10 Questions With… Dustin Yellin

Inside the studio—a warehouse he renovated down the street from his multidisciplinary art center Pioneer Works—Yellin relies on natural light as well as Ketra lighting by Lutron, merging the day’s fluctuating hues with shades he can tune and control. “Like a fly caught in amber, my works act as a kind of time capsule,” he says. “Instead of hosting fossils, I embed human artifacts, typically images sourced from print media, within in such a way that we, as a species, become the specimen.”   

Read Interior Design’s interview with Yellin about finding the right light and the performative aspect of his sculptures.

Interior Design: The invention of the moving image owes much to lighting. What role does light play in your idea of “frozen cinema,” in other words suspending an image to stillness? 

Dustin Yellin: Goethe once said that “architecture is frozen music.” My use of the term “frozen cinema” is an update to his idea that through pattern, plan, and frame, an artist can breathe narrative into fixed forms. Like architecture, and unlike cinema, sculpture requests the observer to experience art through a body in motion in space and time, which is never constant. In a sense, I employ two forms of scenography; one that is pictorial, while the other relies on an active viewer who becomes their own director scripting encounters with the work in real space and in real time. I find that the difference between stillness and animation is really just a matter of time.   

ID: Could you talk about your relationship with glass as a form of craft and a conceptual medium? 

DY: Glass is a paradoxical medium; it is both strong and fragile while it also attempts to show itself and hide at the same time. Duchamp once said something to the effect that the best art exhibits an ambiguity of experience that is not one thing or the other, but is both one thing, and something else at the same time. To answer in the negative, the only thing I am against conceptually in art is the dichotomy between either/or states of being.  

ID: Light, whether natural or artificial, is critical in an artist’s life in studio, one that even determines the artist’s use of the space. What is your relationship with light from conception of a work to its final form? 

DY: All vision is predicated on light, and yet we often take light for granted. Glass by its very nature does something extortionary to all forms of light: it bends it. And while painting reflects light, glass acts as both a prism and a filter that makes legible how photons move around the work and around us. As an analog, my glass works are more like sensors that allow each viewer, and myself, to build sensitivity to the nature of light itself.    

ID: Why is midday sunlight your favorite? 

DY: Midday’s lack of shadows chips away at the object-hood of glass, transforming it into something more akin to an instrument, whether that be a window, a mirror, or a prism.   

ID: Light lives through a constant shift through movement, similar to your sculptures that invite viewers to rotate around them. How do you orchestrate this sense of mobility for your audience? 

DY: My works have different edge conditions that each provide different ways and moments of seeing the work. As sculpture exists in four dimensions, the act of the observer moving around and through these different conditions allows a suit of shifting views that merge, develop, and emerge yet again out of these situations and their borders. This movement allows the work to always be in a state of “becoming.”  

ID: Exhibiting Psychogeographies in spaces associated with dance creates an interesting contrast between movement and stillness. Could you talk about your projects for Lincoln Center in New York and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. through this aspect? 

DY: There is an adage that the rests between notes give music its soul. Movement and stillness are already wed, just as darkness is to light. Each defines and clarifies the other; without one there cannot be the other. Jung mentioned that the human condition is one of duality, and that art is the expression par excellence of this reality.  

ID: Psychogeographies consists of paintings and sculptures. How do you see these play with dimensionality? 

DY: Since the Renaissance, Western art developed a form of painterly perspective based on foreshortening and geometry. The Modernists countered this illusion by flatlining the picture plane to assert the flatness of the canvas. Instead of seeing these two modes as antithetical, I mix both together so that the shift between each technique produces a “3rd depth”.  As my works are three dimensional objects comprised ostensibly of sets of layered picture plains, I also move along the z-axis through these plains to provide a further play of depth through the relation between classical perspective and scale in real space.  

ID: Scale is another critical element, almost similar to miniature art in which minuscule elements build a narrative altogether. Can you share a bit about your process of using small bits to form larger narratives? 

DY: Each work is a microcosm in which the individual parts never lose their own unique identity. They also work together as a community of images to produce a larger systemic image at the same time.  

