Eva Hagberg

David Rockwell: The Storyteller (Wallpaper*)

Published December 2008, Wallpaper*

It’s 1967. And David Rockwell is a New Jersey boy who loves community theater and the beach, probably in that order. His mother and stepfather are a vaudeville dancer and a business entrepeneur, in charge of four older boys, and that year seems like a good year to get out of Deal. ‘My father decided to sell the house and within eight weeks of talking about moving we were in a station wagon driving to Guadelajara, Mexico,’ says Rockwell, telling this one of a hundred stories on a hot August afternoon in his Union Square office. David Rockwell is all about stories.

‘That was the best way to move,’ he continues. It’s good to know he was happy, but this isn’t a story about relocation and how it affects the family. This is a story about how David Rockwell, now 52, makes the playful, engaging, literally theatrical (in that it has to do with theater and its cuts and scenes and stages and transitions) architecture he does, and maybe even why. 

‘It was all public space,’ he says of that first trip. ‘All of the life happened in marketplaces, and in the space between different buildings.’ Rockwell is looking back in what he calls the ‘rearview mirror’ of his life and filing all the events into a narrative that can explain his work today. And it’s clear, looking at Rockwell’s colorful, often outsized and always entertaining work, that this first introduction to public space, and that eleven-year-old’s observation that most of the interesting stuff happens on the periphery and in the places between, that he has been working and re-working that idea ever since.

Brad Cloepfil: Mad Men (Wallpaper*)

Published December 2008

The way Brad Cloepfil tells it, when he and Terence Riley -- former architecture and design curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and current director of the Miami Art Museum -- met, Riley gave Cloepfil a word of advice. This aw-shucks thing? Riley, all smooth edges and polished words said to the blond and blue-eyed Cloepfil, an Oregonian who would very clearly never truly leave his green and chilled-out state. It wouldn’t last. 

Aw-shucks might have been one way of describing Cloepfil’s rejection of the usual tropes of architectural discussion, in which the questions asked and answers given rarely make any sense whatsoever, in which architects sketch wordlessly to music by way of explaining their bridges and others play a convoluted game of “Who’s on First?” with anyone asking for a concrete answer. Complete dedication to the actual practice of architecture itself might have been another.

Cloepfil tells the story on a Monday afternoon at his Morrison Street office in Portland, a city so beloved by Americans interested in urban planning – not only for its completely forward-thinking urbanism, one of controlled sprawl and appreciation for civilized togetherness, but for its trees and hills and grassy greens and coffee. It’s easy to see why, even though he’s made it in New York, he calls this Oregon city home.

The narrative is the stuff of story. Ten years ago, Brad Cloepfil was a forty-year-old architect with two kids and just as many employees. He’d done a few projects here and there, the best one so far a bar called Saucebox. That’s where the Wieden + Kennedy kids went to drink after they were done for the day with their ads for Nike and Miller High Life, and it’s where, one day, after rounds and rounds of meetings with architects who weren’t quite cutting it, one of them looked around and said “Hey, who did this place?”

Luck of the Draw (Wallpaper*)

Published in Wallpaper* November 2008

Alan Aldridge is so LA. It’s taken a while for him to become so LA – answering the door to his La Brea Park apartment in bare feet, hair dyed black and slicked back, stereo playing music that would fit just as well in a raucous yoga class as in this spare art-decorated space – but he made it. It’s taken a few career shifts, a few absurd stories, and one self-described Machiavellian move, but Aldridge is settled in this fair city of angels. And, after years as a Hollywood screenwriter, Aldridge is back to his art.

Aldridge designed this month’s magazine cover and, when we speak a bright August afternoon, is about to start designing the word “Wallpaper.” He doesn’t really have a plan for how it’ll go – “when it’s right it just hits” – and he’s not really worried about having to get ready for a big retrospective of his work slated to open this October at the Design Museum London –“it’s not a problem.” Mostly, right now, he wants to tell the story of how he got here.

