaces and objects that reflect contemporary and modern aesthetics. It’s a central feature of their eponymously named DeMuro Das studio. For the business and life partners, it’s all about rooting their forward-thinking concepts in history and utilizing the best quality components. While their limited edition tables, chairs, and credenzas reflect a careful interplay of sumptuous materials, textures, and colors, their interiors are imagined with a level of restrained eclecticism. Though pared back and sophisticated in composition, the practice’s residential projects exude a level of warmth and personality. It’s an approach best exemplified in their own, recently completed, New Delhi apartment, complete with a home office.

Situated on the 3rd floor of a 1950s modernist villa in the Indian capital’s up-market Jor Bagh neighborhood, the 2,700-square-foot flat was gut renovated and meticulously re-designed as a calling card entertainment space and design studio. DeMuro and Das reside on the floor below. The duo devised a design scheme that would both reflect their background as former New Yorkers and respond to these surroundings.

“We wanted this space to both embody our brand but also act as a crucible for new design projects,” says Das. “The apartment, of course, houses a number of key pieces in our furniture collection but we also designed and produced all of the millwork, doors, and even some of the lights and hardware as a way to showcase the breadth of our capabilities.”

Leaving no stone unturned, the duo custom-developed door handles based on the post ends of 19th-century palanquins—a vehicle transporting mail or people and carried by two individuals on either side. The decorative, animal-head element was 3D scanned, scaled down, 3D printed and cast in solid bronze to create this element in multiples. “These small interior details communicate a lot of what we aim for in our practice,” Das adds, “linking technology and contemporary design with India’s tradition of craft and ornamentation.”

The duo chose to restore the apartment with oak chevron patterned flooring and similarly light-toned wood wall paneling to help filter-in an ample amount of natural light. The space—complete with a sprawling living room, dining area, and den—sits on top of the building and makes the most of large exposures on all four sides. On its north side, an oversized terrace gives way to verdant greenery below.

The majority of DeMuro Das’s intervention centered on reworking the internal layout to create large entertaining zones and adjoining design offices. To take advantage of the sweeping views, window lintels were raised while the old wood framed external openings were replaced by sleek bronze framed glass doors. Ceilings were left free of recessed lights and curve down to meet the wall paneling. This pared back setting serves as the perfect backdrop for the duo’s select offering of furnishings, also available in their NoMad, New York showroom. The popular Claire Chaise takes pride of place near a reeded howlite supported shelf, adorned with an eclectic array of objects and books.

New York’s Noguchi Museum Spotlights Filmmaker Marie Menken

Despite the commonly-held belief that influential creatives achieve genius through isolated practice, the reality is that most do so through collaboration and mutual critique. No artist is an island. This is especially true for interdisciplinarians like Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988). Foraying into almost every available medium, the era-defying polymath often worked with or alongside like-minded talents, pushing the boundaries of material and practice in equal measure. The groundbreaking concepts he put forward in terms of form, composition, and loosely defined function would have been nothing without the feedback or interpretation of his contemporaries. Leading experimental filmmaker Marie Menken was one such force.

A new showcase at The Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York looks to highlight Menken’s filmic translation of the sculptor’s explorations but also, her ultimate contribution to his ever-evolving practice. On view from September 27 to February 4, 2024, “A Glorious Bewilderment: Marie Menken’s ‘Visual Variations on Noguchi” will center on the continuous screening of Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945–46/1953), her inaugural film. The showcase also marks the 100th anniversary of the invention of the 16mm format.

Examining Marie Menken’s Impact in the Art World

Going on to greatly influence the likes of Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger, the filmmaker’s quintessential handheld and ambulatory approach was first articulated in this historically-significant project. In the impactful—albeit short—film, she sought to capture the mobility, shape, and viscerality of Noguchi’s seminal artworks, some of which will be on view as accompanying material within the exhibit, presented on the museum’s second floor.

Using a hand-cranked Bolex camera, Menken moved rapidly in and around these format-defying pieces—Remembrance (1943), E=MC2 (1945), among others—emulating Noguchi’s own belief that “sculptures move because we move.” The film is an emphatically personal yet honest portrait of these works and perhaps even an intimate look inside his venerated practice. This depiction would expose Noguchi to aspects of his output he might not have been aware of without the critical distance afforded by this lens. Noted composer Lucia Dlugoszewski created a score that was added to the film in 1953, which mirrors the captivating messiness, sporadic motion, and rhapsodic expression communicated in this unique portrayal.

“It is our pleasure to screen Menken’s film at [our institution] for the very first time and to illuminate the unexplored cross-connections between Menken, Noguchi, and Dlugoszewski,” says Kate Wiener, Noguchi Museum curator. It’s almost as if the film is making a long overdue homecoming. “While working in different mediums, all three artists sought poetry and revelation in fracture–and inspired us to salvage meaning from disorder. Menken’s daring 4-minute film is a document of this shared ambition, and an extraordinary cinematic experience in its own right.”

A Glimpse at The Noguchi Museum Showcase Ongoing Through February, 2024