Slovenian practice OFIS Architects takes us to the former suburbs of Ljubljana, where the curious Ring House finds shelter amid middle-class villas erected between the wars. The project revitalizes a 1930s modernist dwellingwith a light and floating pavilion that follows the cubic building’s original curvatures. While touring the house, one notices semicircular fringes and subtle detailing extending towards the garden, as well as a slanted roof that crowned the originally flat top following a 1980s intervention. In light of that, OFIS sought to restore the building’s original qualities. The first step involved omitting the added roof and introducing a smaller terrace that effortlessly completes the existing volume and features.
OFIS Architects weaves new and seamless connections
At the start of the renovation, OFIS Architects (see more here) attempted to resolve the challenge of connecting the Ring House to its existing garden, which occupies more than double the building footprint. Another challenge was the height difference between the ground floor and the garden, preventing a direct exit to the outdoors. In response, the design went much further than conventional solutions, creating a pillar loop as an extension of the living area and pavilion simultaneously. This intervention creates a cruciform corridor that partly encloses the garden into the inner ‘Zen’ atrium and connects the interior with an open garden on the southern part through a gradual descent. In doing so, the intervention overplays classic modernist themes, such as architectural promenade, ramp, transparency, and free-floor plan.
Meanwhile, a newly created circular path widens in two places, creating two different environments for residents of the Ring House by OFIS. A living area in the glazed part of the colonnade unfolds slightly above the floor, connecting old and new volumes. Just above the lawn sits the garden pavilion, which is already wholly open, limited only by columns and a curtain. The pavilion and the colonnade ultimately engage in a witty dialogue with the modernistic house, fostering the architectural languages of two periods into a coherent whole.
Commissioned to design a retail and exhibition space in a newly opened commercial centre in Hangzhou for JIA Garden, a brand specializing in hand-crafted objects, Chinese interior design practiceMountain Soildrew inspiration from the brand’s name approaching the projects as much from an interior design aspect as from a landscaping perspective. Don’t expect any greenery though; the designers have opted instead for a rugged, sparse landscape swathed in muted cream, grey and beige hues, punctured by concrete and stone.
The ascetic interior straddles artifice and nature thanks to a mix of natural and man-made materials. An organic design language of curved shapes and rounded volumes paired with the building’s exposed concrete skeleton further blurs the boundaries between the natural and the artificial. The result is a soothing, peaceful environment that nevertheless conveys a sense of wonder and discovery, elevating the mundane into the remarkable in reflection of the artisanship behind the clay and stone-crafted objects on display.
Life imitates art in the brilliant interiors for the Holboro House by Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary design firm Another Human. Helmed by principal Leah Ring, the studio’s distinct approach – and penchant for spaces saturated in pigment – helps homeowners unlock their potential for personal expression echoed through interior finishes and home furnishings. Ring’s recent solution for a couple’s 1990s postmodern home in Los Feliz, California, forgoes a full renovation of the 4,000-square-foot residence and instead relies on high-impact changes to specific areas that produce a significant architectural return on investment.
Guests get their first taste of Ring’s visual confections as they approach the hillside property. Predominantly gray and white, the existing facade hints at a playful interior with several updates including black slate tiles on the stairs, new sconces that lean into the structure’s geometric composition, and an accent front door in periwinkle blue – only hints of the fantasia that awaits beyond the threshold.
Bold but not brash, blue-stained hardwood floors pull visitors into a wonderland that unfurls through the main floor in the joint living and dining space past the entry. The home’s large proportions and boxy interior volume are then made digestible by a bright palette, soft line breaks, and cozy shapes in a concoction of contrasting hues for a saccharine high without the sugar rush.
“Working with color is so intuitive – sometimes I walk into a room and immediately sense what color I think it should be. I’m really a fan of cooler shades, so developing the living and dining room palettes of greens, blues, and purples was such a joy for me,” Ring says. “Form and color have to work hand in hand so that spaces feel balanced. The living room features a lot of curved forms, which gives the room a sort of airy, ethereal feeling which is what we were going for.“
Walls awash in green, somewhere between mint and pistachio, provide the backdrop for a variety of treatments that are as technical as they are whimsical. The Kvadrat Asami blue pleated sheers bring a physical softness and human scale to the room while a curvy, amorphic blue plaster fireplace is sculpted into the original fireplace footprint. Vintage elements are showcased including jewelry-like Murano sconces above the fireplace, postmodern chairs reupholstered in Kvadrat’s Atom bouclé fabric by Raf Simons, and an Eileen Grey Reproduction side table by Room and Board. The large curvaceous statement sofa and detached ottoman anchor the rooms while allowing for visitors to face the fireplace and engage with those in the dining room, which is ideal for the homeowner’s desire to entertain.
