Truly extraordinary buildings are rare. They are often cared for by people who recognize their value, add their own stories, and eventually pass them on to the next caretaker. Layer by layer, these buildings acquire richer histories. But great buildings offer more than shelter. They are cultural artifacts that shape how we feel, stir our imaginations and memories, and sometimes change the way we see the world. In the documentary Five Living Buildings by Renzo Piano, the Italian architect speaks of the “happiness” of buildings. However monumental or ambitious they may be, their happiness is inseparable from the happiness of the people within them.

I have traveled to the ends of the earth to experience such buildings. When I encounter one, I am often stunned, and I carry the experience with me for years. Yet one of the most memorable buildings I have visited is in my hometown of Manhattan: a modest four-story, 19th-century building with pointed-arch windows on Forsyth Street, on the Lower East Side. It is that humble that it has no name. Its power lies partly in how vividly it retains its past and present. Today, it is the studio of artist Dana Barnes, the current caretaker of this architectural gem. Barnes creates sculptures, objects and architectural installations from materials including wool and other fibers, which she knots, felts and sometimes melds with contrasting materials, to form works of remarkable texture and presence.

What makes the building especially compelling is the succession of lives it has held. Built in the Victorian era as a synagogue, it was once a center of Eastern European Jewish life on Forsyth Street. It later became the studio of Abstract Expressionist painters Pat Passlof and Milton Resnick. Their canvases, built up through dense, physical layers of paint, seem to have left traces of their presence on the wooden floors. In 2013, Barnes made the building her studio, creating what is, to my mind, one of the most extraordinary artists’ workspaces in New York.

Beyond its history, the building is distinguished by its light. Sun enters through enormous steel casement windows and skylights, reaching into spaces that feel fresh, expansive, and almost weightless. Whitewashed brick, Venetian lime plaster, and double-height ceilings give the interiors a quiet grandeur. The architecture carries you back to the 19th century while feeling entirely contemporary in dialogue with Barnes’s large-scale sculptural works. It is the kind of place you do not want to leave. Airy and comfortable, with sunlight moving across its rooms, it keeps you connected to the world outside.

Within this setting, Barnes and a small group of artisans have created an imaginative world of dimensional floor pieces, objects and hanging sculptures, both functional and nonfunctional. Many of these works are made for particular homes and spaces, for people who value the expressive possibilities of textiles. Now, as Barnes is relocating her art practice to another space, she is ready to pass the building to its next caretaker, who will give it another life and add another layer to its story. That is the gift of an extraordinary building: it holds the lives of those who came before while making room for those still to come. For more information, visit Sotheby’s International Realty.

The first time I visited an exhibition devoted to the American modernist jeweler Art Smith (1917–1982), From the Village to Vogue: The Modernist Jewelry of Art Smith, which opened at the Brooklyn Museum in 2008, it marked a turning point for me. By then, I was already familiar with modernist art jewelry: I had met serious collectors, visited exhibitions, and attended presentations by galleries. But that exhibition was the first time I discovered that I could truly love art jewelry.

Smith’s pieces have extraordinary character. They are brilliant not only as dynamic, bold sculptures—sweeping, looping, and embracing space—but also in the way they correspond so intimately and beautifully to the body. Perhaps what best summarizes his greatness is the way he connected jewelry to his own cultural identity as an African American artist working in New York, fusing modernist abstraction with influences drawn from African, Caribbean, and jazz culture. Anyone who has lived with his jewelry understands that these works are not simply adornment; they can be read as heroic expressions of the African American narrative. Today, the Smithsonian collection, together with that of the Brooklyn Museum, constitutes one of the most comprehensive public archives of Art Smith, one of the most important African American studio jewelers of the twentieth century.

Since that 2008 exhibition, I have followed Smith’s work and the scholarship surrounding it closely. Every exhibition and publication has felt like a celebration. Now the Smithsonian has published Bodyworks: The Jewelry of Art Smith, a scholarly monograph by Joanne Hyppolite and Toni Greenbaum that offers a broad and richly contextualized view of Smith’s extraordinary life, achievements, and place within postwar American design. Much of the book’s fresh scholarship draws upon Smith’s archive—his papers, sketches, photographs, and other materials—which was donated to the Smithsonian in 2018 by his longtime romantic partner. As a result, the book presents some of the most up-to-date scholarship on Smith, further cementing his legacy within American cultural and design history.

The book is structured around two principal essays. Joanne Hyppolite takes readers through Smith’s early history, revealing that although he was born in Santa Lucia, Cuba, to Jamaican parents, he later recast his own biography as though he had been born in Brooklyn, where his family settled when he was three years old and where he grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Hyppolite brings us into the heart of African American life and culture, which played a central role in shaping Smith’s racial pride, identity, and artistic vision. Smith studied at Cooper Union and opened his own shop in Greenwich Village in 1946, using $3,000 in startup capital provided by a backer whose identity he never disclosed. Working primarily in copper, brass, and silver, he developed a highly personal language of sculptural jewelry. His introduction to jewelry making came through Winifred Mason, the pioneering Caribbean American jeweler active in New York in the 1940s, whose copper work was deeply informed by West Indian cultural traditions and who hired Smith as an assistant early in his career.

Toni Greenbaum’s essay turns to Smith’s visual language, analyzing the formal vocabulary, cultural references, and sculptural intelligence that made his jewelry so distinctive. She positions him as a jeweler who prioritized the relationship between the object and the wearer. The body, as she demonstrates, was not merely a support for his jewelry but an essential element in its conception. It is this sensitivity to movement, anatomy, and physical presence that played such a central role in the success of his designs. Greenbaum also traces his engagement with the language of the avant-garde, including the sculpture of Henry Moore and Jean Arp, and her comparison between the jewelry of Alexander Calder and Art Smith is particularly helpful in developing a deeper understanding of how to “read” art jewelry.

Ultimately, this publication illuminates the reasons for Art Smith’s rare achievement as a Black artist working in postwar America and helps explain why his legacy remains so vital today. It teaches us to appreciate his originality while understanding his work as a manifestation of Black American and diasporic culture. The richness of the scholarship, together with the extraordinary sequence of images, makes this publication an essential addition to any serious library devoted to art, design, jewelry, or fashion.

