Inside the Museum of Applied Arts in Brno, Czech Republic

Founded in 1873, the Museum of Applied Arts in Brno, Czech Republic, is among the world’s 10 oldest such institutions, although, as its director Jan Press acknowledges, “It took another decade before the building itself was constructed.” A handsome, three-story Renaissance Revival–style palazzo by architect Johann Georg von Schön, who was also the museum’s first director, the building’s interiors were lavishly decorated with frescoes, stucco, stained glass, and other quattrocento-inspired embellishments.

“From the start, it was clear the museum would expand,” Press continues, which it did almost immediately. “During a 14-month remodel in 1888, its total space doubled.” The building was largely reconstructed in 1945, repairing severe wartime bomb damage and making multiple additions and reconfigurations. In 1961, the museum merged with the Picture Gallery of the Moravian Museum to create the Moravian Gallery, a multisite art museum—the country’s second largest—that now comprises six separate structures including Von Schön’s palazzo and the bright-yellow house where Josef Hoffmann was born.

Architect Ivan Koleček Preserves Museum History Through Design

Between 2019 and 2021, Czech architect Ivan Koleček—principal of an eponymous practice based in Lausanne, Switzerland, specializing in the restoration and conservation of historical buildings—completed another major renovation of the museum. “The aim was to come as close to the original shape as possible,” Press says, “preserving historical motifs and restoring damaged decorative elements without resorting to the use of replicas. Koleček also utilized his own contemporary style, characterized by simple, minimalist forms, which creates an interesting contrast between the old and the new.”

A good example of these juxtapositions is found in the atrium flanking the main lobby. The architect created the three-story volume by removing the ground-floor ceiling, opening the space to the huge skylight above, and flooding the adjacent lobby with daylight via a colonnade of soaring archways—a classical architectural form rendered in Koleček’s signature pared-down aesthetic. Equally minimal, but completely contemporary, are several glossy-white catwalks that zigzag overhead, not only linking various galleries but also providing platforms for up-close viewing of site-specific installations suspended in the atrium. Clad in aluminum panels and supported on rolled-steel girders, the sleek footbridges evoke the dynamic power of bullet trains speeding toward the future.

Museum Standouts Include Catwalks and Cloud-Shaped Terrace Canopy

Designed by Prague’s Studio Olgoj Chorchoj, the catwalks are one of many attention-grabbing interventions—others include a robotic café, a cloud-shape terrace canopy, and a pair of massive floor-to-ceiling cases for displaying ceramics and glassware—commissioned from leading Czech firms. These individuated spaces, permanent installations, and bespoke structures reflect a reconceptualization of the renovated museum, now marketed under the rubric ART DESIGN FASHION. “We don’t focus exclusively on any one of them,” Press explains. “Our goal is that each is perceived not separately, restricted to itself, but rather as part of a triunity. Art can be found in design and be fashionable; design and fashion can be artistic.” It’s a multilayered, boundary-erasing approach in which the three disciplines are show­cased not only through exhibitions but also in the very look of the museum itself.

Arriving in the lobby, visitors are naturally drawn to the light and dynamism of the atrium glimpsed through its frame of monumental arches. There’s equivalent energy in another Studio Olgoj Chorchoj installation in which an icon of Czech aeronautical design—Karel Dlouhý’s L-13 Blaník glider from 1956—is suspended vertically next to the glass elevator. The sailplane remained in production for two decades and is still the most widely used glider in the world. Of course, Moravia and Bohemia are even better known for the fine glassware produced there since the 13th century. The museum, which has more than 11,000 pieces of glass and porcelain, commissioned designers Maxim Velčovský and Radek Wohlmuth along with edit! architects to create an open repository for the massive collection. The collaborators devised a system of stackable glass-and-steel display cases that spans two rooms—the glittering Light Depot, where walls, ceiling, and cabinet frames are stark white; and the moody Black Depot, with inky walls and obsidian metalwork—that offer dramatically contrasting experiences.

