Issues

Outer space

For the better part of 50 years, people passing through Annecy in southeast France would be forgiven for thinking the small Alpine city doubles as the set for a long-running science-fiction TV show. This is largely due to the spaceship-like building on the edge of the city centre. Called Nouvelles Galeries, it’s the conurbation’s defining piece of architecture –and it looks like a grounded ufo. Built to the design of French architect Antoine Dory in 1969, it has a box-like department store at its centre, wrapped in a circular car park.

Its striking modernist form, in stark contrast with Annecy’s more traditional Alpine vernacular, has become a source of pride for residents, with local lobbying helped secure its heritage status. Despite this, Dory’s structure has long failed to adequately serve the increasingly pedestrian-friendly city centre, with easy access on foot only possible via the car park. It’s a fact that Citynove, the real-estate development branch of Groupe Galeries Lafayette (of Parisian department store fame), knew it had to address when it purchased the property and took over the main retail tenancy.

“People don’t just want to buy something nowadays; they want to connect with other people,” says Romain Labbé, deputy director-general of Citynove. “Tenants want spaces where they can build relationships with customers and not just transact goods.” The original building, Labbé says, didn’t allow for this. It prompted Citynove to employ celebrated French architect Manuelle Gautrand in 2013 to address the site’s deficiencies, beginning a 10-year renovation process that is finishing this summer. “The original building was a shoebox enveloped by the car park without any alignment to the street,” says Gautrand. “It’s not how we conceive architecture today but it’s loved by the people of Annecy so we had to transform it in a way that respected its roots.”

Gautrand’s approach was simple: “Demolish nothing.” Using the void beneath the existing parking rings, she installed a curving indoor promenade lined with 40 new shops. “Putting a mall precisely beneath the parking meant that we didn’t have to change the shape of the building and could keep all the columns, which is the first goal in terms of sustainability.”

Gautrand added six circular “satellites” to the site. Intersecting with the ringed parking and varying in diameter, these additions seamlessly blend with – and arc out from – the existing structure, extending the edges of the building to meet the footpath and the city beyond. Finished in glass, these satellites invite passersby to linger. “It’s a way of encouraging people to visit,” says Gautrand of the transparent frontages. “It helps to attract visitors by showcasing the life going on inside.”

To increase the building’s appeal, Citynove commissioned Danish architect David Thulstrup to revamp the interiors. He created everything from bespoke lighting to coloured wayfinding that nods to your direction of entry: yellow signs on the west side match the colour of the city’s old lanterns; blue ones are seen by those entering from the lakefront; and an earthy pink is reserved for the side facing the Alps. The colour coding helps visitors to find their way around more intuitively (aided by matching installations from Dutch designer Sabine Marcelis), while the same thematic principles are also applied to Gautrand’s internal promenade. “The floor has nine different types of stone,” says Thulstrup. “They graduate from grey on the western side to being sand-coloured in the south, like the lake shores, to darker browns on the east towards the mountains. It’s about giving definition to the promenade.”

Thulstrup further enhanced this concept with the shopfronts. Owners could choose from a menu of 20 frontages to suit their business, from a kiosk-style counter to a built-in-bench for passersby to sit on. “It means that each tenant can be slightly different, lending itself to more specialised shops and customer curiosity, creating intimacy and accentuating divisions along the promenade,” he says.

The move speaks to Citynove’s efforts to welcome a mix of tenants and ensure that Nouvelles Galeries is more than just a retail destination: there’s a climbing gym, a pharmacy, street-food offerings, fine dining, a repair shop, a cycling store and public seating along the promenade (again, by Marcelis). “Everyone wants to shop online now, which is understandable because the classic mall is super-efficient and that’s boring,” says Labbé. “We have created little opportunities for people to sit in front of a shopfront or stop and drink coffee with friends. We want to bring quality design back to retail and make it a very natural part of everyday life.”

Perhaps it’s appropriate that a building that looks like a spaceship might point to the future of retail.

In the picture

1.
Artists

Artist
Tabitha Millett
Cambridge

Tabitha Millett’s paintings are enigmatic. What seems simple at first glance gets more complex once you take a closer look. Inside her bold geometric shapes, paint is applied in broad strokes to create vivid textures. Inspired by minimalist art and masters such as Pierre Soulages, Millett (pictured) places materials, rather than subjects, at the forefront of her work. “When you’re making anything, especially with painting, you really see a sense of material agency that is apart from you,” she says. “Materials have their own mind. There’s a certain alchemy.”

Millett is speaking in her studio, a space with high ceilings and paint-splashed floors inside the faculty of education at the University of Cambridge. As well as a painter, she is also an assistant professor in the arts, creativity and education course. Her studio is both workspace and classroom: when it’s not filled with chattering students, the only sound is the music she plays while at work. “I listen to techno and house, which connect with the paintings; there’s a certain aesthetic they align with,” she says.

Millett’s pieces can feel as powerful as any electronic track, while brutalist architecture is a big influence too. Her use of black acrylic mixed with marble or limestone dust creates a tactile, impasto effect, while the black and white tones make for compositions that play with high contrast. “I like to explore the different ways in which black and darkness can be imagined,” she says. Her designs are made even more effective by the pieces’ large size and sleek wooden frames.

Her creative process is a back and forth between precision and freehand. “I usually have something clear in mind and the geometric patterns are straightforward,” she says. “But paint pulls you in certain directions that are down to chance.” Yet when it comes to drawing the outlines of the shapes, she allows for no error. “It’s a case of, ‘You have one shot to do this.’ If a line is slightly less crisp, I rip it up.”

With shows so far this year at London’s Maze and Munich’s Nuo galleries, she is now preparing for autumn’s Start Art Fair at the Saatchi Gallery. She hopes that the audience there will feel both the intensity and simplicity of her art. “I’m always treading the line between the two,” she says.
Millett’s work is on show now as part of ‘No 1’ at Nuo Gallery in Munich.
nuogallery.de

Artist
Grada Kilomba
Berlin

There are many layers to Grada Kilomba’s work, whether in her films, installations, writing or performances. This is partly because she is a thinker endlessly interested in the subjects she tackles but also because of the multifaceted research that goes into her pieces.

Born in Lisbon to a family of African heritage, Kilomba (pictured) grew up in a working-class suburb of the Portuguese capital and moved to Berlin in 2008, where she completed her doctorate. Given that she studied Freudian psychoanalysis and philosophy, it’s no surprise she has a tendency to dig deeper – and that she’s frequently been inspired by Ancient Greek myths, such as for her video “Illusions Vol. iii, Antigone”. “Mythologies speak to what we are aware of but also unconscious knowledge, which plays a very important role in our imagination, values and perspectives,” she says. “That fascinates me: what is material and what is not material? What isn’t there, but still exists?”

Already represented by the London- and South Africa-based Goodman Gallery, Kilomba recently started working with Pace. Later this year, she will co-curate the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo. Getting involved in Brazil makes sense, given her work’s themes of post-colonialism, power, gender and trauma, particularly with reference to the transatlantic slave trade. Kilomba has lived a lot of those issues directly; yet her art delivers its message with an empathy that turns stories of loss and brutality into opportunities for healing.

Her best-known piece is the 32-metre-long “O Barco / The Boat”, an installation made from burnt wooden blocks arranged in the shape of a ship, inscribed with a poem and completed with a live performance. An extension of this, titled “18 Verses”, is at Pace New York from May. Each work leads into the next, creating an overarching piece. “Being an artist is a bit like writing a book,” she says. “Each artwork is a chapter that deals with the questions I’m busy with. It’s like a puzzle.”
‘18 Verses’ is at Pace New York until 1 July.
pacegallery.com

Artist
Lee Bae
Cheongdo

When Lee Bae speaks in Korean, he does so with a slight but distinct accent: a remnant from his childhood in the countryside around Cheongdo in Gyeongsang Province. Though he moved to Paris in 1989 and still has a home there, the 66-year-old has gone full circle, returning to his hometown in 2012 to set up a studio.

As a penniless thirtysomething in France, Lee (pictured) stumbled upon a bag of charcoal at a service station and experienced flashbacks to the colours that he had grown up with. Memories of calligraphy traced with Indian ink made from pine-tree soot were among them. Charcoal represented his roots.

Since then he has experimented with the material in many formats. He has mixed it with acrylic paint for drawings, and has assembled charred wooden shards on canvas. To Lee, charcoal is a symbol of the cycle of life: born from the destruction brought about by fire but used to start a new flame too.

After he was named the South Korean National Museum of Contemporary Art’s artist of the year in 2000, Lee attracted international attention, with shows at the likes of Fondation Maeght in southern France and the Musée Guimet in Paris. His adopted home recognised him in 2018 with a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres title.

“Initially I was always aware of a wall [from local artists] as a stranger but it made me contemplate where I come from and what it meant to be a Korean artist,” says Lee, sitting in his studio near the lush hills of his childhood.

This summer, Lee is bringing Cheongdo to the Rockefeller Center’s Channel Gardens in the form of a three-storey-high sculpture for the institution’s Korea Week celebration. As part of his Issu du Feu series, he baked pine logs for weeks in a kiln to create a black monument that shimmers ever so slightly.

“New York is the centre of the industrial world and in the centre of that city I’m bringing a part of this countryside, of primitive physicality,” says Lee. His next project is a collaboration with a paint-maker to create a black named after him, like Yves Klein Blue. For that, he is delving even deeper into his roots, looking at the black hues of ancient pottery made nearly a millennium ago.

2.
Photography

Interview
Yoram Roth
Fotografiska

Fotografiska is a museum of contemporary photography that opened in Stockholm in 2010. Two further locations opened in Tallinn and New York in 2019; in 2021, Fotografiska merged with the US-based members’ club and workspace NeueHouse under the CultureWorks umbrella. Berlin-born Yoram Roth is executive chairman of both companies. He began his career as a photographer and record-label owner, before investing in cultural projects including Berlin’s Clärchens ballroom. With construction under way for Fotografiska spaces in Berlin, Shanghai and Miami, Roth is overseeing a rapid expansion of the museum brand.

What is the Fotografiska philosophy?
We have come to a point in history where we’re inundated by thousands of images a day and their primary task is to sell us something. So we’re interested in this idea of people going to a place and standing in front of an image that was created solely for the purpose of being an image.

Fotografiska doesn’t sell the images on display, like a commercial gallery, but it is run as a for-profit museum. How does it differ in its approach from other institutions?
A friend of mine runs another photo museum in Berlin and we both talk about the same thing: putting on shows that resonate with an audience. Where Fotografiska starts being different is things like opening hours. We sometimes open until 23.00 so you can come after work, have a glass of wine and see an exhibition. A traditional museum can’t offer that.

What stage are you at with the three new venues?
We signed agreements years ago and they’re beyond our control to some degree. In Berlin, we’re delayed so we will be opening in September. We hoped that Shanghai would be open in 2022 but China’s “zero-Covid” policy made that virtually impossible, so we’re hoping to open this year. Miami is not delayed. There’s so much construction going on there; we like what we’re doing.

Where is the photography industry heading in the next decade?
I don’t know but I worry about the photo- gallery world. When you go to Frieze or Art Basel, you see paintings that are worth millions; if a major gallery sells one piece, their overheads are covered. With photography, a gallery has got to sell a lot more work to justify the trip. It will become increasingly difficult for galleries to operate.

How do you see the medium evolving?
The way that we show photography is changing. We just had a lifetime retrospective of James Nachtwey, one of the great war photographers. At the same time, we were showing Sarah Moon, one of the greats of fashion photography. The only thing that they have in common is the tool: the camera. News photography has changed a lot. If 20 years ago there was a crisis, we would send someone like Nachtwey to explain what’s going on. Now, if there’s an earthquake in Turkey, we see the images from people’s phones and we have a more direct contact with that journalistic moment. You used to be able to become relatively wealthy being a fashion photographer; those days are over. Every one of these industries is affected.
fotografiska.com

Briefing
MAP
Bangalore

Bangalore’s new Museum of Art & Photography (MAP) is a ball’s throw from a vast cricket stadium in the heart of India’s fastest-growing city. The location is appropriate: map aims to put culture on an equal footing with India’s most popular sport. “The challenge is: how do you involve the whole community?” says Nathaniel Gaskell, director of map Academy, the museum’s education arm. “How do you take the best elements of experienced museums and still reflect what’s going on in India now?”

map embedded ideas of accessibility and openness into the site’s design. An ambition to engage and educate took shape in meeting rooms and educational facilities that were given equal importance to the galleries. By creating a steel structure, Bangalore-based Mathew and Ghosh Architects were able to accommodate larger spaces, uninterrupted by supporting columns.

