Tag: Makers & Rooms

  • Saul Bass & The Seventy Seconds That Changed Everything

    Saul Bass & The Seventy Seconds That Changed Everything

    Saul Bass did not invent the film title sequence. He did something more consequential: he convinced Hollywood that the audience’s first minute and a half was not dead time to be tolerated but a work of art to be made. Everything that followed — in cinema, in corporate identity, in the visual culture of the…

  • Diébédo Francis Kéré: Building With the Village

    Diébédo Francis Kéré: Building With the Village

    Diébédo Francis Kéré grew up in a village in Burkina Faso with no electricity and no school. He went to Berlin on a scholarship, became an architect, and came back to build one. What he discovered in that act — about materials, about community, about what architecture is actually for — has been reshaping the…

  • The Sculptor Who Made Cars Move

    The Sculptor Who Made Cars Move

    Makers & Rooms — Essay VIII Flaminio Bertoni gave the world the DS and the 2CV — the most beautiful car ever made and the most useful, two objects of genius separated by a decade and united by a single Italian hand working in a Paris suburb. He died almost unknown. The cars are immortal.…

  • Gil Schafer

    Gil Schafer

    Makers & Rooms — Essay VII The House That Remembers You Gil Schafer builds houses that feel as though they have always been there. This is not an accident, a stylistic affectation, or a retreat from the present. It is the result of a very particular theory about what a house is for — and…

  • Alessi

    Alessi

    Makers & Rooms — Essay VI The Dream Factory on the Lake For a century, the Alessi family has been making things for the kitchen and the table. Alberto Alessi turned that inheritance into something stranger and more ambitious: a theory of what objects are for, a laboratory for the most original design minds of…

  • Peter Pennoyer

    Peter Pennoyer

    Makers & Rooms — Essay V The Classical Present Peter Pennoyer builds in the tradition of McKim, Mead and White and sees nothing remotely conservative about it. In an architectural culture that treats ornament as embarrassment and history as weakness, he has spent thirty years making the case that the classical orders are not a…

  • Zaha Hadid

    Zaha Hadid

    The Architecture of Impossible Things Zaha Hadid spent sixteen years designing buildings that could not be built. When the technology finally caught up with her imagination, she remade the skyline of the world. The question she never stopped arguing about was whether any of it was actually for the people inside. By Bergotte There is…

  • Rei Kawakubo – Comme des Garçons

    Rei Kawakubo – Comme des Garçons

    Rei Kawakubo did not arrive in Paris in 1981 to show clothes. She arrived to make an argument — about the body, about beauty, about what a woman was and was not obliged to be. The argument has not stopped since.

  • John Derian

    John Derian

    Makers & Rooms — Essay II The Man Who Saved the Image John Derian didn’t invent decoupage. He did something harder: he convinced the world that beauty could come from what had already been beautiful once, that the archive was inexhaustible, and that a shop on a quiet street in downtown Manhattan could function as…

  • Poul Henningsen

    Poul Henningsen

    Makers & Rooms — Essay I The Light He Couldn’t Stop Arguing About Poul Henningsen designed the most beloved lamp in the world. He also wrote cabaret songs, picked fights with the bourgeoisie, and fled to Sweden ahead of the Gestapo. The lamp was almost the least interesting thing about him. By Bergotte There is…