Table of contents for September/October 2018 in Dwell

Good design is not applied onto things. It is integral to their essence. It has context. One skill of architects is that they solve problems holistically. They think about the details, obsess over them, and then support a vision to manifest them. Architecture is, after all, a series of decisions. And the impact of those decisions can reach across generations. Take two homes featured in this issue, both from the 1950s and both in need of some work. The first, designed and doted over by beloved modernist Alexander Girard, who aspired to live up to the Japanese ideals of quality and harmony, has aged so gracefully over the years that its most recent restoration required neither an architect nor a general contractor (p. 96). The second, a burly cinder-block duplex…

What sparked the idea of RM-3? The idea of telling the backstory of materials came to me in response to the “Process” stories in Dwell, which tap into craft and materiality. I also like to cook, so the idea of “three ways” comes from that tradition. Do you have a favorite material? I am easily fascinated, so I have many favorites, but steel and I go way back. I love the fact that steel is basically processed dirt, and in time, it will go back to being dirt. But while it’s steel, it’s so proud and industrious. What was the first project you designed? One of the first projects that I led was a high-end barn in Weston, Missouri, in 1996, for one of my all-time favorite clients. The dialogue…

LOCATION London, England INSTAGRAM @modularbymensah Large abstract forms zigzag, curve, and tumble in captivating shades of ochre, ivory, and powder blue, like oversized building blocks, in Kusheda Mensah’s debut furniture collection. Mutual, released this year, is a 20-piece set of modular upholstered seating that invites playful experimentation and promotes interpersonal connection. This is what the Ghanian-British designer hopes all her work will inspire. “I want my pieces to encourage human relationships and socialization,” says Mensah, who is troubled by the rifts social media has caused in how we bond. Mensah, 27, holds a degree in surface design from University of the Arts, London, and works both independently and collaboratively from her studio in East London.…

LOCATION Eindhoven, Netherlands INSTAGRAM @p_a_p_i_x_ Growing up near Tel Aviv, Erez Nevi Pana, 35, spent his childhood learning about plants in his parents’ nursery. Further encouraged at Design Academy Eindhoven, he has centered his career on design that doesn’t use any materials derived from animals. Now he’s working on a line of vegan textiles—using plants and minerals—created by following the principles of Ahimsa, an Indian philosophy based on the premise of nonviolence toward all living beings. “In traditional silk manufacturing, silkworms are boiled alive inside of their cocoons,” says Nevi Pana. “In Ahimsa Silks, or ‘peace silk,’ we collect the cocoons after the moth has left.” Earlier this year, he was the recipient of PETA UK’s Vegan Homeware Innovation award.…

The Industrial Revolution heralded a new paradigm: “the World as Machine.” Material Ecology pioneer Neri Oxman proposes a model for the Digital Age: “the World as Organism.” This view aims to impart “a living quality” to the built environment, she explains. The resulting creations could be buildings made of a single surface material that can integrate multiple functions—“not unlike the human skin, which serves at once as both a barrier and a filter,” she says. But it is also the process of design that thrills and inspires the 42-year-old architect and artist, who studied medicine in Jerusalem and architecture in London before earning her PhD in design computation at MIT, where she heads the interdisciplinary Mediated Matter research group. “Design is bigger than ‘form follows function.’ It can lead to…

1947 The Ramseys’ house is completed; Wright designs the First Unitarian Society of Madison meeting house in Shorewood Hills‚ Wisconsin. 1949 Wright wins the Gold Medal from The American Institute of Architects. 1954 The Ramseys sell the house‚ with realtor A.C. Spencer using Wright’s name in a classified ad in The Oregonian. 1964 Five years after his death‚ Wright’s only known Oregon building‚ the Gordon House in Silverton‚ is finished; Margaretta Ramsey moves to Beverly Hills after her husband’s death‚ resuming her career in acting. 1967 Ramsey appears in the movie Riot on Sunset Strip‚ one of four films she acted in. 1972 The house is called a “Wright” design by realtor Peter Campbell in an Oregonian classified ad for an open house. 1975 Ramsey appears in the series finale…

“The window seats are like little pods off the living area. You can imagine sitting there and having a nap or reading a book while the kids build puzzles or play with Legos.”GREG SCOTT, ARCHITECT As co-creator of the Daddy Long Legs Art Hotel in Cape Town and the Elgin Valley’s Old Mac Daddy—where guests sleep in converted Airstream trailers—entrepreneur Jody Aufrichtig knows better than most that location is everything. And he knew just the spot for the vacation home he and his wife, Deirdre, envisioned for themselves and their four children: a west-facing site between a dam and an apple orchard not far from the Old Mac Daddy. The couple also knew just the architect for the job: Greg Scott, who had designed the hotel’s modern barnlike main structure.…