The museum is home to more than 60,000 objects, ranging from contemporary paintings to Bollywood posters. Photography, however, represents its largest holdings, thanks to an archive of negatives stretching back to the 19th century and prints by Western and Indian practitioners, such as Magnum’s Raghu Rai and contemporary talent Dayanita Singh.

Gaskell curated its inaugural photography exhibition, Time and Time Again, which runs until 25 July, with photography by Indian modernist Jyoti Bhatt. Future exhibitions include a show devoted to one of India’s earliest photojournalists, TS Satyan.
map-india.org

3.
Collectors

Collector
Udit Bhambri
Mumbai

You will be hard-pressed to find an empty stretch of wall in collector Udit Bhambri’s south Mumbai home. The former country head of advertising and marketing agency vml India, Bhambri (pictured) owns more than 1,000 pieces of art of various sizes and formats – paintings, sketches, collages, photographs and sculptures. His accumulation includes works by artists considered fundamental to south Asian art history, including Anju Dodiya to Arpita Singh, MF Husain, Rana Begum, Shilpa Gupta and Tyeb Mehta. Over time, he has loaned several pieces for public viewing (such as at the just-concluded Kochi-Muziris Biennale).

“Art allows you to live someone else’s life without actually having lived it,” says Bhambri, whose parents and grandparents were also collectors. His interest was sparked as a child, when he would join his family on studio visits armed with a book for artists to autograph. This would often be a sketch addressed to him. “The first time I met Husain-saab, he misspelt my name, which makes it even more special,” he says of the late MF Husain, with whom he shared a long friendship.

In recent years, Bhambri has spoken at art events, helped friends shape their collections and curated a show for Delhi-based Vadehra Art Gallery. “It was a mini-ensemble of the artists whose works I have at home,” he says. Alvar Aalto Medal-winning architect Bijoy Jain is helping Bhambri build his new residence, where he hopes to bring together “like-minded” people to showcase the art he owns.

Do you have a philosophy on collecting art?
It has to have longevity in the sense that it stays relevant to society and to other people who appreciate art. It could be a political work with a different meaning in 1993 – but it could have an exponential gravity to what it means in 2023. It has to stand the test of time.

Is there an artist who has changed the way you look at art?
Arpita Singh is my favourite artist, by leaps and bounds. She has changed my life in many ways, from how you look at art to the process of looking at it; what colours are going into it; what text means in a certain work of art; whether ultramarine is melancholic or joyous; what the finish point of a work is.

Your taste leans towards paintings so what made you buy the Monika Correa tapestry you’re pictured with above?
Arpita Singh and another favourite of mine, Prabhakar Barwe, have a background with the Weavers’ Service Centre [an institution dedicated to textiles, where Correa studied]. I’m not sure whether it was an extension of this, the blurring lines around art and craft or simply my desire to explore new mediums to juxtapose the collection of paintings with that made me want Monika’s work. But I’ve always loved it.

Collector
Benedicta M Badia Nordenstahl
Chicago

Argentine-born Benedicta M Badia Nordenstahl is drawn to work that confronts her with uncomfortable truths, such as this piece by Filipino-Canadian artist Stephanie Comilang about Thai migrant women in Berlin. Having lived in southeast Asia, she is now based in Chicago. She started collecting 18 years ago. Today much of her professional life consists of connecting different foundations and institutions with creatives outside the European and American canon.

What’s the philosophy behind your collecting?
I buy art that feeds my mind but also when I believe in an artist’s work. I collect as a political exercise. Many of the artists I buy are in a process of real social change. I don’t need to change the world; I just need to be part of the solution. I’m not attached to the object per se, I’m more attached to the human being behind it and the story they’re telling.

Do you ever buy straight from an artist or always through galleries?
I always buy from a gallery. They can be an artist’s biggest champion and I support young galleries that don’t treat the work like a luxury item but that are safe havens for artists. We don’t buy just for things to stay in storage; we rehang our home four or five times a year and we do a lot of tours.

What is it like to live with such challenging art?
There’s a book by Japanese writer Jun’ichiro Tanizaki called In Praise of Shadows and its idea is that there is no light without shadow. I am connected with artists who are change-makers. But they crack me up too: they are funny, satirical and questioning.

Collectors
Allan and Mei Warburg
California

Pinot noir vines frame an uphill entrance road that points to the giant, alabaster-coloured meditating head of Jaume Plensa’s “Sanna”, one of more than 50 sculptures on the Donum Estate in Sonoma County, California. On spring mornings, Bay Area fog swathes the work while, on a clear day, the sun reflects off Richard Hudson’s “Love Me”: a shiny, bulbous heart looming on a hill close to the entrance.

A working farm and vineyard, Donum was taken over by Hong Kong-based art collectors Allan and Mei Warburg in 2011. Danish businessman Allan built his career in China, where Mei was born, while he was working for the East Asiatic Company, and later co-founded fashion company Bestseller. The Warburgs began collecting contemporary Chinese art during the late 1990s and were soon building a global collection. They started adding sculptures to the Donum grounds in 2014 and are now considered among the world’s top art collectors.

The pair’s collection extends far beyond the monumental works placed at Donum but the setting is one that Allan is very keen on. He and Mei champion the idea of displaying work away from the sterile white cubes and wax lyrical on the beauty of birds perching and chirping atop pieces such as Li Hui’s “Captured Rhino”. The estate’s Yayoi Kusama pumpkin is surrounded by vegetation and Zhan Wang, Keith Haring and Ai Weiwei pieces are placed throughout the grounds too (Weiwei’s work also adorns some of Donum’s labels; the artist receives 24 bottles a year for the usage). “Here, you take art and a beautiful landscape, and it just becomes something much stronger than each of them by themselves,” says Allan.

The Warburgs have started commissioning work especially for these surroundings, such as the recently installed “Apollo of Belvedere” by Adam Parker Smith. It is the first marble statue on the estate: a take on the classical work squeezed into a cube-like shape. “I don’t try to influence [the artists] at all,” says Allan. “It is very much a collaborative process.” Next to Smith’s stands another piece created for the estate, Doug Aitken’s “Sonic Mountain, (Sonoma)”: 365 chimes hung in a eucalyptus grove that play music when the wind flows through the vineyard. In the absence of a breeze, Allan runs his hand along the chimes.

“Feel free to touch them,” he says of the works we encounter. Riding around the estate in a brp Can-Am, he gesticulates at this or that sculpture, hops out of the vehicle and advocates getting up close to embrace the uniquely tactile nature of this set-up. At the brightly coloured Ugo Rondinone piece “Nuns 1 Monks”, he speaks about how seeing the colours livened his and Mei’s mood during the doldrums of the pandemic.

Allan fell in love with art while visiting creative studios in China. “Beijing in the late 1990s was really fantastic,” he says. “You hadn’t been allowed to express yourself for so many years but suddenly artists could be creative and free to do what artists should do. You could just go to studios and knock on the door and the artists would be so happy to show you around.”

Messages conveyed by the works he bought then influence his style of collecting today: art that makes strong statements and breaks down cultural barriers, such as Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd’s “Non-Violence” or Robert Indiana’s “Love (Gold/Red)”. Sopheap Pich’s bamboo-and-rattan sculpture “Morning Glory”, depicting the type of flower the artist and his family survived on during Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge rule, also takes pride of place. “For Pich, this is really a sign of hope,” says Allan.

Evenings spent in artists’ studios, sometimes over a glass of wine, have shaped his ambition for the estate. It is to have a space that pairs world-class art with simply hanging out, and that the public can visit by booking in advance. “A lot of the artists we knew from back then, they’re still very close friends,” he says.

4.
Venues

Venue
ICA
San Francisco

Silicon Valley’s start-up spirit seems to have rubbed off on the new Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco (icasf). Set in the former Esprit campus, the gallery opened its doors October 2022, just 18 months after the concept was conceived.

“Moving quickly and risk-taking are the vision of this institution,” says Christine Koppes, the icasf’s curator and director of curatorial affairs, from a sunny courtyard. She wants artists coming on board for exhibitions to be doing “something big”.

Choctaw-Cherokee painter Jeffrey Gibson answered that call with “This Burning World”, a multimedia installation that consisted of him cutting trenches into the museum’s concrete floor with a diamond saw blade. It was a suitably loud announcement for the rest of the burgeoning Dogpatch art neighbourhood that this new kid on the block isn’t afraid to get its hands dirty.

icasf’s status as a non-collecting institution facilitates a sense of artistic freedom. In lieu of constantly maintaining a permanent collection, Koppes believes the institution is better placed to “focus our funding and time on the artists directly”.

Not that icasf eschews the value of collecting. Patrons have flocked to the Collector Starter Pack, an instructional series in which staff teach the basics of browsing and buying art. “A lot of people are interested in purchasing work but it can feel intimidating,” says Koppes. Despite rumours of San Francisco’s and its technology behemoths’ demise, the city remains an enclave of new wealth that can be coached into supporting culture and icasf can play an important role in that process.
icasf.org

Venue
Mac
Marseille

Opened to the public in 1994, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Marseille (Mac) unveiled its new look in April after a four-year, €5m overhaul. The original modernist structure, designed in the 1970s by German doctor-cum-art-collector Gustav Rau to house his works, has been updated with an airy entrance hall and ample extra exhibition space, as well as a rooftop overlooking the genteel southern neighbourhood of Bonneveine. The building’s environmental footprint has also been improved.

Located near Prado beach and Parc Borély, the museum is a great jumping-off point to explore the city’s docile side. Marseille-based Bureau Architecture Méditerranée’s co-founders, Maxime Repaux and Frédéric Roustan – also behind a lofty auditorium in Budapest and a sleek archaeological centre in Cairo – were tasked with injecting a sense of the Riviera’s luminosity into the minimalist space.

Inside, Italian artist Paola Pivi’s bright and cheeky work inaugurates the venue’s refreshed programming, which will focus on artists from across the Mediterranean. Pivi’s installation Free Land Scape consists of a tunnel made from denim, representing a childlike vision of the sea. The museum’s new layout also allows for more room to show off its permanent collection, which spans everything from arte povera to fluxus, featuring works by French artists including Niki de Saint Phalle, Louise Bourgeois and Daniel Buren, as well as big names such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Carsten Höller and Robert Rauschenberg.
musees.marseille.fr

Venue
IN’EI
Venice

On the ground floor of a historic palazzo facing Venice’s Grand Canal, in’ei is an art and design gallery with a particular focus on China, South Korea and Japan. The space is the brainchild of French business partners Patrice Dumand and Hélène Dubois. Dumand calls Venice “the perfect city” for such a project. “Venice was that bridge looking to the east,” he says. “There was a lot of traffic [historically] between the city and East Asia.”

The pair had already worked together on another passion: bringing Japanese vintage furniture to Europe as part of a previous project that they began in Florence in 2019. Seeking to create a home to show works by East Asia’s architects and artists in Italy, Dumand and Dubois found the current building online and fell in love. Dumand calls the gallery’s programming “eclectic”, with plans to change the shows up to eight times a year.

in’ei’s opening exhibition focused on often political Chinese artist Gao Bo, including photography from his travels in Tibet. Next up, to tie in with the architecture biennale, is South Korean architect Jinhee Park and Japanese collective h220430. “It’s going to be the perfect example of who we are,” says Dumand. “From joyful to cerebral.”
in-ei.it

Venue
Sabino 336
Mexico City

On a quiet street lined with industrial warehouses in Mexico City’s Atlampa neighbourhood, contemporary artist Bosco Sodi has opened a new studio and gallery space. Brooklyn-based Sodi, who founded Casa Wabi in Puerto Escondido, needed a place to work when he travelled back to the Mexican capital, which is his hometown. He also wanted somewhere to present his pieces, most of which were hidden away in boxes. “The main purpose of work is to be seen,” says Sodi. “It’s interesting to visit old works and have a new dialogue with them.”

To design Sabino 336, Sodi enlisted the expertise of Mexico City-based architect Alberto Kalach, a longtime friend. “We have a similar philosophy: we like humble materials, such as concrete, wood and brick,” says Sodi. “I wanted to create a space that looks like it has been there forever; there’s no competition between the building and the art. The light changes through the day and there’s an interesting dialogue.”

Sodi bought the former warehouse six years ago, tore it down and replaced it with two soaring cement and brick structures; one houses Casa Wabi’s offices and two exhibition spaces, while the other houses Studio Bosco Sodi. From the outside, Sabino 336 almost blends into the street but inside it’s minimalist and cutting-edge. Across multiple levels are gallery spaces and a terrace with Sodi’s hallmark pieces: large bronze sculptures, gold-coated spheres and paintings made from a mixture of sawdust, pigment and water.