Graphics Chronicle Czech Product-Design History

The principal of Atelier Štěpán practices interactivity on a grander scale with The Cloud, a diaphanous multimedia canopy floating above the ground-floor terrace. Made of aluminum, steel, glass, and a galaxy of LEDs, the nebulalike installation glows, changes color, and emits sounds in reaction to stimuli from the immediate environment. “It also alludes to the surrealist works of painter Josef Šíma,” Press observes, referencing the artist’s use of clouds as a symbol of creativity, imagination, and communication—all qualities on prominent display throughout the dazzling museum.

Walk Through the Museum of Applied Arts in Brno, Czech Republic

studio olgoj chorchoj (catwalks): michal froněk; jan nemecek

mmcité (respirium): david karâsek; michael tomalik

edit! architects (depots): maxim velcōvskȳ: qubus design studio; radek wohlmuth

atelier štepán (café robot, cloud): marek jan štěpán

cave, 2000+ fashion: tomáš svoboda

Roberts Projects Expands its Footprint With New L.A. Gallery

Architects Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee have built an impressive portfolio of significant cultural projects, such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago renovation and the ground-up Menil Drawing Institute in Houston. All are pared-down and sculptural with a sensitivity to scale and an inclusion of natural elements. Their latest endeavor continues that through line while also incorporating adaptive reuse. Roberts Projects, a welcome addition to the gallery scene in Johnston Marklee’s hometown of Los Angeles, occupies a 1940’s, former car dealership in the Mid-Wilshire district. The second commission from the client, the new gallery is three times the footprint of the original Culver City location, encompassing three intimate exhibition areas plus a daylit central hall. The “largely symmetrical interior plan,” the firm notes, not only supports RP’s range of output but also its mission: to present a diverse program emphasizing museum-quality, installation-based exhibits by an international roster of emerging, mid-career, and established artists. A Kehinde Wiley exhibition inaugurated the space earlier this year; Evan Nesbit’s “/’sın.k.si̵s/” runs through July 8. Meanwhile, Johnston Marklee is at work renovating Roy Lichtenstein’s New York studio, a massive, former factory building, into the Whitney Museum’s permanent site for its independent study program.

Behind the Design of the Roberts Projects Gallery

Heather Chontos Showcases 12 New Paintings in Solo Show

10 Questions With… Maarten Baas

Dutch designer Maarten Baas and Hollywood may sound like an odd pairing at first but the City of Angels is indeed a fitting background for the creative’s whimsical furnishings and artworks. His new exhibition, “Play Time,” at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in Los Angeles taps into his signature notions of time captured through the raw emotionality of a child, as well as the weighty adult consciousness of its unstoppable flow. “Los Angeles for me is about Hollywood and film—a film is a reflection of a story in a virtual world which is exactly what I am trying to do, too,” Baas tells Interior Design.

Today, the 45-year-old designer works from a large warehouse in Den Bosch in the south of the Netherlands with a team of 10 employees, some of whom work at the office and others at the workshop. “I see there as my kindergarten, my playground, in which I can experiment with all the techniques and materials that I wish to,” he says about his studio life.

Designer Maarten Baas Talks “Play Time” and More

Interior Design: How do you approach the concept of play, which also coincides with a time of untamed self expression? 

Maarten Baas: I visualized myself as a child. Of course, everybody once was a child, so we can go back in our memories, but I didn’t want to do that in a rational way. I rather wanted to do so in a “how to stay energetic way,” just really feel the energy of how I was as a child. Maybe, this was a little similar to how an athlete would visualize their race. Before actually going for their Olympic medal, they visualize how they reach the finish line. In this sense, this visualization is a meditation on getting into the energy of a child. Then, I come in a gray zone between my own young self and the actual mature 44-year-old Maarten. The interesting part was getting into this verge between a child and an adult, the period when you get wiser. By growing up though, we lose a lot of potential and creativity. I instead wanted to have the best of both worlds and see if I can reach a level in which I’m still a child, but with the wisdom of an adult. It was a very interesting journey.