ID: You create work-on-paper studies of your sculptures but also use paper bits inside the works. Could you talk about your relationship with paper?  

DY: Since the beginning of time, people have made marks to record their existence. These marks endure and circulate long after as a collection of shared experience. There are many words for this greater body of knowledge, be it consciousness or culture. In a sense, I feel that I tap into this long conversation by sourcing other people’s marks, and then reconfiguring these items with mark-making of my own. By preserving these histories in glass, I can sustain that long conversation.  

ID: Pioneer Works is a space that proves the multimedia direction art-making has evolved into in recent years. Many artists and designers refuse categorization of their practices. How do you see the center’s impact on your work and vice versa? 

DY: Pioneer Works is a “museum of process” in which we support the continual development of all disciplines and practices through experimentation and production. I feel that as we support others, we advance ourselves. Pioneer Works is my life practice; they are one and the same.  

Chris Bogia’s Candle Sculpture Illuminates Fishers Island, New York

Shag carpet, Atari, floral wallpaper, West German pottery, embroidery. These are among the varied influences that have shaped Chris Bogia’s mixed-media sculptures, which masterfully meld the approachable and homespun with a Scandinavian-esque sleekness. Bogia, who recently proclaimed, “I love interiors!” and worked for Todd Oldham during college, is also the cofounder of Fire Island Artist Residency, off Long Island’s southern shore, an experience that may have contributed to his latest installation on another islet—and his first outdoors: Candle on Fishers Island, about 5 miles east of the Connecticut coast.

Bogia was awarded the annual public-art commission from Lighthouse Works, a nonprofit organization celebrating its 10th anniversary that’s devoted to encouraging artist development and Fishers’s year-round cultural enrichment. “In my research, I thought about mid-Atlantic summer communities and their homes clad in shingles and shutters. One of the shutters I discovered had a small cut-out of a candle, which inspired me to think of the candle as a sculpture,” explains the artist. He scaled that motif way up, chose a palette that evokes “the faded colors of well-loved beachwear,” and had it fabricated in aluminum. He then fitted the shaft with an LED so the “flame” is illuminated at night, like a lighthouse.

Bogia grew up in Wilmington, DE, and earned his MFA from Yale in New Haven, CT, but has otherwise spent his adulthood in New York City. He graduated from NYU, where he currently teaches sculpture, has his studio in the South Bronx, and is represented by Mrs., the Queens gallery that just hosted his second solo show. A few blocks north, he’s part of a group exhibition at Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling through August 20. Farther afield, his work is on display at Wasserman Projects in Detroit, also through August 20, and he is currently preparing for a show opening September 3 at Perrotin gallery in Paris.

Wyatt Kahn’s Mammoth Cor-Ten Sculptures Debut in Downtown Manhattan

Prior to this summer, Wyatt Kahn was perhaps best known as a painter, specifically his monochromatic multi-panel artworks. But that perception may change for anyone walking through City Hall Park in New York. It’s there that his seven sculptures compose “Wyatt Kahn: Life in the Abstract,” representing not only his first public-art exhibition but also his first pieces in Cor-Ten steel. And he really goes big with it, each piece monumental—the largest clocking in at 3,300 pounds.

They’re the outcome of Kahn’s examination of the spatial relationship between painting and sculpture, two and three dimensions, and developing a language that integrates abstract forms with everyday-life items, like a comb or sunglasses. “The figures have their own narrative, and I hope visitors will find their own meaning based on their experiences,” Kahn says. “To me, the potted plant in Morning represents nurturing an idea, while someone else may be reminded of the plant they raised during the pandemic.”

Each sculpture is constructed of numerous steel sections welded together into blocklike forms, their front and back mirroring each other to create an illusion of drawing in space, their rusted-red tone resulting from Cor-Ten’s natural weathering process. The sculptures also evoke the steel structures of the city’s architecture, which, as a native New Yorker with an MFA from Hunter College, Kahn knows well.

13 Creative Accessories to Dress Up Any Room

Covetable accoutrements for tasteful tabletops—and beyond.