The building also has a ground-floor café and a studio where Sodi can work. Look at the view from the rooftop terrace and you’ll see the surrounding warehouses almost bleed into the distant mountains. Sodi saw an opportunity to lift this neighbourhood, one of the more underprivileged areas of Mexico City. “Art has the power to change complicated dynamics,” he says. “It has always been my philosophy. There’s an obligation when you do these types of projects; you open them in a place where they will add value.” Last year, Sodi debuted Assembly, a non-profit museum in an old Buick dealership in the forgotten town of Monticello, north of New York.

The gallery in Mexico City is open to everyone; neighbouring schools are invited to join creative workshops and spend full or half days in the space. “That’s most important for me,” says Sodi. “Art means its most when everybody can see it.”
boscosodi.com

Venue
Gas
Lagos

Though based in the UK, British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare has long been a key player in Lagos’s creative scene. His role as a city patron has grown steadily since he launched non-profit foundation Guest Artists Space (Gas) with a board of directors in 2019. A brutalist cement building in Nigeria’s biggest city, the structure, designed by Ghana-born UK architect Elsie Owusu, stands in stark contrast to the surrounding uniform houses. “The building will be able to deal with the rain and sun,” says Shonibare. It will function as an art hub, with a courtyard and private rooftop for events and gatherings, as well as a gallery, artist-in-residence quarters and an apartment for Shonibare.

Previous residents include South African Nolan Oswald Dennis, UK-based Evan Ifekoya and Nigerian Samuel Nnorom. Shonibare’s hope is to create a deeper dialogue between Nigerian and foreign creatives. “There’s a huge ignorance about Africa,” says Shonibare. “Knowledge exchange is important so that people can meet other practitioners like themselves and learn from them.”

Shonibare has also opened another artist-in-residence venue on a farm two hours outside the city. “I didn’t want to build a project that’s elitist and doesn’t connect with a place,” he says. The hope is that more creatives will engage in projects around food security. “It’s also to support the local ecosystem, because in Africa many disciplines are interrelated,” says Shonibare. As the interest in African art grows globally, the time is ripe for this kind of institution. “Now, sectors like fashion and art have a huge market and are highly valued,” he says. “The talent is just unbelievable.”
guestartistsspace.com

Venue
Ladbroke Hall
London

The former HQ of Britain’s first purpose-built car factory has been transformed into London’s newest cultural centre. When it was completed more than a century ago, Ladbroke Hall contained car showrooms, offices and a panelled directors’ suite. Loïc Le Gaillard and Julien Lombrail, co-founders of Carpenters Workshop Gallery, are breathing new life into the vast listed building. “My core business is about creating exceptional objects,” says Le Gaillard. “In 1903 they were building exceptional sports cars here. We are carrying on the legacy of elite craftsmanship and creativity.”

The east wing will host a gallery space, exhibition rooms, private salons, a terrace and a jewellery showroom. The opposite wing will include a 120-seater theatre and a recording studio, plus events space. From the garden, designed by Chelsea Flower Show winner Luciano Giubbilei, to the Steinway grand piano in the Sunbeam Theatre, the project has involved an impressive list of collaborators and brands. An onsite restaurant led by Italian chef Emanuele Pollini will also open in September. The scale isn’t lost on Le Gaillard. “This is the biggest project of my lifetime,” he says. “It’s the beginning of something very ambitious – artistically and culturally.”
ladbrokehall.com

Venue
Tiwa Select
New York

Inside the National Arts Club in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park district, Tiwa Select is a recent transplant to New York’s gallery scene from Los Angeles. It carries the torch for a rich but overlooked tradition within US arts: handmade craft objects from self-taught makers.

Founder Alex Tieghi-Walker (pictured) was inspired by a trip to Japan in 2019. “There are shops in Japan called ‘select stores’, which are collections of objects that the owner likes, not necessarily targeted to a particular audience,” he says. On the plane home, Tieghi-Walker, a collector of craft objects, drew up a business plan for a platform featuring works by self-taught artists. When the pandemic scuppered his plans for a physical space, he set up an online shop that grew quickly. “I wasn’t simply putting pieces on the website for sale,” he says. “I was investigating the makers’ stories and the history of the craft traditions that they were working with.”

As Tiwa Select has expanded into physical exhibitions, Tieghi-Walker has kept a context-rich approach, focusing on artists from a range of backgrounds. “Vince Skelly, a wood sculptor I work with, was previously a skater and musician. Potter Jim McDowell was a coal miner, then in the army. Ceramics was something he started doing much later in life. I’ve always been interested in artists who have been making without the intention that their work would be viewed as art; that it would have a more practical use instead.”
tiwa-select.com

Venue
Ateneum
Helsinki

Ateneum, Finland’s most renowned art museum, has unveiled a rehang of its permanent collection. The institution’s new exhibition, consisting of 280 works by 160 artists, seeks to question the prevailing narratives around Finland’s cultural identity. “Our collection has played a pivotal role in shaping Finnishness,” says director Marja Sakari. “We wanted to examine the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in how we tell Finland’s story through art.”

The refreshed display includes works that portray minorities such as the indigenous Sami people and people of colour. It forsakes art history’s traditional chronological narrative, adopting a thematic approach instead. Works are grouped around topics such as modernisation and our relationship with the natural world. “People love Ateneum for its classics and they’re still very much part of our collection,” says Sakari. “But this thematic approach offers a novel perspective.”

The new hang brings works such as the “Redbearded Moor” by the Lappish artist Reidar Särestöniemi and the monumental “Samiuela Elone (Tonga)” by Sirpa Alalääkkölä into the spotlight.
ateneum.fi

Venue
Slovak National Gallery
Bratislava

The giant inflatable spheres inside the Slovak National Gallery look as though they were measured specifically to be displayed in the gallery room, yet the colourful installation by Stano Filko was conceived in the 1970s to inject some excitement into the grey urban life of communist Czechoslovakia. When the museum acquired the artwork in 2015, it lacked a decent space to display it. Now the long wait is over and Filko’s piece stands proudly at the heart of the institution’s renovated venue in Bratislava.

The gallery’s display rooms range from baroque-era halls to modernist extensions by architect Vladimír Dedecek. Atelier bkps, which was in charge of the renovation, wanted to maintain the building’s historic features but it has also transformed the tunnel-like technical rooms into loggias with spectacular views of the Danube and the city’s ufo Bridge. “All of a sudden, the building is inspiring artists, architects, musicians and performers,” says Lucia Gregorová Stach, the gallery’s chief curator of modern and contemporary art. “Even the fact that it has connected the river with the city means a lot. It has created a new experience of the city.” Gregorová Stach has worked at the Slovak National Gallery since 2010 but the reimagined site has allowed her to look at the location with fresh eyes and envision a new programme strand centred around the river and music.

With the Austrian capital just an hour upstream, Bratislava has often been eclipsed by the vibrant Viennese art scene. Now, however, the National Gallery’s new space is giving its team the confidence to claim the city’s place on Central Europe’s art map and present sometimes overlooked Slovak artists. Gregorová Stach will collaborate with museums in the region on an exhibition about expressionism in Central Europe. “Perhaps we don’t need to start with Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka,” she says. “Instead, we can tell the story from our own point of view.”
sng.sk

Venue
Hangar Y
Paris

The structure that now houses Paris’s Hangar Y has lived many lives. Originally built as a pavilion for the third Paris World Fair in 1878, it was moved southwest to the Meudon forest, where it formed the skeleton of the world’s first airship hangar. It then reopened in the 1920s as an air museum, which was moved to the 15th arrondissement, then shut down by the Nazis. By the time that entrepreneur Didier Gouband noticed the site, it had been abandoned for decades. “The building was falling to pieces, to be honest,” says Aideen Halleman, Hangar Y’s general manager.

The vast hall has now been reimagined as a multi-use arts centre. Alongside exhibitions, Halleman hopes to stage theatre, dancing and even circus shows. “We want to explore new things and find the next frontier,” he says. The surrounding nine hectares of forest have also been given an upgrade with a contemporary sculpture trail and a restaurant with views of the 17th-century Chalais basin.

Bagnolet-based Data Architectes was tasked with renovating the space in a way that honoured its colourful past. “The idea was to bring a 19th-century spirit of innovation and exploration into this century,” says Halleman. Hangar Y’s modern glass façade gives the building the impression of being wide open – just as it would have been when it housed airships.

A conversation between past and future is also evident in the opening exhibition. Titled In the Air, the Flying Machines, after the book Dans l’air by Brazilian pilot Alberto Santos-Dumont, it traces the enduring fascination with human flight in global art. The artworks on display, including drones and spaceships, are aeronautical innovations that Hangar Y’s original inhabitants could only have dreamed of.
hangar-y.com

5.
Auctions

Interview
Robert Ketterer
Ketterer Kunst

Founded in 1954, Munich-based Ketterer Kunst is a family-owned auction house specialising in art from the 19th to 21st centuries, as well as rare books. Last year it achieved a turnover of about €100m. Having taken over the business in 1994 at the age of 25, CEO and auctioneer Robert Ketterer leads the company from both boardroom and podium. He tells us how his clientele has changed in recent years and why auction houses outside the world’s main art hubs now have a chance to shine.

Who are Ketterer Kunst’s clients?
It’s an ever more diverse group. In the past it was the wealthy entrepreneurs of the postwar Wirtschaftswunder [West Germany and Austria’s economic bounceback of the 1950s]. Then these were joined by a broad range of business owners or successful lawyers and doctors. In the past 20 years, I have seen an enormous change driven by the internationalisation and digitalisation of our business. We now have clients from around the world, mostly private individuals but also a number of museums and collections. We recently sold a Gerhard Richter painting to a collector in Hong Kong, other works to customers in the Middle East and Asia, and modern art to US bidders.

As the CEO, why do you still choose to lead the major biannual auctions?
I really enjoy it and it is where I excel. The key to being a good auctioneer is empathy, knowing the art and the audience. We have bidders in the room, on the phone and on the internet but I know who they are at every moment. You need to have good communication, to know when to push and when to stop – and to not be so fast that you miss bidders. I’ve been doing this for more than 30 years; there are many small tricks that come with the experience.

What sets Ketterer Kunst apart from other auction houses?
Our auctions are quite small, with only 400 objects. We insist on printing catalogues in German and English, which is remarkable. Most houses have stopped printing catalogues but we send 10,000 of them all over the world. If you have the catalogue on your table, it commands more attention than a link in your inbox. Plus, consignors are more likely to sell at a higher price if their artwork is in print. We also started digitalising early, in 2007. During our sales, we have a video live-stream using up to nine cameras with three operators and three people directing what you see, with close-ups and different information – so it’s not boring; it’s like a television show.

What do auction houses in mainland Europe have to gain from Brexit?
Brexit changed a lot of things and so did the pandemic. In 2018 or 2019, there were two major auction spots in the world: London and New York. Now you can find big auctions in Paris, Munich, Shanghai or Hong Kong. We used to go to London for one week and it was fun to jump between the auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s but buyers now realise that they can go elsewhere.

Looking ahead, what are you most excited about?
We hold big biannual auctions and our next one is in June, with names like Alexej von Jawlensky and Gerhard Richter. We have a Max Pechstein painting, which is amazing because until two months ago it was in the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. It’s part of a restitution case and has been given back to the heirs of the collector. Restitution cases are really important in the global art market at the moment.
kettererkunst.com

Calendar
Auction round-up
Global

Helsinki Spring Sale
Bukowskis Helsinki

The Swedish auction house, acquired by Bonhams in 2022, will be presenting Nordic art, including standout pieces by Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck and writer-cum-artist Tove Jansson.
Until 28 May
bukowskis.com

Summer Auction
Grisebach Berlin

German auction house Grisebach’s summer sale is the occasion to pick up pieces by 19th- and 20th-century artists such as Jean Fautrier, Max Liebermann and Egon Schiele.
1-2 June
grisebach.com

Pierre Boulez Collection
Artcurial Paris

Composer Pierre Boulez’s private collection includes pieces from the prominent artists he met during his career, including Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miró and Pierre Soulages.
7 June
artcurial.com

Mary McCartney: Can We Have a Moment?
Sotheby’s London

This selling exhibition pays homage to UK photographer Mary McCartney’s 30-year career, displaying portraits, still-life images and landscapes.
Until 9 June
sothebys.com

Modern and Contemporary Art
Pandolfini Milan

Italian painter Antonio Ligabue’s “Autoritratto” will go under the hammer for the first time in Milan, along with works by 20th-century artists such as Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà.
21 June
pandolfini.it

Picassomania
Bonhams Paris

Bonhams is marking the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death with a sale of works by the master and other artists celebrating his legacy.
29 Jun
bonhams.com

The Art of Hawaii
Bonhams Los Angeles

This sale features works by contemporary artists including Betty Ecke and Hajime Okuda, who celebrate the beauty of the Pacific archipelago.
5-15 August
bonhams.com

David Hockney London Auction
Phillips London

The second edition of this annual sale offers the chance to secure a piece by the beloved British painter.
20 September
phillips.com

6.
Fairs

Interview
Eri Takane
Director, Tokyo Gendai

Tokyo is hosting a new international contemporary art fair this summer. Set inside the Pacifico Yokohama convention centre, Tokyo Gendai will bring together almost 80 galleries from Japan and beyond. The fair is organised by The Art Assembly, which is behind many of the largest art events around the Asia-Pacific region, including Sydney Contemporary, Taipei Dangdai and Singapore’s Art SG. Tokyo-born director Eri Takane, who lived and worked in New York until 2016, tells us why it was important for the Japanese capital to have its own hallmark fair.