ID: Clay is commonly used in play. How do you view the material?

MB: My first work with clay was a series of furniture in 2006. I use industrial clay, so it’s not baked in an oven but it has a synthetic process. I wanted the clay works to look like the aesthetics of a child’s sculpture or a child’s drawing. The clumsiness and spontaneity make the work interesting, maybe give some Art Brut aesthetics, which I really appreciate. I combined the skills of an adult with the aesthetics of a child. I find the idea of making a shape with your hands and keeping that shape as the final object quite beautiful, rather than designing it in the computer.

ID: Your Smoke series perhaps was the first time you implemented this sense of playfulness into design and its processes. Could you talk about how Smoke assumed these notions as almost a subversive method of creation and how you have transformed this approach over the years?

MB: Smoke was my graduation work. I approached it in a way that maybe an adult wouldn’t approach. Burning something has a lot of symbolic meanings, an adult can interpret it as something negative or positive. For me, it’s exciting to burn something and create a new shape and a new layer; there is an adventure in what comes out of the process. Burning also has to do with the curiosity of a child because children don’t demolish something just for the sake of demolishing, but they do it out of curiosity: “hey, can I pull this apart, or, hey, can I burn this?” There is a genuine curiosity that drove me to burn those pieces.

ID: The forms at the new show carry a similarity with children’s drawings—they are liberated from adulthood’s obsession with precision and sharpness. Has it been a challenge for you to free yourself from adulthood burdens while turning the sketches into products?

MB: Yes, it has been a challenge. This is actually a challenge for everybody—life is designed in such a way that we start with a very beautiful world in which fantasy and everything else can live. And for the rest of our lives, we strive for that same freedom while we have a blueprint for how life should be lived. Trying to get back that freedom is a challenge for many people and it requires confidence. This “carrot dangling in front of us carries us forward.” I made this approach my profession to see if I can make a language for myself which translates the thoughts about where and how I free myself from rational thoughts, from criticism, from logics, from expectations. Yes, it’s challenging, but it’s also a nice way of working and living.

ID: Could you talk about your collaboration with children for this show? 

ID: Works like Grandfather Clock and Real Time The Artist strongly flirt with the space of sculpture. Do you have different approaches to works with utilitarian aspects than those that are solely artistic?

MB: I make functional works and autonomous artworks. Function is not always their main part. I think it’s fairly nice if the clocks are running synched with time because that adds a layer of magic—that dependence to 12 hours is a part of the work. If you really want to have a regular clock, you can buy one for 10 euros and you have your time, but it’s not about that. It is about the story that time can tell. Same goes with the clay furniture as well: the fact that you can actually use them is an added layer to the artistic value. I also make works which are not even supposed to be functional. I like to explore as many sides as possible, and function is not the most important one. However, I sometimes receive special requests for functionality in private commissions. Then I take function into account.

ID: Real Time The Artist is also about performance. What is the role of performance in your work?

MB: Performance is indeed an important element. Especially the work The Artist was made for the Venice Biennale in 2019. I am in that clock as an artist, paying. Artwork is evolving minute to minute whileI’m inside the clock. Artists always try to be ahead of time or to reflect the momentum of time. At least that’s how I have always approached my work. I try to be an ambassador of the time we’re living in and how we experience it. But we’re also always behind because time is always faster than us. So this man in the clock is me as an artist trying to capture time. I like telling stories through my work and performance is a very important part of it.

ID: How do you see the clock’s significance as a symbol of time but also for play as an authority of keeping track of time?