Rising in the West (Wallpaper)

Published Wallpaper October 2008

Ben van Berkel wants to talk about space-time. At 9am, it seems a little early to be talking time-warp continuums, the potentials of looped narratives, the applicability of the tri-fold diagram. It also seems a little out of context, as we’re in the breakfast lounge of the Gramercy Park Hotel, Ian Schrager’s pre-40 Bond practice run at an extra-louche (“Schnabel was here”) darkly nostalgic Manhattan joint, but when van Berkel’s on a roll, he’s on a roll.

Let’s start at the beginning. Twenty years ago Ben van Berkel and his wife Caroline Bos founded van Berkel + Bos. Van Berkel was the architect and Bos, an art historian and former journalist, was the critic-in-residence, composing everything from essays to project descriptions – roles they continued once their practice transformed into its current incarnation, UN Studio, in 1998.

Van Berkel & Bos was behind the Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam, a single-pylon engineering marvel, and the Moebius House in Het Gooi, a fluid space inspired by the continuous one-sided Moebius Loop (most often see as the recycling logo). It was this house, completed in 1998, that ignited the architectural duo’s interest in space and time, the idea of folding dimensions and architecturally, and inspired their desire to re-evaluate the way they look at shape.

The same year, van Berkel, unhappy with the way the studio was mono-focused on architecture and its articulation, and inspired by the fact that he wanted to work on many different scales, formed the looser collective of UN Studio. It went on to design everything from bridges and houses to museums and masterplans and even a 55m table, “The World’s Longest Table for all Cultures.” But the collective was in Europe. The old world. And very much part of the Dutch group of architect such as Winka Dubbeldam and West 8 and MVRDV, firms that were as good at engineering pig farms as they were at folding a façade, as interested in books as they were in buildings. Now, UN Studio is breaking free.

Home McMakin (Wallpaper*)

Published Wallpaper*, August 2008 (full version)

It’s Thursday in Seattle and it’s gray. It’s been gray since Tuesday night, and it will be gray again on Friday. This particular Thursday morning, it’s gray outside but busy inside at William and Ruth True’s house. It’s a typical morning: Ruth steaming milk for her and Bill’s nine-year-old daughter Sophie, Bill checking out an emerging artist’s website, Sophie avoiding her homework. And there are the dogs, Butter and Honey. Butter’s bigger than Honey, a Greater Swiss Mountain Dog where she’s a (of course) honey-colored Labradoodle. The dogs are both excited, jumping around, up and down and over, and Honey jumps up on the sofa and knocks into Sophie, holding the cup of warm steamed milk fresh from Ruth’s gleaming espresso maker, and the milk spills.

It spills onto art.

There’s a lot of art in the True house. There’s a sculpture of a guy crouching down under the stairs, and two photographs by Malerie Marder over the other stairs. There’s a Kiki Smith piece on the side table in the formal living room, and there’s a Brian Jungen on top of the cabinets in the informal kitchen. Even downstairs, in a desolate hallway that leads to the guest bedroom (itself a commissioned work of art), there’s a Claude Zervas and then, even right next to the laundry room, there’s another piece, The Quiet Ticking of Dreams, by New York-based sound artist Ben Rubin of the beloved Listening Post –“We tried to buy it but there was just no way,” Bill True says – project that sat in the basement of the old pre-Piano New York Times building.

Continue reading "Home McMakin (Wallpaper*)" »

Published April 16, 2008 (link)

“We like to think of ourselves as the most open-minded clients we’re going to have,” said Greg Bradshaw, principal of the downtown architecture/interiors/fashion/book/concept/ethos/lifestyle/design firm AvroKO, which he heads along with Kristina O’Neal, Adam Farmerie, and a very tired—that evening, at least—William Harris. The four of them were sitting at the end of the bar at PUBLIC, their first venture as their own clients, and were talking about everything from the just-completed transformation of the restaurant Park Avenue Winter into Park Avenue Spring (on which Harris has been working non-stop), to their plans for a new restaurant on the rapidly gentrifying Bowery, to joking about what exactly O’Neal’s SAT scores were, and what exactly they mean.