Why Tokyo?
It’s about time! People have long been waiting to hold a big international art fair here. The last one, the Nippon International Contemporary Art Fair, was about 30 years ago. Recent fairs in Tokyo have been more focused on local galleries; we haven’t had an event on this scale. This year we’ll have nearly 80 galleries – 40 per cent of the exhibitors are Japanese, while the other 60 per cent are half Western, half Asian. We have a lot of amazing museums and galleries in Tokyo but the general audience hasn’t connected visiting art shows to buying art. Taiwanese, Chinese and South Korean collectors are excited. They’re interested in visiting Japanese art studios and galleries.

What’s the art-buying scene like in Japan now?
There’s a new generation of art buyers who have started collecting, many from IT backgrounds or start-ups. Beginners often feel more comfortable buying a painting but collectors are also getting videos, sculptures and different media. When you think about the contemporary art market in the US and the philanthropists paying for museums there, Japan is different. We have a lot of wealthy people but not at that level. There won’t be so many takers for a $50m [€45m] painting but there is still huge potential, because a lot of people can afford a $50,000 [€45,000] work and those sales are important to a mid-size gallery. We have some big artists in Japan, such as Takashi Murakami, Yayoi Kusama and Hiroshi Sugimoto. But we’re also looking at younger generations and different creatives. I’m enjoying the work of female artists using pottery, such as Namika Nakai. I’m hoping that this fair will highlight new names who might interest people in the future.

What’s on offer at Tokyo Gendai?
We have four sections. The main one focuses on leading galleries from Japan and around the world. Then there are three more with Japanese plant names: Hana (“flower”), where you can explore up-and-coming artists; Eda (“branch”), which focuses on curated exhibitions or artists who are well known in Asia; and Tane (“seeds”), centred on new media, including nfts and digital art. We also have talks and installations, as well as a vip excursion programme for people to visit museums and studios in places such as Kyoto, Naoshima and Maebashi.

Do you think there are too many art fairs in the world?
[The Art Assembly] is organising six art fairs in Asia under the same umbrella but we have different names for each one. We try to localise every event. There are more than 300 art fairs held globally every year but 90 per cent are in Western countries. If we can balance it out, that would be nice.
Tokyo Gendai runs from 7-9 July
tokyogendai.com

Images: Luc Boegly, Hayato Nag

Family unit

There are many reasons why Los Angeles architect Samantha Mink might have shied away from designing a weekend house for her parents. She tends to favour esoteric modernism, while they gravitate towards antiques. Construction quagmires can strain even the strongest relationships. And mixing money and family is always a risk.

Yet 100 years after Le Corbusier built his parents the pioneering Villa Le Lac on Lake Geneva’s eastern shore, perhaps the greatest hurdle was the calibre of what had come before. Some of the biggest names in 20th-century architecture made their first splash with seminal designs for their parents: Richard Rogers, Robert Venturi, Harry Seidler, Charles Gwathmey, Richard Meier. If you’re going to get carte blanche, you had better make it count.

Fortunately, Mink, who dropped out of Georgetown University in Washington and moved to Manhattan to start over as an architect, isn’t the type to shirk a challenge. And now the work that has consumed much of the past decade of her life is done: a cruciform pavilion of concrete, glass, Douglas fir and oak nestled into the pastoral landscape of the Ojai Valley, a two-hour drive northwest of Los Angeles.

“I should never have built this house,” says Mink, 36, as she glances towards the rippling pool that runs the length of its rear façade. “It was way too big an undertaking for me. But it was the same with becoming an architect. I suddenly thought, ‘I want to make stuff.’ I just decide something – and then I decide that I can do it.“Dubbed “Prime”, Mink’s debut unfolds as a series of revelations. The front door – a giant slab of pivoting concrete – awaits at the foot of a sunken staircase, invisible from the street. A sunlit glimpse of pool and meadow beckons beyond the dim, burrow-like lobby. Framed by muscular glulam beams and a vast wall of windows, one colossal valley oak sways in the spring breeze. A lofted office meant for Mink’s father hides behind the monumental hearth; another compressed concrete passage leads to a pair of luminous bedrooms, which in turn open directly onto the stepped pool. But only by wading down the narrow waterway between the master suite and the detached guest studio can visitors reach the heart of the house – a secret “sanctuary”, complete with hot tub, at the bottom of what appears to be a massive concrete monolith rising high above the rest of the long, linear structure. “One contractor tried to talk me out of it,” says Mink, her voice reverberating off the high walls towards the open-air skylight above. “He told me that it would be damp and echoey. I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s the point.’”

Originally a student of literature, Mink worked at a restaurant while reapplying to New York’s esteemed Pratt Institute. Her uncle, a contractor who customised his camper and created his own miniature golf course, had died the year before. The loss helped her to understand how much she “loved making environments and possibilities”, like him. In 2012, Mink’s parents purchased the lot in Ojai, a longtime retreat for artier Angelenos; water and sewage issues had spooked other buyers. It didn’t take long for Mink to devise a water-treatment solution – or a design concept.

“It has always been about this concrete mass that extends the entire length of the property and houses a lot of the fixed elements, such as bathrooms and service areas, and how that intersects with the tower,” she says. “The intersection of any two things is where everything begins.”

Construction was more complicated. First came the Thomas Fire, which swept through the southern Californian landscape in 2017, then the Central Coast floods of 2018 – and then the pandemic. Costs soared. “This wound up being a much bigger undertaking than anybody expected, especially in terms of money,” says Mink. “It just wouldn’t have happened today.”

Natural disasters aside, the fact that Prime happened at all still seems hard to fathom. In some ways, the house summons a familiar history of California modernism: the primal palette of RM Schindler’s Kings Road House; the classical grandeur of Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute; the cabin-esque cosiness of Sea Ranch. Yet in a deeper way, it remains fundamentally defiant. It’s a space far less interested in serving as a spectacle for social media – or a concept for contemporary architectural discourse – than as a good place to live.

As the midday sun glints off the boulders in the garden, Mink perches at the kitchen counter and reflects on a few of her favourite details: the sunken living-room sofa; the custom dining table that she built by hand; the concrete shower tucked beneath a staircase; the automated waterfall shielding the sanctuary; the intricate cabinet that conceals her parents’ TV. But what has surprised her most? “How well it all works as a house,” she says.

Mink’s parents, in their mid-seventies, were unable to visit during the closing months of construction. Throughout, the architect had urged her mother to decorate. But the elder Mink would always demur, insisting that she didn’t want to muddle her daughter’s design. To which the younger would reply, “No, the house is meant for you to live in. I want you and all your things here.”

Finally, last June, Mink’s clients drove up from Los Angeles to see their nearly completed commission. “There were lots of tears,” says Mink. “They were so proud.” Soon after, Mink’s mother installed an antique floral light fixture in her bedroom.

Sharpen up

One of the advantages of using a pencil rather than a pen is that graphite allows for experimentation (and mistakes to be erased); for sketching ideas before making them permanent. It’s this same notion of trial and error that José Vieira has used to breathe new life into Viarco, the Portuguese pencil-maker. “We can kick-start projects quickly,” says the CEO. “We don’t have to change an entire operation, rent a new space and create a whole marketing campaign around a new product. We can just try things out, spending almost no money.”

That nimbleness is possible because of Viarco’s modest size. The company has been around since 1907 but production remains artisanal. The factory in São João da Madeira, a tiny municipality south of Porto with a rich industrial heritage, is a low-tech operation of clattering machinery and about 20 staff working on detailed processes, often by hand. “It’s a nightmare of a factory in terms of efficiency,” says Vieira above the din. Despite all of this, Viarco’s pencils and graphite-based art products have become coveted by artists and stocked by premium retailers around the world and last year the company had earnings of €950,000.

So how has this small, traditional firm not only stayed relevant for more than a century but also found new fans? It hasn’t been simple. The business was founded as Faria, Cacheux & Co by Conselheiro Figueiredo Faria and Jules Cacheux in the town of Vila do Conde but it struggled during the Great Depression. In 1931 it was sold to Manoel Vieira Araújo – José Vieira’s great-grandfather – who had previously been a milliner. Araújo registered the business as Viarco in 1936 before moving it to São João da Madeira – and the factory that it occupies today – in 1941. In the years that followed, Viarco established a near-monopoly on the sale of pencils in Portugal, especially during the latter years of the Salazar dictatorship when every child used Viarco pencils and the regime’s censors struck out anything that they deemed offensive using an Olímpico 291. Today 50 per cent of all sales are in the country (20 per cent are in the US, another 20 per cent in the rest of Europe, the rest in Asia and South America).

“Then came the revolution, followed by Portugal’s entry into the European Union,” says Vieira.“From one day to the next we lost space in the market. There were factories in Asia that could suddenly sell the finished product for cheaper than we could buy the wood we needed.” The new millennium would bring even more challenges and so, when Vieira and his wife, Ana, took control of the business in 2011, many thought that they would shutter the operation. “But then it hit me,” says Vieira. “We are the only pencil-makers in Portugal, the only ones that have this knowledge – and if we close, that’s it.”

This realisation made Vieira look at the business afresh. The factory might seem like an industrial relic but this also made it a symbol of Portuguese heritage and, matched with voguish vintage branding, could be a powerful marketing tool. “But we’re not a museum so we needed new products to sustain all of this,” says Vieira, who turned to one of the key constituencies who use his products: artists.

Since 2008 the factory has hosted artist residencies and it struck Vieira that the space that these visitors used could become a kind of r&d lab. “We’re neither carpenters, nor calligraphers, nor illustrators,” he says of his team. “We make pencils. But these artists who were coming here were using our products and so, if I had any technical doubts, I could go to them and get instant feedback.” This constant dialogue with the end users has propelled numerous innovations that have, says Vieira, rescued the business. “It’s not a very formal residency,” he adds. “We aren’t asking the artists who come here to create something specific or hold an exhibition, we just give them the space and tools to play with.”

Viarco’s new creations include leather satchels for organising your pencils and a clever drawing desk that rolls out fresh paper with the spin of a hand-crank. “It helps that we’re in an industrial area and we can run next door to prototype almost anything,” says Vieira. Other innovations have already become bestsellers, such as the ArtGraf range of speciality products, which includes a soft graphite putty that allows users to shape their own drawing tool and a soluble graphite that can be applied like watercolour paint.

In February, Vieira attended Frankfurt’s Creativeworld trade fair where he gauged market interest for Viarco’s new pencils and scribers especially made for use with ceramics and silkscreen printing. “Every one of these products either came from a collaboration with an artist or was inspired by a residency,” he says, taking a chunky piece of raw graphite in his palm. The idea for this, the ArtGraf XL, came from a sculptor who, during his stay at the factory, expressed a desire for a heftier drawing tool. “If there’s something fundamental that I’ve learnt from these dialogues it’s that, while every physical thing that’s produced today has decades of studies and technique behind them, they’re no longer innovative. And if an industry stops innovating, that’s when people turn to the digital world with its heaps of novelty every day.”

Viarco has become involved in exploring new ways of drawing too. Noticing that several resident artists were creating contraptions to attach pencils to their fingers, Vieira decided to bring this idea to the factory floor. The experiment not only led to the creation of Ponta, a new spring-based fingertip drawing utensil, but also to a whole new way of thinking. “When we started experimenting with it, we began to consider the needs of people who don’t have fingers or properly functioning hands,” he says. “And suddenly we are researching tools for the elderly or people with special needs. A pencil is such a valuable tool. Think about everything it enables, from learning to creativity.”

