This Meditative Art Installation is Meant to Aid Healing

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

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… Stephen Talasnik

Stephen Talasnik Shares His Latest Work

Interior Design: How did you first become interested in design?

Stephen Talasnik: I grew up in Philadelphia, surrounded by industrial sites: an oil refinery, the Navy shipyard. When I was eight or nine, I entered a competition sponsored by the Elmer’s glue company. Glue was a new product at the time, we’re talking the early 1960s. The project was to make something creative using Elmer’s glue. I had just visited Hershey Park that past summer, and I decided to build an entire roller coaster out of toothpicks. That was my foray into what could theoretically be sculpture. I went to RISD and got a degree in painting, then went to graduate school in Rome and taught myself to draw more intensively through copying traditional Italian Renaissance architecture and figurative sculpture.

Then I moved back to Philadelphia, curating and maintaining a studio practice and commuting to Japan, where I was teaching at a program at Temple University in Tokyo. While I was there, I would travel through Thailand, China, the Philippine, Malaysia, and Korea, and I learned how to build by hand using natural materials, learning the art of building through massless engineering. The most important component to pull out of that was a real passion for bamboo construction, specifically scaffolding, which reminded me of the roller coasters from when I was a kid. So I became very much fascinated with linear structures—not hard-edged linear structures, just gesture-aligned linear structures. It was engineering that got me interested in sculpture, but what I call fictional engineering.

ID: What do you mean by fictional engineering?

ST: Pioneer, a permanent piece I did in Tippet Rise, Montana, which is a timber frame structure, started out as a model. And the model was born from the assembly of various types of triangles. I was taught in a night school class at Cooper Union that the triangle was the most important geometric component in building, and if you could master the use of it, that’s all you need to know. So for the piece, I relied on single frames, similar in execution to a loaf of bread where each slice is a frame, and then you assemble these frames one at a time and then collectively group them. The ambition is to rely on intuition, and that comes out of drawing things over and over again. It’s fictional in that it is void of any reliance on mathematics. It’s just the reliance on the senses of touch, the tactility of the object. It’s a leap of faith, a belief in your own instincts and self-knowledge to create something which is large.

ID: That was the scale of the piece at Storm King, right?

ST: I was invited to participate in the 50th anniversary exhibition, which was my first opportunity to work large and to work out of doors—and also to work with bamboo. My idea was to create a massive glacier-like structure that was indicative of how a glacier might move. It was not about climate change, but about the power of ice as architecture. So I created a large-scale bamboo structure that relied on geometry and triangulation, and it took over the side of a hill and appeared to be wedged into the land. It was assembled with a group of young artisans and it survived for two years. A hurricane came through the Hudson Valley, the piece was covered in ice, there were wind storms, all kinds of adverse conditions, but it did survive.

ID: Do you enjoy these larger-scale projects?

ST: I’m still enthralled with the capacity of intimacy within a work of art, and the idea of how to take something small with the intimacy of a drawing and then make it large. Keeping it handmade, you are in the position to preserve some of the intimacy but monolithic. I don’t want the viewer to be intimidated. I like the idea of, when they get larger, to make them as transparent or translucent as possible. So I’m using materials that are still linear, that enable you to look through a piece and have access to how the piece is put together. I rarely put skins on pieces, although I’ve just recently started adding skins to some of the models.

ID: Why?

ST: In part, it relates to my interest in anatomy. Skin is reliant on bones to give form.  But I realized I could make infrastructure without having any idea as to what the actual sheathing would be, because it would depend upon the material that would be placed in such a manner that it would conform to the irregularities of the infrastructure. You would start stretching the material over the infrastructure and you would find a new form, without a preliminary idea as to what it’s going to look like. And that’s part of the beauty.

ID: What was the idea behind Floe?

ST: I wanted to create the equivalent of a fictional archeological museum devoted to the excavation of a part of Philadelphia. It’s composed of five different units, with the primary part being the creation of a glacier-like structure out of the materials I’m most familiar with. It’s 12 feet tall, and it occupies a space of about 400 square feet in footprint. Accompanying it is a sort of monolithic wall chart, a blueprint of sorts, which is a fictionalized drawing based on charts by cartographers examining the potential flow of icebergs. Ironically, the primary part of that drawing relates to an aerial drawing I did for the creation of the sculpture at Storm King, so there is a connection between the first large piece and very last large piece that I did.