Bernardaud

LatoxLato

Raawii

Christopher Russell

Ginori 1735

Esque Studio

Blu Dot

Matthew Fisher

ecoBirdy through Goodee

Gunia Project

Orior

Jan Ernst through Galerie Revel

Oatmeal

Nandipha Mntambo’s Furniture Blurs Human and Animal Forms in a New Show at Capetown’s Southern Guild

Until recently, the Eswatini-born and Johannesburg-based artist Nandipha Mntambo was best known for her uncanny cowhide-resin sculptures that explored, and exploded, the boundaries between animal skin and human figuration. “Transcending Instinct,” her first solo show for Cape Town’s Southern Guild gallery, on view through April 8, stretches her expertise into the realm of functional sculpture.

The result is a quartet of haunting seating. The Hypnotic stool reimagines her 2009 sculpture uMcedoas a hump concealed by tassels that pays tribute to the voodoo spirit Zangbeto. A coat she fashioned that same year, adorned with cow ears, inspired the unsettling cocoon chair Love Quest. A chaise, Serenity,invokes black holes and tentacles yet offers a cozy sheepskin seat in which to snuggle. The Pinnacle chair upends expectations entirely, conscripting an overturned Zebra to serve as a strange seat. “I’m using my current practice as a lens to look back,” Mntambo said in a statement. And she’s finding a range of deeply-bodied, provocative meditations on form—that of human beings, of animals, and what lies in-between. 

10 Questions With… Willie Cole

It’s safe to say Willie Cole has a shoe fetish. With the closure of museums and galleries, income and exposure was in short supply for artists during the global pandemic. Like many, Cole turned to Instagram, and with headpieces for Comme des Garçons, sculptures, self-portraits, installations, furnishings, and masks all dynamically exploding with repurposed shoes—among other reclaimed materials—his following grew. “The global pandemic encouraged independence,” he says. “When you start out as a young artist, it almost feels like you work for the gallery, but the fact is, the gallery works for you.”

Most recently, Cole presented Artcycling, a collection of furnishings and sculpture produced in collaboration with luxury Italian shoe brand Tod’s. Showcased last September at the Salone del Mobile furniture fair in Milan and in December at art and design event Art Basel Miami Beach, Artcycling is made of materials discarded during Tod’s production process. Interior Design sat down with Cole to hear more about Artcycling, as well as the first high heel that caught his eye, the piano that became sculptures, and the unexpected hazard of too many shoes on a headpiece. 

Interior Design: It is fair to say you have a thing for shoes!

Willie Cole: It all started with a prison art project. I was offered an opportunity to show at Eastern State Penitentiary, a prison in Philadelphia that’s been closed for many years. I was living in Newark a the time, and there, like in probably every major city, a pair of sneakers hanging over a telephone wire means a location to buy drugs.

I know that drugs are all over prisons, so I wanted to make a big globe out of sneakers to hang in the middle of the huge prison yard. But I only had seven or eight pairs of sneakers that my son had given me. So I went to my local thrift store, and immediately a high-heeled shoe caught my eye—I forgot all about sneakers and began to collect high heels and then did something completely different for that project. Afterwards, I started discovering large quantities of high heels donated by stores to thrift shops. These became my muse for many sculptural manifestations. Now my shoe masks and large-scale shoe pieces have been cast in bronze and installed in cities including San Antonio, Atlanta, and Newark.

ID: How did Artcycling, your collection of shoe sculptures for Tod’s come about?

WC: Instagram. Over the past two years, my Instagram connections have really been coming together. Tod’s art director saw my work and approached me for a collaboration leading into the Salone del Mobile furniture fair in Milan, with the idea to upcycle leather from their handmade shoe collections. This inspired a custom collection of tables, seating, and sculptures that I created in their studio, and also featured at the Tod’s location in the Miami Design District, coinciding with Art Basel Miami Beach. These pieces are now part of the Tod’s art collection, which is extensive.