MB: The Real Time Series started with the idea that time is something very abstract. Time is everywhere, always there. We are occupied by it subconsciously, all the time we aware of the fact that time is running and we have a limited amount of time on this planet. We try to make the best out of it. Yet still, there’s a suggestion of measuring time or capturing time in a clock, and we have this agreement with each other that a minute is a minute and an hour is an hour. And that’s why we have the suggestion of an idea about a concrete concept of time, but it’s not concrete at all—every minute is a different experience. Every minute, there’s a unique happening with unique moments. And once that minute has passed, there is nothing of it anymore. I like to play with these ideas. All my works are telling a new story about this experience of time and what time means and the fact that time is a human made concept

ID: Brass holds traces of time. How does brass help you convey your statements?

MB: I’ve worked with brass and bronze which are, of course, very sculptural materials. I contrast this with the very naive way of working to turn them into a sculpture rather than furniture. I often develop my own techniques within these materials. Moreover, I liked the effects that I can do with it just aesthetically—it’s a beautiful material to work with.

Maarten Baas: Play Time is on view through May 26, 2023.

10 Questions With… Mia Karlova

Mia Karlova Talks Collectible Design

Interior Design: What is your mission with Mia Karlova Galerie?

Mia Karlova: We live in a moment of great attention to design. I try to use this attention to say something meaningful, to present designers who have an important story to tell rather than just a mere formal and aesthetic concept. It is always important to me that there’s a big story. This is probably what the gallery is known for.

Design is capable of creating a strong emotional connection, and this emotional aspect is essential. At the end of the day, you are spending quality time with yourself in your life, enjoying pieces that surround you not just because they’re comfortable and aesthetic, but also because they’re meaningful. We build our own story every day.

I also give stage to artists whose work articulates a certain ecological consciousness. It is a joint task for both galleries and interior designers to shape taste towards a more sustainable direction and communicate this urgent idea to collectors and clients.

ID: Where does your talent come from?

MK: I am based in Amsterdam and am proudly representing Dutch artists. I enjoy the proximity to Dutch Design Week, where galleries and curators from all over the world scout for design. However, I have a very international roster, with artists and designers from France, the Czech Republic, Japan, Latvia, Russia, South Africa, and Ukraine. I’m visiting not only design fairs, but also art fairs, studios, and graduation shows. There are a lot of them, say 300 events a year. You basically could just travel and do nothing else.

The most important for me in Europe are PAD Paris and Collectible in Brussels. Collectible, which we just finished our third year participating in, is very specific and dedicated to purely collectible design for the 21st century.

ID: Could you tell us about a few stand-out creatives you represent?

ID: Do you believe collectible design is experiencing a resurgence?

MK: Collectible design is definitely at a high point, and increasingly attracting attention from art collectors. You can see how this influences the fair market. For example, Collectible in Brussels is still young, but has already gained important momentum among collectors from all over the world. I’m also a big fan of the design showcase Alcova, held during Milan Design Week. They are doing great representation there.

In May, the gallery will take part in BAD+ Art Fair in Bordeaux, France. This new event, with strong links both to the art world and one of France’s most renowned wine regions, was from the start designed as an art de vivre fair embracing both modern and contemporary art and design.

ID: With collectible design, function sometimes seems less important. Where do you draw the line?

MK: It is true that in the world of collectible design some works are more functional, while others are more sculptural. I leave it to designers to decide what side they want to lean towards. I have pieces which are quite limited in functionality. For example, we have a wooden coat rack made from rose-tinted beechwood by Japanese designer Sho Ota. This object is functional in theory, but it is so sculptural that it disrupts the hierarchy of home objects, elevating a pure technical function to a true minimalist sculpture.

If I see the line developed by the designer, I don’t say no. Sometimes the same designer makes a capsule collection where some pieces are very visually functional, and others following the same idea and line tend to be barely functional, but still very beautiful.

ID: How do you think your childhood influenced your design thinking?