For the influential Danish furniture designer Børge Mogensen (1914–1972), a modernist who studied under Kaare Klint, the creation of honest, functional, and enduring furniture for everyday life formed the foundation of his design philosophy. Central to his socially minded vision was the belief that good design should serve ordinary people—not merely the wealthy—and that furniture should be useful, comfortable, beautifully constructed, and capable of growing richer through years of use.

Now, the Japanese multidisciplinary design studio AtMa presents J39.5, a series of chairs inspired by Mogensen’s humanistic and holistic ideals, which lie at the heart of Danish Modernism, and merging them with the Japanese ethos, and crafted of his pieces from his famed 39.5 People’s Chair. “Why Danish design?” I asked founders Makoto Suzuki and Ayumi Koyama when I met them at the opening of this small, jewel-like exhibition at Les Ateliers Courbet’s SoHo gallery. There is, they explained, a close affinity between Japanese and Danish design, rooted in a shared respect for natural materials, craftsmanship, simplicity, and functionality. This connection helps explain why Danish furniture has been so deeply admired in Japan since the emergence of Danish Modern—and why it remains enormously popular there today.

The designers, whose practice focuses on interiors, used broken and irreparable components from Børge Mogensen’s iconic 1947 People’s Chair, along with parts from other damaged Danish chairs, giving them a second—and perhaps more interesting and contemporary—life. Even the seats are woven with paper cord, crafted in Mino City, Japan’s cradle of handmade paper, made from discarded legs and backrests that have been crushed into powder.

Such furniture could perhaps only have emerged from Japan, shaped by a culture of disciplined endurance, quiet perseverance, and profound respect for the time required to achieve mastery. The chairs embody an extraordinary commitment to sustainability expressed through the Japanese spirit. There is nothing fast-paced about their creation. Every chair is constructed by hand from the reclaimed wood of old furniture, combining upcycling—the transformation of discarded chairs into objects of renewed beauty, quality, and design value—with recycling, in which existing materials are broken down and used to produce something new.

No new wood is used, and 95 percent of each chair consists of reclaimed materials. The project encourages us to reconsider the circular life cycle of the objects around us. It is a compelling expression of Cradle to Cradle: the design philosophy in which products are conceived so that, at the end of their useful lives, their materials can be reused rather than discarded. I found the result exquisite—and something that could only happen in Japan.

The exhibition features the complete series of chairs, which received both Design Project of the Year and Collectible Design of the Year at Miami Design Week in 2025. It will remain on view, by appointment, at Les Ateliers Courbet through November 2.

There is nothing more classic, comforting, or essential to a fall wardrobe than a good Burberry trench coat. Age, gender, and geography do not matter—it has universal appeal. What is the secret of the Burberry trench coat, one of the most influential garments in modern fashion? How has it endured for more than a century, and why do we continue to love it so much? These are the questions explored in the new V&A and Burberry exhibition, The Burberry Trench: Crafting an Icon.

Celebrating Burberry’s 170th anniversary, the exhibition brings together rare material from the Burberry Archive and the V&A’s collection. It offers a concise history of the trench coat, tracing its evolution from practical outerwear and military attire to a global fashion icon—one rooted in a distinctly British sensibility.

Making the exhibition even more special is its setting in the museum’s rarely seen Prince Consort Gallery, whose mahogany cabinets once housed fabrics from the textile collection. The intimate display offers a fascinating portrait of Burberry, a fashion house that has come to epitomize timeless British luxury.

Beginning with “Invention,” the exhibition explores Thomas Burberry’s development of cotton gabardine in 1879 and how its use in the trench coat established the garment as highly desirable protective outerwear that seamlessly combined function and style. It also reveals how the trench evolved into a design classic that has remained relevant for more than a century.

The section devoted to “Craft” examines the meticulously constructed elements of the Burberry trench, including its hand-finished collar, distinctive House Check lining, storm flap, and detachable throat latch—all designed to provide protection when the weather turns.

The exhibition concludes with “Creativity,” my favorite section, spotlighting 19 runway looks from the past two and a half decades, including designs by chief creative officers Christopher Bailey and Daniel Lee. Together, they demonstrate the remarkable and continual reinvention of the Burberry trench.

Curated by Oriole Cullen, Senior Curator of Fashion and Textiles at the V&A, and Carly Eck, The Burberry Trench: Crafting an Icon is on view at the V&A South Kensington through January 3, 2027.

In today’s radically transformed ceramic landscape, where clay has moved beyond the realm of craft to assume a prominent place in contemporary art, South Korean artist Hun Chung Lee (b. 1967) has established himself as one of the medium’s most intriguing voices. Yet he should not be called a ceramicist. Although he completed his studies in architecture at the age of 50, he does not consider himself an architect either, but rather a fine artist who embraces the freedom of working between disciplines. Long before ceramic furniture became fashionable—and before artists began moving beyond the vessel to create functional objects—Lee was producing daring contemporary furniture in clay. His benches, stools, tables, lamps, and chairs are distinguished by their sculptural presence and by his mastery of traditional Korean celadon-glazing techniques.

Lee has also brought a distinctly contemporary sensibility to the moon jar, one of the most recognizable symbols of Korean ceramic art. Through his exceptional command of glazing, he transforms these traditionally white vessels—associated with modesty, simplicity, and moral purity—into objects that speak to the 21st century. His ability to fuse Korean ceramic traditions with a deeply personal contemporary language represents his singular contribution to the field.

The full breadth of Lee’s innovations—the modernization of Korean ceramic traditions, the emergence of ceramic furniture within collectible design, and the broader movement of clay from the craft world into contemporary art—is now on view in a major solo exhibition at R & Company, the gallery that represents him. Entitled Hun Chung Lee: Home, the exhibition opened last night and features new works in clay and concrete. It coincides with a presentation of Lee’s work at Manitoga/The Russel Wright Design Center.