Francine Monaco liked spending weekends on Long Island’s North Fork so much that, in 2001, she decided to buy her own place there. Francine, an architect at D’Aquino Monaco in Manhattan, chose Greenport—then a sleepy fishing village, now a burgeoning resort town—because she wanted a place she could get to without a car. Good train service and walkable small-town streets made that possible. One of the first properties she looked at was a quaint cottage plopped right next to the village hall. Built in 1946, it “had a spirit and energy that was so positive that I felt sure it would work,” she says. The classic Cape Cod bungalow had some charming features, including a stone fireplace in the living room and a grass ceiling in the sunroom, and, at…

Of all my possessions, this 65-pound vise is the one I’ve had the longest. My mother gave it to me for my 10th birthday. I’ve always thought there was something comical about giving a small boy such a big vise, but she insists it was purely practical and that she thought I would need something sturdy for the woodworking I was doing. As a boy I used the vise in my basement workshop for making toys. As a teenager I used it to put together skateboards. When I started my design practice in 2006, the vise was there to help me make models of my first furniture pieces, including‚ later, the Olivares Aluminum chair for Knoll. I admire the vise’s red paint and the patina it has gained over…

LOCATION Beirut, Lebanon INSTAGRAM @1millimetre After studying at the AA School in London, Sara Jaafar, 32, went to work at Heatherwick Studio. “They were working on 27,000-square-foot projects,” she recalls. “It was a great experience, but I felt I had to move back to the scale that I really loved.” In 2014, she returned to Beirut, where she had lived after growing up in Nigeria, and founded 1millimetre studio (the name is a reference to her attention to detail). Following her first furniture line—which included the flat-pack, leather-and-copper-tubing Drape chair—Jaafar is now designing pod hotel rooms in north Lebanon. Her primary material? Terrazzo embedded with shards of glass gathered from nightclubs, in response to Beirut’s garbage crisis.…

LOCATION Helsinki, Finland INSTAGRAM @hannaanonen Since graduating in 2013 with a master’s from Aalto University in applied art and design, Hanna Anonen, 29, has worked with Arabia, Iittala, and Hakola, as well as with Helsinki Design Week. Her pieces entice with their playful simplicity and curious medley of colors, such as her Cocktail light, which was inspired by the swirling ingredients of mixed drinks. “I’m influenced by everyday life, observing and recording the accidental color combinations in my surroundings,” says Anonen. She was nominated for Nordic Designer of the Year by Formex, won gold among young creatives in Grafia’s Best of the Year contest, and holds additional degrees in industrial design and in carpentry and cabinetmaking.…

LOCATION Mexico City, Mexico INSTAGRAM @studiodavidpompa David Pompa, 32, started in lighting design in his mother’s native Austria but found his muse in his father’s homeland of Mexico. On a trip to Oaxaca following his studies at Kingston University in London, Pompa was introduced to barro negro, a clay that turns black when fired and has been used since pre-Columbian times. “We took that material, which has incredible texture and shine, and used it in a minimalist form,” says Pompa, who now works with more than 60 local artisans to fashion lights out of all sorts of traditional materials, from onyx to volcanic cantera rosa. Last year, his studio became the first Mexican brand to show at Euroluce in Milan.…

LOCATION Oakland, California INSTAGRAM @ume.studio Although UMÉ Studio is based in California, the story of its founders, Mei-Lan Tan, 28, and Victor Lefebvre, 32, is international in scope. “Mei-Lan has Indonesian and Chinese roots. I’m French and I studied and lived in Japan,” Victor says, adding that their lifestyles are still itinerant. “Oakland is the place where we stop and regroup.” The duo, who met while working in Basel for Herzog & de Meuron, established their practice in 2016. Since then, they’ve expanded their network of collaborators, producing sculptural soaps, concrete serving trays that look like giant buttons, and more. Now they are developing a line of silver cups with Indonesian artisans. “We spent time in Bali understanding the local crafts and the silver vessels they use to hold holy…

LOCATION Lisbon, Portugal INSTAGRAM @dozie.kanu When the group show “Midtown” opened at New York’s Lever House in 2017, one piece in particular caused a sensation: Bench on 84s, a concrete seat supported by polished metal car rims. Its creator, Dozie Kanu, 25, who grew up in Houston, had studied film production design at the School of Visual Arts, but became enamored of statement-making furniture. “I’m interested in taking things that are useful and making them functional in a different way,” says Kanu, who is focused on gallery-grade design. “It’s the reverse of what Duchamp did, which was taking something functional and making it purposeless.” He is presently at work on his biggest project yet, converting a warehouse outside Lisbon into his own live/work space.…