Green continues to saturate the walls through the dining room where guests can commune around a custom raspberry Waka Waka table with blue Bruno Rey chairs from Design Within Reach. Suspended above the collection of furnishings is a chandelier from Hem, and off to the side is a vintage console. Notably, the clients – who come from the colorful industries of entertainment and advertising – were active participants in the overall visual narrative. “I love when clients want to be involved in the process,” Ring adds. “They went to Waka Waka’s studio with me and selected the gorgeous raspberry color of the dining table. We always work closely with our clients and really listen to them.”
The sizable primary bedroom also receives star treatment in addition to the living spaces, but here the mood shifts from bright to muted. Tonal grays in contrast to the Radici purple carpet and a variety of minimalist touches lend themselves to a futuristic feel in a new exploration of the postmodern aesthetic.
Ring designed a custom velvet corduroy upholstered bed frame and a long bolster pillow using Sahco Saji fabric. A gray glass dresser is complemented by two matching nightstands that flank the bed and sit underneath chrome and metal sconces sourced from Lumens. The window treatments include two sets of curtains, sheers, and blackouts that add additional colored casts to the room when drawn. Particularly breathtaking is the floor-to-ceiling fireplace surround, a gray marble accented with purple veining, that gleams in place of the black granite that originally bordered it. And adjacent to that focal point is a custom bench in the same green upholstery used on the custom bolster pillow.
Steeped in aesthetic vision, each of the three spaces are spectacular pieces of eye candy due to the synergy between Leah Ring’s Another Human, general contractor Elliot Wall of Elliot Builders, and a pair of clients confident in their bold decision making. With three rooms complete, it is with high hopes that the homeowners return to Ring for another serving.
To explore the spaces and objects designed by Another Human visit AnotherHuman.la.
With professional degrees in architecture and journalism, Joseph has a desire to make living beautifully accessible. His work seeks to enrich the lives of others with visual communication and storytelling through design. Previously a regular contributor to titles under the SANDOW Design Group, including Luxe and Metropolis, Joseph now serves the Design Milk team as their Managing Editor. When not practicing, he teaches visual communication, theory, and design. The New York-based writer has also contributed to exhibitions hosted by the AIA New York’s Center for Architecture and Architectural Digest, and recently published essays and collage illustrations with Proseterity, a literary publication.
A bright red ribbon of metal buckles out of the ground in suburban Auckland, ramping up at a sharp angle before cranking over in a lopsided arc. It frames a big glass wall, folded in a diagonal crease, whose striped surface is covered in a riot of patterns, with abstract motifs of waves, fish and stars swirling together in a polychromatic frenzy.
This is Taumata o Kupe, a new Māori meeting house and education centre for the Mahurehure community, and one of the brightest beacons of Aotearoa New Zealand’s burgeoning contemporary Māori architecture scene.
“It’s quite hard to miss,” says Wayne Wharepapa Asher, an elder member of the community. He recently moved into an apartment in a new terrace next to the building, where the homes open on to a pedestrian mews and a shared deck faces a lush babbling brook. “It feels like a different world here now. It has given us a fabulous place to share our culture with visitors from all walks of life.”
The project is the work of Māori-led practice TOA Architects, who designed it as a dense microcosm of mātauranga, or traditional Māori knowledge. Just like the decorated meeting houses of the past (known as wharenui), whose wooden surfaces were carved and painted with the iconography of ancestral stories, this building’s form and decoration have been designed to tell the tribe’s founding legends.
Riotous Māori PoMo … inside the Taumata o Kupe. Photograph: David Straight
“This is our beautiful castle,” says tribe member Shannon Wilson. “It celebrates how our ancestors discovered this land.” He is standing inside the hall, having conducted a traditional pōwhiri ceremony of songs and speeches in te reo Māori (the Māori language), to welcome me on to the marae, the tribe’s sacred meeting grounds. It is a lofty space, where the window patterns cast swirling graphic shadows across the floor and walls, giving the impression of intricate Māori carvings. “The images tell the story of the great Kupe,” says Wilson, “one of the first Polynesian navigators to arrive in New Zealand. His wife gave our country the Māori name Aotearoa, meaning ‘long white cloud’, after seeing the clouds hovering above the island from their waka.”