MK: I literally grew up visiting museums as it was a big part of my mother’s job as a gallerist and art historian. Our walls were full of art and our home was full of art conversations. As a teenager, I often worked on the gallery’s fair booths. This was incredible experience which I only became aware of when I opened my own gallery. This world was not unknown—and this is in part the reason why the gallery is positioned to include both art and design.

ID: Who in the industry that you particularly admire?

MK: South African artist William Kentridge. He’s known for using quite varied media, from prints and animated films to sculpture and tapestry.

ID: What are you reading?

MK: Ways of Curating by Hans Ulrich Obrist. I know this book so well, but I keep going back to it again and again as if to a mantra. It reshapes the role of curator, defining it as someone, who, despite having their own voice, is there to hear and let other voices be heard.

ID: In what kind of home do you live?

MK: I live in what could be called a designer’s house, meaning that designers fully express themselves when it comes to their own homes. My home is inspired by 1980s interiors, with vivid colors, large patterns, and expressive ceramics paired with great freedom of expression. This decade was a time of great freedom in life. My curtains, for example, are by Austrian designer Josef Frank. I also have a vintage faux-fur upholstered chair, produced in the 1970s in the Czech Republic.

ID: Do you have a secret you can share?

MK: Svenskt Tenn is a place not to miss when in Stockholm. It’s a shop with exceptional design and living philosophy located at the same address for nearly 100 years. Josef Frank has created many of their textile patterns.

Art Dealer Jacqueline Sullivan Hosts Her Gallery’s Inaugural Exhibition

Hot Shots: BC Designs Francis Gallery in Los Angeles

Inside Francis Gallery in Los Angeles

Objective Gallery Hosts a Solo Exhibition of Vincent Pocsik’s Work

“Watch the feet!” Vincent Pocsik warned the crew of some 10 people installing his 1-ton functional sculpture Cabinet Is Me. It arrived moments before his solo exhibition of the same name opened in October at Objective Gallery, a new Manhattan space cofounded by early thirtysomethings Chris Shao and Marc Jebara to showcase contemporary collections by emerging artists who push the boundaries of craftsmanship and innovative vision (think Charlotte Kingsnorth, Eny Lee Parker, Brecht Wright Gander).

Pocsik certainly fits that description: After he earned a master’s from SCI-Arc, he designed homes for five years to support the beginning stages of his Los Angeles studio, where his primary medium is wood—a material he believes “holds truths about the world”—that he carves by hand, CNC, and other digital fabrication methods into pieces that are often anatomical, at once beautiful and grotesque. The 14 works in the Objective exhi­bit have a domestic focus. “I think of each as an experiment in contemplating what is to be a human body in a home,” he says, thus the aforementioned feet on the cabinet and the Yard Playing table and the auricle-accented Ear Blooms sconces, all in black walnut. “When wood is in tree form, it’s collecting information about the world through its roots,” Pocsik says philoso­phically. “And since it’s a porous material, as it’s used in the home, it ends up collecting truths about you.”

A Destination-Worthy Addition to a Cape Verde Museum

At about $3 per piece, lids from the steel barrels in which many products are shipped to Cape Verde, an archipelago of 10 volcanic islands off West Africa, were the mother of invention for an addition to the National Center for Handcraft, Art and Design (CNAD). Scores of the multicolored lids, configured into a brise-soleil, populate three sides of the addition, which is in Mindelo, the largest town on the island of São Vicente. The adjustable screen blocks the tropical sun while admitting cooling ocean breezes inside.

More than a functional sunshade, the polka-dot carapace has become a national icon. It also displays, almost like a billboard, the ingenuity, cultural relevance, and ecological thrift regularly practiced by Ramos Castellano Arquitectos. “Everything that comes onto the island arrives in a container or a barrel,” co-principal Moreno Castellano says. “So we made the addition a container for culture, art, and craft by using a material that’s important for our country.”