The exhibition demonstrates both the breadth of Lee’s practice and the extraordinary level of ambition he has brought to ceramic furniture. The simpler the forms, the stronger the design. Much of the work is defined by the tension between the simplicity of its silhouettes and the richness of its glazed surfaces. His pieces are abstract and organic, often monumental, and nature finds its fullest expression in his richly colored glazes, which reflect his continuous dialogue with the surrounding landscape—with light, plants, and cycles of growth, decay, and transformation. At the same time, his architectural sensibility gives the work its structural authority and powerful spatial presence. He completed a PhD in architecture at Kyungwon University in Korea, and what I find particularly compelling about his work is the consistency of his architectural thinking. His objects do not merely occupy space; they actively shape our experience of it. Whether made in clay or concrete, they possess a commanding presence that transforms functional furniture into architecture on an intimate scale.

Likewise, Lee’s moon jars are not replicas of historical Joseon porcelain but contemporary meditations on the tradition. Through them, he questions perfection, permanence, authorship, and our ability to control natural materials. Traditional moon jars possess gently irregular forms because their upper and lower halves were thrown separately and then joined. Lee takes this inherent imperfection much further. He creates jars that are cracked, tilted, compressed, partially collapsed, visibly repaired, or seemingly unfinished. He has even suspended them on walls. Rather than presenting the moon jar as a flawless national icon, he allows it to appear vulnerable, unstable, and alive.

The exhibition Home presents a contemplative exploration of domestic space, time, and material and will be on view at R & Company through November 16^th.

When I first heard about a woodworker who creates magnificent objects from timber reclaimed from New York City’s water tanks—the cedar and redwood structures that rise above Manhattan’s rooftops and store water for its buildings—I was immediately intrigued. This is how I came to meet Richard Haining, an American designer who was trained at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, and who became a woodworker; he views his practice as an extension of the postwar American Studio Furniture movement.

In his Brooklyn studio, Haining transforms discarded wood into beautifully crafted vessels, lighting, and furniture distinguished by a contemporary neoclassical sensibility and a language entirely his own. In recent years, he has expanded his lexicon of materials beyond water-tank timber to include reclaimed wood from demolished buildings, discarded furniture, and workshop remnants. He carefully cleans the wood and cuts it into small fragments, which become the building blocks of his objects.

In today’s world, using reclaimed timber represents an essential commitment to sustainability, and participation in reduction of waste, protection of forests, and lessening the environmental impact associated with harvesting and processing new lumber. In Haining’s work, however, reclaimed wood is more than an environmentally responsible material—it is his visual language. By transforming fragments of demolished New York buildings and decommissioned rooftop water tanks into one-off objects, he preserves part of the city’s architectural history while asking us to reconsider what we classify as waste.

Like such pioneering figures of the American Studio Furniture movement as Wendell Castle, Jack Rogers Hopkins, and Phillip Lloyd Powell, Haining employs a stack-lamination process. He assembles small pieces of wood individually, layer by layer—almost as though he were building a coiled ceramic vessel, and once the form is complete, he carves and finishes its exterior entirely by hand. The resulting surfaces possess a rich, mosaic-like quality. Conceptually, Haining’s work explores renewal and memory. Rather than eliminating former lives, he incorporates the old into new and precious objects.

This week, I am thrilled to host a conversation with Richard at Wexler Gallery’s showroom during What’s New, What’s Next, as part of the New York Design Center’s centennial celebration. Wednesday, September 17^th at 3:00 pm.

All images courtesy Wexler Gallery.

Forget everything you think you know about the Japanese garden. In his new book, The Modern Japanese Garden, British writer and photographer Stephen Mansfield surveys gardens from the twentieth century and the present, revealing a tradition far more complex and multifaceted than we might imagine. “Not long after I first set foot in Kyoto,” he writes, “I registered that you don’t enter many a Japanese garden; it enters you.” This evocative observation immediately drew me into his account, capturing precisely how I felt upon first visiting the Katsura Imperial Villa—a place I have since called the most beautiful on earth. For anyone traveling through Japan, the garden’s presence is inescapable; it permeates the country’s architecture, culture, and everyday life. Yet despite having visited many of its public and private gardens, reading Mansfield’s book and speaking with him made me realize how much I had yet to discover—and how exploring the gardens he features might deepen my understanding and refine my eye.

For Mansfield, who has lived in Japan for decades, an interest in gardens grew into a consuming passion. Long before deciding to write this book, published by Thames & Hudson, he had visited at least 500 gardens across the country. These encounters cultivated the expertise with which he interprets the Japanese garden’s evolving character and the relationships it embodies between heritage, nature, and modernity. His deliberate selection of gardens that are fully or partially open to the public gives the book another valuable dimension: it invites readers to venture beyond familiar tourist routes and discover extraordinary, lesser-known landscapes. Along the way, he encourages an appreciation of the vision, skill, and sustained care required to create and preserve them, as well as the considerable resources their upkeep demands.

Tracing developments from the Meiji era, which began in 1868, to the present, Mansfield examines how practitioners of Japanese garden design reconcile tradition with modernity while drawing upon philosophical and spiritual foundations, including Zen Buddhism. Through conversations with gardeners and designers, close readings of historical texts, and contributions from distinguished architects, he illuminates the garden as both an evolving cultural expression and a living artistic practice. The perspectives of those who tend gardens at temples, museums, and other public and private settings lend particular depth to his account, grounding aesthetic ideas in the daily realities of their care. We learn how, in the early twentieth century, garden designers, like architects, began to move beyond inherited conventions, developing new forms for a rapidly changing society. As Japan modernized, so did its gardens, their transformation shaped by shifting patterns of patronage, urban development, and, increasingly, climate change.