In tandem, Tod’s debuted Mosaic, a collection of handbags inspired by Italian shopping bags. They are made from different kinds and colors of leather scraps. Together we ‘artcycled’ lots of leather—hence the name—while conceptually underscoring the upcycling idea of using salvage or culled materials. 

ID: Can you describe a few of your pieces in the Artcycling collection?

WC: ︎Tod’s has big bins of handbags, shoe parts and buckles, and all kinds of things that didn’t quite come out the way they wanted them to. It’s basically a ‘cull’ bin of rejected parts. As I was working right in the factory, if I needed something, I could just call, and they would bring it down. The Flowers on My Feet table is made from parts of moccasins—flattened leather sections—arranged in a mandala or a rose window pattern and attached to plywood, which is mounted on shoe forms. ︎The Gommino chair, with a straight back wooden chair at its core, is made from approximately 100 incomplete white Gommino moccasins.

ID: What else have you completed recently? 

WC: I collaborated with Rei Kawakubo on her Homme Plus Fall 2021 Menswear collection for fashion label Comme des Garçons. I began by making headpieces for the models on the runway show, then photographed myself each day wearing that day’s creation, submitting the photos to Rei for approval. Then I turned these photos into a series of watercolor self-portraits. From their side, Comme des Garçons sent their ideas for textile design patterns to me for approval. 

I had been making things out of shoes for a while, and I’ve made masks and standing figures…but I had never made headdresses. So when they asked me to make headpieces, I used 20 or 30 shoes and didn’t think that much about the models. They were too big and too heavy to wear—so they asked me to use fewer shoes. I started out much more elaborate— more sculpture than fashion. In the end, the largest headpiece had just six shoes.

I have a shipping container filled with bottles that I collected years ago, and one private commission I enjoyed early on in the pandemic period was a chandelier from recycled plastic bottles for the home of musician Jon Batiste and writer Suleika Jaouad. I also created a column out of recycled water bottles as part of STOA169 in Polling, Germany. The pandemic prevented me from traveling there, so the crew  collected bottles, produced, and installed my piece based on my written and video instructions.

Another shoe project I did during the pandemic was a reception desk out of high heel shoes for the feminist-themed Hotel Zena in Washington, D.C.Black Art Matters is a collection of objects including clothing, mugs, and masks for museum shops that I did in collaboration with Museum Nerd and Popcorn Custom Products.

Black Art Matters is a collection of objects including clothing, mugs, and masks for museum shops that I did in collaboration with Museum Nerd and Popcorn Custom Products.

ID: What’s upcoming for you? 

WC: The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York will feature my scorch on paper work—using steam irons—in its lobby entry area, as part of a dedicated installation for Black History Month. 

For the ︎Kansas City Airport, I have a public commission for suspended aerial sculptures featuring multiple birds. These are inspired by Charlie Parker, who was born there and whose nickname is ‘Bird.’ 

ID: In what kind of home do you live? 

WC: ︎My home is my studio, and therefore completely full of art. It’s located on two acres in a rural New Jersey mountain community about an hour from the George Washington Bridge. We call it a house for tax reasons but I don’t know what it is now, maybe some type of indoor junkyard!

One piece of furniture I am very attached to is the stringboard or what you’d call the harp of the old upright piano played by my daughter when she was a child. Ten years ago, I dismantled the piano, which has lots of memories for me, and turned the keys and the legs into a bird sculpture. I preserved the harp—the heart and soul of the piano—and it currently stands on end, mounted on brass and wood, as a kind of ‘soundplace’ in my living room as opposed to a fireplace. I use that as my mantle. 

ID: How do you think your childhood or formative years influenced your artistic thinking?

WC: ︎I was big into puzzling and that lent to the way I look at everything—including my sculptures—in four dimensions. We always had an active puzzle in our house, mostly landscapes but they could also be of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper or Martin Luther King Jr. Puzzling was something that my mother enjoyed and she passed it on to everybody after her.

︎African hand-carved sculptures continue to inspire me. The Newark Museum of Art had an extensive collection of African art, and I went there often when I was young. As a kid during the 1960s, it became critical to have a sense of self and cultural awareness in the Black community. As I got older, I had a good friend who was an African art dealer in New York, and he had a lot of African art in his loft. At that time I was primarily a painter, but through interaction with him and his collection, I transitioned to sculpture. 