Drawing attention
Viarco products to discover

Half of Viarco’s sales consist of professional and branded pencils for businesses. The other half is split between its premium ArtGraf line, design products and reissues of its much-loved vintage lines, which come in boxes featuring classic mid-century designs.

Up in the air

On a graffiti-tagged dead-end street in East Williamsburg, a neighbourhood that marries industry with Brooklyn cool, Air Company might seem, at first glance, to be just another artisanal distiller. Housed in one of a pair of galvanised-steel Quonset huts (a nightclub occupies the other), the start-up’s distillation machinery is running round the clock to keep up with the demand for its Air Vodka. A gold-medal winner in the 2019 Luxury Masters spirits competition, the beverage has the distinction of being “carbon negative”; according to the company, the act of producing each bottle removes 450g of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

Air makes its vodka and other products, including a fragrance and a hand sanitiser, in a similar way to how plants create nutrients from the sun’s energy. It takes carbon dioxide, captured at industrial facilities before it is emitted into the atmosphere, and hydrogen, generated from water using an electrolyser (a device that splits water into oxygen and hydrogen atoms), then runs them through its proprietary Carbon Conversion Reactor, which is powered by electricity from wind and solar sources. The result is pure ethanol, which, paired with water, becomes a premium vodka sold at $75 (€68) a bottle.

The company combines the diverse talents of co-founders Stafford Sheehan and Gregory Constantine. The former has a doctorate in physical chemistry from Yale University and a fascination with the idea of turning emitted carbon into useful products, such as fuel; the latter, meanwhile, is an Australian with a background in marketing who previously worked for spirits giant Diageo.

Carbon diversion isn’t cheap, says Sheehan. Producing alternative fuels means competing with fossil-fuel giants. “Look at that reactor,” he says, pointing to a machine that is roughly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. “Now, compare it to an oil refinery. Those facilities have their own zip codes.” Air needed a product that could help to fund its research and would combine Sheehan’s scientific knowhow with Constantine’s ability to tell a good consumer story – something that they could sell at a premium. “The vodka,” says Sheehan, “is a by-product of our research and development.”

Last year the company received a call from members of the US Air Force (USAF). “They said, ‘We’re looking for innovative solutions from an aviation perspective,’” says Constantine. Air had been one of the winners of Nasa’s co2 Conversion Challenge in 2021, a project exploring ways to turn the chemical compound into sugar, which astronauts could one day use to make useful products such as adhesives, food and medicine on Mars. The usaf had got wind of some of the work that Air was doing to convert co2 into sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). “They told us, ‘There’s an opportunity if you guys have the ability to deliver volumes within 90 days.’”

Though Air was struggling to keep up with the demand for its vodka, the company decided that the “internal sprint” was worth it. Air Factory One, as the Brooklyn site is known, produced about 20 litres of Airmade saf, poured it all into “dairy cans” labelled with hazmat stickers, placed them on a pallet and shipped them to Florida. There, the Brooklyn-produced jet fuel was pumped into an unmanned aerial vehicle with no special modifications made to the engine. The usaf was impressed with what it saw. “The most recent round of testing confirmed it as the first fuel made entirely from carbon dioxide emissions that matches the properties and performance of Jet a-1 [conventional jet fuel],” it reported.

On the strength of that test, Air was awarded a $65m (€59.2m) grant from the US Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit this year to install its saf production technology at military bases, partly to reduce the risks of transporting fuel (for every 24 fuel convoys that the US Army undertook in Afghanistan, it sustained an average of one casualty).

That a small company best known for producing top-shelf vodka is fuelling the planes of the world’s largest air force shows how wide-ranging the search for sustainable aviation fuel has become. As aviation bodies and airline carriers commit to the goal of carbon neutrality by 2050 – and to myriad intermediate targets ahead of that – the hunt is on for a reliable, cost-effective alternative fuel that can “drop in” to existing engines. According to the International Air Transport Association, saf is expected to contribute about 65 per cent of the carbon savings (with improvements in aircraft and traffic management, among other things, expected to supply the rest).

Of course, saf is hardly new. More than 450,000 commercial flights have flown on conventional fuel blended with a sustainable alternative since 2008, when a Virgin Atlantic 747-400 flew from London to Amsterdam partly powered by a biofuel comprised of coconut and babassu oils. If you have flown out of an airport such as Los Angeles International (LAX), you have probably been on a plane whose tanks contained at least a small amount of saf.

The number of approved means of producing saf, however, has grown in recent years. Fuels produced through the conversion of biomass waste have been joined by so-called “power to liquid” solutions, such as Air’s, whose “feedstock” is not a waste oil but co2. “We have a methodology to produce a synthetic jet fuel from fats and greases, sugars and starches,” says Steve Csonka, executive director of the Commercial Aviation Alternative Fuels Initiative. “We’re almost there with a full suite of technologies to produce fuel from all manner of circular-economy waste streams.”

All of this technological innovation will be needed to close a huge supply gap. Last year about 300 million litres of saf were produced, according to the iata. That compares to a pre-pandemic consumption height of 359 billion litres of conventional fuel. To put it another way, the entire annual output of Air Company’s Air Factory One would be sucked up and expelled by the engines of a wide-body plane on a single flight from New York to London. The need to produce sufficient quantities of fuel – and at a cost that is more competitive with fossil fuels – is leading companies to scour the planet for the raw materials for saf. “Even with this whole suite of technologies, there’s no silver bullet,” says Csonka.

The world’s largest saf producer is Neste, a Finnish energy company formed after the Second World War to secure the country’s fuel resources. Headquartered in Espoo, it was long known as Neste Oil but it dropped the second word in 2015, signalling a move away from fossil fuels. Jonathan Wood, Neste’s vice-president for renewable aviation, tells Monocle that the company had long had a prowess for converting lower-cost “sour crude”, largely from the former Soviet Union, into high-quality diesel. A few decades ago it began to use that expertise to develop technologies to transform fats into fuels and began opening renewable refineries. It produced its first saf in 2007. “The renewable part of the business wasn’t making money for years,” says Wood. “But we stuck it out. Now it’s making a return and that’s going into the renewables arm of the business.” Neste – and, indeed, Finland – has one remaining crude-oil refinery but that too will soon shift to renewables.

While the company produces 3.3 million tonnes of renewable fuel and other products a year, only about 100,000 tonnes are bound for aeroplanes. By the end of 2023, however, Neste expects to have boosted its saf-production capacity to 1.5 million tonnes, thanks to new refineries in Rotterdam and Singapore. Even this increased supply would account for less than 1 per cent of global aviation fuel, says Wood. With an EU mandate expected in 2025 to call for saf to comprise 2 per cent of Europe’s aviation fuel, “Neste’s production alone would exceed what that would require,” he says.

Neste produces a kind of saf known as Hydroprocessed Esters and Fatty Acids (HEFA) by using hydrogen to convert a feedstock, such as cooking oil, into jet fuel. While Wood underscores the importance of working with larger sites of carbon emissions, such as factories, much of Neste’s fuel comes from the fryer baskets of restaurants – from Wingstop to Burger King (in the US alone, Neste collects oil from about 80,000 restaurants). At the most recent Super Bowl, in Arizona, Neste, working with US company Mahoney Environmental, collected about 3,220 litres of cooking oil. That oil, however, needed to be transported back to Finland to be refined, which is one reason why Neste’s saf can cost as much as five times more than traditional fuel (the Neste saf used at airports including lax, meanwhile, is shipped from Finland). Wood points out that carbon-pricing regimes that impose costs on the externalities of emissions, as well as the efficiencies and learning effects of scaling up production, will eventually force fossil-fuel and saf prices to converge. In the meantime, government policy must support the forward-looking bets of Neste and others, he says.

The more saf that Neste produces, the greater the pressure on the available quantities of cooking oil, or whatever the feedstock happens to be, and the more you risk competing with sectors such as the food industry. That is why companies are seeking to broaden the range of materials that can be converted into saf. For example, US-based saf pioneer World Energy uses tallow, a by-product of beef production. But Timothy Obitts, CEO of Washington-based Alder Fuels, warns that there’s a finite supply of even tallow. “In North America, there’s about eight billion pounds [3.6 million tonnes] of tallow produced every year,” he says. “If you were to take all of the tallow in North America and make 100 per cent of that into jet fuel, you would be talking about a billion gallons [3.8 billion litres] of saf.” Not a small number on the face of it. “But we need 25 billion gallons [95 billion litres] and it continues to grow,” he says. How to meet that demand? “The only way we’re going to get there is by looking at abundant biomass that is scalable and commercial.”

Alder uses waste products from forestry and agriculture for its feedstock. These range from bagasse, the fibrous residue from sugar-cane production, to purpose-grown grasses such as miscanthus. The advantage of the latter, notes Obitts, is that you’re “using dirt that can’t bear crops and basically rehabilitating it”. Alder builds on pyrolysis, a heat-driven decomposition process, to create a kind of oil. “People have been trying to figure out for years how to make this pyrolysis oil,” says Obitts. “It’s simple and easy to make, and can be refined.” Through Alder’s proprietary process, backed by grants from the US Department of Energy, a “greencrude” is produced that, says Obitts, has the potential to be “a lot closer to the price of fossil crude oil without the incentives”. Citing research from the US Department of Energy, he says that the use of existing forestry and agricultural residues could supply enough biomass-derived fuel to offset about 75 per cent of conventional fuel consumption in US aviation.

Alder is in a rapid commercialisation phase and already has a commitment from United Airlines to its product. There are currently only two facilities in the US that produce saf at scale, says Csonka. But more are on the way. “If you look at the offtake agreements [the arrangements that airlines make to buy a company’s future production], the entire production of jet fuel has been more or less completely purchased for the first 12 facilities.” Nine of those 12, says Csonka, “don’t even have even concrete or steel in the ground but the airlines have bought fuel from them. We have a lot of production in our future.”

At the site of the Germany Aerospace Center in the town of Jülich, North Rhine-Westphalia, two towers rise from a field. They are surrounded by a cluster of more than 2,000 mirrors that track the sun’s movement and beam the reflected light towards the towers. Last year, Swiss start-up Synhelion, which was spun out of research by eth Zürich, used the facility to produce “sun-to-liquid” synthetic fuel, or “syngas”, on an industrial scale for the first time.

Gianluca Ambrosetti, Synhelion’s co-CEO and co-founder, says that the idea of using mirrors – “heliostats” – to harness the power of the sun’s rays has a long history, from the mythical story of Greek sailors using bronze shields as mirrors to destroy the Roman fleet in 212bc to the deployment of solar-concentration power plants in places such as Spain and California. The technology fell out of favour, he says, after the price collapse of photovoltaic panels but it has an advantage when it comes to producing fuels: heat. Synhelion has been able to reach temperatures exceeding 1,500c in its receiver; that heat is directed into a reactor, along with bio- methane and co2, to produce a syngas that is then converted into sustainable liquid fuel. Because heat can be stored much more efficiently than electricity, he says, the plant can run at night using the preceding day’s sunlight. He explains that the whole process echoes the way in which greenhouse gases are created, albeit in this case harnessed for benevolent ends. “We are turning an enemy into a friend,” he says.

Backed by investment from Swiss International Air Lines, as well as industrial firms such as Mexico’s cemex (with which it is developing a way to drive cement production with solar thermal energy instead of burning fossil fuels), Synhelion has broken ground on an industrial demonstration plant in Jülich, with plans to construct a commercial facility in Spain in 2025. Ambrosetti says that the plant will produce 1.25 million litres a year. That scale would be below the radar for the fossil-fuel world but he says that for “solar people”, it’s “already huge”.

While scale will be the watchword in the world of saf over the coming years, Ambrosetti says that, unlike in the technology industry, this isn’t “a winner-takes-all game”. “Because of the way that energy conversion works, you will have a series of boundary conditions that makes one technology better than the other,” he says. As crucial as government intervention is, favouring one technology at the expense of others could hinder innovation, which might be the most crucial feedstock of saf. How quickly we will reach genuinely sustainable flying is a roundly debated question, one that might ultimately be driven more by policy and price than technological feasibility. But one thing is clear: there is no one fuel yet poised to fill every tank.

Bay watch

It’s a choppy day in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, as a pair of rocket-shaped drones skip over the swell. They stop abruptly, noses pointed skyward in the dark water, awaiting a signal to dive into the deep. “You just throw these boys in the surf and off they go,” says Ian Estaphan Owen, a Welshman who served in the UK’s Royal Navy and worked for US defence manufacturers Raytheon Technologies and Lockheed Martin before co-founding Jaia Robotics in December 2020. In a historic bay-side workshop, where Burnside rifles were assembled during the American Civil War, Owen developed this small, inexpensive craft that autonomously collects real-time data about conditions beneath the waves. “There’s also a payload option,” he says, running a hand along the bright red body of the Jaiabot. “You could put a bit of c-4 [explosive] on it and really annoy somebody.”