Mansfield examines dozens of gardens across Japan, using individual landscapes to trace these broader changes. For me, however, the book’s appeal extends beyond its account of the transition from traditional to modern, postmodern, and contemporary design. It is an expertly curated invitation to experience places where landscape, architecture, philosophy, and emotion converge. His exploration of the greenery behind Tokyo’s concrete-and-glass façades is especially revealing, underscoring the garden’s central place within Japan’s built environment. Filled with hundreds of Mansfield’s photographs, this 352-page volume brings gardens unfamiliar to many English-speaking readers into vivid focus. It deserves a place on the bookshelf of anyone drawn to Japanese aesthetics, culture, and landscape design. For me, it will also be an essential companion as I plan my next visit to Japan in the spring of 2027—a guide to looking more closely, venturing further, stepping away from the impassable crowds, and allowing new gardens to enter me.

The third edition of the Mingei Bamboo Prize, initiated by Galerie Mingei in Paris, will be awarded on September 11, 2026 at the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac with an exhibition presented between September 1 and 13. Visitors will be invited to vote for their favorite work via a QR code, and the winning artist will receive the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac / Parcours des Mondes / Mingei Prize. This vital and forward-looking initiative offers contemporary bamboo art meaningful recognition within the international art and design market.

Bamboo is a magical material and one of the most emblematic expressions of Japanese craftsmanship (‘kogei’). Beyond its inherent humble beauty, this extraordinary member of the grass family can be woven and shaped into an almost limitless variety of forms. Fast-growing and naturally regenerative—requiring neither fertilizers nor pesticides—bamboo is also among the most sustainable materials on earth.

Bamboo has long occupied a fundamental place in Japanese culture, used in the creation of furniture, screens, lanterns, chopsticks, kitchen utensils, and a remarkable range of utilitarian baskets. In fact, the town of Beppu has become Japan’s center of bamboo craft because of its hot-spring culture and the need for bamboo baskets, trays, and other utensils for the Onsen, driving it into a thriving regional industry.

In recent years, however, a new generation of artists has brought a fresh perspective to bamboo weaving, mastering and advancing ancient techniques to reach new heights of personal and artistic expression. During my visits to Japan, I never miss the opportunity to meet some of the country’s most ambitious bamboo artists; these encounters are invariably inspiring and their work doesn’t look anything like the traditional baskets.

Galerie Mingei has established itself as a leading force for Japanese kogei, and its commitment to bamboo art has contributed to numerous museum exhibitions. This year’s prize exhibition presents fourteen works selected from dozens of submissions. Moving decisively beyond the traditional boundaries of basketry, these works offer a compelling glimpse into the avant-garde of contemporary bamboo art in Japan. Each demonstrates exceptional mastery of basketry techniques while revealing a singular relationship with the material and a deeply personal artistic language. Through the artists’ gestures, technical virtuosity meets poetry, uniting the transmission of centuries-old knowledge with a thoughtful engagement with the contemporary world.

Do not miss this jeweled exhibition if you visit in Paris between September 1st and 13th, a true celebration of Japanese kogei.

Few designers shaped the look and experience of the modern American table as profoundly as Eva Zeisel. Over an extraordinary eight-decade career, she transformed everyday dinnerware into something sculptural, sensuous, and unmistakably modern, while developing a design language entirely her own. In 1946, just eight years after arriving in the United States as an émigré, Zeisel became the first woman to receive a monographic exhibition at MoMA—a year before Mies van der Rohe. It was an extraordinary recognition and an early confirmation of her place among the defining figures of twentieth-century design.

At a moment when modernism was increasingly associated with rigid geometry and machine-age austerity, Zeisel offered an alternative vision: warm, biomorphic, playful, and deeply humane. Her dinner services entered millions of American homes in the postwar years, helping to reshape not only the appearance of the table, but the rituals and informality of modern dining. Zeisel lived to the remarkable age of 105, and this fall marks the 120th anniversary of her birth.

I first met her in 2000, when I was a PhD student at the Bard Graduate Center and she came to speak with her daughter, Jean Richards. My teacher, Pat Kirkham, who has published extensively on Zeisel, invited her to speak to the students. It was a memorable encounter that has remained with me ever since. Kirkham famously argued that Zeisel should not be understood simply as a successful ceramic designer, but as a “major figure in the world of twentieth-century design.” She emphasized the distinctive character of Zeisel’s biomorphic vocabulary—its playfulness, femininity, sensuality, and humanity—qualities that resonated with Zeisel’s own description of her work as “the playful search for beauty.”

This week, on a beautiful, crispy, late-summer day, we made our way to Zeisel’s country house in Rockland County, where her daughter, actress Jean Richards, now lives full time with her architect husband, Brent Brolin. Together with photo artist Paul Clemence, I spent a magnificent day completely immersed in Zeisel’s world. For a few hours, it felt as though we had stepped into her life.

The house allowed us to experience Zeisel not simply through her objects, but through the world she created around herself: the antique furniture she collected at small auction houses, the objects she chose to live with, the rooms in which she worked, and the atmosphere that shaped her daily life. We ate a delicious lunch prepared by Richards and served on tableware designed by her mother, pieces carefully stored and brought out for special occasions. It was a rare opportunity to inhabit Zeisel’s world rather than merely observe it.

Zeisel was born in Budapest and began her career working with clay before establishing herself as an industrial designer in ceramic factories in Hungary and, later, in the Soviet Union, where she moved in 1932. There she rose to important positions within the porcelain and glass industries and became deeply involved in efforts to modernize industrial production. In 1936, however, she encountered the brutality of Stalin’s regime firsthand when she was falsely accused of participating in a political conspiracy and imprisoned for approximately sixteen months, much of that time under extremely harsh conditions. She was unexpectedly released and deported, moved to Austria, where she married Hans Zeisel, and shortly afterward the couple emigrated to New York, which would remain her home for the rest of her life.

It was in the United States that Zeisel emerged as a major figure in twentieth-century industrial design, offering Americans a new vision of how the dining table could look. Gone were the ornate porcelain services associated with previous generations; in their place came something modern, informal, chic, and unmistakably contemporary. From her arrival in New York in 1938 until her death in 2011, Zeisel remained extraordinarily productive, designing countless dinner services, glassware, tabletop objects, and furniture.

Zeisel was also in the right place at the right time. In the postwar years, American domestic life was undergoing a dramatic transformation. Mass suburbanization introduced new houses, new kitchens, new appliances, and a rapidly expanding consumer culture. Within this changing landscape, Zeisel’s dinnerware allowed Americans to live modernism in the most intimate and everyday way: at the dining table.