ID: What else is in the show?

ST: There’s a collection of handmade debris, which is the result of a schooner crushed by an iceberg. And there are individual sections of what could be called glacial architecture, which is the idea of how a sculpture might look if it were designed by a computer—it has all the elements of linear structure, but it doesn’t have the skin of an actual iceberg. So there’s the mapping of ice movements, the digesting of this large-scale wood schooner by an iceberg and the crushing of it, and the debris field left out as as a result of the melting of the ice, and then an examination of how icebergs might be built. There’s no digital component, all done by hand by simple, intuitive movement.

ID: We often think of icebergs as agents of destruction, taking down boats, and their destruction by climate change is also a warning sign. What is interesting to you about them as architectural objects?

ST: We’re making something small-scale with the notion that they could potentially be large-scale. Taking something monolithic and putting it within grasp of your hand. And what’s important is you can see a sense of the hand building them. Even in buildings we see in the skyline, we don’t see the hand as part of it. We see the hand that’s part of the infrastructure, but there’s a skin put on it. So what I try to do is expose the possibility of what the infrastructure of an iceberg might look like, put into a language that is contemporary enough to relate to how we create mathematical systems now.

ID: What’s important about the framework of a fictional museum within the actual museum?

ST: The nature of a museum is to compel people to be restricted to a space and look at things they might not normally have the opportunity to. When you’re seeing something you experience out of doors—a tree or a boulder or a mountain—within the confines and intimacy of a room, there’s a different relationship between the object and the human experiencing it. When it’s out in the open, it’s for all to use. It plays a functional role. When you bring it into a museum, you’re denying its functional role.

Also, I’ve always loved museums that are grounded in science. I’m dealing primarily with natural information, and manipulating it, and this museum is large enough in scale to enable the objects I’m making to create a language that connects the viewer to the object. But underneath that, there is something perhaps that might be possibly optimistic, because optimism resides in the education and awareness. Whether we choose to do anything about it is a much broader issue, but it’s triggering the imagination and means different things to different generations. Do you want to bring your child in and say: Well, this is an iceberg, and icebergs used to be things that inhabited the world? A museum affords this almost irrational sense of time travel, because every object is imbued with a sense of connection to another time and place. We collect artifacts connected to humanity, we’re always living with this fascination that an object is a time traveler in and of itself. The context of a museum is important because it enables people of the present to go back, and it also enables them to project into a future.

ID: What’s in your future beyond this show?

ST: I have a show of 30 selected drawings at the Tayloe Piggott gallery in Jackson Hole, with the common theme of fictional engineering. They are all pencil drawings, made over a twenty-year period. And I’m working on a commission for the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., examining their mission and the architecture of its building, which is celebrating its 100th Anniversary. I’ve spent days at the building doing rubbings of all the low-level bas reliefs, which I’m going to use to create a large piece. My passion is building. A problem exists in that I see engineering, or at least the type of engineering I do, as gestural drawing. And fictional engineering is a way of translating the gestural line into a three-dimensional structure. It all came out of the experimentation of an eight-year-old playing with toothpicks to make roller coasters.

View a Towering Installation in Spain Made of Silk

Years of research into the structural potential of standard textiles transformed silk into a towering installation in Spain by Paloma Cañizares Office.

Textiles are Transformed in the Silk Pavilion Installation

Paloma Cañizares Office used AutoCAD to develop Silk Pavilion, a temporary installation unveiled last spring at the Concéntrico design festival in Logroño, Spain.

The pavilion was formed from over a hundred yards of black silk that’s typically used to make clothing.

The fabric was draped over pleated molds, and then coated with resin, stiffening it enough for it to become a self-supporting structural panel.

Architect Paloma Cañizares and her team oversaw the process at the fabric manufacturer’s studio in Madrid.

For additional support, the panels sandwiched a thin layer of fiberglass.

Behind the Creation of the Silk Pavilion Installation

• 10 architects and installers led by founder Paloma Cañizares
• 0.5mm fabric thickness
• 26 feet tall
• 328 linear feet of silk
• 12 panels

The exterior panels of the completed Silk Pavilion, which first appeared in the courtyard of Escuela Superior de Diseño de La Rioja during Concéntrico last April before traveling to Madrid’s Nuevos Ministerios gardens for 10 days, were painted gold.