Jaia Robotics attracted more than $1m (€1.7m) in seed funding last year and its Jaiabot drone has caught the US military’s eye as a tool for finding safe spots for amphibious operations when the waves are high. It’s one of the many firms and start-ups that are clustered on Rhode Island’s coastline, an emerging blue economy of maritime expertise, ideas and manufacturing.

For 2024, the Pentagon has requested an $842bn (€769bn) budget – the largest in US history – and embarked on one of its biggest peacetime procurements. While America’s major defence players will reap the benefits, the Department of Defense (DOD) is also looking to grow its network of small defence businesses across the US – and Rhode Island is showing the way. Beyond the quaint, cobbled streets and Gilded Age mansions of Newport, a growing cadre of factories and laboratories are supplying the US Navy with undersea technology, from vessels that can withstand depths of 6km to onboard systems for submarines.

Pacmar Technologies, for instance, has expanded its historic canal-side workshop where it makes prototypes and inflatables for the navy, as well as carrying out undersea work that it must keep tightly under wraps. “Being in Rhode Island gives us access to a wealth of partners to grow our undersea line of business and ensures that we are staying in lockstep with the navy’s needs,” says Pacmar’s chief technology officer, Priya Hicks. Down the road in Quonset Point, General Dynamics Electric Boat is building the next generation of American submarines, the Columbia class, which is billed as a potential game-changer in undersea warfare, even if it won’t be delivered until 2031. “We need to have a strong workforce pipeline to ensure that people can get the training and skills that they need to fill those well-paying submarine manufacturing jobs,” says Rhode Island state senator Jack Reed, who also chairs the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee. Turn on the local TV channels and there are regular adverts recruiting people to build the new submarines. “These jobs are critical to the future of our national security,” Reed tells Monocle.

All around Narragansett Bay, which is crowded with sailboats and sunseekers in the summer, history is repeating itself: the US Navy tested torpedoes in these waters during the Second World War and the military is again looking at hardware developed on this coastline to help turn the tide of future conflicts.

At the centre of the blue economy is the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC), a secretive US military installation perched on the eastern side of the bay, which is handing big contracts to local manufacturers. Home to about 3,600 civilians, mostly scientists and engineers, and only 20 military personnel, the nuwc is where the US Navy comes to solve a deep-sea problem: its specialists work in artificial intelligence and its physicists know how to take advantage of the bubble that forms as a torpedo enters the ocean. Jason Gomez, the nuwc’s chief technology officer, drives us around the base, keeping close tabs on everything that we see and hear. “Our folks work directly with the fleet on a daily basis,” he says. “They understand what the commanders in the leadership need, right down to points in a mission kill-chain.”

The nuwc team is not used to welcoming visitors, especially foreign media, and none of our photographer’s cameras are allowed on base. Instead, Monocle must use the navy’s own equipment and our shots are scrutinised. “These vehicles are at the forefront of the navy’s future,” says Mike Ansay, supervisor of the unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVS) workshop at nuwc. “Most of the uniformed navy hasn’t yet been exposed to what we’re working on down here.”

Almost everything in Ansay’s basement workshop is highly classified: objects of various shapes and sizes are swathed in sheets of tarpaulin. Undersea drones will play an increasingly important role as deployable listening posts that lie in wait and patrol the depths, monitoring hostile submarines and distracting incoming torpedoes without putting sailors in harm’s way. At nuwc, there’s a Snakehead drone, the largest such vehicle yet to be launched from a nuclear submarine – to the public’s knowledge, anyway. It is currently unclear whether this hefty machine will ever go into full service. Though intended for surveillance, it also looks as if it could be adapted to pack a punch. In the torpedo launcher lab, a new configuration is put through its paces; the head engineer leans on a decommissioned Tomahawk cruise missile as a blast of compressed air emits from the ocean-blue test barrel, which gets a thumbs-up from the crew. “In the 1990s a lot of work was done on quieting but now we need to renew that technology and get even quieter,” says John Laliberte, who is standing in the propulsion lab’s anechoic chamber, which is designed to eliminate all echoes. “The adversary has become a lot more complicated.”

Undersea warfare is, by its nature, stealthy work – the motto of US submariners is “alone and unafraid” – yet some of the labs appear ossified and unchanged since the Cold War. But those who work with the nuwc say that a fresh energy is blowing through the facility as it engages more with local firms. Many now test their latest products on the base’s stretch of waterfront and are increasingly called upon to find solutions to naval dilemmas.

“Rhode Island is a small place with a long history of innovation,” says Julie Kallfelz, director of Northeast Tech Bridge, a non-profit formed in 2019 that tries to cut some of the red tape that otherwise prevents new products developed in the private sector getting out to the fleet. Kallfelz cites a recent example of a Rhode Island firm that devised an onboard system to 3D-print handwheels – ubiquitous aboard any naval vessel – in case one should break at sea. Having hosted the America’s Cup 12 times between 1930 and 1983, Rhode Island can also tap into a long tradition of boat building. Eric Goetz made race-winning sailboats for decades and now the firm he co-founded, Composite Energy Technologies (CET), uses the same methods to mould uuvs out of carbon fibre for the navy. The huge 16.7-metre-long hull of one lies in pieces on the factory floor. Though Goetz’s team also mould architectural forms for Renzo Piano and theme-park rides, the military is now cet’s biggest customer. “We end up doing everything on these uuvs – the naval architecture, the calibrations for how it floats – from soup to nuts,” says Goetz. “And the navy guys love that.”

All of this is not just about growing the blue economy. In February the US secretary of the navy, Carlos del Toro, warned that China has a larger fleet than the US, as well as the shipyards to further increase its advantage. Simply put, America no longer has the manufacturing muscle that it did at the height of the Cold War. The decline of small defence manufacturers in recent decades has curtailed supply chains that would be essential if the navy ever needed to mobilise suddenly. What’s happening in Rhode Island are tentative steps to address that. “It’s about putting more resilience into the system,” says the aptly named Colonel Erik Brine, director of defence sector r&d initiatives and operations at the University of Rhode Island. The university’s research foundation is leading on millions of dollars in new funding from the dod this year to help accelerate local maritime firms and give them access to the latest equipment.

Rhode Island is also home to the US Naval War College, which was founded in a coastal cottage in 1884. Now, it’s the Pentagon’s think-tank for US sea power and recently they’ve been wargaming the question of whether larger navies win wars. There’s no single answer, say academics: China has more warships but its nuclear submarines are outpaced by US technology – for now. “They’re the right type of subs to do what they want with them though, which is the unification of Taiwan with the mainland, and ensuring that the US and its allies can’t come to Taipei’s assistance,” says Alfred Turner, an associate professor of joint military operations at the college.

Professor Carol Prather, a specialist on Chinese maritime strategy, says that there’s a tendency for military planners to fight past wars. She points to the use of drones in Ukraine as a sign of how conflict is evolving. The US Navy plans to have 150 unmanned surface and undersea vehicles in its fleet by 2045, so an industry gold rush is coming. Further up the New England coast, ambitious defence start-up Anduril is building a submersible in Massachusetts that it says can conduct missions autonomously for 10 days at a time, while Swedish firm Saab is opening a vast new factory in Rhode Island that will build uuvs that the navy will use to train sonar teams to identify undersea threats. “Maritime domain awareness is shaping the evolution of underwater and surface vehicles,” says Erik Smith, president and CEO of Saab Inc. “The geography of Rhode Island couldn’t be better for testing the kind of vehicles that we envision building and deploying there.”

It’s fitting that this is a state where people have long sought privacy and solitude. The relationships in the undersea economy, between business and military, are anchored in discretion; workforces are vetted and tech is only explained on a need-to-know basis. As one engineer told Monocle: “The navy gives us the dimensions, they tell us where the wires go, but when it comes to the actual gizmos inside, we don’t know what they’re for.”

Plane sight

Business aviation is coming off one of its most successful periods after the pandemic drove legions of wealthy individuals to fly privately for the first time. But it’s not all rosy as we look ahead to the rest of 2023 and beyond. Economic headwinds are a concern – not so much for the ultra-high-net-worth individuals, who will certainly continue to fly privately, but for corporations that might be trying to cut costs or simply feel that the optics of business jets doesn’t fly when they are facing a turbulent economy and the potential of staff layoffs. Meanwhile, some of those people who took up flying privately because of the pandemic are returning to premium cabins on commercial airlines. The hopes that the industry might have harboured of converting these people for life seem, in many instances, to have been misplaced.

Concerns about sustainability also dog this part of the aviation industry. How many litres of fuel it is acceptable to burn to transport a handful of people in a business jet is a question being asked more frequently – often by shareholders. Then there are the supply-chain issues that continue to hit hi-tech, complex manufacturing in an especially pronounced way. Manufacturers can’t deliver aircraft on time and deadlines for development programmes have slipped.

And yet, despite all of this, the industry looks robust. Order books at every major manufacturer are full. New models are being rolled out with ever more exciting passenger comforts, impressively long ranges and significantly lower fuel burn. The next iteration of the European Business Aviation Convention & Exhibition (Ebace) takes place in Geneva from 23 to 25 May. It will be a moment for the industry to say, “We’re here, we’re still going strong and we’re addressing some of the more sticky questions.”

Visitors will see that electric and hydrogen propulsion are being applied to light aircraft much earlier than they are to big commercial people carriers. And for those larger aircraft that can’t rely on battery power now, the use of sustainable aviation fuel is the order of the day. All of this means that, even though there are significant challenges ahead, business aviation stands primed to be at the leading edge of technical innovation. In fact, from the looks of what is being shown at Ebace, it already is.

Fair assessment

Following the latest successful edition of the planet’s premier furniture fair, we sit around the table to select the 15 designers, firms and pieces that caught our eye at Salone del Mobile.

1.
Esther de Vos
Designer

Leuven-based designer Esther de Vos’s handmade steel-and-glass magazine racks and shelves were at hit a Salone Satellite, which is dedicated to emerging designers.
estherdevos.be

2.
Haze by Nanimarquina
Rugs

Turkish designer Begüm Cana Özgür used a weave of half New Zealand wool and half Italian wool to create these rugs for Barcelona’s Nanimarquina. The colours contrast with and then melt into each other, and the outcome is a stunning feature for living rooms and offices alike.
nanimarquina.com

3.
Workmates by Flos
Lighting

New suspension, track and floor lamps by Flos are intended to provide glare-free lighting in the workplace. The thin lines of the design bring an airy quality to an otherwise powerful lighting solution.
flos.com

4.
Linea and Materic by Porro
Furniture

The late Alessandro Mendini played a key role in postmodern Italian design. His playful Linea cabinets, now put into production by Porro, have colourful cellulose surfaces that bring energy to any room. Also for Porro, Piero Lissoni’s dining table, made from Paonazzo marble, has a tapered round tabletop and truncated cone base in stainless steel – a blend that lends it a futuristic look.
porro.com

5.
Tatami Refab Project by Honoka
Sustainable materials

Japanese product-design collective Honoka has been developing new materials by mixing biodegradable resin with discarded tatami mats (composed of Igusa grass). It’s a development project that not only reduces waste but creates a beautiful new material for making new mats and other furniture.
honoka-lab.jp

6.
Kobo and Meriggio by Flexform
Outdoor furniture

Flexform’s outdoor Kobo table is made from solid iroko, a sturdy African hardwood, meaning that it can handle large communal meals – or being danced on at cocktail parties. Meanwhile, long-time Flexform collaborator Antonio Citterio’s Meriggio armchair has an appealingly glam retro look that hides clever innovations, such as a sled-like base – also made from iroko – on thermoplastic spacers, protecting the timber from moisture.
flexform.it

7.
Kall M by Kettal
Office booth

This smart solution for a modern telephone booth would make a welcome addition to any open-plan office that lacks spaces for making private calls or recording live radio. Available in a range of sizes, Kall comes with an adjustable desk, overhead lighting and the option of a swivel chair.
kettal.com

8.
Spaghetti chair by Alias
Furniture

The Alias booth at Salone del Mobile stood out thanks to its spirited installations and a liberal use of UV lights. This reissue of a 1979 design by Giandomenico Belotti, made from chromed steel and woven pvc, takes inspiration from spaghetti twirled around a fork – a good fit for any dinner table.
alias.design