The sails of the waka (or canoe) were the starting point for the building’s form, with the diagonal crease across the glass facade echoing the stays, while the faceted frame alludes to the shape of a rudder. Such nautical themes are frequently found in the region’s Indigenous architecture: Polynesian shelters were often made from upturned boats, raised on poles, while sails became floor mats and vice versa. This building brings the approach into the 21st century, sculpted with the aerodynamic styling of a modern racing yacht (fitting, given it received funding from the 2021 America’s Cup), and collaging historic references together in a kind of riotous Māori PoMo.
Inside, the spaces unfold as a cosmic diagram. The ground floor represents the terrestrial world, with space for 300 people to gather, while a raised mezzanine is associated with the celestial realm, the ceiling studded with a constellation of lights. The Māori tradition observes a strict separation of tapu (sacred) and noa (profane), so toilets are housed in a building outside, while the mezzanine provides an elevated meeting area for communicating tapu knowledge. While most of the materials are modern, the entrance is lined with timber milled from 3,500-year-old swamp kauri, prehistoric wood unearthed from peat bogs in the north of the country. This ancient timber holds a spiritual importance for Māori, whose tradition tells that the kauri tree created all life. An intricately carved piece of it hangs above the entrance, a pare (lintel) featuring the openwork spiral patterns of a war canoe prow, another reminder of how the tribe’s ancestors arrived here more than 700 years ago.
This colourful pavilion is one of many such projects that have been cropping up across Aotearoa New Zealand in recent years, authored by a new wave of Māori architects keen to make their mark. The country’s Māori population now numbers 17% and rising, and the new generation’s enthusiastic embrace of tribal cultural identity is making their presence more visible than ever.
Shifting shadows … Deidre Brown. Photograph: Adrian Malloch
Many young urban Māori now sport traditional facial tattoos, or moko kanohi, and greet each other with a hongi, gently pressing the nose and forehead together. Te reo Māori is becoming more widely spoken, with a kind of creole emerging as Māori words are sprinkled into English conversation and official documents. There are two dedicated Māori TV channels – one of which recently aired a series on contemporary Māori architecture – and Māori design principles have even been written into urban planning policy.
“Things have really changed in recent years,” says Deidre Brown, professor of architecture at the University of Auckland. “When I was a student, I wanted to explore Māori architecture in my project. But my tutors told me to ‘leave it on the marae, where it belongs’.” Last month, Brown was awarded the prestigious gold medal by the New Zealand Institute of Architects, the first Indigenous woman to receive the accolade, for her work in championing Māori architecture. Student projects now regularly explore such themes, like MA graduate Victoria Carran’s design thesis for an architectural educational campus in a former quarry, informed by Māori ideas about repairing the landscape and working in harmony with nature.
The Aranga Māori design principles were adopted by Auckland city council in 2016, but they have had mixed results so far. The seven principles cover everything from using historic Māori placenames to enhancing the natural environment and integrating cultural narratives, but vague wording leaves them open to interpretation. Walking around the city, you see many surfaces adorned with geometric patterns – from tiled facades and coloured brickwork to etched glass canopies and paving slabs – variously referring to Māori tukutuku (woven panelling) or kōwhaiwhai (scroll patterns). But it often looks tokenistic, thin surface decoration stuck on to pre-existing designs.
“The principles can be misused,” says Jade Kake, a young Māori architect whose practice, Matakohe Architecture and Urbanism, often collaborates with larger firms to ensure their projects are culturally appropriate and take into account the needs of Indigenous communities. “But it’s more about the process than the product, ensuring that the consultation and co-design process is meaningful to the mana whenua” – a term that refers to Indigenous people with historic and territorial rights over the land.
Kake is working on several housing projects for Māori iwi (tribes), designing forms of collective dwelling known as papakāinga, where communal facilities are shared in a similar way to co-housing. The homes are designed to be flexible to respond to changing family patterns, where cousins might come to stay for months at a time, or floors might be adapted to accommodate older relatives. The separation of tapu and noa must also be taken into account (the laundry can’t be in the same space as the kitchen, for example), and traditionally Māori wouldn’t sleep above other people, sometimes making multistorey apartment configurations tricky to juggle.