Her teaching at Pratt Institute was equally influential. She trained generations of industrial designers and taught ceramics not as a studio craft alone, but as an industrial material intended for mass production. Zeisel was never interested in creating precious objects for the few. She believed in design as a means of elevating everyday life for millions. Yet while industrial tableware could easily become plain or anonymous, hers was sculptural, abstract, bold, and sensuous. She brought something almost architectural—and at times even figurative—to the dinner table.

My favorite of all her designs has always been Town and Country, created for Red Wing Pottery in Minnesota and introduced in 1947. With its iconic salt-and-pepper forms, it is perhaps the ultimate expression of her biomorphic vocabulary. At the same time, it announced the informal and playful character of her philosophy. Seen as a complete service, with its dozens of forms and varied colors, it is astonishing in its richness and vitality.

The famous salt-and-pepper shakers, often described as “mother and child,” became among Zeisel’s most recognizable objects. Their gently embracing forms encapsulate her gift for transforming useful objects into intimate, almost animated presences. The service remained in production for only about a decade, yet it has become one of the defining achievements of American postwar design.

For many years, Zeisel lived in Upper Manhattan in a historic apartment furnished with Biedermeier pieces that reflected her Central European background. She also acquired a country house in Rockland County, roughly 25 miles north of New York City and west of the Hudson River. In this picturesque house, she spent her summers and established a studio on the top floor. She furnished the interiors with nineteenth-century antiques passionately acquired at small auction houses, gradually transforming the house into a deeply personal sanctuary.

In her later years, she moved there full time and made the house entirely her own. Today, it is where Jean Richards continues to preserve and advance her mother’s legacy. Spending the day there—surrounded by the furniture Zeisel loved, seeing her work in the rooms where she lived, and eating lunch from dinnerware she designed—felt like the perfect way to conclude this wonderful summer.

It was a rare opportunity to encounter Zeisel’s work not within the formal setting of a museum, but within the intimate world in which she lived and created. The house remains alive with her presence and continues to attract museum curators, scholars, and admirers from around the world. More than a historic interior, it offers something museums cannot: the experience of seeing how one of the great designers of the twentieth century actually lived with objects, surrounded herself with beauty, and made design part of everyday life.

Photography by photo artist Paul Clemence.

To me, the most exciting event of the fall is the publication of my first book 100 Milestones in Modern Design. I come from a family of distinguished writers and novelists—including Lion Feuchtwanger, Michael Ohad, and Edgar Feuchtwanger—and I have published hundreds of articles, written a PhD dissertation, and spent countless hours speaking publicly. Yet writing a book is an entirely different experience, and one that fills me with tremendous excitement and a profound sense of anticipation.

Through examining the pivotal events that shaped the story of design, we can learn through its evolution. 100 Milestones in Modern Design celebrates the monumental power of historical moments to shape the story of modern design, and vice versa. As much as design is affected by groundbreaking events, it also defines the modern world (and our modern lives). Shifts in technology, politics, culture, and the economy have all been powerful drivers of design’s evolution. The Berlin Olympics—controversial for its political Nazi propaganda—was designed by Albert Speer, architect and Adolf Hitler’s confidant, as a grand celebration of Germany’s roots that also evoked ancient Greek and neoclassicism. The Design Museum in London, founded by Sir Terence Conran in 1989, was the first museum devoted to contemporary industrial design and reflected the growing public awareness and interest in design.

Modern design has always been a reflection of new visions, serving as a vehicle for innovation. Each historical event demonstrates that only daring, risk-taking approaches challenge the status quo and prioritize experimentation over convention. And the constraints of the profession can bring design to new horizons, influence the way we live, and make a difference in the world. My book celebrates design success stories, showcasing the breadth and depth of the most remarkable works in the story of modern design. You will learn how to look at and read modern design not only in terms of its visual appearance but also as cultural symbols. The 100 milestones I’ve proposed reflect my own view of the monumental power of decisive historical events to stimulate the spirit of architecture and design. Radical visions, pivotal decisions, protests. Political and social events, revolutions and wars, technological innovations and discoveries: all changed the course of design history, and shaped our world and our human experience.

Design influencer India Hicks grew up immersed in the highly structured world of British aristocracy, yet she built her professional identity around a distinctly personal vision of her relaxed Caribbean living. The daughter of legendary interior designer David Hicks and Lady Pamela Hicks, daughter of Lord Mountbatten, she is the goddaughter of King Charles III and, as a teenager, served as a bridesmaid at the 1981 wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, famously helping to manage Diana’s long train at St Paul’s Cathedral.

Hicks developed an international public persona defined by informality, individuality, and an embrace of imperfection. Her design philosophy was shaped less by inherited convention than by the life she created for herself on Harbour Island in the Bahamas, celebrated for its pink-sand beaches and easygoing rhythm. There, she forged a free-spirited identity and an aesthetic that, while informed by her British background, became increasingly connected to the landscape and relaxed pace of island life. She raised five children there and developed a personal style that blends British tradition with Caribbean informality.

That effortless relationship between beauty and everyday life lies at the heart of her new book, India Hicks: Entertaining, with a Side of Chaos. The book is less a conventional manual on entertaining than a portrait of Hicks’s way of living: the lunches and dinners she hosts, the stories behind them, and the sources of inspiration that shape her approach. Deeply personal and richly illustrated, it offers an intimate account of how she gathers people, creates atmosphere, and integrates entertaining into the fabric of daily life.

As in her previous books, family, memory, taste, and personal history are inseparable from the subject. Hicks reflects on an upbringing in which entertaining was approached with great attention and a certain degree of ceremony, acknowledging how profoundly those early experiences shaped her own sensibility. “Entertaining,” she writes, “is never just about food, table laying, or dinner parties. My parents paid particular attention to the entire experience.”

