ISSUE
46
in bloom
architecture interiors design culture
CULTURAL EXCHANGE:
ARCHITECT FRANCIS KÉRÉ BRINGS WEST AFRICA TO MONTANA
PLUS: Vikky Alexander Memo Furniture Natalia Ilyin Ana Kraš Todd Saunders Cauleen Smith Julian Watts Le Whit Carrie Yamaoka
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XX NO 46 : I N B L O O M
14.
HELLO
16.
MASTHEAD
20.
CONTRIBUTORS
98.
CHECKING IN
104.
AGENDA
24.
THERAPY WORKS
A graphic designer’s remedy for too much screen time.
BULLETIN 34.
INTEL
Ana Kraš’s Bonbon lamp debuts at HAY, Longchamp and Nendo join forces, Sterling Ruby’s fashion line, and other goings-on in the world of design. 46.
PARADIGM PUSHERS
Meet the duo behind the firm that’s standing up to the maledominated mindset of the construction industry.
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F I E L DWO R K 52. C A R V I N G O N E ’ S O W N P A T H
At his woodshop in Alpine, Oregon, 30-year-old artist Julian Watts considers how traditional furniture making and his art school training inform his otherworldly work. 58. R A I S I N G T H E B A R
Memo Furniture honors the designer, and the design process, in every piece. 62. I D E N T I T Y T H E F T
Design critic Natalia Ilyin considers the architecture of Seattle’s cultural institutions.
on the cover
Architect Francis Kéré at Union Square Cafe in New York. Photographed by Christopher Garcia Valle SEE PAGE 76
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64. A M I D S U M M E R N I G H T ’ S D R E A M
Turn your backyard (or patio, rooftop, or jerry-built fire escape terrace) into a warm-weather oasis with our favorite furniture and textiles of the moment. 70. S U I T U P
With his Sheltersuit project, fashion designer Bas Timmer offers the homeless a way to sleep and recharge. 72. S E C O N D N A T U R E
How the late photographer Terry Toedtemeier created his simultaneously serene and daredevilish portraits of the natural world.
IN BLOOM 76. C O M M U N I T Y C E N T E R S
West African architect Francis Kéré and philanthropists Peter and Cathy Halstead connect two towns nearly 7,000 miles apart. 84. N A T U R A L L Y I N F O R M E D
In designing a family home on the coast of Norway, architect Todd Saunders shows deference to the rocky landscape while upholding his modernist ideals.
90. A R T I F I C I A L I N T E L L I G E N C E
Ahead of her first retrospective, photographer Vikky Alexander mulls over her fascination with manmade versions of nature.
APPENDIX 114. D U C K H U N T
How one woman “accidentally” assembled the world’s biggest collection of rubber ducks.
GRAY MAGAZINE
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Architecture: SKB Architects Photo: Lara Swimmer
HELLO
He’s the one Who likes all our pretty songs And he likes to sing along And he likes to shoot his gun But he don’t know what it means Don’t know what it means “In Bloom,” that perennial song from Nirvana’s second album, Nevermind, is about admirers who don’t understand the band. It’s not that they don’t want to be admired— what creative isn’t seeking some form of validation? Rather, the song acknowledges that fame requires establishing a public image that is at once a vocation and a limitation. Dealing with success is hard. Boo-hoo. As someone in her 30s who recently left behind a fairly established life to start a new one from scratch, I’ve been thinking a lot about what “making it” means. The definition I land on depends on the area of life I’m considering— my criteria for flourishing as a person differ vastly from my criteria for flourishing as a writer—and
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my assessment of each one varies depending on how I feel at that particular moment. Sometimes I feel great. Other times my cynicism sets in, creating a gloomy cloud to follow me around, or I’ll seek an escape, losing myself in a world, real or imagined, that allows me to forget about it all. (Maybe that’s why I rejoiced last November upon realizing that Netflix offered not one but six 10-episode seasons of The Great British Baking Show to stream.) My hope is that all the while, whether I realize it or not, I’m moving forward. And I believe that I am. As hard as it is to reach success, it’s still more difficult to navigate once you get there. It’s a privilege to even get to try. But the journey toward something you believe in—a job, a cause, a relationship, a way of being— is among life’s richest experiences. It’s where real growth happens and consequential discoveries are made. This is the experience that inspired this issue’s theme, “In Bloom,” and its stories about people who are finding their own way and putting their hard-earned wisdom to use.
Peruse the following pages to read about artist Julian Watts (page 52), who’s ruminating on the purpose of his carved wood creations, and Dutch fashion designer Bas Timmer (page 70), who’s using his garment-making know-how to help the homeless. In our cover story (page 76), architect Francis Kéré, who was born in a poor village in Burkina Faso that had no school, electricity, or access to clean drinking water, teams up with the cofounders of Montana’s Tippet Rise Art Center to utilize design in a wholly unexpected way: as a means for cultural exchange and social justice. Each of these undertakings is by no means an easy pursuit. I trust you’ll find some parallels between these quests and your own.
TIFFANY JOW Editorial Director
SINGLE-CHANNEL VIDEO (COLOR, SOUND); 7:41 MIN. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST, CORBETT VS. DEMPSEY, CHICAGO, AND KATE WERBLE GALLERY, NEW YORK
Cauleen Smith, Pilgrim (video still), 2017 (see page 33)
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ITECT H C R É A IS KÉR C N A FR RINGS B A AFRIC WEST NTANA TO MO
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CONTRIBUTORS
CHRISTOPHER DIBBLE (“Carving One’s Own Path,” page 52) has made pictures for Architectural Digest, W, Flaunt, Paper, Bust, and Sight Unseen, among others. He is based between Portland and Los Angeles. AILEEN KWUN (“Second Nature,” page 72) is a writer and editor based in New York. She is the author of Twenty over Eighty: Conversations on a Lifetime in Architecture and Design (Princeton Architectural Press). Her work has appeared in Dwell, Architectural Digest, Fast Company, Interior Design, Metropolis, and Wallpaper*, among others. NATALIA ILYIN (“Identity Theft,” page 62) is a professor of design at Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts. She is also a founding faculty member of the MFA in graphic design at Vermont College of Fine Arts and has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, Yale University, the Cooper Union, and the University of Washington.
Behind the Lens CHRISTOPHER GARCIA VALLE is a New York–based photographer whose work has appeared in Vice, OUT, Surface, and the Portland Mercury, among others. He also shot the portrait for “Paradigm Pushers,” on page 46. Below, he recounts his experience shooting architect Francis Kéré (page 76). “AS WE SET UP FOR THE SHOOT AT NEW YORK’S UNION SQUARE CAFE, WHERE A PRESS LUNCHEON WAS ENDING, I COULD SEE FRANCIS ACROSS THE ROOM SPEAKING WITH REMAINING GUESTS AND ADMIRERS. He wore
gray slacks and a white button-up with a navy cardigan—casual but sleek. He had a soft smile and expressed his interest in the mechanics of my camera and lighting. He explained that he’d recently purchased a camera in the hope of documenting his work someday. Not ready to call himself a photographer, Francis discussed how he found the math and magic behind the process to be fascinating. “The most surprising moment was when Francis hugged me at the end of our shoot. I was so focused on getting the shot that when we wrapped, I immediately started looking through the photos only to realize he was coming in for a hug. I put down my camera and we embraced. It was a humble gesture that solidified the rapport we’d built in such a short time.”
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KATHRYN O’SHEA-EVANS (“Next Wave,” page 98) is a Coloradobased contributing editor at House Beautiful and writes for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Her first book, Veranda: A Room of One’s Own (Hearst), was published in April. SHYAM PATEL (“Space Jam,” “Sartorial Secrets,” page 40; “Tribal Knowledge,” page 45) is a fashion writer and market editor based in New York. His work has appeared in Paper, Cool Hunting, CFDA.com, and MR Magazine, among others. JESSE TREECE (“Identity Theft,” page 62) is a selftaught collage artist living in Seattle. He makes each artwork entirely by hand, using vintage ephemera and found images.
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STILL LIFE
Therapy Works
A graphic designer’s remedy for too much screen time.
@ N E W. M A T E R I A L
By TIFFANY JOW Photograph by ORION JANECZEK
SOME PEOPLE CREDIT DIGITAL BURNOUT FOR THE RECENT MANIA FOR CERAMICS—A CRAFT THAT IS SLOW AND TACTILE AND CELEBRATES THE HANDS OF ITS MAKER. This
rings true for Orion Janeczek, a graphic designer who works at a branding firm in Portland. “I needed a way to be optimistic about being a creative and geek out about the shapes in my mind,” says the 35 year old, who never touched pottery until 2017. “I found clay to be a good use of my time. It’s been a salvation ever since.” Janeczek’s ceramist friends lent him a wheel, kiln, and basic instruction, and he was off. He slip-cast initial pieces and trimmed others on the wheel, eventually opting to combine the methods with hand-building. The results are weird, chubby objects, such as stained-clay vessels with slip-cast bodies and doughnut-shaped uppers
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he calls “tube tops.” Janeczek christened his ongoing body of work “Brutalism for Lovers” and released images—which he styled and photographed himself—on Instagram in January under the moniker New Material. The work references Native American art (Janeczek was born in West Virginia but raised in New Mexico, where he gets most of his glazes), and the simplified, nonrepresentational forms of Constantin Brâncuși. One piece, a wide oval column with a Y-shaped indent, suggests a female pelvis and thighs. Ultimately, Janeczek’s project is about making things that toe the line between sculpture and utility. “I want to make things that are useful, not provocative,” he says, noting that his mother, an arts educator, found the collection overtly sexual. “I’m trying to keep it kitchen-table appropriate.” h
ARCHITECTURE / STUDIO RICK JOY PHOTOGRAPHY / JEFF GOLDBERG / Esto
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Goings-on in the world of design.
Cauleen Smith, Space Station: Two Rebeccas (installation view), 2018
Cauleen Smith’s work spans multiple media—from experimental film to embroidered banners—but is united by its exploration of black identity, feminism, and contemporary life. On June 1 at Seattle’s Frye Art Museum, the artist presents Give It or Leave It, a show that interweaves four distinct historical universes that feature immersive film and video installations (glimpses of which appear on the opening page of each section of this issue). Smith intends viewers to become physically integrated into her environments through looking, listening, and thinking about them in the here and now.