Never give up … Kāinga Kaumātua homes for elders. Photograph: Courtesy of Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei Whai Rawa
But the biggest hurdles come from wider structural issues and the legacies of colonial injustice, including access to funding and land. “The pieces of land available to the tribes are often not the best bits,” says Kake. “We have to make do with the leftovers.” The site of the Taumata o Kupe used to be the city’s tip, while one of the sites Kake is working on can only be accessed through a swamp.
One tribe that is fiercely battling the country’s intense housing inequality, against historic odds, is the Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei. They once lived on a prime piece of land facing Ōkahu Bay, one of the idyllic natural inlets that fringes the coastline in Auckland, or Tāmaki Makaurau, to use the Māori name. “First, the council put a sewage pipe in our bay,” says tribe member Anahera Rawiri. “That killed our food supply and made our people ill. Then, in 1952, ahead of a visit by the young Queen Elizabeth II, they bulldozed our homes and forced us up on to the hill.”
Some residents were relocated into a handful of council houses on Bastion Point, above the bay, and the rest were dispersed around the region. “But we don’t give up easily,” says Rawiri. She is driving me around the streets up on the hill, where rows of houses are rapidly rising out of the ground – part of a masterplan for a potential 5,000 new homes. “We are prepping for our people to return to their land.”
Following the Waitangi Tribunal, established in the 1970s to settle Māori claims, the tribe received 100 acres and NZ$3m (£1.4m) from the government, which it has since invested to become one of the country’s wealthiest tribes – with land holdings worth NZ$1.4bn (£670m). It has used its funds to build award-winning housing, including Kāinga Tuatahi, by Stevens Lawson architects, and a recent street of low-rise housing for elders, or kaumātua, by Jasmax, where Rawiri now works. The former comprises terraced houses, unified under a long folded roof plane and arranged around shared gardens, with playgrounds, barbecue areas and vegetable plots. We pass a big communal kitchen block, a weaving house, a wood- and stone-carving studio and a gym, while the streets are full of children playing out. The properties are collectively owned by the tribe, in a similar model to a community land trust, keeping the homes affordable in perpetuity.
“This is housing by Māori, for Māori,” says Rawiri. “It is self-sovereignty to the max!”
Caon Design Office introduces its concept aircraft seat, Modulo
Caon Design Office unveils its concept aircraft seat, Modulo, which employs 3D knitted Merino wool to create its semi-transparent skin and changeable covers. The office teams up with Woolmark for the Merino Wool, which is made of natural, renewable, and biodegradable fibers. While the aircraft seat design may hint at First Class cabins on airplanes, the material and technology used serve a general purpose and fit all kinds of arrangements, regardless of the seat class. As soon as the passengers sit down, they can feel the 3D-knitted wool blend membrane of Modulo, offering them a distinctive tactile feel even with its semi-transparent skin.
images courtesy of Caon Design Office
Woolmark teams up for modulo’s material
Caon Design Office and Woolmark concentrate on using a single material for their aircraft seat design, Modulo. Titanium, aluminum, and carbon fiber form Modulo’s structure and support its fabric membrane. These materials are used individually rather than blended to prop up the lightweight and robust framework of the aircraft seat. It’s already been established that the advanced 3D knitting techniques form the semi-transparent skin of the Merino wool membrane. But passengers may want to know that carbon and elastic polymers are integrated into the fabric to allow the seat to transition from an open space to a private enclosure, thus avoiding the use of traditional foam.
Caon Design Office teams up with Woolmark for the Merino wool of Modulo
A quick-release mechanism is in place for the aircraft seat design, Modulo. It allows for cover changing, and this feature is intended by Caon Design Office and Woolmark, who want to provide passengers with a new 3D-knitted Merino wool feel every other flight or season. The interchangeable cover also seals a guaranteed hygienic flight and less lengthy period for the airline staff to reconfigure or refit the aircraft seats. Caon Design Office keeps versatility in mind too, since the lightweight structure and modular nature of Modulo mean mass transport, hyperloops, autonomous vehicles, and electric aircraft can adopt the aircraft seat design and its 3D-knitted wool material.
as soon as the passengers sit down, they can feel the 3D-knitted wool blend membrane of Modulo
3D-knitted throughout the aircraft seat design
Another feature of the Modulo is the bench in front of the passenger, which doubles as storage. They lift up the lid, and the extra storage greets them. When not in use, the cushion on the surface is plush enough to hold their backs as they sit on it. On the side of the aircraft seat design, electronic devices can be stowed on the wooden shelf illuminated by ambient lighting, and remote workers can easily deploy and stow their movable table too.