LOCATION London, England INSTAGRAM @yemiawosile A graduate of the Royal College of Art, textile designer Yemi Awosile, 34, isn’t interested in just the visual and functional qualities of fabrics, but also their potential for “sharing a narrative through material,” she says. That’s why she sends swatches of the new materials she develops—including cork-based wallcoverings and fabrics made of bark from East African fig trees that can be harvested without felling the tree—to material libraries where anyone can study them. Awosile has created projects for the Tate Modern, The Design Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum and is currently working on a permanent public art commission, which will be installed in London in 2022.…

When architect Kevan Hoertdoerfer was asked to turn “probably the ugliest house in Charleston” into the proverbial swan, he was both thrilled and apprehensive. “It’s a dream to have a client who gives you an open book,” he says of the instruction to do anything he wanted. “On the other hand, you’re compelled to do something really powerful.” The resulting metamorphosis of a squat 1950s cinder block duplex into a concrete and glass neighborhood standout leaves no trace of its ugly duckling origins. Located in Wagener Terrace, the building was chosen in part because it sits just outside the purview of the historic city’s stringent architectural review board. The owners, interior designer Karen Baldwin and her partner, share a passion for 1970s art and sought an unconventional space that evoked…

With its sleek linear form surrounded by massive vine maple trees, Sharen McLean and Mark Derraugh’s house on a quiet street in Vancouver feels like a faraway escape in the heart of the city. Yet until recently, the landscaping was “lackluster” and didn’t fall in line with the modernity of the house, says Sharen’s daughter, Andrea McLean, an architectural designer with her own practice who is working toward becoming registered. “The front yard was literally just a way to get from their cars to the front door,” she explains. “And the backyard was in such bad condition, they didn’t want the grandkids playing out there.” After spending the previous 15 years slowly renovating the home’s interiors, Andrea tackled the front yard in 2013, starting with a Western red cedar fence that…

LOCATION Seoul, South Korea INSTAGRAM @umzikim Maybe it’s not surprising that Jae Yang is skeptical of borders: His grandfather slipped south across the 38th Parallel during the Korean War, and he’s spent large parts of his life hopping from South Korea to British Columbia to Italy and back again. Yang, who studied aerospace and mechanical engineering at Seoul National University before interning at the Samsung Design Center in Milan, started his own studio in 2011 to erode the barriers between disciplines. “Realizing that there is no solid boundary between design and engineering, I founded UMZIKIM, meaning ‘a movement’ in Korean, to define how engineers can design,” he says. The studio’s output, including an eye-shaped steel mirror and a series of Impressionist-inspired acrylic vases created in conjunction with his other venture,…

LOCATION Pontiac, Michigan INSTAGRAM @aratani_fay Ayako Aratani, 34, and Evan Fay, 29, are studio partners determined to go their own ways. Aratani’s Roommate lamp, which has a cloud-like shade of bent wire, and Fay’s Lawless sofa, a rigid framework woven with foam ribbons, aren’t obvious companions. But when the designers met at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, they discovered they had similar interests despite stylistic differences: a desire to break from the rigors of industrial design, make things by hand, and celebrate incongruities. Since graduating in 2016, they’ve shared a Detroit-area studio and resources while maintaining individual authorship of their creations. “All production for our pieces is done by both of us, and we show together under the name Aratani Fay,” says Fay. “But our products are different.”…

LOCATION Karachi, Pakistan INSTAGRAM @j.salman Architect Salman Jawed, 32, founded Coalesce in 2008 with fellow graduates from the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. The multidisciplinary firm made a name for itself at Dubai Design Days in 2015 with its installation Daalaan, an “abstract courtyard inspired by our childhood games,” says Jawed. For the space, he contributed Lattoo, a rosewood stool in the shape of a spinning top that gained widespread praise. But their proudest project to date has been the creation of the first National Pavilion of Pakistan for the Venice Biennale, in 2018. Coalesce not only designed and built it; they also raised funds, since there was no support from the Pakistan government. “It was an amazing feeling to make history,” he says.…

LOCATION Brooklyn, New York INSTAGRAM @facture_studio Quincy Ellis, 31, had spent years fabricating art for talents such as Fernando Mastrangelo when he came to a realization: “I didn’t think there was enough being done with resin.” So Ellis, an industrial designer who studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, founded Facture Studio in 2015 along with Nebojsa “Shoba” Sheric, an artist from Sarajevo. Since then, he and his partner have been developing tables, shelves, and wall pieces with simple geometries that exploit multiple layers, saturations, and opacities of resin. “We’re still so intrigued by resin’s Popsicle properties,” says Ellis.…