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INTEL
BULLETIN
Umbrella Effect
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The umbrella, at least when it’s open indoors, may have a reputation for attracting bad luck, but the brand Certain Standard is reenvisioning the rainy-day accessory as a designconscious conversation starter. Made with attention-grabbing colorways and durable, lightweight materials such as powder-coated steel shafts, fiberglass frames, and hand-cut pongee-fabric canopies, Certain Standard umbrellas straddle the boundary between fashion and function. Recently, they’ve started appearing for use by guests at Seattle’s Civic Hotel, Scribner’s Lodge in Hunter, New York, and at Ace Hotels across the country. This summer, the brand will launch a limited-edition collection made in collaboration with Brooklyn-based artist Scott Albrecht. Certain Standard’s new Seattle studio, whose design was led by
Amy Vroom of local interiors firm Residency Bureau, is an eclectic space inspired by the umbrellas themselves. A triangular Fireclay backsplash in the kitchen pays homage to the white “pocket square” on each umbrella, while an angular Lambert et Fils chandelier echoes the geometry of an open parasol. Cofounder Jason Sullivan says the studio doubles as a retail and gathering space that facilitates relationships with customers. “When people walk into [the studio], it’s airy,” he says. “We want people to smile, and that reflects what we believe about brightness and color mattering in people’s lives.” —Claire Butwinick with Tiffany Jow » MEGHAN KLEIN
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DESIGN
Candy Crush overwhelming,” says the Serbianborn, New York–based multihyphenate, whose work spans fashion, art, and design. She made Bonbons only for special projects until she met Mette and Rolf Hay, cofounders of the Danish-inspired home furnishings company HAY, in 2016. They, too, liked the lamps. Kraš felt a special connection with the couple and decided the time had come. In June, HAY will release the Bonbons stateside in its Portland and Costa Mesa
EXHIBITION
Mirror, Mirror In the digital age, one key to an artwork’s success is its ability to double as a selfie backdrop. In an ingenious twist on this phenomenon, Brooklynbased artist Carrie Yamaoka’s first museum show, recto/verso, leans into the collaborative relationship between artist and viewer with pieces that are reflective and change as one navigates the space, teasing out the multiple ways in which a viewer can read the work. Opening July 13 at Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery, the exhibition will feature pieces from 1990 to today (a span during which Yamaoka cofounded the queer art collective fierce pussy, won an Anonymous Was a Woman award, and
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received a Guggenheim Fellowship), ranging from early text-based works to recent polyester film creations. One piece, 10 by 8 (black bubble #1), from 2015, layers reflective Mylar and urethane resin over imprints of black-painted bubble wrap to emphasize the depths beneath its mirrorlike façade of the beholder’s reflection. “I’m interested in the idea of giving the viewer the agency to interact in a very material way with objects [to] create their own picture,” Yamaoka says. “So actually, I’m setting up the conditions in which they will create that picture themselves.” —CB/TJ »
stores. The wool-nylon yarn—leftover material from the Serbian knitwear brand Ivko—is hand-applied to the powder-coated steel frame string by string. Each lamp requires up to 40 hours of focused labor and is produced by artisan women in Ukraine. “I made the first prototypes and sent them the color patterns,” Kraš says. “They’re doing such a great job— even better than me!” —TJ
COURTESY HAY. CARRIE YAMAOKA. 10 BY 8 (BLACK BUBBLE #1). 2015. REFLECTIVE MYLAR, URETHANE RESIN, AND MIXED MEDIA ON WOOD PANEL.; COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
People have been clamoring for Ana Kraš’s Bonbon lamps since 2010, when, as a college student, she debuted them at the Salone Satellite showcase in Milan. The idea for them had come the prior year: Kraš had an imperfect shade frame on her hands that she rescued by knitting thread over it in color-blocked geometric patterns that looked good enough to eat. “Architects wanted to put them in their projects; companies offered to produce them—it was
DESIGN
System Update
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At the heart of Henrybuilt, the Seattlebased manufacturer of sought-after kitchens and closets, is a seamless network of things. Its storage systems are pure expressions of everyday tools that also carry a sense of noble permanence, like heirlooms. Each top-grade design is customized, too, resulting in a hefty price tag. Last month, Henrybuilt launched a more approachable alternative: Space Theory, a sister company that’s produced by Henrybuilt craftspeople but functions as a separate entity. “We want to do things with Space Theory that are more experimental and less weighty,” says Scott Hudson, Henrybuilt’s founder. Space Theory will adhere to Henrybuilt’s exacting standards but utilize less-expensive materials, including anodized aluminum, acrylic, and laminates. Flexibility is another differentiating factor: wall-mounted panels feature holes for anodized aluminum rods
from which accessories such as baskets and shelving can be hung and interchanged on a whim. Inside the drawers, acrylic or stainless steel organizers allow for similarly endless configurations. Most importantly, Space Theory invites people to customize their own systems by using proprietary software developed by the same team that made the program Henrybuilt’s in-house designers use. It puts IKEA planners to shame with its high-res imagery that lets users see what they’re getting and know the cost as they go. “You’ve gone by all these barriers [in minutes] that could take months to complete with a custom shop,” Hudson says. The software is available only to designers at the moment but soon will be extended to consumers. “I don’t think people want to move boxes around on a screen,” Hudson says. “But they do want direct information.” —TJ »
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Since the space race kicked off in the 1950s, generations of creatives have been fascinated by otherworldly exploration. Showcasing the output of this widespread curiosity, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will unveil Far Out: Suits, Habs, and Labs for Outer Space on July 20, the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11’s moon landing. Through works that depict life in outer space alongside built environments and objects that were designed to protect humans off-Earth, the exhibition connects
the seemingly disparate efforts of scientists, artists, and designers to imagine and plan human spaceflight. “Rick Guidice’s Toroidal Colonies painting is one of the few artistdriven projects supported by a government agency,” says Joseph Becker, SFMoMA’s associate curator of architecture and design, of one work funded as part of a 1970s NASA initiative. Another piece, Neri Oxman’s Wanderers, depicts a future in which computationally grown apparatuses augment bodily
functions such as digestion to help humans survive in hostile environments. Included among the functional objects is Tom Sachs’s space suit, a manifestation of his own desire to reach outer space; read as sculpture, such items become thought-provoking works of art. “Maybe this [exhibition] will cause viewers to question our human purpose in colonizing another planet,” Becker says, “and out of it will come renewed enlightenment.” —Shyam Patel
Ruby utilized menacing splatters of bleach.) The mystery will soon be solved, though: debuting on June 13 at the 96th installation of the Pitti Immagine Uomo menswear show in Florence, Italy, Ruby’s first solo public foray into fashion follows his decade of experimentation with textile-based works, including starspangled “snake fang” soft sculptures, quilt collages, and backdrops for performance art. “I’ve always been interested in the behavioral power that comes with clothing,” Ruby said in a press release. “For years I have
been privately exploring garments as a medium, as something that impacts the way one can think, feel, and move.” Ruby has collaborated with a longtime friend, Belgian fashion designer Raf Simons, on projects for Christian Dior and Calvin Klein, but whether S.R. STUDIO. LA. CA. will champion Ruby’s somber interpretation of American utility or reflect European sensibilities is anyone’s guess. If his oeuvre is any indication, it’s bound to be at least a little sinister. —SP »
FASHION
Sartorial Secrets Sterling Ruby’s personal wardrobe is as apocalyptic as his artwork. With little information—apart from Instagram posts showing a sewing station, paper patterns, and a close-up of a neon-and-black windowpane-check fabric—out on the 47-year-old artist’s forthcoming coed ready-to-wear and accessories label, S.R. STUDIO. LA. CA., fashion circles are speculating about whether it will echo Ruby’s own moody, chemically altered outfits, which are rooted in American workwear. (To achieve their ghostly appearance,
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CRISTINA DE MIDDEL, MIWITU, FROM THE SERIES THE AFRONAUTS, 2012; © CRISTINA DE MIDDEL.
Space Jam
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DESIGN
Pattern Play
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For textile designer Sonnhild Kestler, tradition isn’t something to be left in the past—it’s inspiration for today. Using imagery from folklore and children’s books around the globe, Kestler’s textiles merge history and contemporary aesthetics with vibrant primary colorways and bold block-print patterns. This summer, the designer—to date known mostly in her native Zürich—is making her US debut in a collaboration with the textile brand Maharam. The collection will feature three cottonyarn upholstery textiles and two rugs in patterns such as Amulet, updated from an alpine teardrop motif Kestler discovered on a vintage silk scarf, and Mela, an ornate blend of geometric shapes and flowers. Kestler’s textiles are not only aesthetically traditional; her printing techniques are old-school, too. Instead
of using computer-generated graphics, Kestler hand-paints her designs onto paper cutouts before transferring them to silkscreen. She also uses mirrors to guide repetitions in her patterns rather than digitally designing them. “I prefer a hands-on approach, and I love the improvisational element,” she says. “The process of translating hand-cut paper to silkscreen, and of passing shapes gathered from diverse sources through a singular filter of scale and simplicity, has become a stylized iconography. I refer to it as my handwriting. Each design is less a formulaic application of shape and composition than a means of intricate expression.” —CB/TJ »
COURTESY MAHARAM
INTEL
BULLETIN
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FASHION
Above the Fold
They say you should never mess with a classic, but Longchamp’s latest offering makes a compelling argument for reshaping tradition. In July, the French leather good company teams up with the Japanese design studio Nendo to introduce the Longchamp x Nendo collection, an ingenious twist on Longchamp’s iconic origami-inspired Le Pliage totes, which morph from large carry-alls to envelope-sized purses with a few twists. Inspired by these origins,
Nendo’s founder, Oki Sato, decided to riff on furoshiki—the traditional Japanese wrapping cloth, whose aesthetics are similar to those of origami—in his designs for the Katachi line. It comprises three collapsible totes, each of which can be transformed into either a cube, a flat circle, or a cone. “A transformable bag gives us freedom and enables two ways of living,” Sato says. “Whether you’re active or relaxing, you’re never without your favorite things.” —CB/TJ
BOOK
Christina Weyl was working toward a degree in American studies at Georgetown University when her thesis adviser suggested she visit the campus library to look at 20th-century American prints (by women artists) that were part of a collection assembled by Rev. Joseph A. Haller, S.J., the school’s late print curator emeritus. “It’s phenomenal,” Weyl says of the more than 10,000 pieces that Haller gathered. “I fell in love with the work of artist Grace Albee and ended up writing my thesis on her. It was intoxicating to be able to touch the prints and discover things about the work myself.” Weyl’s research on Albee led her back to graduate school with a desire to continue her study of female artists and printmakers. Deeply inspired, she embarked on authoring a book about the subject, The Women of Atelier 17: Modernist
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Printmaking in Midcentury New York (Yale University Press). Out in June, the volume spotlights a group of women, including Louise Bourgeois and Louise Nevelson, who worked at Atelier 17, an avant-garde printmaking workshop founded in Paris in the late 1920s. In response to World War II, the group moved to New York and was active there from 1940 to 1955. Over this 15-year period, Atelier 17 attracted nearly 100 female printmakers, some of whose work would serve as an inspiration for feminist artists of the ’70s and ’80s. “These women may not have worked at the studio at the same time, or even known one another personally,” says Weyl, “but they made important strides in terms of collegiality and supporting one another. That shared support helped to bolster many successes.” —Rachel Gallaher
COURTESY LONGCHAMP. COURTESY ESTATE OF MARTIN HARRIS
Women’s Work
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: DOROTHY GRANT WITH ROBERT DAVIDSON, HUMMINGBIRD DRESS, 1989, WOOL, DENVER ART MUSEUM COLLECTION: NATIVE ARTS ACQUISITION FUND, 2010.490 PHOTOGRAPH © DENVER ART MUSEUM, ©1989 DOROTHY GRANT AND ROBERT DAVIDSON. RAMONA SAKIESTEWA, HOPI, NEBULA 22 & 23 (DIPTYCH), 2009, TAPESTRY, WOOL WARP AND DYED WOOL WEFT. COLLECTION OF CARL AND MARILYNN THOMAS, © 2009 RAMONA L. SAKIESTEWA IMAGE: COURTESY OF TAI MODERN GALLERY, SANTA FE, NM. NEZ PERCE ARTIST, BAG, 1900S. CORN HUSK, YARN, RAWHIDE, WOOL. DENVER ART MUSEUM COLLECTION: GIFT OF DR. CHARLES J. NORTON, 1986.261 PHOTOGRAPH © DENVER ART MUSEUM. JAMIE OKUMA, LUISENO/SHOSHONE-BANNOCK, ADAPTION II, 2012. SHOES DESIGNED BY CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN. LEATHER, GLASS BEADS, PORCUPINE QUILLS, STERLING SILVER CONES, BRASS SEQUINS, CHICKEN FEATHERS, CLOTH, DEER RAWHIDE, BUCKSKIN, MINNEAPOLIS INSTITUTE OF ART, BEQUEST OF VIRGINIA DONEGHY, BY EXCHANGE 2012. 68.1 A, B, © 2012 JAMIE OKUMA. CHRISTI BELCOURT, (METIS), BORN 1966, THE WISDOM OF THE UNIVERSE, 2014, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS; ART GALLERY ONTARIO, TORONTO; PURCHASED WITH FUNDS DONATED BY GREG LATREMOILLE © CHRISTI BELCOURT. CHERISH PARRISH, GUN LAKE BAND OF POTTAWATAMI, THE NEXT GENERATION—CARRIERS OF CULTURE, 2018 BLACK ASH AND SWEET GRASS
EXHIBITION
Tribal Knowledge Although most outsiders don’t realize it, Native American art is largely the product of women’s work. “This material culture stems from a Native female understanding of the world, her own identity, who her people are, and how this knowledge can be passed on,” says Kiowa beadwork artist Teri Greeves. To illustrate this often overlooked aspect of Native art, Greeves and the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s Jill Ahlberg Yohe organized an exhibition of some 120 works conceived over the span of a millennium by female artists from indigenous nations that, collectively, represent all regions of Native North America. Opening at MIA June 2 and titled Hearts of Our People: Native
American Women Artists, the show includes contemporary works such as Santa Clara Pueblo artist Rose B. Simpson’s Maria, a customized 1984 Chevrolet El Camino; Romanesque 19th-century sculpture by Edmonia Lewis; and ancient pottery by the Hohokam and Mimbres tribes. “No one other than the individual who comes from the community that’s created these works can speak to it,” says Greeves, citing the importance of the Native Exhibition Advisory Board (a panel of 21 Native and non-Native female artists and scholars) in selecting the works on view. The final assemblage was organized into three overarching themes that connect each object: relationships,
power, and legacy. “When you see a dress made for a young woman, you’re seeing four deer taken by her uncle, tanned by her aunt, and beaded by her mother,” Greeves continues. “She wore it understanding her relationship to the deer sacrificed for her, the trade routes that brought her the beads, and the love of her family.” While the show reaches across time, media, and Native communities, it’s by no means a definitive study of Native American women’s art. “It’s a first step toward a conversation around Native art we hope will continue in art institutes,” Greeves says. “This is barely the tip of the iceberg.” —SP h
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FIRST LOOK
PARADIGM PUSHERS
Meet the duo behind the firm that’s standing up to the male-dominated mindset of the construction industry. By RACHEL GALLAHER Portrait by CHRISTOPHER GARCIA VALLE
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OPPOSITE:
Le Whit’s cofounders, Liza Curtiss and Corey Kingston, outside New York’s Elizabeth Street Garden, where Kingston accepted a job that would eventually lead her back to Seattle. THIS PAGE: A loft remodel by Plum Design and Corey Kingston in Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood. Frosted glass doors hide the bathroom and a sauna.