The four, who met when they were eighteen, each have different approaches, personalities, and skills, but together they make up a coherent and collaborative whole. Initially, however, they operated as two firms, Avro Design (Bradshaw and Farmerie) and KO Media Studios (O’Neal and Harris). After many years of collaborating, the two firms merged while working on PUBLIC. Their ethos is research-driven as much as it is fantastical, interpretive as much as creative, and conceptual as much as style-conscious. The firm has become known mostly for its historically referential restaurant design, clear in everything from the Lower East Side’s Stanton Social, which adopted the neighborhood’s long history of tailoring with a herringbone-riffing wine wall, to PUBLIC—the restaurant they own and above which they work—where they took the discarded fixtures of municipal buildings from the 1930s and recast them, so that an old library card catalog is used to store old menus.

Published January 2008

Dror Benshetrit seems charmed.

He might seem charmed because he moved to New York five years ago and has already established himself as a leading force in the city's crowded design scene, or he might seem charmed because everything he designs is just such a hit. Benshetrit might seem charmed because he just seems to meet the right people – real estate magnate-to-the-hip Michael Shvo; ultra-influential MoMA design curator Paola Antonelli, an early supporter; the people who commission for Bombay, Boffi, Puma, Levi's  – or he might seem charmed because everything he does is at once so completely obvious and stunningly novel.

Published March 2007

‘I want to see a world of flesh and bone,’ Robin Standefer, principal, with husband Stephen Alesch, of New York-based architecture and design firm Roman & Williams says on a Thursday afternoon, sitting at her office's long and thoroughly beaten-up conference table, one she crafted out of recovered wood and un-matched industrial legs. "A world of food, architecture, design, sex."

Five years ago, a little movie called Zoolander came out. Revered among the college set, admired by nearly everyone who saw it, the film was remarkable as much for its set design—skate ramps in the apartment, superfuturistic day spas—as it was for its quotability. Ben Stiller, who played the ‘really, really, ridiculously good-looking’ male model Derek Zoolander, loved what production designers Standefer and Alesch had done, and hired them to work on another movie of his, Duplex. The movie bombed, but it cemented Stiller's relationship with the pair. When the time came to renovate his Hollywood house, he called Robin.

Amale Andraos and Dan Wood—a pair of OMA alums—emerge from the long shadow of Rem Koolhaas.

Published July 25, 2007 (link)

“We’re in purgatory,” Amale Andraos says one morning earlier this year, her back to a row of desks covered in iPods, blue foam models, and gleaming black computers, their screens showing half-kicky renderings, half-straightforward CAD. She’s talking about Work Architecture Com­pany’s recent move to its new offices, but she might also be talking about where the firm stands now, about how after founding the office four and a half years ago she and partner Dan Wood are beginning to form their own identity.

Work is just wrapping up projects accepted as part of its first five-year plan, which they describe simply as “say yes to everything.” That explains the bathroom; the low-budget apartment renovation; the kitchen, where, Andraos says, “we almost got fired because we didn’t know how to do a kitchen”; and the Ultrasuede bordello-themed conference room. Now, with projects ranging from the New York headquarters for Diane von Furstenberg (DVF) to shops for the Anthropologie chain, the firm is finding its way out of the shadow—the “tattoo,” Andraos once called it—of Rem Koolhaas.