Beyond a semi-sheer entry curtain, also silk, the 57-square-foot interior contained custom benches in lacquered steel, the same metal as the triangular structural pillars supporting the pavilion’s roof.

The color and pointed folds of each panel—repeated 12 times to form a dodecagon—were intended to evoke a bright star.

Natural light, its pattern and shadow cast on the interior shifting with the movement of the sun, filtered through the narrow gaps around the roof oculus, also resembling a star.

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].”

Inside Sketch’s ‘Crafted Wonder’ Installation at the London Design Festival

Sketch, the London dining and art destination founded by Mourad Mazouz, celebrated its 20th anniversary last year. Over the two decades, its spaces have been designed and redesigned by such luminaries as Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance, Yinka Shonibare, and Interior Design Hall of Famer India Mahdavi. Sketch also participates in the annual London Design Festival, creating temporary immersive installations. This year’s iteration, titled “Crafted Wonder,” transformed three rooms into boundary-pushing, international examples of the handmade. It began at the entry, where French rug maker La Manufacture Cogolin covered the floor and arches with a golden pattern derived from 1930’s gouache drawings by the late fashion illustrator Christian Bérard. The mode shifted to this century in the bar: Multi­dis­ci­pli­nary British artist Julian Carter forged what he calls a “three-dimensional line drawing” from steel rods. Finally, in the lounge, Czech glass manu­fac­turer Lasvit presented a special gold version of its Herbarium chandelier by Mária Čulenová Hostinova to complement the lush botanical setting.

Sustainability Spotlight: The Biennale Architettura in Venice

Earlier this year, Interior Design offered an inside look at the 18th Biennale Architettura, in Venice, Italy, rounding up eight must-see installations centered around architectural impact on power structures and social systems. But there’s even more to see. Take a look at these show-stopping pavilions, which spotlight environmental issues and show how designers are paving a more sustainable path forward.

12 Impactful Installations from the 18th Biennale Architettura

Rowland + Broughton

Redefining Beauty is an image of the dry Colorado River Delta by National Geographic photographer Peter McBride on reflective steel panels inside the site’s European Cultural Centre.

Olalekan Jeyifous

For the Nigeria pavilion, ACE/AAP imagines a multimedia departure lounge for a fictional transportation company, a prototypical transport hub for low-impact, zero-emission land, sea, and air travel.

Belgium

In Vivo, curated by Bento Architecture and University of Liège professor Vinciane Despret, presents alternative construction methods using living substances like raw earth and fungi in a contemplative setting.

Kingdom of Bahrain

Sweating Assets is an installation of micro-climates curated by architects Maryam Aljomairi and Latifa Alkhayat that suggests ecological reuse for condensation and examines past, present, and hypothetical future water use in the Kingdom.

Hood Design Studio

Examining the history of basket-making as it relates to a former plantation site in South Carolina, Sweet Grass Walk in the Carlo Scarpa Sculpture Garden features palmetto columns crafted from the same wood used for the mooring poles throughout Venice.

Serge Attukwei Clottey

Time and Chance is the Ghanaian artist’s patchwork tapestry of thousands of squares cut from plastic gallon containers, strung to­gether with wire, and suspended from the Gaggiandre shipyard.

Korea

At the heart of 2086: Together How?, curators Soik Jung and Kyong Park created a game show where audience participants make choices on questions of environmental crises as researched by architects and civic leaders from three small communities in South Korea.

MMA Design Studio

Origins, a video installation by the Johannesburg firm, depicts the hidden ruins of Kweneng, the precolonial capital of the Tswana people occupied from the 15th to 19th centuries.

Norman Foster Foundation and Holcim

Essential Homes Research Project, a prototype for displaced people, is a low-carbon, energy-efficient, semipermanent dwelling made of concrete sheets with a comfortable, light-filled interior.

Ireland

In Search of Hy-Brasil, curated by architects Peter Carroll, Peter Cody, Elizabeth Hatz, Mary Laheen, and Joseph Mackey, represents ecological fieldwork from the country’s remote islands, with local materials in innovative forms, like an abstraction made of sheep’s wool from Sceilg Mhichíl.