In May 2018, on a whim, designer Liza Curtiss messaged a friend, architect Corey Kingston, to ask if she’d ever thought about starting her own business. Curtiss had recently left her job at an interior design firm to pursue a master’s degree in psychology, but she had a few personal projects in the works whose structural elements needed an architect’s help. Within minutes of sending that initial message, Curtiss received a response: “I am literally Googling that RIGHT NOW.” The duo, who met in 2015 while Kingston was living in Seattle (she’s now based in New York), immediately set up a time to meet. “Once we started talking more deeply about [working together], we realized we were on the same page as far as our
CHARLIE SCHUCK
IT ALL STARTED WITH A TEXT.
values, aesthetic, and approach,” says Curtiss. They launched their design practice, Le Whit, a few months later. Founded on principles that steer clear of male ego—it’s no secret that the male-dominated field of architecture often pushes women to the sidelines—Le Whit strives to provide a space where Curtiss and Kingston can explore their ideas freely. “There’s a gender norm of men being raised to build things,” says Kingston. “You see little boys playing with Legos, helping their dads build sheds, and going into construction as a summer job in high school. They have the advantage of being immersed in that vocabulary their entire lives.” Kingston’s interest in architecture stems from childhood weekends spent exploring residences across » GRAY MAGAZINE
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the suburban sprawl of Tucson. “My best friend’s mom was a real estate agent who would bring us to open houses,” she says with a sheepish laugh. “I was fascinated by the differences in the interiors and architecture from home to home, and how that impacted what was selling.” This fascination led her to New York’s Parsons School of Design, where she enrolled intending to become a fashion designer, and eventually took her to her home state, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of Arizona. Curtiss also had an unconventional entry into the design world. While studying theater and religion at Williams College, she styled the subjects of photographer Gregory Crewdson’s Beneath the Roses series, a set of haunting large-format images of modern American suburbia. In 2011, she moved to Seattle to join the Satori Group, an experimental theater ensemble that specializes in producing shows in unusual spaces including the Georgetown Steam Plant. After a stint as a lead in-home stylist at West Elm (a job she took to help pay the bills), Curtiss worked as an art director at the clothing retailer Totokaelo before landing at Brian Paquette Interiors. It turns out these experiences lend themselves to
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Le Whit. At just over a year old, the firm has already tackled several residential projects in Seattle and California and is currently working on two restaurants and a bar in New York. Although the designers operate on opposite coasts, their complementary skills (Kingston covers the technical and architectural side of things, while Curtiss handles interiors and project management) and technology help bridge the miles. Like any other designers, they stretch their aesthetic to meet clients’ tastes, but modernism and minimalism are key themes that link their projects together. Now that they are calling all the shots, the two aren’t afraid to push back against male contractors who might try to influence or shift a design based on misperception that they know more about construction than women. “It can be very subtle and presented as a helpful suggestion,” notes Kingston, who has two years of construction management knowledge under her belt. “But there often is still that subtext of male superiority. Luckily, Liza and I are well equipped to stand firm in our decisions.” “Hopefully other women look at us and see it’s possible to change the way we talk about design,” Curtiss adds. “Our voices are valuable, and they should be heard.” h
MEL CARTER
FIRST LOOK
The moody living room of a residential project in West Seattle, designed by Le Whit.
DESIGN COMPETITION WINNER Spark Modern Fires would like to congratulate John A. Chipman, AIA the Grand Prize Winner of our 10th Annual Design Competition. He used a Fire Ribbon Vent Free Vu Thru to create the magnificent focal points in his winning entry. To see all the winners visit www.sparkfires.com or 203.791.2725
modern ďŹ res
Modernist Woodland Retreat, Harbert, Michigan Architect: John A. Chipman, AIA / Chipman Design Architecture Interior Designers: Julie Babcock, Bree Burkett / Chipman Design Architecture Photographer: Ballogg Photo
SINGLE-CHANNEL VIDEO (COLOR, SOUND), 9:40 MIN. SINGLE-CHANNEL VIDEO (COLOR, SOUND), 4:44 MIN. SINGLE-CHANNEL VIDEO (COLOR, SOUND), 6:43 MIN. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST, CORBETT VS. DEMPSEY, CHICAGO, AND KATE WERBLE GALLERY, NEW YORK
FIELDWORK The people, places, and objects in our orbit.
FROM TOP: Cauleen
Smith, Black and Blue over You (After Bas Jan Ader), 2010; Strelitzia Satellite Meditation, 2012; Cotton Plant 187?, 2018.
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STUDIO VISIT
F I E L DWO R K
CARVING ONE’S OWN PATH At his woodshop in Alpine, Oregon, 30-year-old artist Julian Watts considers how traditional furniture making and his art school training inform his otherworldly work. Interview by TIFFANY JOW Photographs by CHRISTOPHER DIBBLE
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Known for his hand-carved wood utensils and stone forms that blur the line between sculpture and functionality, California native Julian Watts revises everyday objects with a strange, subversive edge. You relocated your studio from Oakland, California, to rural Oregon last June. What prompted the move? I kept having these experiences where people thought I lived in Brooklyn, and I realized that with social media, I can live anywhere. [My girlfriend] Nina and I wanted more space, with a shop on the property—I can be sort of obsessive and I work late—so we started checking Craigslist ads up and down the West Coast. We found this spot, which is perfect: it’s 5 acres, with a really nice house that was built by the landlord and a shop that was already set up as a woodshop. There’s also a meadow and a shed, where you’re storing a giant collection of sticks for a future project. How has living out here affected your work? The first show I had while living here was at San Francisco’s Jack Fischer Gallery in September, while I was a visiting professor at the California College of the Arts. It was the
first show with zero references to spoons, bowls, or furniture—just organic shapes and a lot of references to nature. But the main thing about being out here is wanting to work bigger. I’d like to make a little hut as a fully interactive space, and have furniture, sculptural objects, hang-up drawings, and little books of drawings lined up on the shelves inside. Drawing is something you learned from your father, James K. M. Watts, an illustrator and sculptor whose work fuses wood and other organic matter with layers of oxidized metal paint. He had a pretty huge influence on me. Growing up, we’d go to a storage unit and sort through sticks—he has a stick collection, too—then go over to his studio. Our work is extremely different, but the compositions—the lines, shapes, and tension; those more indescribable elements—have been passed down. You enrolled at the University of Oregon in 2007 planning to study folklore but ended up getting a BFA in sculpture. What kind of work were you creating then? I couldn’t find any pictures. That’s on purpose. My teachers, Tannaz Farsi and Amanda Wojick,
were incredible and taught us conceptual, progressive ideas about art and a lot of nonobject-based stuff— we weren’t allowed to use pedestals. I was doing really grotesque things, like making piles of pink goo with video projections of my face on it, and pink blob costumes. Looking at it now, it was a primordial time in my creative process. At that point, the idea of working with wood felt old-fashioned and irrelevant. But after you graduated in 2012, you took a job at the furniture brands Cottage Table Company and Anzfer Farms in San Francisco, where you focused solely on woodworking. I’d moved back in with my parents and needed a job—I was applying for anything. I wanted to learn a skill because I felt like I’d graduated and my skills were, like, blobs on the floor. I immersed myself in the shop, which generously taught me on the job. Eventually they gave me a bench space to carve on: I’d work 9 am to 5 pm, then carve spoons from 5 pm to 2 am every day. All the things I learned in art school started coming into the spoons. They got weirder, and I started selling them. Soon I was making more money by selling these nonfunctional utensils than I was by making dining tables. »
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Why spoons, though? A spoon is one of the first things you learn to carve. It has a concave part, a convex part, and a long part. But I’m drawn to it as a sculptural form and an interactive object. It’s such a beautiful, poetic thing: this extension of yourself that you use to pick up [food] and bring into your own body—you have this intimate relationship with an everyday object. I try to draw out the bodily relationship we have with the objects around us. The spoon was the perfect starting point for that.
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You established your studio in San Francisco in 2016. How did you support yourself by making spoons? I had a few people showing interest, but when [the furniture label] BDDW got in touch on Instagram, everything changed. I gave them all the spoons I had, and they paid upfront. Suddenly I was making a ton of stuff. I’d send them photos, and they’d be like, “Great, ship it!” It enabled me to do this full-time. »
OPPOSITE: Wood shavings in the studio. THIS PAGE, FROM TOP: A barn that houses
the artist’s stick collection, a drawing by Watts, the artist’s desk, featuring a baseball cap from his alma mater and a zine about werewolves.
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STUDIO VISIT
The artist’s traditional carving tools on a table outdoors, where Watts often works.
Human anatomy is a recurring theme in your work. You find ways to create familiar yet unfamiliar forms—such as lunglike conjoined vessels, spheres with phalluses, utensils growing menacing appendages—from natural materials like wood and alabaster. That’s right, especially with stone, an ancient geological form that comes from deep in the earth. To try to find some bodily form within alabaster is exciting. When you carve into wood, a living thing, you’re seeing its insides and the way it grew, and through that you have a [personal] relationship with it. I try to bring that out as well. What’s your process for doing that? I am always making abstract line drawings in which shapes and ideas take place. They get jumbled together until something comes out that I want to make threedimensional. I never do a technical drawing. It stays a cartoonish doodle, and I’ll use that as my
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reference point in the studio. The shape changes when wood comes into play, as I’ll adapt the shape to the grain direction or the way the wood hunk is shaped. It becomes this interactive process between my vision and this natural form, which I really like. When I try to work with clay, where I can have an idea and just sculpt it, it loses the power for me. What kind of tools do you use? With wood, it’s a mixture of power tools and traditional carving tools: a gouge, a mallet. Sometimes I’ll use a grinder or do some laminating, drawing on traditional furnituremaking techniques. With alabaster, it’s a similar process: I’ll use power tools and stone-carving chisels, files, sandpaper, and rasps. But I am beyond the idea of exclusively using hand tools, and I am happy to try any technique. It’s fun to experiment.