ID: Who in the art or design industry do you particularly admire?

WC: Picasso—to me, every artist, especially from the Modern art era, is a disciple of the tribal aesthetic which I see to be timeless and at the root of all that is modern and contemporary. When I say tribal aesthetic, I am referring to the actual tribes, from places such as Cameroon or Mali.

ID: What are you reading?

WC: “Breaking The Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One” by Joe Dispenza. It is helping me unlock personal power and see myself as a part of the universe as opposed to seeing myself as someone living in the universe.

ID: Do you have a secret you can share?

WC: I’ve been a vegan for the last five decades—and I’ve never had a cup of coffee in my life. In Italy, one of the Tod’s crew members was amazed by the fact that I start my day without coffee. ‘How do you do it?’ he asked me.

The secret is that I consume powdered vitamin supplements in juice twice a day. In the summertime, I have watermelon juice because it’s high in antioxidants and economical—one watermelon gives me maybe two and a half gallons of juice. However, this morning I had pineapple juice with fresh spinach. With my vitamin powders, that carries me through to dinner around 6:30pm. Digestion requires blood. So the more you eat, the less blood you have working in your brain. I minimize my consumption during the day because it makes me more alert.

10 Questions With… Mac Collins

Interior Design: Did you have a passion and interest in making and designing as a child?

Mac Collins: When I was a kid I was known for making things. We had a lot of electrical stuff lying around the house and I would cannibalize it and take it apart. I was intrigued by the components. I’ve always had this thing for tactility, although I guess at the age of eight you don’t know why you like certain things. But I was always a collector of objects and I liked to hold things and compare the weight of them. Going into school, I got really into illustration, which transitioned into graffiti and street art. It always seemed like an interest or something that people told me I was good at. It wasn’t until college [editorial note: this refers to sixth form college, which is equivalent to to the last years of high school in the U.S.] when I was encouraged to do an art foundation course that I realized it was something I could pursue as a career.

ID: After the art foundation course you applied to do Three-Dimensional design at Northumbria University in Newcastle, England. What was the course like?

MC: During the art foundation course, I transitioned from 2D sketching, drawing, kind of neural inspired stuff into creating in 3D forms. I was into the idea of sculpture and drawn to the idea of things that could communicate more complex ideas, but through 3D forms. But I worked equally well to briefs and thought in a way that was slightly more mathematical. So this 3D course was a perfect bridge between those two things. The scope of the course was particularly broad and I think that’s what I appreciated. You could work on projects that ranged from highly functional and engineered to things that were more speculative, conceptual, and sculptural. 

ID: Can you tell me a bit about Nottingham, the city you grew up in? What is it like in terms of a design scene and a place for creativity?

MC: I was involved in the creative scene in Nottingham from quite a young age. I was definitely the youngest when I was doing street art and live events at 15. Events that I probably shouldn’t have been at! I think the scale, the intimacy of the communities, means you definitely feel that you can get to know people in a way that you might not be able to in bigger cities like London. There are some bigger substantial institutions and studios in Nottingham too but there is something about it that also feels quite underground.

ID: You are currently teaching on the same course you took at Northumbria University. What is that like and how does that feed into your own work?

MC: I’m currently teaching the first years and running my own module with them, taking them through certain processes and introducing them to the idea of making and communicating through making. Throughout the year I will be taking them though three key projects, where each one is an introduction into a set of processes. It’s exciting because they’re at a point where you can foster creativity and an excitement for the subject. They’re encouraged to experiment with materials as there’s space and machinery and workshops. The teaching itself doesn’t directly feed into my work as the narratives I’m exploring at the moment are quite specific to my own experiences and understanding of British society. But I enjoy engaging with different perspectives and encouraging discussion between students. And the days spent teaching also give some structure to my week.

ID: Can you elaborate on the focus of your work and how it relates to your experiences of British society?