Lesley Lokko

The Ghanaian-Scottish architect, novelist, and curator of the Biennale Architettura 2023 created Loom for the entrance of the Central Pavilion. Although not a textile, the construction summarizes the whole show—themed the laboratory of the future—its dozens of crimson components alluding to the ensuing projects and the wire supports metaphorically weaving them altogether.

China

In Renewal: A Symbiotic Narrative, curated by architect Xing Ruan, 50 massive scrolls invite visitors to stroll through and contemplate cities of the future, be they modernist towers, traditional courtyards, a symbiosis of the two, or other possibilities—all with clean energy.

10 Questions With… Kim Mupangilaï

With teak carefully carved to anchor volcanic stone and woven banana fiber, Kim Mupangilaï’s corporal sculptures take on lives of their own. These functional artworks—limber armoires, amorphous tables, and puzzle-piece loungers—stem from the young designer’s personal exploration of cross-cultural identity. Each material is carefully chosen to reflect her Belgian upbringing and, perhaps more potently, offer an introspective quest to better understand her Congolese roots. On view as part of the young talent’s “Hue/ Am/ I – Hue/ I/ Am” solo show at New York gallery Superhouse Vtrine—running through August 19—the Kasaï capsule collection manifests as much from the up-and-comer’s attempt to code-switch and blend seemingly disparate symbolic elements as it does self expression. Both intellectual and creative impulses are successfully assuaged, and to captivating effect.

Kim Mupangilaï Talks Design, Cultural Narratives, and More 

Interior Design: What first brought you into contact with architecture and design?

Kim Mupangilaï: I grew up in a small Belgian town among cows, farmers, and fields. Once I graduated high school, I was dead set on studying interior architecture, but had to wait because I also had a passion for typography, books, and paper—tangible items from different eras—and so decided to pursue a degree in graphic design first. I’ve alway been drawn to vintage things with emphasis on ‘things;’ objects that have a story to tell. As a little girl, I spent hours rummaging through my grandparent’s attic finding old photos, clothing, vinyl records, and other little knick knacks. It was like a time capsule. These explorations set the tone and ever since, I’ve developed designs with a narrative approach. 

ID: How does your Congolese heritage and Belgian upbringing inform your work?

KM: From an early age, I was fascinated by African currency tools, musical instruments, and traditional hairstyles because of the variety of shapes, ornamental detail, and meanings they could represent. Some even had the look and feel of fine artwork. Exposure to this rich cultural offering came from my Congolese grandfather. My Belgian grandfather taught me the basics of woodworking: joinery, turning, and other handicraft techniques. This proved to be an important foundation for design school, where I honed my technical skills even further but also began learning theory.

ID: How do references to Belgian culture come into play?

KM: I never had nor have the intention to design in a certain style because the pieces I create have their own identity. However, over the past few months, multiple people have said that the pieces on view in the exhibition remind them of the Belgian Art Nouveau architecture. Ironically, this movement emerged during the Belgian colonization of the Congo. Because of that, I welcomed this association as it proved that viewers were indirectly deciphering the links to Africa I was intending to convey. Having been able to render materials like teak, stone, rattan, and banana fiber—symbolic of the Democratic Republic of Congo—in sinuous forms that evoke that style helped me drive this point home. While rattan is traditionally found in baskets, rugs, and textiles, banana fiber derives from leaves commonly used for cooking, serving, and preserving food.

ID: How does the cross pollination of different cultures inform your work?

KM: I think it’s imperative to be mindful of the cultural landscapes when designing or creating. This approach acts as the main differentiator from myself and what’s expected from other designers. I believe one cannot be inspired by certain communities, indigenous cultures, and their art without acknowledging the basic principle of extraction. It’s important to give back and credit those who might not benefit from your purpose within design.

The cross pollination of different cultures has piqued my young peers’ interest. I’ve had several students reach out to me for interviews and perspectives on culture, cultural appropriation, and so called vernacularity within architecture and design. Recently, I was asked to teach about similar topics at Parsons School of Design. These inquiries confirmed my suspicions that there’s, unfortunately, a lack of information out there on this matter. I strongly believe that there are much larger conversations to be had. This has fueled my aspiration even more to teach and be more vocal about these issues. The educational side of design has been a career path that has always intrigued me aside from the practice itself.