There are many ways to make a blob. Your current work deals with mostly abstract shapes, but you still make spoons. Do you classify what you’re doing as art or design? (Not that it matters.) I like that people don’t care about that [distinction] anymore. But the truth is I think about it a lot. Is what I’m doing relevant, or just stuff for fancy rich people to put on their credenzas? Is there anything meaningful behind it? That’s one of the things that keeps pushing me to make the spoons. I can carve a beautiful spoon, and even if it’s not going to be used, it’ll go on someone’s wall. But even that isn’t enough—there has to be something subversive about it, something that makes you uncomfortable. Then we’re where I want to be. I’d like to keep pushing further away from domestic design objects but never fully leave them. I think once I get there, I’ll be, like, “What’s wrong with a beautiful bowl?” I’ll never really settle, which is OK. h
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F I E L DWO R K
SEAL OF APPROVAL
THE BAR RAISING Memo Furniture honors the designer, and the design process, in every piece it makes. By TIFFANY JOW Photographs by BIGTOP STUDIO
HAVE YOU EVER HEARD A DESIGNER LAMENT THAT HIS DESIGN WAS DILUTED,
or totally changed, in the course of working with a client? [Reader nods empathetically.] A new furniture company called Memo aims to be an antidote to such situations. Sixteen years in the making, the company formally launches in June with the goal of developing and manufacturing furniture by working closely with a range of designers and conscientiously carrying their concepts through to the very end. And it’s not a gimmick: Memo is helmed by Seattle-based Dave Simon, 49, and Gary Cruce, 52, whose combined experience includes coursework at the California College of the Arts, the University of Washington, and London’s Royal College of Art, plus nearly two decades in executive positions at design heavyweight Herman Miller. They’re furniture designers running a furniture design company, setting themselves apart with their intention to approach their products from a qualitative point of view. Memo’s first offering, the Penna lounge chair, was designed by Studio Gorm, the Eugene, Oregon–based firm formed by Wonhee and John Arndt. “We’ve never worked with someone who had a better understanding of our design than us,”
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Wonhee says, but notes that Memo did. “They aren’t a pull-yourself-upby-your-bootstraps start-up—these guys really know,” John adds. “It’s amazing to see that level of integrity and awareness embraced from the get-go. Memo has the potential to set new standards for other [furniture manufacturers] out there.” Memo’s story began in the early aughts, when Simon was consulting for Brandrud, a furniture company that conceptualized and manufactured products for healthcare, education, and corporate clients, maintaining an unusually high level of design execution. At the time, Brandrud was owned by Lee Falck and Bobby Holt, who knew a lot about running a business but little about design. Simon joined Brandrud in 2003 and, charged with creating an internal design studio, called Cruce, a friend who was then a designer in architecture firm NBBJ’s retail store, to help him. The foursome grew Brandrud into a respected leader in its field, epitomized by Herman Miller’s acquisition of it in 2008. Simon and Cruce took on roles there, while Falck and Holt pursued other opportunities. “Even as we went our separate ways, there was a spark that never went out between us,” Simon says. “We always said that one day, we should build
on what we’d created and do it again but better, with years of experience behind us.” Last January, the stars aligned and the quartet began developing a new premium design brand. They called it Memo, droll shorthand for their vision of achieving something “memorable.” To raise capital, the four (under a different, now-dissolved moniker) leveraged the relationships they’d built through Brandrud to create furniture for the healthcare sector; the proceeds funded the brand they wanted to become. As they surveyed the furniture industry, Simon and Cruce observed a lack of authenticity. “The American market is operating in a world of sameness, where everything is measured,” Simon says. “Many of the larger companies are fixated on performance.” Rather than developing products that make people work better, he continues, Memo is interested in creating furniture that is visceral, connects with users, and— through a kind of pared-down beauty that makes an object’s construction apparent—allows for a human experience of balance and calm. Memo’s Penna (Latin for “feather”) lounger lives up to the hype. Made of North American ash, molded plywood, and cold-formed polypropylene and upholstered in Maharam »
Dave Simon and Gary Cruce, cofounders of Memo Furniture.
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SEAL OF APPROVAL
Memo Furniture’s Penna lounge chair.
and Kvadrat textiles, it’s a lightweight, refined, yet friendly piece that invites its sitter to stay a while in its deep, tilted seat. Cruce first encountered Penna as a prototype at Studio Gorm last fall, after it was initially presented at Milan’s Salone Satellite in 2014, and was drawn to its origins in material exploration. “The original idea came from folding a piece of paper,” John says of Studio Gorm’s vision for the seat. “We wondered how we could take a flat sheet of material and bend it into a complex organic form that makes a really comfortable chair.” Memo worked with Studio Gorm to optimize Penna for manufacturing and made some structural changes— including adding more padding, thickening the sheet material to better accommodate the upholstery process, and improving the joints and construction methods. The connection between the front leg and the frame, a detail Memo developed to strengthen the construction, is more elegant than the initial concept, John says. “There are countless
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little [ways] Memo improved on the original design, and their tireless approach to making things better and consistently reproducible at a high level of quality is impressive.” He suggests flipping the chair over to see the part that most wows Studio Gorm: “The bottom is the prettiest part,” he says, noting that Memo suggested the base’s original four screws be reduced to two. “Even though very few people will look at the underside, they still care about making it look as good as possible.” The chair was manufactured in the Seattle area, where all of Memo’s furniture will be produced, and Studio Gorm met frequently with Memo throughout the process. “We spent the dime to get them here and have face-to-face interaction,” Cruce says. “We’re trying to support the designers who are authoring the project, and it’s a big undertaking to champion their point of view.” This people-first sentiment is echoed in the way Memo presents its work to the public: while pieces can be purchased through its website, they
can also be experienced first-hand at Fulcrum Cafe, the brick-and-mortar arm of Memo’s sister company Fulcrum Coffee, owned by entrepreneurs Falck and Holt and located a stone’s throw away from Amazon’s Spheres in Seattle. Memo plans to put all its furniture in the space, which will host quarterly events for the A&D community in the near future. Studio Gorm is developing additional products that will debut from Memo in 2020, and pieces by Finnish designer Harri Koskinen, Brooklyn design consultancy Standard Issue, and Jun Yasumoto—who works with Jasper Morrison and also runs his own practice—are slated to be released starting this fall. Not surprisingly, Simon says that he, Cruce, and their staff dream about work stuff all the time. It’s this kind of dedicated thinking—both resourceful and detail-obsessed—that all but ensure Memo will triumph. “All our prior work has been with existing businesses,” Cruce says. “Now it’s a tabula rasa. We can do whatever we want!” h
OPINION
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Identity Theft A design critic considers the architecture of Seattle’s cultural institutions, and what it says about the city’s character. By NATALIA ILYIN Artwork by JESSE TREECE SINCE 1979, THE ARCHITECTURE FIRM LMN HAS DESIGNED NEARLY EVERY CULTURAL
Its buildings include Benaroya Hall and McCaw Hall, Octave 9 and the Museum of History and Industry, the Asian Art Museum expansion and renovation, the Mercer Corridor streetscape design, the Seattle Central Library (with OMA), and Seattle University’s Lee Center for the Arts, with more projects on the boards. What does it say about a city when so many of its cultural institutions are designed by one architecture firm, and that one firm plays such an overwhelming role in representing its creative community? Well, first, there’s the ease of it. When Seattle asks LMN to design a building, we know what we’ll get. We know that the theater or performance space or museum will be designed faultlessly. We know the building will be a beautiful, modern-inspired contemporary building that will fit right in. We have the comfort of the known process, the greased wheel, the usual routine. But we are a bit too comfortable. LMN’s contemporary architecture is an architecture of elegant forms. It is restrained. It is made up of spare, empty spaces that are meant to not interrupt our experience— whether of music or of art. These spaces could be anywhere: they are not of Seattle. When, as a young city, we were growing into our large paws, we wanted these spaces to tell us how to value the objects and the performances held inside. As country folk on the fringes of a regionalist nation, we didn’t have the confidence to know whether a symphony was worth anything unless we heard it while sitting in an expensive building. And we wanted to show that we could speak Modern, like the big boys. INSTITUTION IN SEATTLE.
But these days, we need more from our architecture. We don’t see ourselves in these buildings. They don’t remind us of who we are, and they are born of a lineage that wanted to erase the individual (except for the Individuals of Architecture, who didn’t mind telling us how to live and what to value). We need more from the civic architecture of Seattle. We aren’t exhausted by the human, by the mud and blood and confusion of a war that had taken all our friends the way the original modernist designers were. We’re exhausted by the inhuman. We’re increasingly alone in a sea of technology. We spend far more time with machines than we do with people. An order and a scale aimed at reducing our human bond with place—the egoistic tyranny of the “international simple”—do not play well in a world in which lives are becoming increasingly mechanized, and humanity increasingly ordered. The incomprehensibly large volume, the straight line—those elements don’t refresh us. They alienate us. Our anxiety witnesses our exhaustion: we cheer as the Viaduct comes down. We can see trees. We can see up the hill again. Seattle is a frontier baby. Isn’t it time we looked to our history and our values to make our buildings, rather than to forms that have nothing to do with us? Isn’t it time we trusted a wider range of architects to give voice to more of Seattle’s identity—to give voice to our own mud and blood, to our indigenous peoples, our lumber milling, our influxes of Norwegians, our music, our tattoo artists, our LGBTQ communities? Can we make buildings that reaffirm our values, that make us feel grounded and, most important, at home? h
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OBJECTS OF DESIRE
F I E L DWO R K
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM Turn your backyard (or patio, rooftop, or jerry-built fire escape terrace) into a warm-weather oasis with our favorite furniture and textiles of the moment. By T I F FANY JOW
Introduced at Maison&Objet in January, Nanimarquina’s inaugural outdoor collection includes the Oaxaca rug, made from PET fiber that’s woven into an unexpected checkerboard-and-floral motif. nanimarquina.com
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Outdoor Bela rugs, made by the London studio Doshi Levien for Spanish outdoor brand Kettal, explore the interplay of different geometries. Made of polyester, the floor coverings were introduced during last year’s Salone del Mobile in Milan and became available for purchase in-store in 2019. kettal.com Brazilian architect Marcio Kogan of Studio MK27 created the Quadrado table for Minotti out of teak duckboard, a material commonly used in yachts to facilitate the outflow of water, and an aluminum base covered in a striking lava-stone powder finish. minotti.com
The iconic LC1 chair, designed by Le Corbusier with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand in 1928, gets an outdoor-friendly upgrade: the Italian furniture brand Cassina teamed up with the Le Corbusier Foundation, Pernette Perriand-Barsac (Charlotte’s daughter), and design historian Arthur Rüegg to develop the seat’s new upholstery options and its colored, textured steel frame. cassina.com
Copenhagen-based textile designer Karina Nielsen Rios created the Patio collection for Kvadrat using specially developed Trevira CS yarn in an environmentally friendly fluorocarbon-free finish that’s chlorine-, seawater-, and artificial weathering–resistant. kvadrat.dk »
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OBJECTS OF DESIRE
Designed by Spain’s MUT Design Studio for Expormim, the Nautica swing chair debuted in 2013. This year, it was released in new colors and a patio-friendly aluminum version, all finished in textured epoxy paint with a polyurethane seat cushion. expormim.com
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Campus, a new garden party–ready geometric pattern created by Dedar using a panama weave, is made from polypropylene fibers that are dyed before they’re intertwined, ensuring its colors remain vibrant. dedar.com
Made with as little material as possible, Barber & Osgerby’s On and On chair for Emeco is an exercise in the clever use of environmentally friendly materials—in this case, PET infused with fiberglass and nontoxic pigments—and can be recycled at the end of its life. emeco.net
The outdoor version of BoConcept’s pared-down Torino table is both scratch- and weather-resistant, thanks to its ceramic glass top and sturdy matte-lacquered steel base. boconcept.com
Launched a decade ago by Italian furniture designer Patrizia Moroso, the M’Afrique initiative invites blue-chip designers—including Tord Boontje, Sebastian Herkner, and Concetta Giannangeli—to work with artisans in Dakar, Senegal. The result: dazzling outdoor furniture, including the Jardin Suspendu planter, made from painted steel, wire, and hand-woven thread. store.moma.org; moroso.it »
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OBJECTS OF DESIRE
F I E L DWO R K
Ellen Van Dusen of Brooklyn-based textile brand Dusen Dusen created this brightly hued cotton terry towel—informed by midcentury resort architecture, Italian industrial design, and Scandinavian textiles— for Design Within Reach. Its jacquard-weave pattern is inverted on the underside. dwr.com
Fast-drying, mildewresistant foam cushions upholstered in highperformance Sunbrella fabric are cradled by a noodly powder-coated aluminum frame in Blu Dot’s Cache sofa, shown here in tomato. bludot.com
A stackable, rounded, powder-coated aluminum frame with wood and bamboo slats serves as the base of Roche Bobois’s Sunlounger sofa, designed by the Rockwell Group. Interchangeable cushions, flexible headrest positions, and a detachable back support frame allow users to customize the lounger to their liking. roche-bobois.com
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Room & Board’s aptly named Laze chair features a recycled high-density plastic frame and Sunbrella fabric upholstery. Its frame is available in a range of colors, including white, shown here. roomandboard.com h
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Suit Up POWER
With his Sheltersuit project, fashion designer Bas Timmer offers the homeless a way to sleep and recharge. By RACHEL GALLAHER Photographs by MELVIN WINKELER
DURING THE LAST YEAR OF DUTCH FASHION STUDENT BAS TIMMER’S STUDIES AT THE NETHERLANDS’ ARTEZ UNIVERSITY OF ARTS, AN ENCOUNTER WITH HOMELESSNESS CHANGED HIS LIFE. “It
was the first time I had ever seen people sleeping in doorways in front of shops,” the now 29-year-old designer says, referring to an internship he undertook in Copenhagen, where there is a larger concentration of unhoused people than in his native Enschede, a municipality in the eastern Netherlands. “I instantly felt guilty that I was making clothes for people with extra money [while] there were men in the streets with nothing at all.” Post-internship, Timmer returned to school, but the feelings of self-reproach, and the desire to do something in response to the issue, stayed with him.
