few years ago

© T&CO. 2013 800 843 3269
|
TIFFANY.COM
Breguet, the innovator.
Invention of the Tourbillon , 1801
The Classique Grande Complication Tourbillon 5317 provides the perfect
setting for Breguet’s most spectacular invention and undeniably the most
beautiful of all horological complications, developed over 210 years ago
to compensate for the effects of gravity. On the back, the “B-shaped”
oscillating weight reveals the beauty of the meticulously hand-engraved
movement. History is still being written...
EXHIBITION
November 7 -17 2013
Breguet, the innovator. Inventor of the Tourbillon.
th
th
On display at the Breguet Boutique - 711 Fifth Avenue, between 55 th & 56th streets l 646 692-6469
N O R T H S TA R C O L L E C T I O N
For starry nights, diamonds and white gold.
NEW YORK
CHICAGO
LONDON
COPENHAGEN
W W W.G E O R G J E N S E N.C O M
HONG KONG
TOK YO
november 2013
20 EDITOR’S LETTER
26 CONTRIBUTORS
28 ON ThE COvER
30 COLUMNISTS on Innovation
112 STILL LIFE Marc Newson
The renowned designer shares a few of his
favorite things.
Photography by Annabel Elston
What’s News.
33
Film Heiress Gia Coppola’s First Movie
Photography by Mona Kuhn Styling by Jacqui Getty
A Brief History of Space Tourism
36
Lace Gets an Update
Photographer Dennis Stock’s American Cool
Luxe Teatime Tableware
38
Four Cutting-Edge Watches
Renzo Piano Expands the Kimbell Art Museum
40
Shigeru Ban Reimagines a Cathedral in Cardboard
Brazil’s Joaquim Tenreiro Shows in New York
Art Inspired by the Perfume Miss Dior
42
Designer Paola Navone Goes Global
Dermatology Influenced by Mother Nature
44
Rob Lowe’s Pitch-Perfect JFK Performance
Andermatt: Winter’s Hottest Swiss Destination
Mark Fletcher and Vito Schnabel Team Up
Market report.
47 CLEaN SwEEp
Things aren’t so black and white when a dash of pink
is added to otherwise simple pairings.
Photography by Jennifer Livingston
Styling by Zara Zachrisson
on the cover Daft Punk and Gisele Bündchen photographed
by Terry Richardson. Styling by George Cortina. On Bündchen:
Atelier Versace jumpsuit, price upon request, 888-721-7219.
On Daft Punk: Saint Laurent Stage Wear by Hedi Slimane.
Sold exclusively in Louis Vuitton s tores and on louisvuitton.com.
47
thIS PAGe Photography by Jennifer Livingston. Styling by
Zara Zachrisson. Balenciaga hat, $1,085, Barneys New York,
shirt, $925, Nordstrom, shorts, $855, 212-206-0872, bracelet,
$525, Kirna Zabete, and bag, $2,650, Bergdorf Goodman, and
Van Cleef & Arpels ring, $5,450, vancleefarpels.com.
70
55
94
innovators issue.
55 TRACKED: Mark Parker
70 DAFT PUNK
Nike’s CEO combines technical savvy
with a sophisticated aesthetic.
By Christopher Ross
Photography by Michael Friberg
60 CLICK, BID, COLLECT
By Ellen Gamerman
64 SUPERCHARGED
The Croation engineer who built the
world’s fastest electric car is writing
the blueprint for the next generation
of supercars.
By Andy Isaacson
66 A LIGHT TOUCH
Michael Anastassiades has earned midcareer acclaim for his minimal designs.
By Jen Renzi
A pioneer of farm-to-table cuisine,
Waters has changed the way
Americans think about food.
By Brian Raftery
Photography by Terry Richardson
Styling by George Cortina
By Howie Kahn
Photography by William Abranowicz
78 NICK D’ALOISIO
The 18-year-old became an overnight
millionaire by inventing an app that
revolutionizes how we read on the go.
By Seth Stevenson
Photography by David Bailey
82 DAVID ADJAYE
With his plans for the Smithsonian’s
African American museum, Adjaye
is forging a new kind of global
architecture.
100 DO HO SUH
Suh’s work investigates the idea of
home—and what it means to belong
in the 21st century.
By Julie L. Belcove
Photography by James Mollison
106 THOMAS WOLTZ
The rising star of landscape design
takes on the greening of New York’s
Hudson Yards development.
By Alastair Gordon
Photography by Adrian Gaut
By Ian Volner
Photography by Sze Tsung Leong
88 PAT McGRATH
From runways to research labs, the
highly inventive makeup artist sets
trends season after season.
By Derek Blasberg
Photography by Ben Hassett
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870 madison avenue new York
Three companies are seeking to
revolutionize the process of buying
art online.
94 ALICE WATERS
With the success of their fourth
studio album, the robot duo have
made 2013 their knockout year.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: TERRY RICHARDSON; MICHAEL FRIBERG; WILLIAM ABRANOWICZ
the exchange.