The strength of the book lies precisely in this contrast. Hicks witnessed entertaining at its grandest, yet succeeded in translating those lessons into something far more relaxed, intimate, and distinctly her own. The formality of her aristocratic upbringing meets the spontaneity of island life, producing an approach that feels neither prescribed nor contrived, but entirely authentic. “I have learned,” she says, “to entertain not from manuals or menus, but by paying attention.” This juxtaposition between the inherited and the invented gives the book its freshness and illuminates Hicks’s particular contribution to the genre.

Greta Garbo in a scene for The Kiss (1929) at a vanity table. I was quoted today in an article on the revival of the vanity table in the New York Times.

This exhibition reminded me how much I miss great museum shows on architecture as an agent of change — on architectural aspiration, its history, and its culture. Walking through the new exhibition at MoMA, which brings to light the built fabric of West Africa in the years when the continent celebrated its liberation and decolonization, feels like strolling through seven countries of the region — Cameroon, Ghana, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Senegal, and Togo — as they moved away from colonial rule and forged their own identities.

It is hard to believe, looking at the hundreds of bold, futuristic, ambitious modernist buildings constructed in West Africa during the postwar and Cold War years, that they once electrified the continent with optimism for a bright future and a new, modern life. In postcolonial Africa, they looked as if they had come from space, shiny, aspiring. They are now illuminated in a new exhibition, curated by Martino Stierli, MoMA’s Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design: Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa — one of the most ambitious museum exhibitions on architecture in recent memory.

The dozens of architects featured in the show saw themselves as liberators, freeing post-independence Africa from its colonial dark past and its built legacy of Art Deco and Tropical Modernism. Through modernist and brutalist hospitals, universities, housing estates, civic buildings, and cultural institutions, they sought to symbolize political freedom and a new cultural identity in the built form. It was an extraordinary period for Africa, full of prosperity and hope for an enlightened future. What we know now — and what the leaders, architects, and citizens of that era could not have foreseen — is that those promises went largely unfulfilled: this architecture became a footnote in history, aging poorly and, in most cases, falling into disrepair. But at the time, and this is beautifully presented in the exhibition, the leaders of these newly founded nations were determined to construct new identities for their countries and to erase every trace of colonial rule – through architecture (and other forms of culture).

This body of architecture — one so deeply tied to social change — has been largely overlooked by architectural historians. Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa sets out to correct that, drawing on years of groundbreaking research into never-before-seen archival materials, models, period photographs, and newly commissioned images of the buildings as they stand today. I was unfamiliar with most of the non-European architects featured, but I knew the work of the German-Israeli architect Heinz Fenchel, who was active in Côte d’Ivoire and designed the magnificent Hôtel Ivoire at the time when Israel had a remarkably strong presence in Côte d’Ivoire during the late 1960s and early 1970s, with Israeli specialists working in agricultural development, rural development, banking, and tourism.

Making an architecture exhibition speak to a wide audience is no easy task. Yet the way this show is curated — weaving together architectural drawings, models, archival photographs, and new photography, and organized into sections that spotlight individual architects or particular bodies of work — makes it dynamic and engaging, rendering architectural history accessible to the general public. The exhibition runs through January 2nd, leaving plenty of time to revisit and study this fascinating chapter in architectural history.

Join us this fall on an exquisite journey into the world of spaces, architecture, and interiors — join the course “Magical Spaces of the Past & Present.” Discover some of the finest interiors of past and present centuries, meet the world’s leading architects, writers, and curators, and expand your taste toward new horizons.

What makes a space extraordinary, memorable, and refined? An interior is a manifestation of the spirit of its age — its cultural values, prevailing technologies, social realities, tastes, and aspirations. Its defining qualities are therefore constantly shifting. Every era is shaped by different values, expressed by those who create interiors in pursuit of the idealized spaces of their time. There have been eras when interiors served as the self-expression of their makers, and others when they expressed the political values of their time.

Today, the finest interiors are those that offer a full expression — a biography — of the people who live in them. The three most essential elements of a successful interior today are a curated selection of objects, a strong presence of craftsmanship, and a sense of storytelling. Interior designers have taken on the dual role of curator and poet, striving to create spaces that are meaningful, interesting, personal, and inspiring. These are the qualities that infuse interiors with soul and contemporary identity, giving people a genuine sense of connection.

In the new series “Magical Spaces of the Past and Present,” design historian and connoisseur Daniella Ohad will host eight conversations with interior designers, historians, and scholars — exploring identity across past and present, and revealing what makes spaces truly quintessential and powerful.

Registration is open now.

The photo above: Yaw House, home of architect Robert Konieczny; photography by Jakub Certowicz (it will be included in the discussion).

Join me today at 12:00 pm for a mini-course on Mid-Century Design in the US, France, Italy, Brazil, and Scandinavia. Registration is open.

For the first session of Design in New York City, we visited the Jewish Museum, where Kristina Parsons, Leon Levy Associate Curator, gave us an in-depth tour of her remarkable exhibition, Modernity and Opulence: Women of the Wiener Werkstätte. My thanks to Hillit Zwick, Deputy Director for Public Engagement and Partnerships, for making this special visit possible.

Vienna, 1900. What a magical moment in design history: fresh, inspiring, and endlessly beautiful. In his memoir, the Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig famously recalled the world before the First World War as the “Golden Age of Security.” Cultured and cosmopolitan, Vienna became a fertile ground for avant-garde art, architecture, music, psychology, and philosophy. In this environment, Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser, with the financial support of Fritz Waerndorfer, founded the Wiener Werkstätte, an enterprise that would become a cradle of modern design.

What we learn from the exhibition is that the Wiener Werkstätte was far from a male-only venture. Women—artists, designers, patrons, and tastemakers—were central to its success, its visual identity, and the realization of its vision. While past scholarship has emphasized its dynamic founders and leading figures such as Dagobert Peche, Eduard Josef Wimmer-Wisgrill, and Carl Otto Czeschka, this exhibition reveals the extent to which women’s contributions have been underrecognized and, too often, entirely overlooked.