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Three years later, the crisis became personal when the father of two of Timmer’s friends passed away from hypothermia while homeless. “He died right in front of a shelter that was full at the time,” Timmer explains. “It was winter, and he didn’t have enough clothes to keep him warm overnight.” The event galvanized Timmer into action. Using a discarded sleeping bag and a scarf, he stitched together a garment that consisted of a hooded jacket that zipped onto a sleeping bag to create a cozy, cocoonlike haven for those without lodging. Timmer took the garment to a shelter in Enschede, intending to give it to someone who perpetually spent the night outside. “They pointed me to this tough-looking man alone in the corner,” Timmer says. “His name was Peter, and
he was very disconnected from everyone around him. But as soon as we offered him the suit and started talking to him, that hard shell melted—he transformed into a warm, happy guy.” While Peter was excited about the gift, Timmer believes it is the simple act of human interaction that is most meaningful to the oftenoverlooked homeless population. “That was the moment I knew that [helping others] is what I’m supposed do with my life.” In 2014, Timmer officially launched Sheltersuit (the name he’d given the garment) to produce the ensemble on a larger scale and bring Sheltersuits, which are distributed for free, to other cities in the Netherlands and eventually other countries. The current design of the suits follows that of the original prototype, but now includes
FROM FAR LEFT: A
warm-weather iteration of the Sheltersuit, the lightweight Shelterbag can be rolled up and carried like a yoga mat. A child being zipped into a youth-sized Sheltersuit, by an individual and Bas Timmer. A prototype for the next-gen Sheltersuit, the Urban Safety Kit, integrates tech essentials including solar panels and a power bank.
a backpack that allows the wearer to easily carry the bottom section when it isn’t in use. The suit’s outer fabric is waterproof and breathable, and the coat has a large hood and big pockets. The Sheltersuit factory is located in Enschede, where Timmer employs people looking for homes or jobs, as well as Syrian refugees. Partnering with shelters and social-service organizations to distribute its suits, Sheltersuit has seen demand for its products grow, and Timmer has started the nonprofit Sheltersuit Foundation to support the factory’s work. For its first campaign, the foundation raised 300,000€ (about $337,125)—each suit costs about 300€ ($337) to produce—to provide 1,000 suits to refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos. As of this year, some 6,000 Sheltersuits have
been distributed throughout at least 12 countries, mostly in Europe. In March, Timmer spoke at SXSW in Austin, Texas, where he unveiled a prototype for the next iteration of the Sheltersuit. Called the Urban Safety Kit, it retains the current design but integrates technical elements including a solar panel and a power bank. Developed in collaboration with students at the Netherlands’ University of Twente and Saxion Smart Functional Materials, the next-gen suit embraces the importance of reconnecting individuals with their community. “We were researching ways to add [more] technology to the suit,” Timmer says. “Many homeless people have phones and are on social media, but they often don’t have ways to charge them. If we could provide the ability to
connect, then the hope is that they could start to integrate back into society.” The company is currently looking to raise funds for additional research and development of the Urban Safety Kit. It will also debut a warmer-weather Sheltersuit, called the Shelterbag, in June. Its modified design consists of a lightweight, waterproof sleeping bag with a hood, a built-in pillow, and ventilation that rolls up into a yoga-mat-like carrier. As the Sheltersuit grows, Timmer’s enthusiasm and optimism are still fueled by his desire to help others. “What scares me the most is that this could just end one day,” Timmer says. “I never thought we’d come this far, but now that we’re here, I feel like there is still so much more to do. I’m not even close to being finished.” h GRAY MAGAZINE
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Second Nature
How the late photographer Terry Toedtemeier created his simultaneously serene and daredevilish portraits of the natural world. BACKGROUND CHECK
By AILEEN KWUN
TERRY TOEDTEMEIER WAS KNOWN TO EMBARK ON SOLO HIKES WITH A TRIPOD IN HAND, SHOOT 35-MILLIMETER FILM FROM A SPEEDING CAR, AND HANG OUT THE DOOR OF A HELICOPTER TO GET THE PERFECT AERIAL SHOT.
A photographer, teacher, curator, and lifelong student of his craft, Toedtemeier enjoyed an oversized presence in his hometown of Portland, where he was the driving force behind many firsts for the Pacific Northwest art scene. Now, after its initial run at the Tacoma Art Museum, the first comprehensive survey of his career, Sun, Shadows, Stone: The Photography of Terry Toedtemeier, has arrived at the Portland Art Museum, where it will be on view through August 4. “There were always folks working to champion photography as a fine art and an expressive tool,” says curator Julia Dolan, who organized the Portland show. “But Terry came at it in such an interesting and rigorous way, by looking at the open road.” Toedtemeier became PAM’s first photography curator in 1985 and helmed it until his untimely passing in 2008, at the age of 61.
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A self-taught artist, Toedtemeier studied geology at Oregon State University and began experimenting with film in the 1970s, shooting friends as his initial subjects. By the following decade, he’d begun to meld his passions for nature and photography, gaining critical attention for his serene black-and-white portraits of the natural world, from the Oregon desert to the Columbia River Gorge. Behind the lens lay a thirst for adventure. “These often quiet photographs were produced by a man who had an incredible amount of energy,” says Dolan, noting that since many sites were off the beaten path, Toedtemeier’s work usually involved some risky feat. “The stories I’ve heard from those who knew him say he was willing to drive out practically to the surface of the moon.” But Toedtemeier did more than capture landscapes—he helped cultivate a regional interest in landscape photography. In 1975, with a group of five others, he cofounded the nonprofit Blue Sky Gallery, which focused on emerging and established photographers at a time when
photography galleries were still finding their footing in the art market and the ubiquity of Kodak Brownie and Polaroid cameras challenged the medium’s legitimacy as a high art. Today, Blue Sky still plays a crucial role in the region’s art scene. Toedtemeier pursued other activities over time: he taught courses at the Museum Art School, which was part of PAM until 1984 (when it became its own entity, the Pacific Northwest College of Art), and grew PAM’s photography collection from around 500 photographs to some 8,000. While his involvement in the gallery waned, his dedication to his craft did not. In his later years Toedtemeier, who lived with colorblindness that perhaps drove his early predilection for black-andwhite film, continually embraced new technical processes and rigorously experimented with color and digital photography. “That’s something we can all take away from his work,” says Dolan. “This is the eye of a very curious person who was constantly looking, revisiting, and asking questions about the world around him.” h
OPPOSITE: Burning
Railroad Tie, Burlington Cut near Catherine Creek, Klickitat Co., Washington, 1987. THIS PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Pothole Erosion, Big Wood River, Lincoln Co., Idaho, 1995; Untitled (Near Abert Rim, New Road Surface), 1978; “Owl and Pussy Cat” Rock, Sherman Co., Oregon, 1990.
OPPOSITE: GELATIN SILVER PRINT, 8 1/2 X 18 3/8 INCHES, ESTATE OF TERRY TOEDTEMEIER, COLLECTION OF PRUDENCE F. ROBERTS AND COURTESY OF PDX CONTEMPORARY ART, PORTLAND, © TACOMA ART MUSEUM, PHOTO BY LOU CUEVAS. THIS PAGE: GELATIN SILVER PRINT, 18 5/16 X 7 9/16 INCHES, PORTLAND ART MUSEUM, MUSEUM PURCHASE: FUNDS PROVIDED BY MELVIN AND MARY MARK, JR., 1995.74; GELATIN SILVER PRINT, 12 1/8 X 18 INCHES, TACOMA ART MUSEUM, GIFT OF SAFECO INSURANCE, A MEMBER OF THE LIBERTY MUTUAL GROUP, AND WASHINGTON ART CONSORTIUM, 2010.6.90, © TACOMA ART MUSEUM, PHOTO BY RICHARD NICOL. GELATIN SILVER PRINT, 8 5/8 X18 1/2 INCHES, PORTLAND ART MUSEUM, MUSEUM PURCHASE: FUNDS PROVIDED BY RICHARD LOUIS BROWN AND WALLACE H. AND LOIS M. ALLAN IN MEMORY OF BETTE HOLMAN, 1995.75.
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IN BLOOM
SINGLE-CHANNEL VIDEO (COLOR, SOUND); 22:41 MIN. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST, CORBETT VS. DEMPSEY, CHICAGO, AND KATE WERBLE GALLERY, NEW YORK
A collaboration between architect Francis Kéré and Montana’s Tippet Rise Art Center, a Norwegian home by architect Todd Saunders, and a retrospective of photographer Vikky Alexander’s work.
Cauleen Smith, Sojourner (video still), 2018
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community centers Through a shared belief in the importance of community, West African architect Francis Kéré and philanthropists Peter and Cathy Halstead connect two towns nearly 7,000 miles apart.
IWAN BAAN; COURTESY TIPPET RISE ART CENTER
By RACHEL GALLAHER
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Beartooth Portal (2015), designed by Ensamble Studio at Tippet Rise Art Center. »
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acre ranch, it is home to some of the most significant monumental sculptures in the contemporary art world, and, as of this summer, a pavilion by the Burkina Faso–born architect Francis Kéré, whose socially driven buildings are designed with the aim to reconnect our increasingly disconnected world. “At this moment, everywhere around the globe, people have a tendency to cut themselves off from one another,” Kéré says on the phone from Berlin, where his office is based. “The point of the [Tippet Rise] project is to create a space where people can open up to one another.” Envisioned as a sun-shielding gathering space for visitors (there is very little shade on the grounds at Tippet Rise), the structure is an intellectual and creative collaboration between Kéré and the art center’s founders, Cathy and Peter Halstead. Named Xylem, the scientific term for the vascular tissue in a plant that conveys water and dissolved minerals from the roots to the rest of the organism, the structure’s design features a roof inspired by toguna, traditional sacred structures in Kéré’s native village of Gando. The project provides an aesthetic and, in a way, spiritual link between rural Montana and rural West Africa, where, with support from the Halsteads, Kéré is simultaneously building a project in his hometown: the Naaba Belem Goumma Secondary School. It is named for the architect’s father and is slated for completion in early 2020. Like almost everything Tippet Rise does, the dual-site project has many layers. At its core is a remarkable partnership between Kéré and the Halsteads, who have chosen to use design not as a means to an end, but as a means for cultural exchange. To understand the magnitude of what Kéré and the Halsteads are creating together, I had to first understand Tippet Rise. Located near the one-block town of Fishtail (population: fewer than 500), Tippet Rise is a vast swath
I can talk about the blue gradient of the sky and the subtle roll of the landscape surrounding Tippet Rise, but there are no easy words to describe actually being there. Pete Hinmon, Tippet Rise’s managing director of operations and my day-at-the-ranch guide, tells me that first-time visitors are often overcome with emotion. “It’s a place you feel as much as you see,” he says during our hour-long drive north from my hotel in Red Lodge. “As easy as it is to put feelings into words, they lose some of their magic if you can’t experience them for yourself.” As we drive onto the property and crunch up a dusty gravel driveway, the sharp points of Alexander Calder’s Two Discs (1965) emerge from the brown, winter-dry hills. The animalistic form of the painted steel sculpture (on loan from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, where it once held pride of place in the institution’s entrance plaza) seems both at home and foreign in this desolate landscape. Hinmon stops the car so I can snap some pictures. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that I’m in what seems to be the middle of nowhere, viewing work by a 20th-century icon. Five minutes earlier, I’d seen my first marmot, which I somehow mistook for a rabbit. This isn’t your standard art-viewing experience—but it’s exactly what the Halsteads, who spent decades envisioning Tippet Rise before it opened in 2016, want it to be.
C
athy and Peter Halstead have known each other since their teens. Both grew up in New York, with families that were deeply involved in the arts both nationally and abroad. (Cathy’s father was the late Sidney Frank, who obtained the importing rights to Jägermeister in the 1980s and developed Grey Goose vodka in the late 1990s. Peter’s family has roots in oil and banking.) The two are artists in their own right: Cathy is an abstract painter; Peter has published several volumes of poetry and is an accomplished pianist. They share a passion for all forms of creative expression and a deep curiosity about the human experience. They believe that art is vitally important to life and that everyone should have access to it, not just those who write the big checks. But rather than go the easy route—opening their own white-walled gallery
Like almost everything Tippet Rise does, the dual-site project has many layers. At its core is a remarkable partnership between Kéré and the Halsteads, who have chosen to use design not as a means to an end, but as a means for cultural exchange. of hill-and-valley terrain in south-central Montana. Nine monumental art installations are scattered across the property, along with a dining hall, housing for musicians and artists in residence, and a barn (with a recording studio) that doubles as an indoor performance venue.
