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This week we’re off to Mexico City’s La Condesa to take a peep into a bank-vault-inspired eyewear shop, before tuning in to a Noguchi-designed baby monitor and indulging our inner lounge lizard on Moebe’s new modular sofa. Here to break ground, Nic Monisse is sipping on white wine and witty anecdotes with pioneering Maltese architect Richard England.
Opinion / Nic Monisse
As a journalist, I’m fortunate to find myself in far-flung locations talking to the world’s leading creatives on an almost weekly basis. Often, for larger reports, I’ll spend days with a designer who is, at the outset, a complete stranger. But, over multiple meals and visits to sites and studios, a closer bond forms. While they’re still very much a subject, I do find myself in moments of quasi-friendship with such designers, picking up anecdotes and insights that I wouldn’t if I were merely scheduled for an hour-long interview.
This was an experience I enjoyed with Richard England, the octogenarian architect whose work has come to define the architectural style of his native Malta. I trailed him for a week this summer, bouncing between his works but gleaning insights and hearing tales that went beyond mere explanations of bricks and mortar. From England’s terrace with a glass of white wine in hand, he told of the time he spent with Victor Pasmore, one of the UK’s finest mid-century abstract artists, and how he imparted to England the ability to deal with creative hardship. “In 1994, one of his early paintings had been sold for £70,000 and I asked him, over lunch, how he felt about the sale and the dealer who made the profit.” Pasmore said: “I sold that work for £10, so I feel a little bit like a horse that won a race but is now watching the jockey get the cup.” Equally, England talked in an off-hand way about drinking “vodka like a fish” with government officials in Astana before unveiling a project, having Argentine-American architect César Pelli support his opposition to tall buildings in Malta and meeting the nuns responsible for protecting Luis Barragán's work in Mexico. All of this, England says, inadvertently affected his outlook and approach to his work.
The downside to such experiences is the fact that, as an editor, you have to distil these tales down to a fine spirit. Much of what is told to you, no matter how brilliant, ends up on the cutting-room floor – as was the case for these aforementioned anecdotes. So why bring this up? First, because it was a way for me to squeeze another couple of hundred words out of Richard England (see ‘Words With’ below). And second, to invite you to hear more from the esteemed architect in person when he speaks at Monocle’s Quality of Life Conference in Istanbul next Friday. For more anecdotes from Richard – and a glimpse into the life of a design editor on the road – do join us.
Nic Monisse is Monocle’s design editor.
Curious to know more about Richard England’s remarkable life and career? Join us at Monocle’s Quality of Life Conference in Istanbul, which runs from Thursday 10 October until Saturday 12 October, where England will join Monocle’s editors as part of an action-packed three-day programme.
Sign up for inspiring conversation and connection on the Bosphorushere.
The project / Retrosuperfuture, Mexico
Italian optical retailer Retrosuperfuture (RSF) is bringing its collection of elegant eyewear to Latin America with the opening of its first flagship shop in Mexico City. For this new retail space in the leafy La Condesa neighbourhood, Dutch design studio Cloud created a stainless-steel-clad space. “We took inspiration from the architecture of a bank vault,” says Cloud’s Paul Cournet. “A space where the walls are entirely covered by hidden drawers and with the centre of the space left as a void.” It’s a sleek way for the brand’s customers to peruse its collection with a full-length mirror offering buyers a chance to reflect on potential purchases while also bouncing light through the space.
The atmosphere within is enhanced by a giant lightbox on the ceiling, which emits the ambient glow of a sunset to create a warming retail environment. It’s a combination of features that not only makes a visit here an enjoyable shopping experience but provides RSF with an inviting space in which to build a community. “During the day, the space acts as a storefront gallery for the display of all the latest RSF collections,” says Cournet. “At night, the central void is liberated and can turn into a dance floor, a bar, an exhibition space or a stage for performances.”
retrosuperfuture.com
For more on Retrosuperfuture, pick up a copy ofMonocle’s October issue.
Design News / Urban Nature Project X Holcim Foundation, UK
For the past 20 years, the Switzerland-based independent non-profit Holcim Foundation has been spotlighting projects that champion innovative practices in sustainable design and construction through its awards programme. One of its most recent winners is the newly completed Urban Nature Project at the Natural History Museum in London. The two-hectare garden features planting dedicated to a variety of landscapes, from woodland to wetlands, with flowering plants, fruits and grasses attracting pollinating insects and significantly increasing the site’s biodiversity.
The gardens are a product of a design team led by architects Feilden Fowles and landscape architects J&L Gibbons, and serve as a research space for the museum’s scientists, who now have a dedicated area to monitor, record and study urban wildlife. Significantly, it has also provided a moment of respite for those alighting from South Kensington Tube station. It’s this combination that saw the Holcim Foundation earmark the Urban Nature Project as a winning initiative back in 2023, well before its completion this summer. “The jury particularly applauded the project’s dedication to repurposing urban spaces, to effectively increase biodiversity and provide new public and recreational areas accessible to all,” said the Holcim Foundation’s European prize jury, then led by Belinda Tato.