Before turning to the exhibition in detail, let me say that this is precisely what I hope to find when entering a museum: an exquisite experience that lingers in memory, stirs the imagination, and brings unfamiliar worlds to light. Curated by Kristina Parsons, with curatorial consultancy by Anne-Katrin Rossberg of the MAK–Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, the exhibition could not be more timely. It arrives amid a growing commitment to reconsidering women’s place in art and design history. The MAK, the principal lender, has made this remarkable gathering of works possible.

Why the Jewish Museum? Because many of these designers, artists, and patrons were Jewish. Their role in Viennese modernism was illuminated in Elana Shapira’s Style and Seduction (2016), which examined the importance of Jewish patronage and the contributions of Jewish businessmen, professionals, and writers to the development of Viennese architecture and design. This exhibition turns the focus to women.

Modernity and Opulence is a rare celebration of design and beauty, featuring more than 200 objects by some thirty Jewish women artists. Fashion, ceramics, graphic design, decorative arts, painting, and art glass appear alongside one breathtaking mirror. Together, these works reveal the breadth of women’s contributions to one of the most significant enterprises in modern design during its relatively brief existence, from 1903 to 1932.

It is high time we learned their names: Vally Wieselthier and Felice Rix-Ueno, whose prolific work in ceramics and textile design, respectively, left a lasting mark on those disciplines; Lotte Calm, Mizi Friedmann, Anna Lesznai, Hedwig Hirsch, and Maria Likarz, among others; and the fashion illustrators who gave visual form to strikingly progressive ideas. Equally important was Berta Zuckerkandl, the influential critic, journalist, and salon host whose advocacy helped sustain Vienna’s modernist culture.

These women helped shape new ideas about how women of the twentieth century could dress, express themselves, and inhabit the world. Their work challenged the nineteenth-century ideal of passive, delicate domestic femininity and contributed to the emergence of the New Woman. Through freer silhouettes and bold patterns, they proposed a new language of elegance and beauty.

At a time when design exhibitions have grown increasingly reverential and design criticism has all but vanished from the press, this presentation feels refreshing. It offers New Yorkers a rare opportunity to encounter treasures from the MAK’s collection firsthand and to reconsider the women who helped define modern design.

Yet if I could pose a single question to the Jewish Museum’s Director, James S. Snyder, it would be this: why has such extraordinary curatorial work not yet resulted in a publication?

As a minimalist, I regard my home as an architectural stage set—one that only truly comes alive through use. I have always been fascinated by how minimalists inhabit space, and by the way they deploy furniture not merely as function but as an element that reinforces and articulates the architecture around it. To understand how the world’s most celebrated minimalist lives, one need only turn to the new monograph on British architect John Pawson, long regarded as the godfather of contemporary minimalism. Pawson strips buildings and interiors down to their most essential elements: restrained palettes, spare formal vocabularies, an acute sensitivity to light and volume, and a material register pared down to no more than two or three elements. His most celebrated projects—the Design Museum in London and Calvin Klein’s former flagship store on Madison Avenue among them—stand as enduring testaments to his rigorous, almost spiritual design philosophy.

Pawson has been the subject of numerous monographs, yet his latest, John Pawson: The Minimalist Home—authored by the architect himself, with commentary by Deyan Sudjic, and published by Phaidon—distinguishes itself as a singularly compelling contribution to the genre. This inspiring book illuminates the manifold ways in which design shapes the texture of everyday life. Structured into six chapters that mirror the rhythms of domestic existence—living, cooking, eating, bathing, sleeping, and working—it articulates Pawson’s conviction that designing a home transcends mere elevations and floor plans. At its heart lies a more intimate inquiry: what will it feel like to sit at a table and share a meal? From where will the daylight fall—will one’s companions be cast in silhouette, or softened by shadow? How will the floor feel underfoot, and what sound will it yield to footsteps? These are the quiet, sensory considerations that form the bedrock of his exquisitely conceived houses.

To me, Pawson’s inspirations—the touchstones and points of departure for his discussions—constitute the heart of the book, and they are drawn almost entirely from history. He admires Arne Jacobsen, Shiro Kuramata, and Donald Judd. Some references are readily apparent: the meditative rock garden of Ryōan-ji Temple in Kyoto, the circular dining room of Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat, Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint’s celebrated Grundtvig’s Church in Copenhagen, and Adolf Loos’s own bedroom. Others are less expected—the famed poster for the 1927 Werkbund exhibition in Stuttgart, which disregards the cluttered interior; the Romanesque Thoronet Abbey in Provence; and the French gastronome who, in 1825, published The Physiology of Taste and, in doing so, helped establish what we now recognize as the art of eating well: design in service of life. We learn, unsurprisingly, that he prefers Mies to Le Corbusier. It is the sense of universality, the classicism that served as his tool for achieving minimalism, and the pursuit of perfection that Pawson most admires. Equally significant are Pawson’s own sources of formation—the influences that shaped his particular approach to creating homes. What emerges is a sense that many of these historical references remain deeply relevant today: the orchestration of a meal, and the manner in which we eat, ultimately signals self-identity.

I was particularly struck by the autobiographical passages in the book. Pawson recalls that in his childhood home, no one was served until everyone was seated, and no one was permitted to leave the table until the entire family had finished. This unassuming discipline elevated the meal from mere routine to something closer to ritual—an occasion rather than a habit. Reading it, I found myself drawn back into a memory of my own.

The book’s central preoccupation is how architecture and design shape the way we inhabit space, and what it means for a space to feel comfortable. “Comfort,” he observes, “means getting everything to work with everything else, and to be harmonious.” It is not a matter of how comfortable any single piece of furniture might be, but of “getting spaces to work in terms of proportions and scale, and getting the inter-relationship of spaces right—that is what creates the simplest kind of comfort.” Pawson closes with the perennial question: can anything truly be timeless? His answer is unambiguous: “there is no such thing as timeless.” To understand why, one must read the book. What a wonderful addition to any library, and with so much assets one can take from it into living life of style.