titanium, aluminum, and carbon fiber form Modulo’s structure and support its fabric membrane
Embedded on the side of their seat, Caon Design Office adds the chair’s controls with temperature functionality, wrapped and injected into the 3D-knitted Merino wool of Woolmark. The combination of these features makes Modulo a platform of materials, shapes, and concepts rather than a specific configuration. It’s easy to see how Modulo plays with material properties and design outcomes, an approach reminiscent of Mario Bellini’s work with Olivetti. For Caon Design Office and Woolmark’s aircraft seat design, the texture of materials is underlined, along with experimenting with public privacy through the semi-transparent skin.
advanced 3D knitting techniques form the semi-transparent skin of the Merino wool membrane
Accommodating technology springs into the design too, since Modulo can be integrated with sensors that can actively monitor and regulate seat temperature. These sensors, hidden away by the thoroughly designed membrane of the aircraft seat, can prompt the passengers to move in their seats too and mitigate health risks associated with prolonged immobility, such as deep vein thrombosis (DVT). As of publishing the story, Modulo is a concept aircraft seat design, and Caon Design Office aims to materialize it for airlines in the future and after further research.
carbon and elastic polymers are integrated into the fabric to allow the seat to transition into a private enclosure
Since its opening in 2021, Gallery Collectional, Dubai’s first collectible design gallery, has been fostering creative conversations across design and art, blurring the boundaries between functionality and aesthetics. For “Urban Fabric Series 001”, its inaugural commissioned series curated by Yoko Choy, the gallery invited seven next-generation designer-artists from Asia to craft collectible editions inspired by their respective metropolitan experiences, namely in Tokyo, Seoul, Hangzhou, Singapore and Milan. Experts in materials, state-of-the-art manufacturing techniques and new technologies, with a strong understanding of craftsmanship and quality, most of the designers however had no prior experience in the collectible design field or the gallery environment. “I believe that providing them with this platform to step outside of their comfort zones and offering them an opportunity to express themselves in ways not achievable through mass production and consumer markets will stimulate them to create something refreshing and exciting” Choy says, and they’ve proved just that.
The 28 artworks on display until March 31, 2024, epitomise the juxtaposition between industrial precision and artisanal finesse, seamlessly fusing rationality and emotion. At the same time, by showcasing the works of a younger generation of Asian creatives with diverse cultural backgrounds, Series 001 also aims “to uncover a deeper understanding and appreciation of Asian contemporary design” as CEO and Co-Founder of Gallery Collectional, Cristiano Baccianti explains.
The architecture of home, or in this case an artful interior, is sometimes referred to as the third skin. Each layer – from flesh to fashion to facade – is in some way an expression of the person inhabiting it. For the Sen residence in Mumbai, India, it is a fully immersive family experience designed by Saniya Kantawala of her eponymous practice Saniya Kantawala Designs (SKD). Playfully gilded, the design is a particular reflection of Shubhra Sen, an acclaimed Dubai-based jewelry designer and mother of Bollywood’s Sushmita Sen.
The customized entry to the Sen residence.
Artworks and metallic flourishes are layered in the luxurious, double-height living space.
The sprawling 7,500-square-foot, two-story penthouse comprises four bedrooms, five bathrooms, communal spaces engaged in a richly layered, voluminous open plan, and a long central spine created by opening the main area to accentuate spatiality. The living room, kitchen, and two bedrooms are on the lower level, while the upper features a lounge and two more bedrooms. Left of the main entry is the kitchen camouflaged with a grid wall, which extends the space into the living room and makes way for dining. And on the right side of the main gathering area is a balcony that runs the length of the apartment. Notably, each space reads like a chapter within a greater design narrative representative of the family. Bedrooms in particular speak a language of comfort and aesthetic finesse curated to emulate the occupant’s wants and needs while harmonizing with the interior scheme.
The main living room is designed in collaboration with Italian designer Ugo.
A long central spine has been created by breaking down a wall near the dining area.
Ample storage space is concealed behind a custom grid work of cabinetry with gilded detailing.
“If we were to liken the metal accents to a particular accessory, they would embody the essence of a timeless watch,” Kantawala says. “Just as a watch seamlessly combines functionality with elegance, the metallic accents in the penthouse strike a perfect balance between practicality and luxury. They serve as subtle yet striking embellishments, elevating the overall aesthetic of the space with their understated opulence.”
Sliding windows separate the kitchen from the living area.