A sustainable approach to the National Center for Handcraft, Art and Design

Working with local labor, Castellano and co-principal Eloisa Ramos produce homegrown designs that are no less sophisticated for often being built from recycled materials, even scrap. At the modest end of the architectural food chain, the firm punches way beyond its weight, achieving a grass-roots architecture of international stature remarkable for its authenticity, invention, and can-do spirit. Castellano, who is also an artist, professes to use architecture and art “as a social revolutionary tool.”

Trained in Portugal, where Ramos, a native of Mindelo, and Castellano, a native of Sardinia, met in architecture school, the young architects focus their design literacy on solutions as simple as cross ventilation. Their budgets for eco hotels and walk-up apartments built on in-fill urban lots are, characteristically, slim to meager. But they make the most out of the least as a matter of conviction, and practice financial ecology by avoiding a dependency on imported technologies and materials, preferring, for instance, not to order HVAC systems from Europe, which would rely on parts bought at punishing exchange rates.

Ramos Castellano Arquitectos draws inspiration from local materials 

The architects employed local workshops, most within walking or biking distance of their office, to sand, polish, and spray-paint the lids and fabricate the steel armature for the brise-soleil, which opens and closes like a louver. Speaking of their simple, “common sense” building strategies in an island culture, Ramos says, “Materials are our helpers. They allow us to do what we do where we practice.” What is considered “precious” is a matter of judgment, she continues, and lowly materials like the barrels are treasurable since they enabled a practical, affordable, visually effective solution transformed into a cultural symbol.

The CNAD commission involved remodeling and restoring a gracious, 5,000-square-foot colonial-era house located on a prominent square. For the addition, Ramos and Castellano conceived a narrow, five-story building that sits on the footprint of a demolished shed in the adjoining backyard lot. Comprising basement archives, two floors of tall galleries, a third-floor library, a workshop and artist’s residence on the fourth level, and offices on the top, the 11,500-square-foot structure is only one-room deep—a mere 22 feet wide, including the brise-soleil, down its entire 109-foot length. The architects recast the backyard as a patiolike public square linking the old and new buildings and functioning as the museum entry.

Transforming a Cape Verde museum into a cultural icon 

Could this little museum’s joyous architectural music prove to be Cape Verde’s siren song? “We wanted to achieve a Bilbao Effect,” Castellano acknowledges, “to demonstrate that even on this small island in the middle of the Atlantic, you can build things that spread around the world, to counter the feeling that only the most developed countries with the most developed economies can generate amazing architecture.” Francis Kéré did it with his Gando primary school in Burkina Faso, at the very heart of Africa; Ramos and Castellano’s CNAD addition may well do the same for this tiny nation some 400 miles off the great continent’s coast.

Ramos Castellano Arquitectos: zico lopes; bruno kenny; edoardo meneghin; marvin delgado; danil silva; marco dos anjos

los project: lighting consultant

ilidio alexandre: structural engineer

linea light: track lighting

sita: lid paint

Catch Lou Stovall’s Silkscreen Prints at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. This Summer

It has been said that Lou Stovall was responsible for turning silkscreening into an art form. Born in Athens, Georgia, in 1937, he moved to Washington to earn his BFA from Howard University and never left. That’s where, in 1968, he established his second claim to fame: Workshop, Inc., a collaboration studio for local creatives that grew into a professional printmaking facility ultimately called the Dupont Center used by the likes of Sam Gilliam and Robert Mangold. Stovall’s own art practice is also noteworthy, characterized by sophisticated silkscreen prints with lush palettes and allusions to nature and collaborations with such prominent artists as Jacob Lawrence and Lloyd McNeill. All these facets come together in “Lou Stovall: The Museum Workshop” on view this summer at the Phillips Collection. Guest curated by his son Will, the show’s more than 80 prints, paintings, sculptures, and photographs encompass work produced by artists at the workshop and collected by Stovall between 1969 and 1973, Stovall’s own silkscreens, plus his early community posters, which document DC in a time of protest and upheaval.