Eva Hagberg

The Storytellers (Architect's Newspaper)

Published April 16, 2008 (link)

“We like to think of ourselves as the most open-minded clients we’re going to have,” said Greg Bradshaw, principal of the downtown architecture/interiors/fashion/book/concept/ethos/lifestyle/design firm AvroKO, which he heads along with Kristina O’Neal, Adam Farmerie, and a very tired—that evening, at least—William Harris. The four of them were sitting at the end of the bar at PUBLIC, their first venture as their own clients, and were talking about everything from the just-completed transformation of the restaurant Park Avenue Winter into Park Avenue Spring (on which Harris has been working non-stop), to their plans for a new restaurant on the rapidly gentrifying Bowery, to joking about what exactly O’Neal’s SAT scores were, and what exactly they mean.

The four, who met when they were eighteen, each have different approaches, personalities, and skills, but together they make up a coherent and collaborative whole. Initially, however, they operated as two firms, Avro Design (Bradshaw and Farmerie) and KO Media Studios (O’Neal and Harris). After many years of collaborating, the two firms merged while working on PUBLIC. Their ethos is research-driven as much as it is fantastical, interpretive as much as creative, and conceptual as much as style-conscious. The firm has become known mostly for its historically referential restaurant design, clear in everything from the Lower East Side’s Stanton Social, which adopted the neighborhood’s long history of tailoring with a herringbone-riffing wine wall, to PUBLIC—the restaurant they own and above which they work—where they took the discarded fixtures of municipal buildings from the 1930s and recast them, so that an old library card catalog is used to store old menus.

Behind the Curtains (Metropolis)

Published April 15, 2008 (link)

David Rockwell is sitting in a rocking chair in the lobby of an Aloft hotel, looking at a pool table. It’s 10 o’clock on a Monday morning in January. More accurately, he’s rocking in the rocking chair, which is green and plastic, and he seems calm for someone who created this theatrical space, whose architecture and design tends toward the bright sweeping gesture, the triple-note move, the overt discussion of play and stage and movement. Every thing looks good: the pool table is in the right place; the LED lights on the bar glow steadily; the entrance’s two glass doors are perfectly spaced; and the hallway carpet (designed to withstand 75,000 double rubs) looks like it’s barely been touched, even though it has, so far, supported hundreds of meetings, visits, inspections, and cocktail parties.

Rockwell is calm because his design for a new hotel chain—with the first location opening this summer in either Beijing, China, or in Lexington, Massachusetts—is looking great. He is happy because he knows that when the first one is finally built, it’ll look pretty much the way it looked in his mind—no small feat for an architect. And he’s in a good mood because the interior is feeling as right as it did the last time he checked in. There’s just one snag.

Design and the Elastic Mind (Wallpaper.com)

Published March 4 (link)

'Revolutions,' Paola Antonelli writes in her introduction to 'Design and the Elastic Mind', her just-opened exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art, 'are not easy on us.' It's a hell of a way to start a design show. That might be because it's a hell of a show.

'Design and the Elastic Mind', on view through May 12 in the museum's sixth-floor galleries, takes on ideas of the future, and how design works - and will work - with it. The over 200 objects, drawings, ideas, speculations, nanotechnologies, photographs, concepts, possibilities, environments, arguments, polemics, drawings, renderings, models and more on view here, combine to create a vision of the future that isn't apocalyptic, or even post-apocalyptic, but instead that exemplifies the range we cross-disciplinarily express these days; the work is everything from quietly hopeful to overtly celebratory, from politically argumentative to aesthetically stunning.

John Powers at Virgil de Voldere

EXTENDED: John Powers: Empire, Virgil de Voldere, 526 West 26th St, Rm 416, New York, February 21-April 25

The Worst Building In The History of Mankind (Esquire)

Published February 1, 2008 (link)

It's the Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea, where the world's 22nd largest skyscraper has been vacant for two decades and is likely to stay that way ... forever.

A picture doesn't lie -- the one-hundred-and-five-story Ryugyong Hotel is hideous, dominating the Pyongyang skyline like some twisted North Korean version of Cinderella's castle. Not that you would be able to tell from the official government photos of the North Korean capital -- the hotel is such an eyesore, the Communist regime routinely covers it up, airbrushing it to make it look like it's open -- or Photoshopping or cropping it out of pictures completely.