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or pouring money into another wing at an established institution—the Halsteads dug into their colorful past and realized that some of their most meaningful experiences have occurred in places where art and nature collide. From there, the seeds of Tippet Rise began to sprout. »
COURTESY TIPPET RISE ART CENTER
IN APRIL, I MADE A TRIP TO A TINY MONTANA TOWN TO VISIT THE TIPPET RISE ART CENTER. Located on a working 12,000-
FROM LEFT: Peter
Halstead, Francis Kéré, Cathy Halstead, and Xylem design team member Nina Tescari stand at the base of Inverted Portal (2015), designed by Ensamble Studio.
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RENDERINGS COURTESY KÉRÉ ARCHITECTURE
Renderings of Xylem, the Kéré-designed pavilion slated for completion this summer at Tippet Rise.
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In 2007, the couple started searching for the land that would become Tippet Rise. “We looked in California, Hawaii, France, New Mexico, Colorado—so many places,” Cathy says by phone from Oahu of the three-year-long search. “We nearly bought a place in Colorado, but then one day Peter woke up and said, ‘Before we buy this land, we should look in Montana.’” The couple had heard about the little resort town of Red Lodge from an acquaintance and decided it was worth checking out. Peter flew in first, looked at every ranch in every corner of the state, and two weeks later called Cathy and said, “I think we found it.” Today the land around Tippet Rise remains mostly untouched, and the ranch itself is partly in conservation, which means that they couldn’t even put in asphalt roads (all roads are gravel). The rest of the property is protected by the ethos of the Halsteads themselves. Aside from the nine artworks (in addition to Calder, there are pieces by Mark di Suvero, Ensamble Studio, Stephen Talasnik, and Patrick Dougherty—and yes, I noted the dearth of female sculptors in the mix), the Olivier Music Barn is the most-visited spot on the ranch. A 150-seat concert hall designed by Wyoming-based architect Laura Viklund, the space is meant to give visitors (each of whom procures $15 tickets through a lottery system months in advance) close-up access to musicians from around the world. On certain days, guests are treated to live performances outdoors at the foot of a sculpture, an endeavor that can involve several staffers hauling a grand piano up a gravel trail on a padded dolly. “There are no marked seats, no stage. The musicians are on the same level as you,” Peter says of the concerts. “One of our goals [with Tippet Rise] was to do everything right that we thought was being done wrong with classical music, and a lot of that has to do with access.” They took a similar approach with the sculptures, which are reachable via bike, hiking trails, and, until recently, the ranch’s two zero-emission passenger vans, which took visitors on tours. (According to Cathy, they had to retire the vans in favor of vehicles with all-wheel drive). Tippet Rise caps visitor numbers at around 200 per day (an additional 450 join for weekend concerts) to give each guest the most meaningful experience possible. After leaving the ranch, I decide the Halsteads are right: something powerful does happen when you take art out of the gallery. The juxtaposition of highbrow art and natural landscape (especially the “ugly” parts, such as dirt, dead grass, and deer excrement) forces you to look at the work differently than you might while standing at an opening with a glass of champagne. The deep silence, the whip of the wind—these elements remind us of the fragility of humanity in the face of nature. The experience is different for each person who looks up at the sculptures, but a sense of community ties together the thousands of visitors who travel to Tippet Rise each year.
It was a temporary installation at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark that first drew the Halsteads to Francis Kéré’s work. For the 2015 exhibition AFRICA: Architecture, Culture and Identity, Kéré created a canopy and sitting area using bundles of logs, drawing upon the traditional architectural forms and practices of West Africa. The bundles, each between 2 and 2.5 feet across, hung at slightly different heights, bringing a sense of texture to the installation and creating varying patterns of light throughout the day. The Halsteads envisioned a similar pavilion at Tippet Rise: a spot that would provide shade on the hottest summer days and serve as a place for guests to gather after tours and concerts to talk about what they had seen and heard. They contacted Kéré in mid-2017, and the architect made his first trip to Tippet Rise in July of that year. He returned four times over the next two years in order to understand the ranch in all its seasons, and to see how the landscape and light around the pavilion’s site— situated between the Olivier Music Barn and Dougherty’s Daydreams installation—change with the weather. When
“There is a hide-and-seek element; approaching it will be a little experience in itself because the perspective changes as you get closer.” —FRANCIS KÉRÉ, ARCHITECT
complete, Xylem, located slightly downhill from the main road, campus, and walking path, will be partially visible to approaching visitors from the path, revealing itself gradually as they move toward the structure. The first glimpse is of its roof, made of large bundles of lodgepole pine and ponderosa pine that were standing dead, most likely killed by the mountain pine beetle. “There is a hide-and-seek element,” Kéré says of the pavilion. “Approaching it will be a little experience in itself because the perspective changes as you get closer.” “I was inspired by toguna,” the architect continues, “which is an important landmark in my village. It is a gathering space where people will join together to hold a meeting or celebration. It’s a place that you can go and you know you will always find other people there.” In addition to toguna, Kéré’s pavilion was informed by a decades-old drawing of Cathy’s he had seen during an early visit. It depicted abstract organic forms similar to microbes or paramecia, shapes the architect used not only in the undulating oval roof of the pavilion, but also in the individual bundles of logs that make up the entire »
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COURTESY KÉRÉ ARCHITECTURE
Villagers building the Naaba Belem Goumma Secondary School in Gando, Burkina Faso.
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structure. With a view of the Beartooth Mountains and the background babble of the nearby South Grove Creek, Xylem will be the ideal place for a contemplative stop at the end of a day spent out on the ranch. Early in the design process, as the Halsteads and their architect were getting to know each other, the couple flipped the script and asked Kéré what they could do for him. The architect told them about the Kéré Foundation, which is dedicated to improving the lives of people in Gando. A grant from the Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation will fund the completion of the seven classrooms remaining of the Naaba Belem Goumma school complex, a project underway since 2010 that currently consists of two completed buildings used by around 300 students. Once the supplementary buildings are complete, the school will serve 1,000 children. An important aspect for both Kéré and the Halsteads is that both projects are being created for and by the communities in which they’re located—an effort that links two towns that share more than just remote locations and minimal populations. “In Gando, the villagers are part of the building process, and we got the locals in Fishtail involved as well,” Kéré says. “Both buildings are spaces where people can access knowledge, music, art, and poetry, and both communities are so enthusiastic about helping and learning more about each other.” Kéré brings pictures from Montana (and other parts of the United States) back to Gando, sharing them with the village by projecting the images on a screen in one of the school buildings. “You can see the excitement in the children’s eyes when they see pictures from America,” he says. “It’s opening a new world to them.” The idea of community is at the heart of Kéré’s work. Growing up, he was the first son of the head of his village, and his father allowed him the rare opportunity to attend school—mainly so the young Francis could translate his letters. No school existed in Gando at the time, so Kéré was sent to live with his uncle in the eastern city of Tenkodogo to pursue an education. After secondary school, he became a carpenter and received a scholarship for an apprenticeship that brought him to Germany, where he eventually studied architecture at the Technische Universität in Berlin. Driven by a hunger to give back to both his family and his village, Kéré set up what is now the aforementioned Kéré Foundation (formerly Schulbausteine für Gando e.V., or School Building Blocks for Gando) while still a student. The first project it undertook was fundraising for construction of the Gando Primary School, which opened in 2001. By making the privilege of education Kéré received as a child accessible and equitable for others, the architect is setting up future generations with the knowledge they need to thrive in an ever more competitive world. “My work always comes back to people,” he says. “My school in Gando is more than just
a school. It’s become a place where people from the village gather and talk and exchange ideas. It’s wonderful to think that a building can have that kind of power.” Kéré founded his eponymous firm, Kéré Architecture, in 2005 in Berlin, and over the past 15 years, he’s gained attention for a range of projects, including the Burkina Faso National Assembly, a 2017 installation at the Serpentine Pavilion in London’s Kensington Gardens, and this year’s much-Instagrammed Sarbalé Ke installation at Coachella. The latter, a cluster of hollow conical towers made from multicolored triangular wooden panels, was a popular gathering spot during the two-weekend April music festival. On the day of my visit, Xylem was still under construction, and staff members were waiting for a crane to arrive and lift the hexagonal steel framework of the roof into place. Even in its nascent stage, though, surrounded by bare birch trees and mounds of displaced dirt, the site holds a sense of promise, and not just in anticipation of a Kéré-designed structure. Over in Gando, the remaining seven classrooms are expected to be completed in January 2020. The next steps will be an extensive reforestation and landscaping effort around the campus, introducing trees and vegetation that, in time, will make the surrounding soil more resilient against desertification. Instead of building the school brick by brick, Kéré—who notably reverse-engineered much of his architectural education, as the building techniques he’d learned at university were optimal only for northern climates and assumed practitioners had access to complex machinery—developed an efficient construction technique tailored to the area. Both the existing and the forthcoming schools are being constructed using clay and a small amount of cement, which are poured directly into molds to create the buildings’ walls. The process and the materials are well suited to the West African climate. “Francis cares so much about Gando, and we feel the same way about Fishtail,” Peter says. “The world is polarized right now, but there are so many good people who share the same values—family, community, friendship, art—regardless of where they are living.” Perhaps that’s the reason so many people are eager to make the pilgrimage to Tippet Rise. They can’t help but feel connected to a larger sense of humanity while looking out at a landscape that hasn’t changed much in thousands of years, viewing breathtaking manmade work that suggests a progression of culture amid the unknowable, untamable forces of nature. This sense of connection—to both the land and one another—becomes infinitely more meaningful in the face of increasing political and environmental turmoil. It is an idea that is perfectly suited to discussion in the shade of Xylem’s log-bundled roof as the sun sinks low behind the peaks of the Beartooth Mountains. h GRAY MAGAZINE
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IN BLOOM
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NATURALLY INFORMED In designing a family home on the southern coast of Norway, architect Todd Saunders shows deference to the rocky landscape while upholding his modernist ideals. By R ACH E L GA L L AH ER Photographs by B E N T RENÉ SYNNEVÅG
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The house is positioned on a waterfront plot of land in southern Norway. Its interior ceilings echo the home’s exterior façade.