I was honored to sit on a panel - House of Oberson: A Design Legacy - in celebrating the newly-published monograph by architect Dana Oberson (founder of Oberson Archtiects), an old friend and one of Israel’s leading design figures. On the panel was her father, fashion legend Gideon Oberson and desigenr Erez Nevi Pana, who collaborated with her on Bedouin-crafted textiles for the Six Senses Shaharut Hotel, famously inserted in the Negev desert. A few paragraphs from my introduction:

“Architecture is a strange profession that does not allow its practitioners to mature early. Indeed, it requires an enormous body of work to be recognized, and long and extensive experience to achieve a reputation and to substantiate new visions. But unlike fashion, buildings are not dresses, and it takes years to complete architectural projects. To Dana Oberson, to be an architect means that one has to slowly grow within, as she enjoys embracing the process and progress of the profession. Dana Oberson is the quintessential architect for the twenty-first century. Her architecture, whether private, public, or commercial, glorifies the roots of International Style as it was developed in her homeland, Israel, during its goldenage of the 1930s, merging modernism with environmentalism. The local landscape that surrounds her, she believes, is the most substantial agent for forging personallanguage and layered interiors and architecture, filled with meanings and narratives,as reflected across her portfolio. While celebrating her own design mantra, she takes pride in making an “Israeli” architecture of continuity, soundly inserted in site, context, climate, and genius loci (aka the spirit of the place).

A native of Ramat Hasharon, Dana Oberson grew up surrounded by the localworld of fashion. Her father, Israel’s leading fashion designer, Gideon Oberson, recognized globally for his swimwear creations, raised his two daughters in his couture house. Oberson honed her skills at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Designin Jerusalem. After graduating in 1995, she joined the studio of Saadya Mandel, the late Tel Aviv–based architect who had taken a leading role in the preservation and restoration of urban plans and landmark buildings, working on some of the most ambitious projects of his time, spanning the country from Jaffa to Jerusalem, from Hebron to Safed.

Windows, long, narrow, semi covered balconies, and crispy, geometric staircases ,all of which became the ethos of the unique local interpretation of the moderncity. She finds her inspiration by walking through the old parts of Tel Aviv, built by architects who fled Nazi-occupied Europe and who built simple, white apartment blocks just like those built in Germany by the pioneers of the Modern Movement. One such site is Dizengoff Square, the white circular plaza, designed in the 1940s by Genia Averbuch, a Russian-born female architect who won the prestigious competition over the design of Tel Aviv’s main square.

To her, learning from this powerful past and its political and historical narrative,as well as from familiar architectural traditions, is a way of expanding herunder standing of possibilities without abandoning conventions. It is the “charisma”of the aged façades and the volumetric quality of the city’s earliest buildings that constitute her most substantial sources of inspiration. This architecture, she says, makes her feel connected and inspired. Her 2023 Penthouse in Central Tel Aviv is characterized by distinctive balconies, integral to the ethos of life in the city’s earlyyears. Hers is a contemporary interpretation, making the outdoor space 50 percent of the entire apartment’s square footage. In this duplex, where she sought to createa refuge loft for empty nesters, the outdoor space has come to define the lifestyle ofthe new Israeli urban home.”

The book, featuring some of Oberson’s most recent projects, is now avaialble in Amazon.

The legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon (in present-day Iraq), one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, have captivated the human imagination for millennia. This series of tiered gardens, resembling a verdant mountain rising from the Mesopotamian plain, is believed to have been constructed circa 600 BCE by King Nebuchadnezzar II to assuage the homesickness of his beloved wife, Amytis. The absence of definitive archaeological corroboration for their existence has only deepened their mystique, elevating them to near-mythical status as perhaps the most sublime gardens ever conceived by human hands.

The Bahá’í Gardens in Haifa, a UNESCO-recognized terraced garden complex adorning Mount Carmel, draw direct inspiration from this ancient wonder. The site holds profound sanctity within the Bahá’í faith, a global monotheistic religion founded in nineteenth-century Persia by Bahá’u’lláh, whose teachings espouse the oneness of humanity, the equality of the sexes, and the eradication of all forms of prejudice. Comprising nineteen cascading terraces that encircle the resplendent golden-domed Shrine of the Báb—itself a site of deep religious veneration—the gardens reached completion in 2001. Spanning no fewer than nineteen terraces and 1,500 steps, the complex ascends the entirety of the mountainside, its very architecture suffused with layered symbolism.

Construction commenced in 1987 under the direction of Fariborz Sahba, the celebrated Iranian-American architect renowned for his design of the Bahá’í Lotus Temple in New Delhi, India. Sahba conceived a sequence of interconnected gardens linked by staircases flanked by twin rivulets of flowing water, which cascade gracefully down the mountainside through terraced steps and ornamental bridges. At the composition’s heart stands the Shrine of the Báb, its golden dome commanding Haifa’s skyline with quiet majesty. The design—characterized by precise geometric patterns, murmuring fountains, gravel-lined pathways, and symmetrical flowerbeds—adheres faithfully to the classical tenets of Persian garden design, themselves rooted in ancient horticultural tradition. To behold this marvel of design in person was nothing short of a transcendent experience.

Coco Chanel once declared that the beauty of white is absolute, while the American architect Richard Meier observed that white is the most wondrous of colors, for within it lie all the hues of the rainbow—a conviction he carried into the white masterpieces he built. It is in this spirit that The White, a new exhibition at Sokyo Gallery in Kyoto, takes shape.

The exhibition draws its inspiration from The White Book, by novelist Han Kang. In this autobiographical story on the death of her baby sister, the author uses a narrative on the color white to discuss grief, loss, and the fragile nature of the human spirit. Kang describes white objects such as rice, sugar cubes, salt, ice, blank paper symbolizing renewal.

Assembled from the gallery’s collection, the exhibition brings together ceramic works by some of the most compelling artists working in clay today, in Japan and abroad. Each has turned to white not merely as a color but as a vessel of profound duality—holding within it life and death, loss and renewal, purification and hope, all at once.

Taking these symbolic qualities as its point of departure, The White invites visitors into a space of contemplation, attuned to the deeper nature of human existence. At a moment when war and uncertainty continue to shape our world, the exhibition comes to ofer a space for reflection—on the preciousness of life, and on the possibility of hope for what is yet to come.