MC: That’s kind of been the crux of the self directed projects that I’ve worked on over the past couple of years, which have been more conceptual or speculative by nature. I’ve been exploring ideas of identity and culture and heritage. I’m of dual heritage, British Jamaican, and I feel I want to respond to those things through the work that I create. My upbringing has definitely had a bearing on how I view the world and the forms that I create visually are in turn informed by my perspective of the world around me. I think I am continually interested in that idea of being British Jamaican and trying to understand my position within contemporary British society.

ID: Can you talk a little bit about specific projects in terms of these interests and concerns. For instance your Iklwa chair?

MC: It started out as my graduation piece, my final project for university. Up until that point I’d always been heavily inspired by Japanese, European and American designers but I hadn’t ever really considered my own heritage or identity as a starting point for my work or brought my own story into what I do. For my dissertation at university I wrote about the roles and responsibilities of Black artists during the civil rights movement and I came to the conclusion that perhaps I also had a responsibility to discuss my own lineage in my work. So this was a bit of a turning point in how I saw my practice. And that project became an opportunity to explore my heritage, to try to understand how my family as Jamaicans now live in Britain, to trace their migration during the Windrush era to Britain and then trace back even further to the transatlantic slave trade that had led to my ancestors being moved from West Africa to the Caribbean. I responded to the powerlessness these people must have felt with a project that I felt instead would empower, elevate and enhance whoever was to sit in that chair.

ID: How does the chair specifically reference these ideas in terms of shape and forms?

MC: Pretty much everything played into how I wanted to communicate these ideas. So the backrest is oversized and abnormally large for what you’d expect in a lounge chair. The idea was that you’d be able to feel the presence of this thing in your peripheral vision, that you’d feel it over your shoulders and almost feel that presence and protection from behind. I had observed and looked at a lot of artists working right now. There’s a British-Liberian painter called Lina Iris Viktor and it feels to me as though she is working to elevate and enhance the person at the centre of her paintings. So that’s how I started to see this this chair. It also had these spear-like forms—the chair is named after the short spear used in colonial wars in South Africa. The idea is they are protecting the person sat within this object. 

ID: What about the brilliant blue colour of the chair you made for your graduation? 

MC: There were kind of quite a few things that linked to the blue. It is quite a celestial blue, which tuned into some of the things I was reading at the time around Afrocentrism and Afrofuturism, and some of the research I had done for my dissertation about the Black Arts Movement in the 60s and 70s. There was this idea of seeing African identity or the identity of the wider African diaspora in a way that hadn’t happened before and in a way that elevated them and celebrated the future of black identity. So Afrofuturism as a movement developed as a way of celebrating an identity that wasn’t present in mainstream media music, film and TV before then. I also got this blue from stories that my grandma told me about when my granddad first moved to the U.K. People expected new arrivals to be scruffy or roughly dressed when actually they arrived and were really sharp. My granddad was wearing this blue suit, which was really sharp and smart. And that has come to symbolize something for me. Just this idea of people expecting less and yet you arrive with more and how—in the face of the racism they experienced—having this ultra marine bright blue suit was an act of resilience. That to me was so significant.

ID: What materials do you most like to work with and why?

MC: Up to now, I have mostly used timber, particularly on all of my bigger projects. And it’s a material that I’m continually impressed by and that has a significance in the human story. It is also particularly tactile and warm to the touch. I think as a material it is also kind of understated but yet can still have such an impact when it’s manipulated. For a lot of the narratives that I want to communicate, timber has just been the right choice for me but I intend to explore new materials. I want to learn new processes and the processes needed to work those materials. I want to get into the metals. So for a project at the moment, I’m sand casting aluminium.

ID: Do you plan to focus on furniture in the future or also venture into other areas of design? 

MC: Furniture has worked for me to communicate the ideas I wanted to communicate. But I don’t see my practice as being defined by that and I think I’m ready to allow it to evolve. I’m interested in exploring ideas through maybe more substantial installations of objects. Currently a lot of the stuff I do is standalone objects. But I’d like to investigate how people might experience and interact with a number of components within an installation. I think that’d be really exciting.