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A
rchitect Todd Saunders is most often lauded for his inventive use of form—a fact that tends to rile him up. “People think we’re such strong form architects and that that’s all we think about in our designs,” he says one evening by phone from Bergen, Norway, where his 21-year-old firm is based. “But that couldn’t be further from the truth! Form is often the last thing that comes together, and it is built around a design that puts the way people use the space first. We’re not just a bunch of aesthetic princes.” Flipping through Canada-born Saunders’s portfolio, however, it’s easy to see why form dominates some viewers’ understanding of his work. From his five-star Newfoundland Fogo Island Inn, an imposing block with one end balanced on a cluster of stiltlike wooden poles, to the vertiginous curve of a fjordside wilderness lookout in eastern Norway, Saunders designs structures that are rooted in modernism—but he reinterprets and elevates the canon through gestures such as arcing façades and eye-catching geometric protrusions. One Saunders house, positioned on the shore of a Norwegian inlet at the country’s southern tip, belongs to a family of four with a generational connection to the land. The homeowner, a talented soprano named Bente, grew up in the area, and she and her husband, Svein, a tech entrepreneur, lived for most of their marriage in Bergen, with a few years spent in Oslo. Yet they knew they eventually wanted to raise their two children (a son and a daughter, now 13 and 10 years old) in the region. The journey back home started in 2007 when the couple purchased a waterfront plot with a modern cabin that Svein describes as “well built and optimized for summer use.” Initially they used it as a vacation retreat, but in 2010 they relocated there permanently. Soon they realized it was too small for their growing family. “We thought we could remodel the existing [structure],” Svein says, “but due to various regulations and the cost, it was easier to build new.” They gave the old cabin to an acquaintance, who hauled it to a rugged site in the mountains about 90 miles away, and then cycled through various architects, seeking the right one for the job. The couple had admired Saunders’s aesthetic since they first saw his work on the cover of a magazine. The featured project, a family home on the southwestern coast of Bergen, spoke to them in more ways than one. “Bente really liked the curves and the organic shape of the building,” Svein says. “I liked the way it interacted with the landscape.” Channeling these favored elements, Saunders designed a single-story, L-shaped three-bedroom home with a long glass façade that offers sweeping views of the coastline. Public areas (the kitchen, the living room, »
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and recreational rooms) are located in the north-south portion, while bedrooms are in the wing extending off this section. A smaller guesthouse, built for Bente’s parents, sits just to the north of the main structure. “The family already lived on the plot for several years, so they know it intimately: they know where the winds hit the strongest, where to best catch the sunset as it goes into the water, and where the light is [best],” says Saunders, who incorporated that knowledge into the design. “They also wanted a house that was easy to navigate and maintain.” Svein even worked out a series of calculations to ensure the house was built on a spot where the roof wouldn’t obstruct sightlines from the house behind them. For the build, Saunders enlisted local company Byggmester Øyvind Bakkevold AS, which the architect says is the best carpentry firm he’s ever worked with. “I usually interview three or four carpenters for a project,” Saunders says. “I knew within five minutes of talking to [cofounder] Øyvind Bakkevold that he had the same respectful approach [as our firm] and understood the importance of great craftsmanship.” Since Saunders couldn’t be onsite for much of the build, Bakkevold stayed in constant contact, sending him pictures several times a week—especially when the crew was working with tricky angles, or before they cut a board to fit around a rock. “There was a mutual respect for the work, and no ego,” Saunders says. The finished project appears to hover over the land, its curved form a reflection of the plot’s rocky contours and
a contemporary contrast to the angular, boxlike houses in the surrounding town. Wraparound terraces provide sheltered areas (the winds can blow extremely hard at times) to enjoy the views, and stone steps lead down to a pool. Portland-based Swedish designer Hannes Wingate created the interior spaces, which embrace a traditional Scandinavian palette of white walls and oak floors from Dinesen. Slatted timber ceilings echo the exterior façade in a riff on traditional regional building materials. Thoughtful, human-centric details abound, from the placement of the closet in the master bedroom (“to avoid open doors obstructing the view,” Saunders says) to a dedicated area in the entryway where the kids can take off their boots and store their backpacks. Exploring the land is central to the lives of the youngsters, who often spend summer afternoons catching clams and crabs or joining their parents to paddle kayaks around the bay. For Saunders, himself an avid kayaker and outdoor lover, this is a perfect, albeit ironic, setup: a home designed to get people outside. Even during the frigid winter months, the family can enjoy their property from the home’s generous terraces and windows. “We oriented the house so you get a different perspective wherever you go inside,” Saunders says. “The view is always changing as you walk from room to room.” It’s compelling evidence that even in the face of flawless form, nature will always be king. h
Architect Todd Saunders designed a modern house that stands out against and complements its surroundings.
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Between Dreaming & Living #8, 1986. Courtesy Vikky Alexander and Downs & Ross, New York
ARTIFICIAL intelligence IN BLOOM
Ahead of her first retrospective, photographer Vikky Alexander mulls over her fascination with manmade versions of nature. As told to T I FFAN Y J OW
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COURTESY COLLECTION OF THE SURREY ART GALLERY, GIFT OF THE ARTIST
In July, the Vancouver Art Gallery will mount Extreme Beauty, an exhibition tracing the past three decades of Canadian photographer Vikky Alexander’s work. Organized by the institution’s chief curator emerita, Daina Augaitis, the show explores the central themes that define 60-year-old Alexander as a leading practitioner in the field of photo-conceptualism: the appropriated image, the artificiality of nature, and the seduction of space. Here, the artist discusses these themes and the experiences that led to them.
Interior Pavillion #4, 1989
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I DON’T KNOW IF I CAN SAY EXACTLY WHY THE SUBJECT OF LANDSCAPE INTERESTS ME. I am concerned with instances where man has intervened with nature. Like ice sculpture, or topiary—what’s wrong with a hunk of ice or a bush? Those kinds of follies, where humans try to make something better than the real thing, pique my curiosity. I was born in Victoria, [Canada], but shortly afterward my father got a job in Ottawa and we moved there. We were near the National Gallery of Canada, and I grew up visiting it often, taking in great exhibitions with my family. My parents liked art, but not modern art. They preferred 18th-century paintings and landscapes, and we always had something to look at in our home. In high school, I had an encouraging teacher named Reva Dolgoy who took me on a trip to New York one weekend, just she and I. We took the train down and went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. I decided that was where I wanted to live one day. First I needed to go to university. I attended the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where I became fascinated with dark-room photography. I don’t know if you’ve ever done it before, but the process is magical: an image comes out of the dark. I really loved that. But I was primarily interested in photography because it is about the world around us, not about something coming directly from me. Painting seemed so subjective. I shot buildings and landscapes, but I wasn’t a street photographer, which, along with dark-room photography, was popular [at the time, and dominated by men]. It felt intrusive to take photos of people on the street. And there was too much visibility for me as an author in sticking a camera in front of people. I try to stay in the background. Appropriating images was something I could do in my parents’ basement. I didn’t have enough money to have a studio. So I started taking images of broadcast television.
I set up a tripod in front of the TV and used a cable release, as the shutter speed had to be quite slow—a 15th or 30th of a second—and took pictures of something that already existed. Then I began taking photos of backlit billboards. The ones in Canada in the late 1970s were very photorealistic. They looked like drive-in movies. When I moved to New York in 1979, I discovered that kind of billboard didn’t exist; theirs were old-school graphics focused on text and color. So I started getting information from fashion magazines instead. I thought about how women were depicted in those publications, and started to identify certain looks and understand how seduction works [in magazines] through isolated imagery. I decided to build pieces out of those images by juxtaposing, enlarging, or duplicating them. In the early days, I matted some of these magazine photographs with a substantial area of black matte board. When the pieces are framed [and covered] with glass, the matte board becomes something like a mirror: When one looks at it, the image of the normal, everyday viewer is superimposed on, or juxtaposed with, the image of the supermodel. There’s a bit of self-realization going on when you look at them. After a while, I started wondering how I could incorporate landscape into these works. I wanted to put the figures somewhere and have them doing something. In a few pieces from 1982 and 2017 in the Vancouver Art Gallery retrospective, there’s an image of a super-beautiful model flanked by images of a superbeautiful landscape. The first time I mounted a purely landscape work was at the New York Cash/Newhouse Gallery in 1986, where I installed Lake in the Woods. One wall features a store-bought scenic mural [of the type] that used to be put in rec rooms in the 1970s, and the wall facing it has wood panels with a band of inlaid mirrors. When » GRAY MAGAZINE
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After Lake in the Woods, I was in a group show curated by Daina Augaitis—the curator of my show at VAG, who was then at the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff, Canada— and she suggested I go to [Alberta’s] West Edmonton Mall. “It’s totally you,” she told me. “There’s all this fake landscape and mirrors—right up your alley.” I didn’t know what I would find when I got there, but I was interested in the utopian ideals of [the building’s] artificial landscape, particularly the way nature has been incorporated into the architecture of
the mall to soften the experience of consumption. There are mirrors on almost every support structure in the building. They surround and reflect areas such as a lagoon and a concrete beach, so natural details are juxtaposed with shoppers and commercial goods. After I took photographs there, I thought, “What other kinds of utopian environments are there that are manmade and supposed to be fantastic?” I came up with Las Vegas and Disneyland, two places I’d never been before. I went to Vegas first,
COURTESY RBC ART COLLECTION
you look into it, you see the details of the landscape behind you as well as your reflection. People came in and said, “Oh, right, Vikky is Canadian! Canadians like mountains.” I don’t think that’s necessarily true, but they had to make sense of it somehow. Landscapes just seemed like an easier, more comfortable thing for me to photograph. The female body has always been a political arena, and while I am a feminist and those issues are addressed in my [previous] work, I wanted to expand the discussion to other areas besides the body.
Portage Glacier, 1982/2017
which was all casinos and artificial light. I thought Disneyland would be the polar opposite, but there wasn’t much to photograph there. I just shot the topiary animals. There’s nature and culture colliding for you. Later, I visited Paris to see the manmade park called Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. It was designed by Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who redesigned Paris [under the orders of Emperor Napoleon III]. There was one staircase I thought was cool because each step was made to look like a wooden log,
formed by concrete poured into a mold. My photograph of it, L’Escalier (1996), has the same image directly below it, but flipped like a reflection, forming a staircase you can never get to the top of. Having a retrospective like the one at VAG is amazing. Most artists only look ahead, because you always want to go on to the next thing. What’s interesting about looking back is realizing how one thing led to another. I’ll see something I did in 1979 and it could fit into something I did last year.
There’s a room in the show that’s covered in 30-foot-tall self-adhesive wall vinyls. They started out as small cut-out collages of found images and different kinds of printed paper—origami, shelving, wrapping, or photo paper—that I scanned [and enlarged]. These are rooms within rooms that are abstracted with blocks of color and usually form a kind of window to nature. They’re so big, it is as if you can actually go into the room, like Alice in Wonderland. They make you feel quite small. h GRAY MAGAZINE
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WOODL ARK, PORTL AND, OREGON
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APPENDIX An invigorating coda.
Cauleen Smith, Pilgrim (video stills), 2017.
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APPENDIX
Noteworthy hoteliers and restaurateurs pushing the proverbial design envelope. CHECKING IN
By KATHRYN O’SHEA-EVANS
LOS ANGELES
Westwood Pali Hotel
“The vibe is eclectic Parisian plus midcentury charm, with lots of wood, terra cotta tile, and marble surfaces,” says Palisociety’s president and founder, Avi Brosh, of his firm’s latest project. The recently opened 55-room Palihotel Westwood Village, housed in a 1939 building that was home to the first hotel in LA’s Westwood Village itself (home to UCLA), has Palisociety-designed
interiors that evoke Old Hollywood at its best, with Smeg fridges, 1950s Westclox Big Ben Moon Beam alarm clocks, and custom rounded headboards in faux sherpa fur. But it’s the amenities, including sandalwood-scented toiletries and a daily continental breakfast of local Röckenwagner Bakery’s croissants and Mylk Labs oatmeal, that will have guests extending their stay.
Sister City
“In a time of visual fatigue and excess, we were curious about spaces that are open and tranquil—ones that ask what’s truly necessary for the modern traveler,” says Kelly Sawdon, chief brand officer at Atelier Ace, the design firm behind Ace Hotels. To answer that question, the firm recently opened the hotel Sister City on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, with 200 rooms overlooking the cityscape and inspired by everything from Scandinavian
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architecture to Montessori schools. With custom black Italian terrazzo vanities, modular shelving systems imported from Italy, and cherrywood floors and headboards, it’s New York made new, and it even sounds unique. “We’re debuting a new generative lobby music score by electronic musician Julianna Barwick and a team from Microsoft,” Sawdon says. “We wanted to rethink what sound can be as an extension of public space.” »
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APPENDIX
VANCOUVER
Rome—where all roads lead to cinematic cafés—is too far-flung for a macchiato run. Thankfully, Caffè La Tana, a 1,100-square-foot boîte, opened last October in Vancouver’s Little Italy and is just as evocative as its Italian progenitors, with custom wallpaper that riffs on images in vintage pomology and zoology textbooks as well as antique accents that include a brass pendant designed by Luigi Caccia Dominioni in 1965. “I travel to Italy quite a bit—I still have family in the Marche region, and we’re doing a client’s house in Puglia,” says Craig Stanghetta, La Tana’s co-owner and creative director of the Vancouver design studio Ste. Marie, which dreamed up the restaurant’s interiors.