Entries are now open for the newest round of theHolcim Foundation Awards. Projects must be unrealised but have reached the detailed design phase, showing the potential to flourish into benchmark works like the Urban Nature Project.
Words with... / Richard England, Malta
An award-winning architect, poet and artist, Richard England aims to give “poetry to the pragmatic”. During a distinguished career spanning more than 60 years, the Maltese creative has created a cannon of regionalist architecture, particularly on his island home, that is built from a strong sense of place and rooted in local materials.
You studied and worked under Gio Ponti. How did this influence your practice?
What I brought back was his approach, philosophy and methodology of working. Ponti was one of the first architects in the rampant modernist period that was interested in vernacular architecture and I drew inspiration from that. I always say that architecture doesn’t travel well. It’s like vegetation – something you plant in Malta probably isn’t going to grow in Alaska. So you need to create an architecture that belongs to its place and time.
What’s your view on new architecture and how can our approach to contemporary design be improved?
Most of the problems with contemporary architecture are that it feels as if there’s nothing there. If you walk into an old village you’ll notice that the roads snake, you get a view of the dome or the spire, and you’re enticed to keep going, to try to get there. That’s what architecture is supposed to be about, a “hereness” and “thereness” that seems to be missing now. It’s also about creating “wow” moments because we feel architecture and sense it visually, aurally and even orally. Take my friend, Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa, and his experience of the Pantheon in Rome. When he visited he told me, “I had a great urge to taste the marble.” If he did lick it – I hope he washed it down with a few whiskeys.
You were invited by Iraqi architect, Rifat Chadirji, to help develop a new vision for Baghdad in the early 1980s. What was your experience working in Iraq?
It was very intense. I once tried to take some photos of Baghdad’s Convention Centre for The Architects’ Journal only for Iraqi security services to pull me out of the taxi I was photographing from at gunpoint. Then they kept me in a prison cell overnight. I didn’t want to give them my camera, so I opened its back and exposed the film to destroy the photos. They were happy with that outcome and called a taxi for me. But, as I was getting in, another guy came out with a gun, and said, “Come back in.” So I did. They sat me down and said, “We Iraqis are very honest people. How much do we owe you for the film?” The next morning there was a package at my hotel with a replacement film. It was a nice gesture, if not for the fact that the film had expired about seven years prior.
For more on Richard England’s work, pick up a copy of theOctober issue of Monocle magazine. Or join us in Istanbul next week for ourQuality of Life Conference.
From The Archive / Radio Nurse, USA
Isamu Noguchi made his name as an artist and designer with his sinuous sculptures, furniture and the Akari series of paper lamps. One less appreciated aspect of the American designer’s career is that he also gave form to the world’s first baby monitor. Invented in 1937 by Zenith Radio Corporation, the Radio Nurse was marketed as the essential household device for parents to know that their babies were safe and sound. For designing the gadget they went to Noguchi, who came up with an abstract rendering of a human head in dark-brown Bakelite.
While baby monitors have indeed landed in many family homes, the pioneering Radio Nurse was not a commercial success. The problem was partly that the transmitter shared a frequency with other new household devices, and would broadcast radio programmes over the baby’s babbling. Another element might be Noguchi’s faintly sinister design, which is more evocative of a Star Wars character than any children’s bedtime story. Still, though it didn’t enchant its newborn demographic, any adult will admit that the Radio Nurse is far more artful than the nursery gadgets in production today.
Around The House / Modular Sofa, Denmark
Moebe recently unveiled its Modular Sofa. It’s the Danish brand’s first large-scale seating project and, as the name suggests, it can be assembled in all manner of configurations. It’s the perfect addition for those regularly on the move, allowing its owner to bring the sofa from city to city and home to home.
The sofa also ticks environmental boxes: its components are made from oil treated, FSC-certified oak. Its versatility is also enhanced by a range of 16 fabric types, meaning that the sofa can also change in textile finishes and evolve to match new environments.
moebe.dk
In The Picture / ‘John L Wong’, USA
The 50-year career of one of America’s leading designers has been documented in a new monograph, Selected Works of Landscape Architect John L Wong: From Private to Public Ground – From Small to Tall. With an introduction written by Wong himself (among others), the book explores his influences from an upbringing spent in Hong Kong to an education in the Bay Area, a combination that led to his nuanced mixture of textures and colours in projects ranging from small-scale private gardens to the forecourts of some of the world’s largest skyscrapers.
The Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers’ book showcases the landscape master’s work through sketches and photographs, including his drawings as a student during a year abroad in Italy. Serving both as a monograph and a guidebook for aspiring professionals in the field, the book’s personal stories delve into the deeper meaning of landscape architecture, where themes of culture, society and context are crucial to the success of building for the public.
oropublishers.com
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