9.
Superblocks by Minotti
Sideboard

Brazilian architect Marcio Kogan has translated his love of rationalist architecture’s boxy shapes into smart furniture for Minotti. This low Superblocks sideboard is made from palisander wood and rests on metal blades; it also has a granite storage area for drinks – or keeping a bottle of saké or two.
minotti.com

10.
Curve by Poliform
Beds

Brianza-based Poliform has many beds in its collection but Curve by French designer Emmanuel Gallina is a standout. The frame comes in black elm and spessart oak, while its padded headboard can be upholstered in a range of fabric and leathers, enabling it to be personalised to its owner’s taste.
poliform.it

11.
W103 Sempé by Wästberg
Lamps

This lamp combines sturdiness and a lightness of form thanks to its hefty base and slender steel arm. The sleek aluminium shade comes in an array of colours and can be adjusted at different angles.
wastberg.com

12.
Run by Technogym
Treadmill

Technogym played to its strengths at Salone by showcasing its sports equipment with the aid of professional runners utilising its Run treadmill. The display showed that a good-looking home-gym setup needn’t be hard work.
technogym.com

13.
Luca Nichetto
Designer

Industrial designer Luca Nichetto applied the look of steam-bent wood – a signature of Austrian furniture firm Gebrüder Thonet Vienna – to a different material for this body-hugging chair. “We used metal but wanted to retain a Thonet design language,” he says.
nichettostudio.com

14.
Lightwood and T1 by Maruni
Office furniture

Jasper Morrison’s office furniture for Hiroshima-based Maruni doesn’t feel corporate, making it ideal for home or hotel room. The simple forms of the Lightwood desk and T1 task chair ensures that they can fit into different environments too.
maruni.com

15.
Paf Paf by Mattiazzi
Dining chair

Italian architect Marialaura Irvine’s playful dining chair for Mattiazzi is made from an ash frame and finished in a dark stain, with removable upholstery cushions in Kvadrat textiles. In contrast to its sturdy form, the wooden chair is soft and inviting to sit on – making long dinners appetising.
mattiazzi.EU

Telling storeys

1.
Curating the future
Lesley Lokko

Venice Biennale’s International Architecture Exhibition is back. For the next five months in the pavilions of the famed Giardini della Biennale, the halls of the flagship Arsenale building and other venues across the city, the best minds in design will showcase how we might build a better world. Across the following pages, we provide a guide to the exhibition and an insight into the works of some of its key participants. To find out how the event is charting the future course of architecture, we start by talking to its curator, Lesley Lokko.

By selecting the theme and the participants, the curator of the Venice Biennale’s International Architecture Exhibition is responsible for directing the discussion at the world’s largest congregation of architectural talent. In 2023, that honour has fallen to Ghanaian-Scottish architect Lesley Lokko. Raised in Accra, Lokko graduated from The Bartlett School of Architecture in London in 1992 and has since enjoyed a career that has been far from conventional.

Over the course of 30 years, she has founded two design institutes (Johannesburg’s Graduate School of Architecture and the African Futures Institute in Accra), written 12 best-selling novels and worked on three continents. It’s a blend of practice, academia and storytelling that leaves her well-placed to lead the conversation around her chosen theme of “The Laboratory of the Future”. The aim is to turn Venice into a living workshop where architects and creative practitioners will, in her words, “imagine for themselves what the future can hold”. She tells us more.

Tell us about the theme’s development.
There’s a kind of strapline to “The Laboratory of the Future”, which is, “Africa is the laboratory of the future.” Africa is the continent with the youngest population, so most Africans have their lives in front of them. This creates a certain kind of energy. Africa is exploding with potential, talent and creativity. The continent and the diaspora were in my mind when I was thinking about the theme for the Biennale but I didn’t want to put that story front and centre. Taking “Africa” out of the official title gave us a way to open what is happening in Venice to the rest of the world. The “laboratory” is meant as a kind of workshop; it’s less to do with the nuts and bolts of making things and more to do with ideas.

This laboratory will include 89 participants, more than half of whom are from Africa or its diaspora. Why has their story not been told before?
When you grow up in Africa, you don’t really have a sense of yourself being African because everybody around you is African too. You only become African when you leave. The word “Africa” is the veil through which we are always seen but it’s also the veil through which we look. I was interested in bringing together a group of people who know what it’s like to be both behind that veil and with it removed.

Many architects in that position – such as David Adjaye, Mariam Issoufou Kamara and Francis Kéré – are finding global renown. How has working in Africa set them on this path?
Working in contexts that are unstable politically, economically and sometimes socially, as is the case in much of Africa, does make you a different kind of designer. Add to this the infrastructure on the continent – we live without consistent electricity – and it means that you don’t take for granted the infrastructure that is being built all the time. As a designer, you prioritise slightly different things and you think about the environment in slightly different ways. I’m hoping that this exhibition will show that it’s possible to do that and still be phenomenally imaginative and creative.

How is this perspective relevant to non-African participants?
When I think about Africa, I can’t think about it without the diaspora. For much of the African middle class, the relationship between Africa and former colonial countries is a physical one; it’s not just someone on the end of the telephone or a video call. Sometimes the money that a person is earning outside the continent is the money that sustains half a village back here. As such, people have it in their minds that they can go “there” and become somebody; and the diaspora also has an idea of what “home” is like back in Africa. There’s this traffic all the time between “there” and “here” that alters one’s sense of scale, time and distance. This is something that many people around the world can relate to; migration is the theme of the 21st century. Many of the things that Africans have been experiencing quite intensely, over quite a long period of time, are now being experienced by the rest of the world.

Through your curatorship, how do you begin to explore these global themes?
To be a curator, you must have a strong sense of a narrative but also have a feeling for the physical. It’s not unlike writing a novel; you have certain threads that you want to pull out in the story of the exhibition. For me, with a literary impulse, curating the Biennale started with the titles for the various components of the exhibition. Once that was set, it was a bit like a book with five or six chapters: I had to work out how I was going to fill them.

Tell us how you did it.
I knew that this would have to be an exhibition of parts because the story is very complex. Off the back of “The Laboratory of the Future” theme, we needed to start by talking about decolonisation and decarbonisation. These are two sides of the same coin but they’re not always expressed or understood that way. You can’t go at both ideas with the same focus all the way through with 100 participants; it would be too complex. So I broke it down into six subgroups, or components, very early on and they haven’t changed [see right].

What do you hope that people will take away from the Biennale?
I’ve always been interested in the idea of spaces where people come together to work something out. To get practitioners, an audience and the curatorial team together to work out what we all understand by “The Laboratory of the Future” seemed to be a rich starting point. At the end of the Biennale, I’m hoping that we’ll have a strong sense of what it was like to have taken part in this experiment, whether as a spectator or as a participant.

2.
Representing concerns
National pavilions

A highlight of the Venice Biennale is the national participations, which sees the countries involved nominate a curator who pulls together a showcase that responds to both the event’s theme (in 2023, “The Laboratory of the Future”) and the most pressing architectural concerns that the particular nation is facing. This year, 64 countries will be represented with many showing in dedicated pavilions in the Giardini. Here’s our pick of the bunch.

Social Friendship: Meeting in the Garden
Holy See

Sitting on a little island across from San Marco, the Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore was once, along with Venice itself, a focal point of power in the Christian world. With a history stretching back more than 1,000 years, the Benedictine monastery is still in operation, though over recent centuries the number of monks has dwindled to two. For the next five months, the Vatican has opened a corner of its quarters to the public. The exhibition, Social Friendship: Meeting in the Garden, commissioned by Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça and curated by Roberto Cremascoli, is only the second time that the Holy See has participated at the Architecture Biennale. “We invite visitors to care for the planet as we care for ourselves and celebrate the culture of encounter,” says Cremascoli.

Entering the abbey via a long, stone corridor, visitors can make out a larger-than-human figure beckoning at the other end. A procession of sombre sculptures by Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza – two in marble and nine more in wood – lead out into a walled garden. Among the monastery’s vegetables, herbs and chickens, Studio Albori has built structures using demolition-waste timber to provide biennale-goers with seating and shade. In a city flush with splendours old and new, this down-to-earth show is a reminder that it is the simple stuff that counts in the long run.

Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice

Fertile Futures
Portugal

Commissioned by Portugal’s Directorate-General for the Arts, the country’s pavilion investigates the management of fresh water on the Iberian peninsula. Called Fertile Futures, the showcase casts a critical eye on the issue, by building case studies around seven locations in Portugal, including the Tâmega basin the Lagoa das Sete Cidades, while also acknowledging that the country isn’t alone in facing water scarcity issues. “The planet’s existence depends on water and the way that we use it can tell us a lot about different societies’ quality of life,” Andreia Garcia, head curator of the Portuguese pavilion, tells Monocle.

In addition to the exhibition, the pavilion will also welcome a series of conventions, called Assemblies of Thought, where the public can talk with designers and consultants about the issues explored by the pavilion. The first was held in Lisbon, prior to the biennale, and will be followed by assemblies in Braga, Faro and Porto Santo this year.

Garcia says that broader conversation is essential as governments everywhere should be looking to the regions most affected by climate change for guidance on how to tackle future crises closer to home. “Our analysis, which uses the national context as a starting point, is still universal at its core,” he tells Monocle. “We all share these problems.”

Palazzo Franchetti, Venice

Children’s Forest Pavilion
Lithuania

A near-constant at the Venice Biennale are national pavilions that address architecture’s relationship with nature. Leading that charge in 2023 is the Lithuanian entry, which looks at the country’s paradoxical relationship with its forests: they are treated as either a robust material source for the construction industry or an untouched natural landscape offering reprieve from the urban environment. To tackle this complex and contradictory issue, a childlike curiosity has been applied to Children’s Forest Pavilion.

Curated by Jurga Daubaraite, Egija Inzule, Jonas Zukauskas, co-founders of design-led research and residency programme Neringa Forest Architecture, the exhibition brings together works and findings developed in parallel to outdoor activities held with children in woodlands in Lithuania and Finland. “We wanted to look at how we speak to children so that we empower them to think for themselves, explore their creativity and see the beauty of thinking about the future positively,” says Zukauskas.

Children’s Forest Pavilion will have a life beyond Venice. After the Biennale, the exhibition will be brought home to Nida. Zukauskas and the team hope that it will introduce thinking of forests as negotiated spaces where no single actor has a central stake.

Campo Tana, Castello, 2125, Venice

3.
Building bridges
European Cultural Centre

The Venice Biennale inspires a host of satellite exhibitions to pop up alongside it in the Lagoon City. Chief among them is the European Cultural Centre’s flagship showcase, Time Space Existence, which, inspired by the international architecture exhibition, highlights the latest innovations and encourage better built environments.

“We are a playground of experimentation for architects to test their ideas,” says Lucia Pedrana, exhibition organiser for the European Cultural Centre – Italy (ECC). It’s a sunny spring morning, shortly before the opening of the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, and Pedrana greets Monocle under a brick arch that straddles the entrance to a 16th-century palace in Venice’s Cannaregio neighbourhood. The days before, a crew of construction workers laid the bricks for the self-balancing arch, modelled after Brunelleschi’s dome in Florence, while wearing virtual-reality headsets that supplied step-by-step instructions. The befuddled builders served as guinea pigs for a collaboration between Princeton University and architecture firm SOM, which looks to revive age-old construction methods by way of augmented reality (AR). “It was amusing,” says Pedrana. “But it worked.”

The AR arch is only the parting shot for Time Space Existence, the ECC’s biannual satellite exhibition to the Venice Biennale. The title is fittingly broad for the show, which presents more than 200 projects spread out across two palaces, Palazzo Mora and Palazzo Bembo, as well as the Giardini della Marinaressa. There is no set theme for each venue but the curatorial team of the ECC (a private organisation without ties to the EU) invites architects, research institutes, photographers, product designers and artists from around the world to submit a piece or demonstrate a project that they are working on. “We want to open the door to all kinds of projects and only later draw out common themes,” says Pedrana. “It becomes a snapshot of contemporary architecture.”

With such an ambitious remit, a visitor wading through the labyrinthine floors of the two palazzos is bound to feel a little overwhelmed: here’s an MIT investigation into the geography of tourism; there are photos reflecting on time, space and existence by Kengo Kuma. Apart from a handful of commissioned artworks, participants must fund their installations independently, which results in some sections feeling slightly slapdash and others a little corporate. But the jumble imbues the display with surprises, such as at Palazzo Bembo, while a sober retrospective of German firm Gerber Architekten leads straight into a room full of surrealist sculptures by Mexican artist Pedro Friedeberg.