The son’s and granddaughter’s bedrooms on the primary floor are conceptualized as private boudoirs. Awash in muted tones, a scalloped paneled wall provides a backdrop for the bed with a hidden walk-in wardrobe in the son’s space, while the focal point of the granddaughter’s bedroom is a bespoke mural symbolizing transformation. The en suite bathroom features meticulously crafted terrazzo and stone – every triangular tile has been cut and plastered by hand to create an organic pattern.
An accent wall was created to make space for a walk-in wardrobe.
A bathroom that features an interesting interplay of patterns evoking interest.
The focal point of the granddaughter’s bedroom is a bespoke mural symbolizing transformation.
Made from terrazzo and stone, the daughter’s bathroom features triangular tiles that have been cut and plastered by hand to create a unique geometry.
A discrete elevator brings visitors to the upper level lounge area drenched in vibrant hues of maroon and pink in a playful contrast from the rest of the home’s ambient, neutral color palette. Quietly making its presence known is a small mandir with foldable shutters and lotus motifs transforming the unassuming corner into a spiritual sanctum. This floor accommodates a guest bedroom with a neutral color scheme, sage and white checkerboard pattern flooring, and modest lighting fixtures. The primary bedroom is a graceful solution marrying elegance and functionality. Feminine touches grace the space in elements, like a mural-wrapped column, custom-made French panels leading to a fabulous walk-in wardrobe, and pink marble with a fluted tile wall in the ensuite bathroom.
Shifting from the neutrals to highly saturated magenta pigments, the lounge has a bold aesthetic.
A small mandir with foldable shutters and lotus motifs offers a spiritual sanctum.
From the lounge, a passageway leads to the bedrooms.
The design vocabulary is best expressed, though, in the open living quarters. Form, function, and luxury conspire to create a cozy, personal haven for its multi-generational homeowners – tying all the individual vignettes together. Made double-height, freed from columns, and flooded with natural light, this interior space is enhanced in collaboration with Ugo Concept Studio as seamlessly integrated storage is hidden through a grid work of cabinetry embellished using metallic inlays. These elements imbue the residence with sophistication and glamor reminiscent of fine jewelry without feeling ostentatious.
The guest bedroom has a neutral interior design scheme juxtaposed with a sage and white checkerboard pattern flooring.
Modest pendant lights illuminate the guest bedroom at dusk.
The primary bedroom reflects feminine grace with a subtle color palette embraced in every detail.
Pink marble lends a distinctly contemporary flair to the bathroom, complemented with a fluted tile wall.
A doorway leads to a closet and vanity area in the primary suite.
With professional degrees in architecture and journalism, Joseph has a desire to make living beautifully accessible. His work seeks to enrich the lives of others with visual communication and storytelling through design. Previously a regular contributor to titles under the SANDOW Design Group, including Luxe and Metropolis, Joseph now serves the Design Milk team as their Managing Editor. When not practicing, he teaches visual communication, theory, and design. The New York-based writer has also contributed to exhibitions hosted by the AIA New York’s Center for Architecture and Architectural Digest, and recently published essays and collage illustrations with Proseterity, a literary publication.
Founded almost 40 years ago, the Fotofest biennial has an ambitious programme of exhibitions, portfolio reviews and artist talks. This year’s central show, curated by Steven Evans, reveals the effects of social, cultural, ecological and political forces on places and communities
There was no excuse that Toshiko Takaezu, a formidable ceramist, deemed acceptable when students missed her class at Princeton University’s Program in Visual Arts.
Not even if a student was training for a place on the United States women’s field hockey team for the Olympic Games.
Martha Russo was a sophomore in 1982 who was absent for two weeks while traveling with her team. “I have given your spot away to someone who cares about ceramics,” Russo says Takaezu snapped at her. “Don’t ever come back.”
But after Russo’s Olympic dreams were dashed by a career-ending knee injury in 1984, she did return, begging readmittance from her teacher, who was recognized at the time as one of the pre-eminent figures in the field. And Russo said that she came to treasure Takaezu’s bluntness and tough criticism.
“Toshiko became my new coach,” Russo recalled in a recent interview. After graduating, she worked as an assistant in Takaezu’s class for three years, lived in her kiln shed as an apprentice and remained close with her until the artist’s death in 2011, at age 88. “She kind of saved my life,” said Russo, now a sculptor and instructor at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Russo is among dozens of former students, apprentices, collectors and family members who have maintained an almost cultlike devotion to Takaezu and collaborated on national exhibitions from Boston to Bentonville, Ark., that are repositioning her squarely at the center of 20th-century art.