ID: What was the impetus for expressing this conceptual framework through furniture design?

KM: Growing up in a cross-cultural household yet western world, it became my natural instinct to blend in with my surroundings. This resulted in never fully understanding nor finding my identity. My Belgian roots and Congolese heritage became the yin-yang of a conceptual process. This helped me shape my work into a montage of opposites, translated into a perfect amalgamation of my deep appreciation for African artifacts and western design. 

Furniture is my tool of choice when it comes to artistic self expression. I’m able to share and shape my unique narrative with the intention of offering a feeling of community, new perspective, and insight with the hope to encourage fresh discourse and conversation. I often believe that so much more can be ‘said’ through art than articulated in words.

ID: What draws you to the more artistically-inclined collective design industry? 

KM: While there is no shortage of ‘personal’ explorations in the collective design industry, these works go beyond that approach and more deeply into the territory of self reflectivity, the ultimate contemplation of trying to merge two different cultures. The specific and personal narrative that embodies the work reflects a certain exclusivity—not in the luxury sense—but in that each piece is unique and unreplicable. Each piece is artistic in its own way, combining complex design with practicality even though they might appear to be that way. This playful duality reiterates the concept of ‘art/design is subjective’ and can be interpreted however the viewer sees fit.

ID: What’s next for you? What would be your dream project?

KM: I’m still in the exploratory phase of my career as an autonomous designer, but I am excited to continue pursuing new opportunities and evolve. I am currently working on new pieces that will hopefully come out at the beginning of 2024. Eventually, I’d love to be commissioned by a museum to develop a piece that sheds light on the concepts of cultural landscapes and appropriation. Another dream of mine would be to develop a work for a fashion house I admire. And of course, as mentioned before, I’d love to teach.

Kim Mupangilaï Crafts Furnishings that Reflect Her Heritage

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

10 Questions With… Ceramicist Ludmilla Balkis

Ludmilla Balkis’s sanded stoneware vessels made their New York debut in Guild Gallery’s recent solo exhibition for the French ceramicist, titled “Stasis.” Loosely constructed, like cloth deliriously flapping in the wind, the medium-scale sculptures contain mystery and process with their allusive yet energetic formations and textured surfaces that brim with traits of oxidization. Voluminous bodies throughout the show’s 26 pieces are not coincidental for Balkis who left a career in fashion behind for sculpting with clay. After working as a fashion designer for Céline in London with Phoebe Philo, she decided to pursue her interest in textures and forms through the promise of the pottery wheel. “The history of clay is so ancient—it made me aware of living in connection with the environment and human history,” Balkis tells Interior Design. “It gave me the opportunity to manifest the homogeneity between nature and human beings.”

Here, Balkis shares insights into her creative process as well as her works featured at Guild Gallery and those in “A Summer Arrangement: Object & Thing at Long House,” an exhibition in East Hampton, New York ongoing through September 3, 2023.

Interior Design: Folds are an important part your aesthetic. Could you talk about the resonance of folds?

Ludmilla Balkis: I’ve always been so attracted and intrigued by folds, ever since I discovered them in paintings from the Renaissance era through to the 18th century. The static compositions with these almost moving fabrics were really fascinating to me and was an ode to the virtuosity of the painter.

Isadora Duncan is a woman who really changed the perspective of wearing garments while dancing, representing a route to alternative practices that encouraged physical and personal freedom. That was a tipping point for me, where folds appropriate a deeper meaning and which could be imbued into the clay: freedom and movement. Two essential elements folds offer the sculpture.

ID: What is your relationship with clay? As a sculptor and someone who comes from fashion where sculpting is a crucial part of the process, how do you appropriate its softness?

LB: My relationship with clay while it is soft makes me want to create a relationship with space. Space as an emptiness is a notion we tend not to pay attention to, but clay allowed me to understand it in a very pragmatic way. Space became as physical as the clay when I started with this new material. In a manner of speaking, sculptors sculpt the space around them and dig in the empty space that finally becomes physical. I feel that everything is possible when the clay is soft, as long as I respect its drying time and mailability. It gives me multiple ways to expand the relationship with emptiness.