The Storytellers (Architect's Newspaper)

Published April 16, 2008 (link)

“We like to think of ourselves as the most open-minded clients we’re going to have,” said Greg Bradshaw, principal of the downtown architecture/interiors/fashion/book/concept/ethos/lifestyle/design firm AvroKO, which he heads along with Kristina O’Neal, Adam Farmerie, and a very tired—that evening, at least—William Harris. The four of them were sitting at the end of the bar at PUBLIC, their first venture as their own clients, and were talking about everything from the just-completed transformation of the restaurant Park Avenue Winter into Park Avenue Spring (on which Harris has been working non-stop), to their plans for a new restaurant on the rapidly gentrifying Bowery, to joking about what exactly O’Neal’s SAT scores were, and what exactly they mean.

The four, who met when they were eighteen, each have different approaches, personalities, and skills, but together they make up a coherent and collaborative whole. Initially, however, they operated as two firms, Avro Design (Bradshaw and Farmerie) and KO Media Studios (O’Neal and Harris). After many years of collaborating, the two firms merged while working on PUBLIC. Their ethos is research-driven as much as it is fantastical, interpretive as much as creative, and conceptual as much as style-conscious. The firm has become known mostly for its historically referential restaurant design, clear in everything from the Lower East Side’s Stanton Social, which adopted the neighborhood’s long history of tailoring with a herringbone-riffing wine wall, to PUBLIC—the restaurant they own and above which they work—where they took the discarded fixtures of municipal buildings from the 1930s and recast them, so that an old library card catalog is used to store old menus.

Top Dror (Wallpaper)

Published January 2008

Dror Benshetrit seems charmed.

He might seem charmed because he moved to New York five years ago and has already established himself as a leading force in the city's crowded design scene, or he might seem charmed because everything he designs is just such a hit. Benshetrit might seem charmed because he just seems to meet the right people – real estate magnate-to-the-hip Michael Shvo; ultra-influential MoMA design curator Paola Antonelli, an early supporter; the people who commission for Bombay, Boffi, Puma, Levi's  – or he might seem charmed because everything he does is at once so completely obvious and stunningly novel.

Roman & Williams (Wallpaper)

Published March 2007

‘I want to see a world of flesh and bone,’ Robin Standefer, principal, with husband Stephen Alesch, of New York-based architecture and design firm Roman & Williams says on a Thursday afternoon, sitting at her office's long and thoroughly beaten-up conference table, one she crafted out of recovered wood and un-matched industrial legs. "A world of food, architecture, design, sex."

Five years ago, a little movie called Zoolander came out. Revered among the college set, admired by nearly everyone who saw it, the film was remarkable as much for its set design—skate ramps in the apartment, superfuturistic day spas—as it was for its quotability. Ben Stiller, who played the ‘really, really, ridiculously good-looking’ male model Derek Zoolander, loved what production designers Standefer and Alesch had done, and hired them to work on another movie of his, Duplex. The movie bombed, but it cemented Stiller's relationship with the pair. When the time came to renovate his Hollywood house, he called Robin.

On the Cusp (Metropolis)

Amale Andraos and Dan Wood—a pair of OMA alums—emerge from the long shadow of Rem Koolhaas.

Published July 25, 2007 (link)

“We’re in purgatory,” Amale Andraos says one morning earlier this year, her back to a row of desks covered in iPods, blue foam models, and gleaming black computers, their screens showing half-kicky renderings, half-straightforward CAD. She’s talking about Work Architecture Com­pany’s recent move to its new offices, but she might also be talking about where the firm stands now, about how after founding the office four and a half years ago she and partner Dan Wood are beginning to form their own identity.

Work is just wrapping up projects accepted as part of its first five-year plan, which they describe simply as “say yes to everything.” That explains the bathroom; the low-budget apartment renovation; the kitchen, where, Andraos says, “we almost got fired because we didn’t know how to do a kitchen”; and the Ultrasuede bordello-themed conference room. Now, with projects ranging from the New York headquarters for Diane von Furstenberg (DVF) to shops for the Anthropologie chain, the firm is finding its way out of the shadow—the “tattoo,” Andraos once called it—of Rem Koolhaas.