Last year, Takaezu’s glazed stoneware “Moon” from 1985, a celestial sphere washed in purples, golds and rusts, set a new auction record of $541,800in a sold-out sale at Rago. It is part of the potter’s posthumous reappraisal and broader art world embrace of long-marginalized craft mediums as well as female artists.
“This surging interest and recognition is in large part because of the incredible force of Takaezu’s extended network so deeply committed to her and her legacy,” said Kate Wiener, a curator at the Noguchi Museum in Queens, N.Y., who helped organize the artist’s largest exhibition to date, “Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within,” opening March 20. Takaezu was close friends with Isamu Noguchi, the renowned Japanese American sculptor, who collected her work.
A smaller show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, “Toshiko Takaezu: Shaping Abstraction,” through Sept. 29, is built around a significant gift of ceramics the potter made in 2007 to the institution. It is one of 16 museums that Takaezu strategically earmarked to receive self-selected constellations of her best works.
“She knew she was ahead of her time,” said Nonie Gadsden, the senior curator of American decorative arts and sculpture at the MFA Boston. “She was just laying the seeds so it was there — ready when we were.”
Gadsden unearthed seven of Takaezu’s pots from storage in 2019 for the exhibition “Women Take the Floor,” placing the vessels, with their vibrant glazes and calligraphic brushwork, in lively conversation with Abstract Expressionist canvases by female contemporaries, including Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner.
The Noguchi retrospective — which will travel to the Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Mich; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Chazen Museum of Art, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and the Honolulu Museum of Art — includes about 200 works in ceramics as well as the artist’s paintings, weavings and bronze-cast sculptures. They span functional wares Takaezu produced as a student in Hawaii, where she was born to Japanese émigré parents — the middle of 11 children — to her highly experimental and organic “closed” forms, including monumental cylindrical sculptures, that she grouped in immersive installations.
“This idea of the total environment does register very well with contemporary art and what’s happening now,” said Glenn Adamson, an art historian and a curator of the forthcoming show at the Noguchi Museum and another at LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton, N.Y., opening March 30. (Reflecting her holistic approach, the artist once said, “I see no difference between making pots, cooking and growing vegetables. They are all related.”)
At her home and studio in an 1800 farmhouse in Quakertown, N.J., Takaezu would host fellow artists and Princeton students for large communal meals and Raku firings. Today, an animated crowd of closed forms cluster around its stone hearth, the space largely as she left it. It is preserved by Don Fletcher, who bought the home with the artist’s blessing and is president of the Quakertown Studio Project, which has kept facilities open to artists interested in working there, according to Takaezu’s wishes.
Fletcher was drawn into her orbit at Princeton in 1969 after she initially rebuffed him for coming to her class late.
“She was a fantastic teacher — I’ve never seen anybody like her for knowing what to say to inspire somebody,” Fletcher said. For three decades after graduating, he would hang out at the house on weekends, firing pots and cleaning gutters or planting a strawberry bed. “She was really good at putting people to work.”
Susan Sayre Batton, the executive director of the San Jose Museum of Art, recalls walking into Takaezu’s open kitchen, teaming with students, as a college graduate prepared for a professional interview. The artist merely said, “Why don’t you make the salad,” before reprimanding Batton for hurting the lettuce by twisting too hard. Takaezu then instructed her to put the wet lettuce in a pillowcase and dry it by dancing in the garden.
“It was liberating and odd and wonderful,” said Batton, who worked with Takaezu for the next eight years.
During Russo’s apprenticeship in 1990, she remembers driving her mentor into New York with roast chickens for Takaezu’s weekly visit with her closest friend, the fiber artist Lenore Tawney. Takaezu would give Russo lists of exhibitions to see as part of her art education and would quiz her on the ride home.
“Phony or not phony?” Takaezu would ask about artists such as Cy Twombly. “You must feel it in your stomach, not your head!”
Now sculptures by Russo and Fitzhugh Karol, another apprentice, will be displayed in dialogue with works by Takaezu and Tawney in the show at LongHouse Reserve.
When Takaezu had a stroke in 2010, Russo’s brother, Peter Russo, who collected her work in depth, helped get her back to Honolulu to be with her siblings, where she died the following year.
Peter Russo initiated the digitizing of Taekaezu’s papers left in Fletcher’s home, which fostered research for the current exhibitions. The two men also recruited Takaezu’s grandniece Darlene Fukuji to take the helm of the Toshiko Takaezu Foundation, and they have worked in concert to promote her legacy.
