Architects and Artisans

One of the more interesting hotels to open in Thailand in the past five years is The Library, an oceanfront affair that offers writers and bibliophiles a lush respite from deadlines, clients and editors.  A+A recently interviewed Kasemtham Sornsong, managing director and owner of the property, via email: What’s the size of the property? The Library is [...]

We should all be challenged the way architect Francis D’Haene was recently. Sought out by clients in Paris to redesign their 18th-century apartment in Saint Germain, the New York designer was forced to split his time between Manhattan and the Left Bank. For six months.  With a once-a-month flight to Paris.  All to create something [...]

Inaki Echeverria’s office in Mexico City has designed a façade in Villahermosa, Tabasco for Liverpool, Mexico’s largest luxury retailer.  It’s located in a strategic area on the south end of the city, in the shopping center Plaza Altabrisa, part of a new development.  The firm’s  aim was to design a dynamic and modern facade that [...]

One hour north of the George Washington Bridge, on 500 sylvan acres and inside a rural stone house museum, visitors to the Storm King Art Center will soon be able to see an exhibit that examines the nature of light itself, stretched out over the summer and fall months. “We want people to look at the art [...]

Annika Connor is a painter first, an entrepreneur next, and then a fan of La Belle Epoch. But it’s her paintings that fuel her fires. “I fund everything I do through painting,” she says. Her varnished watercolors on board seem flat at first glance, but a closer look brings on a disconcerting effect – the result of lavish rococo [...]

The clients wanted sustainable. The architect suggested rammed earth. They called in David Easton, a guru with 40 years’ experience perfecting the technology, and got to work. “We used soil from the foundation to make a beautiful wall, and we weren’t transporting a lot of cement,” says Cass Calder Smith, architect of the home on Cowper [...]

Minimalist David Mitchell creates works of art that are almost architectural, then photographs them. “It’s about displacement, rebuilding and reconstructing,” says Dru Arstark at Jim Kempner Fine Art.  “It’s about juxtaposing one shape upon another.” His career started in the early ‘80s in London, Florence and Milan. In 1991 he moved to Hong Kong to [...]

Though he was educated in Brazil where opaque concrete forms by Oscar Niemeyer and Le Corbusier rule the day, photographer Paul Clemence says it was the transparency of the Barcelona Pavilion that truly opened his eyes to modern architecture. “I identified more with that than the prevailing Brazilian modernism,” he says.  “There’s something about the [...]

Tonight the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. will take on a new identity. Internationally known artist Michael Lin has transformed its walls and floors with a decorative motif based on armorial art from heraldic coats of arms. “His work is about textile patterns blown up very large,’ says Trevor Smith, the museum’s curator of [...]

So what do you do for the latter-day nuthatch, wren or chickadee that’s already experiencing the best that life can offer? A modernist bird house, for starters. At least, that’s what architect Nandinee Phookan of IMAKE Studio is thinking. “We wanted to use the modern language of clean lines,” she says. So with Luis Rivera in [...]