Tomo Design Creates an Ethereal Sales Office in China

When Tomo Design was selected to design a property sales office for the Chinese real estate giant Sunac, they knew a conventional office would not be enough. “Customers want novel, superb, unknown experiences,” said founder Uno Chan. “We customized a variable selling and experiential space, that creates a spiritual realm beyond the physical one.” They called it “Art Beyond Mansion.”

That spiritual, ethereal quality is exemplified by a UFO-like installation of mirror stainless steel in the entry lobby. It hovers above a sandboard table where property models can be displayed. Nearly everything, from furniture in the lounge areas scattered throughout to whimsical robot sculptures, is custom. 

For all its extravagant touches, the designers never lost sight of the business function of the sales center. Relaxation areas and even a gift shop are multi-functional spaces that can also serve as places for meetings and conversation. Tomo Design also had to let go of some ideas due to budget constraints. But in the end, they delivered a forward-looking artistic environment that transcends its purpose as an office.

SheltonMindel and Architecture + Information Earn an Iconic Old Classic Best of Year Award for a Private New York Office

2021 Best of Year winner for Iconic Old Classic

Experiencing perhaps the greatest James Turrell piece in New York doesn’t require a museum membership. You only need to have business to conduct with this family-run office. Rising through its double-height reception area is Turrell’s enormous hollow egg shape, a chamber that required a laborious six-month process to construct from white solid-surfacing and concealed LEDs. Typically for this master of light and space, his mysterious conceptual sculpture alters our perceptions. Once you enter the egg and encounter the shifting colors inside, everything outside it looks different for a few seconds.

Like the Turrell, its surroundings make us see the world differently. A Manhattan office, it turns out, can be as graciously proportioned and serene as a Palladian villa. That’s thanks to the impressive real estate: 40,000 square feet of a tower by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and even more so to the joint efforts of the interiors firms, led by Interior Design Hall of Fame members Lee Mindel, Brad Zizmor, and Dag Folger, the latter two the co-founding principals of A+I. Mindel relates the egg installation to the philanthropic work done by the client: “This is a metaphoric think tank. They desired contemplative spaces, as opposed to some others that we all know of. That’s something beyond interior design.”

sheltonmindel: Grace V. Sierra; Michael Neal; Marc C. Newman; Emily M. Meroney; Margaret O’Connor

Architecture + Information: Brad Zizmor; Dag Folger; Cheryl Baxter; Nisha Mary Prasad; Chris Shelley; Abby Kuskin; Aaron Whitney; Katina Max Kremelberg

Ministry of Design Earns a Best of Year Award for This Striking Lobby

2021 Best of Year winner for Commercial Lobby/Amenity

This project neatly toggles between grandeur and intimacy. The soaring entry rises no less than 82 feet. “The challenge was how to enhance the majestic quality yet not dwarf human scale,” says Ministry of Design founder Colin Seah of the 32,700 square feet of lobby and amenity spaces he and his team designed for a construction conglomerate’s headquarters, which occupies a Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates skyscraper. Their solution was to clad the colossal columns in white marble, etch the stone with vertical grooves, and then anchor and interrupt them with base insets and horizontal ridges of bronzed aluminum, which break up the dizzying height. Further tempering the vastness is Leaves, a commissioned sculpture by Studio Sawada Design of thousands of silver- and bronze-tinted aluminum shapes that descends like a glimmering cumulus.

In the café on the eighth floor, MOD went warmer and smaller scaled, employing oak-slat paneling, granite flooring, and seating clusters offering partial privacy. Linking levels eight and nine, where the meeting and function areas are, is a spiral statement stair encircled by golden rods of powder-coated aluminum—akin to an opulent birdcage.

Ministry of Design: Colin Seah; Joyce Low; Ruth Chong; Kevin Leong; Damien Saive; Namrata Mehta; Fai Suvisith; Justin Lu; Zhang Hang; Maggie Lek; Kaye Mojica; Richard Herman; Rais Rahman; Tasminah Ali; Azilawati Wanti; Faiz Jasni