Developer Jonathan Rose has a vision: Rejuvenate neighborhoods
to create affordable and environmentally responsible housing close to
jobs, schools, parks, healthcare and mass transit. For years, Citi has
been helping to do exactly that. So, we are collaborating with Jonathan
to invest in the revitalization of urban areas across the United States,
including Chicago, Washington D.C., Newark and beyond.
For over 200 years, Citi’s job has been to believe in people and to help
make their ideas a reality.
#progressmakers
© 2013 Citigroup Inc. Citi and Citi with Arc Design are registered service marks of Citigroup Inc.
Between now and 2060, the United States is projected to grow by
90 million people. Almost all the growth will happen in cities. How can
we create thriving communities here and around the world?
editor’s le t ter
AND THE AWARD GOES TO...
ILLUSTRATION BY ALEJANDRO CARDENAS
calibre de cartier
VICTORIOUS CHIC Anubis and Bast, both in Calvin Klein Collection, posing with an Innovator Award at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
20
like the plump tomatoes her parents grew in their
backyard. Artist Do Ho Suh’s pieces subtly reference
the familiar environs of his former homes, while architect David Adjaye called upon his African roots when
designing his career-crowning National Museum of
African American History and Culture in Washington,
D.C. Fashion Innovator Pat McGrath’s career as a
makeup artist also began in childhood, during weekly
excursions with her mother to cosmetics counters,
while landscape architect Thomas Woltz, our Design
Innovator, grew up on a farm, which honed his concept for urban renewal. Tech prodigy Nick D’Aloisio
dreamed up his breakthrough summarization app,
Summly, by addressing a familiar 21st-century need:
finding a simpler, faster way to read things on the go.
Innovation is also built on hard work and determination, so it’s inspiring to recall the example of
25-year-old Croatian engineer Mate Rimac. At one
point in the process of designing the world’s fastest
electric car, he sold all his belongings, just to make
rent. Today, he employs 22 people. No one ever said
changing the world was easy!
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A
LTHOUGH THE WORD “innovation” brings to
mind futuristic gadgets and sneaker-clad
coders, as we assembled our third annual
Innovators issue—celebrating talents who
have revolutionized their respective fields—we discovered that even the most groundbreaking ideas can
spring from the familiar.
Daft Punk, the Entertainment Innovator who
shares the cover with supermodel Gisele Bündchen,
produced one of 2013’s catchiest tunes, “Get Lucky,” by
resurrecting a danceable ’70s sound—and, with it, the
idea of marketing a blockbuster studio album, Random
Access Memories. Humanitarian Innovator Alice
Waters reengineered the way children eat by returning them to the simple pleasure of locally sourced food,
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Magnus Berger
CrEativE dirECtor
ExECutivE Editor
Chris Knutsen
Brekke Fletcher
Managing Editor
fashion nEws/fEaturEs dirECtor
Richard’s favourite expression is The Balvenie PortWood.
Kristina O’Neill
Editor in ChiEf
Elisa Lipsky-Karasz
Anthony Cenname
Stephanie Arnold
businEss ManagEr Julie Checketts Andris
brand dirECtor Jillian Maxwell
Coordinator Molly Dahl
publishEr
global advErtising dirECtor
dEsign dirECtor
photography dirECtor
Pierre Tardif
Jennifer Pastore
sEnior Editor
Megan Conway
ExECutivE ChairMan, nEws Corp
ChiEf ExECutivE, nEws Corp
MEn’s stylE dirECtor
David Farber
Rupert Murdoch
Robert Thomson
prEsidEnt, ChiEf ExECutivE offiCEr, dow JonEs & CoMpany,
publishEr, thE wall strEEt Journal
fashion MarkEt/aCCEssoriEs dirECtor
David Thielebeule
Lex Fenwick
Gerard Baker
Editor in ChiEf, thE wall strEEt Journal
sEnior dEputy Managing Editor, thE wall strEEt Journal
MEn’s stylE Editor
Tasha Green
Michael W. Miller
Editorial dirECtor, wsJ. wEEkEnd
MarkEt Editor
Ruth Altchek
Preetma Singh
ChiEf rEvEnuE offiCEr, thE wall strEEt Journal
art dirECtor
Tanya Moskowitz
Michael F. Rooney
vp global MarkEting
photo Editor
assoCiatE Editor
Damian Prado
Christopher Ross
Nina Lawrence
hEad of digital advErtising and intEgration
Romy Newman
Evan Chadakoff
Christina Babbits,
Elizabeth Brooks, Chris Collins, Ken DePaola,
Etienne Katz, Mark Pope, Robert Welch
vp vErtiCal MarkEts Marti Gallardo
vp ad sErviCEs Paul Cousineau
vp intEgratEd MarkEting solutions Michal Shapira
ExECutivE dirECtor MarkEting Paul Tsigrikes
ExECutivE dirECtor, wsJ CustoM studios Randa Stephan
dirECtor, EvEnts & proMotion Sara Shenasky
CrEativE dirECtor Bret Hansen
priCing and stratEgy ManagEr Verdell Walker
ad sErviCEs, MagazinEs ManagEr Elizabeth Bucceri
vp stratEgy and opErations
vp MultiMEdia salEs
Copy ChiEf
produCtion dirECtor
rEsEarCh ChiEf
Editorial assistant
fashion assistants
wEb Editors
Scott White
John O’Connor
Junior dEsignEr
assistant photo Editor
Minju Pak
Dina Ravvin
Hope Brimelow
Raveena Parmar
So day after day is spent caring for the casks that control time.