As a fashion designer, the body was always the central piece and of course the space around the body became a second protagonist before the fabric. In both instances the intention is the will to freedom, freedom of movement.

ID: In this direction, unlike fabrics, clay resonates with firmness. How was your process of adjusting to the irreversible and stubborn nature of clay once it dries?

LB: The relationship with clay had to become neutral at first and no comparison was to be made if I wanted to understand its process. So, I had to make many mistakes in the beginning and the biggest one was to be constantly trying to anticipate the outcome, but I quickly understood it was necessary to start understanding that clay was a way of interacting with the earth to which we will all return. It was a cathartic moment for me to understand I needed to be in contact with my inner self in order to manipulate the most primordial material and not fight with it, but dance around it with my hands. As a neophyte I was stubborn, but the clay quickly taught me to be humble and my approach developed into highlighting the natural roughness of the clay, to invoke this deeper meaning.

ID: Stoneware is the shared material in all pieces, but some sculptures also include iron stain, wood ash slip, iron oxide and other materials. This makes me think of painting, too. How was your approach to each sculpture as a blank canvas?

LB: I tend to let the clay guide the volumes and once the sculpture is finished, I go with my instinct and would either blow oxides on the dry piece and observe to see if it needs another layer of wood ash or any slip. Each clay has a different way of responding to a certain approach. But I generally focus on the spaces around the individual pieces and their mutual interaction which helps me think of an overall idea. My palette stays really simple and earthy as I like to obtain a result that makes the piece invisible in nature, as if it belongs to it.  I started to observe the shape of things in my everyday life as I moved closer to nature and by mimicking some shapes or textures. I would tend to dig into all the references I’ve accumulated over the years, like we all do as observers. In other words, I never feel that the canvas is blank. I feel like the canvas is actually full of references and one needs to be quiet the mind in order to allow the shape to guide.

ID: There is a desire to turn to natural materials and colors in industrial design and fashion today. Do you see a parallel between two sectors in terms of this desire?

LB: I believe the essence of our species now is to survive in a natural world that we have been severed from. This desire to use natural materials, I hope, is a universal one that might signify our desire to reconcile with nature, albeit subconsciously. To use natural materials is not something new but getting back at it is certainly a way to start this reconciliation process.

ID: The hollows render the sculptures somewhat biomorphic, giving them energy and character. Could you talk about your crafting each piece as figures with personalities in a way?

LB: The dialogue I install with each piece is very much induced with my meditative state. The meaning of biomorphic comes from combining the Greek words ‘bios’, meaning life, and ‘morphe’, meaning form. By giving life to an abstract form, my intention is to collaborate until its final shape and I tend to give each sculpture the importance it deserves. Attention to detail and using a certain tool will evoke a certain personality trait. Dancing around them while shaping them is a great way for me to allow the movement to take place; a piece will look like it’s been shaped by the wind. For each piece, I tend to work towards the same goal: demonstrating that humanity and nature are one.

ID: How did you reach the decision to quit the fashion industry to pursue object-making? Could you talk about the moment when you realized this shift is indeed possible?

LB: I realized I wanted to slow things down and take time to process my surroundings and felt the urge to be in sync with nature. My health got bad, and getting pregnant forced me to reconsider the fast-paced life I was living—a frenetic preoccupation that kept me from facing what was important to me at the time. So, this mindset led me to the desire to avoid making merely obsolete objects, but rather to get to the core of making things, creation.

Like a primordial instinct that kicked in, the process made me connect more profoundly to not only myself, but also our ancestors.

ID: How did moving to Basque Country influence your creativity? Do you think you’d be making the same work if you lived in Paris?

LB: That’s interesting as I started in London and moved back to Paris where my work continued to evolve. I must admit moving to the Basque Country allowed me to make bigger sculptures as I physically have more space to work. It’s also due to the image of grandiose nature that this place offers me every day. The mountains and rivers and the ocean are so wild and rough here. It’s atomizing yet it allows me to express myself on a deeper level. I don’t think I would have been able to create the same work in Paris as I feel more pressured there and also distracted by museums and galleries. Moving to the Basque Country and learning about a new culture that is so ancient and rich gave me other dimensions to explore, new ways of thinking and creating.