Time Space Existence was first organised in 2012 and now forms a decade-long archive of architectural research. “Throughout the years, there’s a narrative that continues,” says Pedrana. There are also specific and sometimes surprising threads that emerge from the submissions. Two years ago, many were thinking about digital design; this year, Pedrana says, the key themes are novel materials, “trans-species design” (which considers non-human life) and population displacement. To see a hopeful answer to the latter, head to the Giardini della Marinaressa by the lagoon, which the ECC has turned into a public sculpture park. Here stands the result of a workshop in Madrid in summer 2022, where the Norman Foster Foundation, supported by Swiss building-solutions firm Holcim, tasked 10 architecture students with designing housing for longer-term refugee camps. The issue has only become more urgent since then, after the February earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. “In response to these crises, you have to very quickly create camps,” says Foster. “But the reality is that families can spend literally decades in a tent that is supposedly temporary.”

The first built prototype to result from this Essential Homes Research Project is shaped like a triangular tube with everything inside that a small family might need, including a bathroom, kitchen, sofa and beds. Built from timber and wrapped in a Holcim-made concrete carpet, which is rolled out and fixed in place by spraying it with water, the idea is that these sturdy, modular houses could be flat-packed and assembled on site in just one or two days. “It’s designed nicely, obviously, because it’s Norman Foster,” says Edelio Bermejo, head of R&D at Holcim. “It also provides comfort, well-being, dignity and the chance to create a community.”

Both Bermejo and Foster emphasise that there is still a long way to go before the design is useful on the ground: the prototype took a team of builders about a week to put together. Nevertheless, it proves that Time Space Existence is serving its purpose as a testing ground for ambitious architectural ideas. “It’s an exploration and it provokes discussion on the key issues, which are refugee housing and protection for the homeless,” says Foster. “That has to be positive.” — sro

‘Time Space Existence’ takes place at Palazzo Mora, Palazzo Bembo and Giardini della Marinaressa, Venice, from 20 May to 26 November.
ecc-italy.EU

4.
Growing influence
Demas Nwoko

“Architecture is a regional art,” says Demas Nwoko, speaking to Monocle from his residence and studio in Idumuje-Ugboko, his hometown in southern Nigeria. “Architecture should differ from geographical zone to geographical zone, and the shape of the interior should be determined entirely by the way of life of the people using the space.” Such ideas have resulted in the 88-year-old artist and self-taught architect being honoured with this year’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, the Venice Biennale’s most prestigious award.

Nwoko first rose to prominence as a founding member of Nigeria’s Zaria Art Society in 1958, a student group that blended Western and African art traditions in their work. Decades on, in a much more globalised world, Nwoko still frowns upon importing any idea wholesale. He believes that architects should look to, and develop, local knowledge, building culture and identity. In the Nigerian tropics, Nwoko’s enclosed but ventilated buildings are designed to moderate the sun, heat and rain. They are also resource-conscious; some of them are constructed from stones or bricks made from laterite soil that’s excavated onsite. And, practical as he is, Nwoko also acknowledges that built works need to grow and develop alongside their inhabitants.

Today the octogenarian is revisiting the New Culture Studio in Ibadan, a design and performing arts centre that he began building as his own residence and studio in 1967. “It was never a solid piece of design but was added to over the years as needs arose,” he says of the evolved building. Having honoured Nwoko with the Golden Lion, it seems that this is an approach to architecture that the Venice Biennale will be hoping others emulate.

An exhibition of Nwoko’s work can be viewed at the Stirling Pavilion in the Giardini della Biennale.

5.
Home from home
Hood Design Studio

To open the biennale display in the Central Pavilion of the Giardini, curator Lesley Lokko has tapped 16 design practices from Africa and its diaspora to present their work. Called Force Majeure, the dedicated showcase will offer creatives such as Walter Hood, founder and principal of Hood Design Studio, the chance to explore human connections to places and landscapes.

For California-based landscape designer Walter Hood, Charleston and the surrounding Low Country in South Carolina is an enduring source of fascination. The area is home to the Gullah Geechee people, who are descendants of the transatlantic slave trade. They developed (and retain) a language, cuisine and cultural practice – and their story anchors Charleston’s International African American Museum, which opens in June. Hood designed its memorial garden and returned to this landscape and region for inspiration for his two-part exhibition Native(s).

Hood’s ambition was to challenge the notion of belonging and question what it means to be native. He explains that both the Low Country and Venice are ideally suited for unpacking this. For the exhibition’s interior component, Hood is displaying two models of basket houses that he designed in response to pressures facing Phillips, a Gullah Geechee settlement in north Charleston. As families grow in Phillips, they carve out plots for new houses from palmetto forests deeded to their ancestors upon emancipation in the 19th century. The landscape also provides the raw material for sweetgrass baskets, sold by the Gullah Geechee on country roads, which are destined for infrastructure upgrades. Naturally, one of the exhibition’s houses is inspired from sweetgrass basketmaking and the other inspired from the structure of palmetto trees. The exterior component consists of wood columns slotted alongside the concrete pillars of Carlo Scarpa’s Sculpture Garden. While Venice’s architecture is famed for its masonry, the city is propped up by wood pilings. Hood sourced the chestnut for his installation from the same company that provides most of Venice’s replacement pilings.

His installation begs the question: is the palmetto tree more native to the Low Country than the basket-weaving tradition brought across the Atlantic? Are concrete columns designed by the beloved Italian architect more native than the city’s hidden pilings?

“I’m hoping that this investigation will help us to articulate the idea of ‘native’ in a way that is more inspirational and less pastiche,” says Hood. “Everything we don’t like isn’t ‘native.’” Through hardwood and grasses, Hood’s designs disarm any such hostility.

Close encounters
AMAA

A key showcase at this year’s Arsenale is ‘Dangerous Liaisons’, which will highlight the practice of 37 designers working across disciplines. In that number is Veneto-based amaa, a studio that proves art and architecture are perfect partners.

Architects Alessandra Rampazzo and Marcello Galiotto set up amaa, a collaborative office for research and development, in Venice in 2012. In 2015, a second office was opened in Arzignano, which is in the heart of the Venetian plain, an hour inland from Venice. “We started by recovering an old electric motor and water pump factory, turning it into a café, retail space and studio,” says Galiotto. “The project showed how you could turn an abandoned industrial structure into a meeting place and immediately, new commissions came in. In a sense, Arzignano gave us an architectural playground.”

Recently, several of amaa’s large-scale projects are being realised, including the art organisation Atipografia’s Threshold and Treasure gallery, which is tucked in between luscious hills, tall pines, industrial buildings and the mediaeval castles of Arzignano. It’s this quickly growing portfolio that drew the attention of the curatorial team of the biennale, who invited the studio to participate in Dangerous Liaisons, an exhibition that celebrates designers working across disciplines.

For Amaa, art is close to its heart. When Monocle visits its studio ahead of a tour of its projects in Arzignano, a wall-covering art installation in mixed wood and ceramics acts as a backdrop to a series of sculptural models cast in concrete, which is on display across the enormous industrial floor.

“These wall pieces are made by an artist who always works with us called Alessandro Neretti,” says Galiotto. “He reuses found materials and sculpts them.” amaa’s close collaboration with artists over the years includes works by artists from northern Italy, such as Arcangelo Sassolino and Andrea Bianconi, who they’ve turned to in order to enhance their architecture’s spatial and atmospheric qualities. “The way art addresses the experience of the user – and achieves a grasp of eternity – is instrumental to the development of our projects,” says Rampazzo.

For proof, Rampazzo and Galiotto point to Threshold and Treasure gallery. Set in an early 20th-century printing house, the gallery’s pavilions reveal the art – and the site’s history – gradually thanks to the staggered placement of walls and doorways. “I get goosebumps in here,” says Galiotto as he walks through the main hall. “The current exhibition by artist Diego Soldà is a series of artworks that enhances our architecture. Three-dimensional paint sculptures made up of thousands of layers of paint, cut or sliced, perfectly echo our philosophies.”

We walk upstairs to the gallery office and Rampazzo and Galiotto spontaneously buy two works from the exhibition. “The art is making the architecture react and live; that is what the collaboration between art and architecture is all about.”

Images: Simone Bossi

Soul supplier

When Maria Lemos started spending more time in Athens, she sensed change in the air. “Like-minded people were moving to the city, the food scene was transforming, the art scene was different – it just felt right,” she says. Over the past few years, Lemos has been making frequent trips to her hometown to work on the opening of Pagostas, a guesthouse on Patmos island, with her husband, Gregoris Kambouroglou. A retailer at heart, Lemos quickly began imagining what an Athenian iteration of her London boutique, Mouki Mou, would look like – and when she found the right spot on the hillside Plaka neighbourhood, she signed a lease long before she could come up with all the answers. “The location we found felt so unique that the decision was instinctive,” says Lemos over coffee. “It’s completely off the grid – it feels like you’re on an island but you’re in the centre of Athens.”

Plaka is a pedestrianised area best known for its narrow, cobblestone streets where neoclassical homes and family-run tavernas meet long rows of souvenir shops, catering to the crowds of tourists hiking up to see the Acropolis. “There’s such interesting architecture all around,” adds Lemos. “You see the new and the old, the good and the bad – that’s the dichotomy of Athens.” Nowhere is this reflected more than on the corner of Diogenous Street, where the new Mouki Mou Athens has opened its doors just in time for spring. The shop is housed in a concrete 1970s building, while nextdoor is the oldest house in Athens.

Lemos gave free rein to Thessaloniki-born designer Leda Athanasopoulou, who chose to let the period architecture of the building define the shop’s interiors, which feature repurposed terrazzo floors and aluminium and mdf accents. “Athens isn’t just about the ancient world,” she says. “It’s about the modern world too. And this location captures both.”

The works of some of Greece’s most skilled craftspeople, from technicians to lighting designers and carpenters, is on display here – the pièce de résistance being a metal table by Eleni Vernadaki, an artist who Lemos considers a “living legend” and whose work she has been collecting for years. A pair of ceramic lace paintings by Vernadaki are mounted on the walls, while vertical jewellery cabinets are dotted throughout and showcase exclusive pieces by some of Greece’s most established jewellers, including Fanourakis and Ileana Makri. Their designs sit next to international names, such as those of New York-based Gabriella Kiss. “We’re not only after Greek names,” adds Lemos. “We want to have a point of view that fits the country. Greece is about simplicity and minimalism, and less is more.”

Above the shop floor, a 160 sq m terrace boasts panoramic views of the Acropolis. “It’s a real viewpoint,” says Lemos. “So we put an enormous amount of work into planting the terrace and were able to transform what looked like a cement football pitch into a space that feels alive and can soften the area’s overall landscape.” Though there’s no product on this green rooftop, it’s an integral part of the business because of its potential as a spot for the local creative community to meet and share ideas. “This can’t just be a retail space,” says Lemos. “People should be able to sit on the roof and grab a coffee or a drink in the evening.” Lemos plans to kick off the summer season with a book signing for Argentine photographer Miguel Flores-Vianna’s latest title, Haute Bohemians. “I’ll be back in Athens regularly for such events. We want to ensure that it’s a living shop, not just a space that sells things.”

But the shop does sell a handsome selection of homeware, jewellery and womenswear, handpicked to reflect Lemos’s slow-fashion ethos. “We’re much more concerned with lifestyle and textiles – our customers shop for pieces that they will be able to keep for the rest of their lives,” says the retailer, pointing to workwear jackets by French brand Casey Casey and tailoring by Fforme, a New York label by Paul Helbers, a former menswear designer for premium luxury label The Row. The shop’s team has a deep understanding of these brands’ stories and the luxurious material compositions of their products, ensuring that the information can then be passed on to customers.

“You often see the finished product but don’t understand how it’s made,” she adds. “We want to educate shoppers and give the makers a voice. That’s why we’re also planning to use our roof terrace as a hub for customers to meet these wonderful people and understand what they do. It will be a cross between a gallery and a shop.”

Having already built a loyal community around Mouki Mou London, which opened on Chiltern Street more than 11 years ago, Lemos is confident that she’ll find a similar audience of Athenians and international visitors who share her appreciation for craft. “We don’t want world domination,” she says, adding that to be successful, retailers should identify their niche and detach themselves from market trends. “The key is finding our customer base and servicing them really well. You need to feel liberated and just love what you do. If you don’t create a shop with soul, people will choose to buy online instead.”

Lemos’s independent, cosmopolitan spirit is helping to introduce a more mindful approach to shopping for one’s home and wardrobe. “That had been quite lost in Athens,” she says. “But today there is a growing Greek audience that appreciates design that’s artistic and has a certain purity. It gives me carte blanche to rediscover my hometown.”
moukimou.com