“Auntie Toshi never really spoke in complete sentences,” Fukuji said, comparing her utterances to poetry. “It was up for so much interpretation.”
The foundation is working with the David Zwirner gallery to present an online exhibition “Toshiko Takaezu: Beyond Form,” beginning March 15, with 20 works priced between $25,000 and $150,000. Fletcher, whose Takaezu collection in Quakertown numbers over 1,200 expressive clay forms, has collaborated with the James Cohan gallery on recent well-received presentations that have crossed-over “to a whole cohort of collectors in the painting and sculpture world,” Cohan said.
The separation between ceramics and what was traditionally considered fine art was something that Simone Leigh bumped against as an emerging artist using clay as her primary medium. But her success representing the U.S. in the 2022 Venice Biennale has helped break down old hierarchies in the art world.
“I really wonder what would happen if Takaezu was having her career now,” Leigh said, adding, “I’m sure she also had to live through all kinds of things being a Japanese American.”
Fletcher described the discrimination Takaezu encountered when she attempted to buy the Quakertown farmhouse in 1966 from a neighbor who refused to sell to a Japanese woman. So she had a friend buy it and in turn purchased it from him.
“Toshiko just knew how to not let other people’s bigotries and limitations wreck her life,” Fletcher said.
The Noguchi retrospective will spotlight an aspect of Takaezu’s closed vessels not obviously apparent: they all emit sound. After she accidentally dropped a piece of clay inside one before sealing the rim and firing, it produced a rattle. Takaezu continued the practice, wrapping clay pebbles in paper with secret messages and sometimes inscribing hidden words inside of the pots.
“There’s this whole other layer of these interior landscapes that you can only understand by listening to them, and imagining what they are,” said Leilehua Lanzilotti, the composer and sound artist who helped curate the Noguchi retrospective and created a concert program and video works highlighting their sound.
For Takaezu, that dark space inside her monumental forms — sometimes taller than she — was as compelling as their expressively painted, three-dimensional surfaces. When “I’m up there on a scaffold and the wheel is moving, there’s an almost psychic feeling that I’m going to be pulled down into the pot,” Takaezu said in a 1993 interview with Studio Potter magazine. “There’s a danger that I might go in. It’s a fantastic sensation.”
She added, “It’s as if the whole universe is right inside the pot.”
Studio Officina82’s Barn Restoration Revitalizes Rural Heritage
Studio Officina82 transforms a rye barn nestled within an abandoned hamlet in the Italian maritime Alps, as part of the Selucente accommodation project. Traditional materials like wood and stone, combined with innovative and sustainable elements, shape the LOFT. The original stone structure has been retained, with a new mezzanine featuring two expansive dormer windows, offering a distinctive vista of the valley below.
The renovation of the former rye barn is a component of the broader revitalization effort for the Alpisella alpine hamlet, known as Selucente. Situated at 1,000 meters above sea level in the Italian maritime Alps, within the Garessio municipality, the project aims to reimagine traditional built heritage in rural settings. It seeks to propose a sustainable model for restoration, economically, ecologically, historically, and aesthetically, using cost-effective interventions replicable elsewhere.
all images by Fabio Oggero
Experimental design Approach Preserves Traditional Architecture
Officina82‘s endeavor serves as an architectural and landscape design laboratory, blending the restoration of existing structures with experimental projects like the StarsBOX and GlamBOX wooden accommodation modules. These draw from traditional architectural forms such as shepherd huts and Alpine barns.
The former rye barn, initially dilapidated, comprised stone masonry on three sides and was later enclosed. The renovation involved replacing the roof, reinforcing the masonry, and constructing a new loft for sleeping quarters. The wooden roof structure, insulated with wood fiber, features a corten steel outer layer. Two new dormer windows enhance interior space and views.
Interior finishes include pigmented cement flooring, thermo plaster on living area walls, marmorino in bathrooms, and cocciopesto in the kitchen. To maintain exterior authenticity, the old lime plaster remains partially intact. Materials and design prioritize a contemporary restoration approach, respecting the original structure while meeting modern housing needs affordably.
Studio Officina82 revitalizes a rye barn nestled in the Italian maritime Alps for the Selucente project
the LOFT takes shape with traditional materials, preserving the original stone structure
utilizing traditional wood and stone, the project adds a new mezzanine with expansive dormer windows