Even by Communist standards, the 3,000-room hotel is hideously ugly, a series of three gray 328-foot long concrete wings shaped into a steep pyramid. With 75 degree sides that rise to an apex of 1,083 feet, the Hotel of Doom (also known as the Phantom Hotel and the Phantom Pyramid) isn't the just the worst designed building in the world -- it's the worst-built building, too. In 1987, Baikdoosan Architects and Engineers put its first shovel into the ground and more than twenty years later, after North Korea poured more than two percent of its gross domestic product to building this monster, the hotel remains unoccupied, unopened, and unfinished.

Tailor (Wallpaper)

Published January 2008

Rarely has a first-time restaurateur's first joint been awaited with such a particular mix of media frenzy and outright impatience as Sam Mason's Tailor, which opened on a Soho side street in September. Mason, trained in the Wylie Dufresne (who strolled into the dining room one fall Thursday) school of New York-style molecular gastronomy, offers up a menu of twelve small dishes, nominally divided into Salty and Sweet. As we discover when we dive into our searingly intelligent snapper with avocado-pistachio ice cream or caramel panna cotta with corn sorbet, those are more guidelines than rules, and the cocktails – including a cheerleader-pink bubblegum martini and the curiously-titled Blood & Sand -- only further this grand experiment. Mason's got some real hits, like an un-missable pork belly with miso butterscotch, but some plates, like a "we're still not sure if we love it or hate it but boy are we glad we tried it" foie gras and peanut butter terrine, will only get better with age. Which, we're sure, they'll get to.

Starchefs (Wallpaper)

Published January 2008

The International Chefs Congress starts out friendly enough, at Geoffrey Zakarian's Gramercy restaurant Country. There are cocktails and hors d'ouevres and chefs, chefs, chefs, most of whom have strolled in from their Manhattan restaurants, taking a break from slinging halibut and drizzling sauces but some of whom have flown in from San Francisco where they're fighting against the locavores and others who are just in from Washington DC or Miami or even Cleveland. It's a who's who of cooks: Noriyuki Sugie from Asiate at the Mandarin Oriental; molecular gastronomist Wylie Dufresne of WD-50; Gramercy Tavern's Michael White, making his mark in the wake of Tom Colicchio's departure; the irascible--and seemingly everywhere--Will Goldfarb.

Top Dror (Wallpaper)

Published January 2008

Dror Benshetrit seems charmed.

He might seem charmed because he moved to New York five years ago and has already established himself as a leading force in the city's crowded design scene, or he might seem charmed because everything he designs is just such a hit. Benshetrit might seem charmed because he just seems to meet the right people – real estate magnate-to-the-hip Michael Shvo; ultra-influential MoMA design curator Paola Antonelli, an early supporter; the people who commission for Bombay, Boffi, Puma, Levi's  – or he might seem charmed because everything he does is at once so completely obvious and stunningly novel.

Roman & Williams (Wallpaper)

Published March 2007

‘I want to see a world of flesh and bone,’ Robin Standefer, principal, with husband Stephen Alesch, of New York-based architecture and design firm Roman & Williams says on a Thursday afternoon, sitting at her office's long and thoroughly beaten-up conference table, one she crafted out of recovered wood and un-matched industrial legs. "A world of food, architecture, design, sex."

Five years ago, a little movie called Zoolander came out. Revered among the college set, admired by nearly everyone who saw it, the film was remarkable as much for its set design—skate ramps in the apartment, superfuturistic day spas—as it was for its quotability. Ben Stiller, who played the ‘really, really, ridiculously good-looking’ male model Derek Zoolander, loved what production designers Standefer and Alesch had done, and hired them to work on another movie of his, Duplex. The movie bombed, but it cemented Stiller's relationship with the pair. When the time came to renovate his Hollywood house, he called Robin.

American Beauty (Wallpaper)

Published December 2007

It can be hard to stand out on Martha's Vineyard. Overstatement – exemplified by, for instance, Larry David's 70-acre spread complete with stainless steel outdoor kitchen—is one way to go about making a dent on this most old-school deluxe getaway for the Eastern Seaboard's elite. The other, and better, is to understate, understate, understate.

Architecture Research Office, a Manhattan-based architecture firm, recently completed a sublimely understated house for a retired rabbi and an art and design curator. The couple, who commissioned ARO five years ago, have owned the site, in the town of Chilmark, since the mid-nineteen-seventies. Their previous house, a single water-focused band designed by local architect Richard Henderson, was just fine for the last thirty years but, with a decrease in commitments –the rabbi just retired – the couple found themselves with an increase in interest in, as it's locally known, the Island.