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To achieve a steeped-in-time Old World effect, Stanghetta found his muses in Milan’s dreamy grocery– bakery–smoke shop Giacomo Tabaccheria and Adolf Loos’s American Bar in Vienna. Then he picked moody, saturated paint colors—Farrow & Ball’s Bone, French Gray, and Old White—for the interior. “We painted the whole space probably five times,” says Stanghetta. “We wanted it to be one really arresting palette that is super-deliberate and leans into that color choice.” To that end, Ste. Marie selected a flat matte finish to highlight the hand-applied plaster walls and imported antiqued green marble from Italy for counters. Stanghetta and his team also nabbed a few classical paintings from the
public domain, cropped and enlarged them, and finished them in gold leaf to turn a formerly lackluster wall into a showpiece. The hand-painted ceramic tile mural behind the bar features a truculent fox (“la tana” translates from the Italian as “the den”), a subtle nod to another Ste. Marie–designed Vancouver restaurant, Savio Volpe, or “wise fox.” For Stanghetta, the imperfect result is decidedly perfect. “When you’re traveling in Europe and particularly in Italy, everything feels artisanal, like someone’s actual hand is behind the work,” he says. He could just as easily be referencing La Tana’s menu: All pastas—including stuffed tortelli, tagliatelle, agnolotti, and pappardelle— are house-made daily. »
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CHECKING IN
APPENDIX
PORTLAND
Woodlark Hotel
C O O S B A Y, O R E G O N
TORONTO
Baypoint Landing
Fairmont Royal York
Tucked away in lower Coos Bay on the southern Oregon coast, this high-end retreat offers both immediate access to the beach and sprawling ocean views. Inspired by Baypoint’s waterfront location and nearby state parks, the project’s designers created cabins with floor-to-ceiling windows and wood exteriors. Interiors are streamlined with contemporary finishes, contemporary amenities such as Wi-Fi, and luxury goat’s-milk toiletries from Beekman 1802. To complement the cozy quarters, a modern clubhouse, designed by R&A Architecture + Design, has an enclosed saltwater pool, fire pits, and bay-view terraces. —CB/TJ
This summer, a grande dame of the Toronto skyline— the 90-year-old Fairmont Royal York—is receiving a revamp of its 18th floor by New York firm Champalimaud Design, including the airy new Fairmont Gold lounge and guest suites decked in gray and gilt. “The design is a romantic reverie evoking a sense of pause,” says Jon Kastl, a partner at Champalimaud. “You’ll find Art Deco–inspired motifs paired with details informed by the country’s English and French heritage.” Among them: white Italian marble fireplaces, herringbone parquet wood floors, and plaster bas-reliefs set above the headboards that echo the spires of the Toronto skyline. h
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COURTESY PROVENANCE HOTELS. COURTESY FAIRMONT ROYAL YORK. JEREMY FENSKE; COURTESY BAYPOINT LANDING
Combining a 1908 French Renaissance hotel with a 1912 Beaux-Arts drugstore and adding a latter-day aesthetic might have resulted in an architectural Frankenstein. But the new 150-room Woodlark, which Provenance Hotels opened in December, has pulled it off. Elements include a marble U-shaped bar that serves as a front desk and coffee counter, backed with work by painter Maja Dlugolecki. “Inside the rooms, custom wallpaper [features] botanicals found in Forest Park,” says Christian Robert, principal of R&A Architecture + Design, which helped create the space. Other touches: blue velvet chairs by R&A’s design director and wool rugs by Christiane Millinger, handmade in Portland.
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APPENDIX
A global calendar of goings-on in the worlds of art, architecture, culture, and design. AGENDA
JUNE 1–SEPT 30
COLOR FIELD Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art Bentonville, Arkansas Located on 120 acres of native Ozark forest, Crystal Bridges doesn’t miss an opportunity to encourage visitors to venture onto its trails and explore its natural springs. This exhibition situates outdoor-friendly work—including Spencer Finch’s Back to Kansas (2015), (an outsize grid informed by scenes in The Wizard of Oz) and Sam Falls’s interactive sculptures—in the museum’s North Forest to create a multisensory spectacle.
JUNE 9–SEPT 14
JUNE 1–30
LONDON FESTIVAL OF ARCHITECTURE London, United Kingdom
Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Switzerland
Aspen Art Museum Aspen, Colorado
This large show, among the many other projects celebrating the centenary of the Bauhaus, surveys the ways in which Bill was influenced by the German design school (the Swiss architect reworked ideas he discovered there throughout his career). See work from his oeuvre alongside archive materials and pieces by Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and László Moholy-Nagy, among others.
Erected in the AAM’s Roof Deck Sculpture Garden, an interactive concrete, cement, and stainless-steel fire pit designed by Los Angeles artist Oscar Tuazon blurs the line between fireplace and stage. Visitors are invited to engage with the structure, itself a commentary on community, ecology, and the built environment, which holds a live fire—a welcome gathering place during Aspen’s cooler months.
JUNE 10–12
NEOCON The Mart Chicago, Illinois Ilse Crawford of Studioilse, and Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch of Roman and Williams, deliver keynote lectures at the 51st edition of the annual commercial interiors fair, which hosts some 300 exhibitors. Among the many presentations and seminars, new this year are offsite designer-led tours, including a look at TAO Chicago conducted by the Rockwell Group and a walk-through of the Hotel Essex guided by the Chicago-based Gettys Group.
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Under the direction of Tamsie Thomson, the juggernaut architecture event returns, this time with the theme “Boundaries” and featuring more than 400 events throughout the affair. Programming focuses on public participation. Among other highlights, there’s the Empathy Tour/ Workshop, a walking tour led by West London–based Powell Tuck Architecture that encourages participants to see the city from other people’s points of view; a pop-up green space by Lily Jencks Studio titled The Quintessential English Garden: what does it mean to be native?; and a panel discussion at the Royal Academy of Arts on how architecture can overcome issues of exclusivity. Yinka Ilori and Pricegore’s vibrant, geometric Colour Palace, the winning design for the second Dulwich Pavilion, a temporary outdoor welcome space for visitors, is poised to steal the show when it opens at Dulwich Picture Gallery on the eve of the festival.
© MAX BILL; COURTESY MAX BILL AND HAUSER & WIRTH. PRICEGORE; COURTESY LONDON FESTIVAL OF ARCHITECTURE
JUNE 7–DEC 1 MAX BILL. BAUHAUS OSCAR TUAZON: CONSTELLATIONS FIRE WORSHIP
w w w. wo o dpe c ke rf lo o r in g . c o m
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Interior Sept 26-29 Design 2019 Show Vancouver IDSVancouver.com
Colours shown: Benjamin Moore’s Jet Black (2120-10) and Limelight (2025-40)
APPENDIX
JUNE 11–16
DESIGN MIAMI/BASEL
JUNE 10–SEPT 22
VIRGIL ABLOH: “FIGURES OF SPEECH” Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Illinois The first museum show dedicated to the work of this multihyphenate graphic artist–fashion designer–architect is set in an immersive environment designed by Samir Bantal of AMO, the research studio of Rem Koolhaas’s firm OMA, and pinpoints major moments of Abloh’s career. Expect to see everything from his Off-White garments to prototypes of those text-emblazoned IKEA rugs. From June 10 to July 12, Chicago designers and artists ages 14 to 21 are invited to participate in the Virgil Abloh x MCA x Instagram Design Challenge, which asks youngsters to submit their ideas to the prompt, “Take something boring or broken and turn it into something extraordinary.” Finalists will be announced at an event on August 24.
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Under the theme “Elements: Earth,” the 14th edition of the fair—and the first led by curatorial director Aric Chen, who’ll also oversee this year’s Miami Beach edition—is packed with highlights from 43 participating international galleries. Among them are Genetic Metropolis, a solo show that traces a 10-year collaboration between Italian architect Andrea Branzi and the New York design gallery Friedman Benda; a selection of vintage and contemporary furniture from Milan’s Nilufar Gallery; and a whopping 13 Curios (immersive environments designed by select creatives), the most in the fair’s history, including spaces by Lindsey Adelman, Armel Soyer, Caroline Van Hoek, and Mathieu Lehanneur. Don’t miss SIDE Gallery’s solo show: a spirited presentation of several pieces by the celebrated Mexican architect Luis Barragán.
JUNE 12–20
BARCELONA DESIGN WEEK Barcelona, Spain This city-wide celebration of design features more than 120 activities organized around the theme “Transitions.” Now in its 14th year, the festival includes exhibitions, workshops, talks, and open studios. On June 17, catch a screening of Gary Hustwit’s documentary Rams, which takes a deep dive into the life and work of industrial designer Dieter Rams and is backed by music by Brian Eno.
JUNE 20–28
SAN FRANCISCO DESIGN WEEK San Francisco, Califorinia “CommUNITY” is the focus of this Bay Area festival, which looks at the intersection of ideas, design, business, and entrepreneurism. It kicks off with an opening-night party—where exclusive pieces by leading local and international designers will be sold in a silent auction benefiting the fair—and invites visitors to take part in studio tours, events, and exhibitions during the rest of the week.
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APPENDIX
JUNE 20–23
JUNE 22–SEPT 22
Los Angeles, California Expect public design installations, tours, exhibitions, and more during the ninth annual incarnation of the fair. Dwell on Design and INTRO LA, a design gallery curated by Small Office, return this year, too.
JUNE 26–SEPT 22
JUNE 21–JAN 5
MEMPHIS — PLASTIC FIELD Musée des Art Décoratifs et du Design Bordeaux, France First presented last year at the Berengo Foundation during the 16th Biennale Architettura, this show brings together more than 160 works made by Memphis Group artists between 1981 and 1988, including pieces by Andrea Branzi, Shiro Kuramata, Peter Shire, Martine Bedin, and group founder Ettore Sottsass, as well as some 30 vases produced in Murano.
LESS IS A BORE: MAXIMALIST ART & DESIGN Organized by Jenelle Porter with Jeffrey De Blois, this show examines artists whose work aimed to disrupt the ubiquity of modernism and minimalism, including practitioners involved with the 1970s Pattern and Decoration movement. Pieces by Sanford Biggers, Miriam Schapiro, Nathalie du Pasquier, Jeffrey Gibson, and Betty Woodman, among others, will be on view.
OLAFUR ELIASSON: IN REAL LIFE Tate Modern London, United Kingdom There are countless reasons to visit the first major survey of the Danish-Icelandic powerhouse Olafur Eliasson, including the museum’s Terrace Bar, where the artist will create a vegetarian menu akin to the one served at his Berlin studio. The Weather Project (2003), Ice Watch (2018), Din Blinde Passager (2010), and Beauty (1993) will all be on view.
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The Phillips Collection Washington, DC
ICA Boston Boston, Massachusetts
JULY 11–JAN 5
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THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS: STORIES OF GLOBAL DISPLACEMENT
Curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Natalie Bell and organized in partnership with New York’s New Museum, this show spotlights more than 70 artists whose work explores important questions about the perception and representation of migration. Based on the exhibition The Restless Earth, shown at the Triennale in Milan in 2017, the presentation is rooted in a reference to the decades-long exodus of more than six million African Americans from discrimination in the American South. Visitors will take in video, painting, photography, and installation by a range of historic and contemporary artists, including El Anatsui, Phil Collins, Glenn Ligon, Diego Rivera, Mark Rothko, and Jacob Lawrence, whose famed Migration Series (1940–41) is a cornerstone of the Phillips Collection.
STEPHANIE SYJUCO, COVER-UP, 2016. © STEPHANIE SYJUCO; COURTESY CATHARINE CLARK, SAN FRANCISCO. OLAFUR ELIASSON, YOUR UNCERTAIN SHADOW (COLOUR), 2010. COURTESY TATE MODERN. GLENN LIGON, DOUBLE AMERICA, 2012. NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON, GIFT OF AGNES GUND
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APPENDIX
Duck Hunt
OBSESSION
How one woman “accidentally” assembled the world’s biggest collection of rubber ducks.
As told to RACHEL GALLAHER Photograph by CHARLOTTE LEE
Charlotte Lee is an associate professor in the Department of Human-Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington. She also holds a 2011 Guinness World Record for the largest rubber duck collection, which then clocked in at 5,631. “COLLECTING RUBBER DUCKS WAS SOMETHING THAT HAPPENED GRADUALLY AND ACTUALLY STARTED
In 1996, I was living in California, in a place that had a dark bathroom. To make it more cheerful, I went to a neighborhood drugstore and bought a few rubber ducks to put in the corners. Friends would come over, see the ducks, and assume I collected them, so I started receiving more rubber ducks as gifts. By the time I had 13 ducks, I thought, ‘Well, I guess A BIT BY ACCIDENT.
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I have a collection now!’ My first ducks were the generic yellow ones—it was a family of three: one big, one medium, and one little. I honestly don’t know how many I have now, but it’s more than 9,000. In order to make it into the Guinness book, they have to be unique ducks, so I do have some repeats, but none of them go toward that total. I have ducks from all over the world, and even some vintage ones dating back to the 1950s. Today I keep them in a ‘duck room’ in my very small daylight basement, which is lined with glass-doored IKEA cabinetry. Of course, they don’t all fit in there, so there are some in the attic and some in the garage, and some have migrated to my office at work. I feel like I have the Library of Congress for rubber ducks!” h
“I like bringing the architect’s drawings to life. Coordinating that process and solving puzzles makes my job interestinG.” BRANDON ROOS Superintendant WITH ROBERTS GROUP FOR 10 YEARS