LOCATION Milan, Italy INSTAGRAM @agustina.bottoni Argentinian designer Agustina Bottoni, 34, spent years working in fashion before shifting her focus to product design and settling in Italy. Since starting her practice in 2016, she has produced a diverse body of work—from a series of mobile-like kinetic vases to a collection of sculptures that incorporate brass wind chimes. “Sound is a feature that is mostly overlooked in design,” Bottoni says. “We are immersed in the digital world, so it is quite refreshing to have objects that we can experience through our less-used senses.” In an upcoming project, Bottoni is going back to her roots, combining fashion and design in a collection of elegant geometric tapestries.…

LOCATION Bergen, Norway INSTAGRAM @ceciliaxinyuzhang From her studio in Norway, Beijing-born Cecilia Xinyu Zhang, 32, conjures designs that hover, dance, and play weightlessly in space, creating delicate illusions that are surprisingly functional and impossible to ignore. One example is her wall hanger Frame for Northern. Its nested steel rectangles can rest flat against the wall or fan out to create a 3D hanging space. For Roche Bobois, she created the Discrete shelf. Due out this month, it features glass shelves held in aluminium frames that seem to float. “It is not about a statement piece. It is simply about offering the user a sense of depth and lightness through an ordinary, functional piece,” Zhang explains.…

Two short, quickly scribbled words nearly put an end to the Aplomb before the hanging lamp even reached the prototype stage: “Non fare.” Italian shorthand for, “It cannot be done.” That fateful sentence is scrawled across the bottom of a faded sheet of fax paper dated June 6, 2008, below an original drawing for the funnel-shaped pendant by Paolo Lucidi and Luca Pevere. The designers had approached master craftsman Giovanni Piccinelli about producing the design in concrete for Foscarini, a high-end Italian lighting firm. But upon seeing the specifications, Piccinelli demurred. Piccinelli, now 77, started working with concrete when he was seven, growing up in Valcamonica, a valley in the Italian Alps that he still calls home. In 1997, he started his own workshop, Crea Cemento, mostly working on large-scale…

In a family photo, everyone might share the same eyes or nose or smile, but you can immediately spot the one with an extra spark, the spirit of adventure. So too the Casablanca, Morocco, house of architect Mehdi Berrada. Though similar in size and shape to other area homes, it stands out while blending in. It’s an original. “It belongs, but it doesn’t. It isn’t a house that says, ‘Look at me,’” Mehdi says. “It’s a house that says, ‘I’m free.’” Mehdi was born in France to Moroccan parents and they moved to Casablanca when he was three. He grew up there in houses designed by his architect father, who created bright, white homes with pure lines that melded Le Corbusier’s International Style with local vernacular. Today Mehdi has his…

As the dynamic chief designer of Fisher & Paykel’s cooking and dishwashing division, Lauren Palmer is part of the team that helps to keep the New Zealand–based home appliance company at the forefront of kitchen design. Palmer has always maintained a strong interest in human-scale design. However, it is her personal passion for cooking and baking that serves as the catalyst for her process. “The thing that inspires me most is the life lived around the product, and how the customer will use it,” she says. “I like getting to understand how our customers live, shop, cook, and entertain.” A self-proclaimed people-watcher, Palmer observes how people interact with Fisher & Paykel products. “I feel that the tactile experience is just as important as the aesthetics of the design. The feel…

24 Bay Watch Cary Bernstein Architect cbstudio.com General contracting by Weitekamp Remodeling & Construction Inc. wremodeling.com Strandberg Engineering strandbergeng.com Civil engineering by ILS Associates Inc. ilscels.com Herzog Geotechnical herzog-geotechnical.com 24 Windows by Bonelli bonelli.com; sliding doors by Fleetwood fleetwoodusa.com; shelving system from Rakks rakks.com 25 Blue-gray tile by Heath Ceramics heathceramics.com; Brix Linen tile by Naoto Fukasawa, limited edition; CH07 chairs by Hans J. Wegner for Carl Hansen & Søn from Design Within Reach dwr.com; Spoke bed from CB2 cb2.com; mini cord lamp from Design House Stockholm designhousestockholm.com; rug by Candice Olson for Surya surya.com; Orange Sky paint by Benjamin Moore benjaminmoore.com 60 Charleston Coup Kevan Hoertdoerfer hoertdoerferarchitects.com Powell Engineering peofsc.com Interior design by Karen Baldwin karenbaldwin3@gmail.com Landscape design by Robert Maerlender designworksslc.com 62 Custom painted staircase by Tess Thomas…