Hammering and punching to repair: charring and burning to
rejuvenate. It took years working out how everything goes together.
But now he knows what holds the future.
Katie Quinn Murphy, Sam Pape
Robin Kawakami, Seunghee Suh
Alexa Brazilian, Michael Clerizo,
Kelly Crow, Celia Ellenberg, Jason Gay,
Jacqui Getty, Joshua Levine, J.J. Martin,
Sarah Medford, Meenal Mistry, Anita Sarsidi
Contributing Editors
Contributing spECial proJECts dirECtor
Andrea Oliveri
spECial thanks
24
He knows American oak from European by touch. He’s not
superman. But he has been reviving bourbon barrels and sherry
butts for over half his life. This wood is what slowly breathes
character into The Balvenie. That’s how important it is.
Tenzin Wild
WSJ. Issue 41, November 2013, Copyright 2013, Dow Jones
and Company, Inc. All rights reserved. See the magazine
online at www.wsjmagazine.com. Reproduction in whole
or in part without written permission is prohibited. WSJ.
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wsj. m aga zine
Handcrafted to be enjoyed responsibly.
The Balvenie Single Malt Scotch Whisky, 43% Alc./Vol. ©2013 Imported by William Grant & Sons, Inc. New York, NY.
Terry richardson, Brian rafTery
& derek BlasBerg
Daft punk p. 70 | On the COver p. 28
david Bailey & seTh sTevenson
niCk D'alOisiO p. 78
Technology prodigy and WSJ. Innovator of the year, Nick D’Aloisio may only be 18 years
old, but he made a very grown-up impression on writer Seth Stevenson and photographer
David Bailey. “He is terrifyingly poised, sharply intelligent and well-read,” says
Stevenson (near left). “He is eerily smart and has this competitive drive. But he’s still a
regular kid, wearing A Bathing Ape T-shirt.” Bailey agrees: “It’s great to find someone so
young who is so positive.”
JaMes Mollison & Julie l. Belcove
DO hO suh p. 100
Photographer James Mollison and writer Julie L. Belcove, tasked with capturing Art
Innovator Do Ho Suh, were impressed by his easygoing personality. “He was very
personable and warm,” Belcove says. “We connected—he was about to have his second
daughter, and I have two daughters.” Mollison was struck by the sparseness of Suh’s
London studio, especially compared to his larger-than-life installations. “I was hoping
there would be a piece in progress, but he works at such a scale that his art is often built
for the space. Instead, it was more of a place where he went and thought about his work.”
Mona kuhn & Jacqui geTTy
COming up COppOl a p. 33
For Mona Kuhn, photographing Gia Coppola meant creating a relaxed atmosphere for her
soft-spoken subject. “There was this certain youth to her, a vulnerability,” says Kuhn
(far left). “I wanted her to feel comfortable. She played the Ramones on set. We made it
very intimate.” For stylist Jacqui Getty, the shoot was a rare opportunity to combine her
job with the role of being Gia’s mother. “It was really fun to work with my daughter,” says
Getty. “It was a family affair! It was very sweet.”
Michael friBerg & chrisTopher ross
traCkeD: mark parker p. 55
Touring Nike headquarters with CEO Mark Parker was a Willy Wonka–esque experience for
WSJ. Associate Editor Christopher Ross. “The research lab is cool,” says Ross (far right).
“There was a robot mannequin that actually sweats. Olympian Ashton Eaton was test-driving
gear on a track.” Photographer Michael Friberg was impressed by Parker’s unassuming
nature. “There was a guitar sitting in the corner. I asked him if he played, and he said, ‘Not
really, that’s Jimi Hendrix’s guitar.’ It was buried behind some frames, not on display at all.”
26
wsj. m aga zine
Top row, clockwise from lefT: Terry richardson; derek blasberg; courTesy of brian rafTery. second row, from lefT: david bailey; courTesy of seTh sTevenson. Third row, from
lefT: amber mollison; jennifer livingsTon. fourTh row, from lefT: mona kuhn; james franco. fifTh row, from lefT: courTesy of danielle friberg; dina ravvin
WSJ.’s Entertainment Innovator of the year, Daft Punk, left photographer
Terry Richardson (near right, with the band) and writer Brian Raftery
(bottom right) in little doubt of the robot duo’s influence and originality. Of
their latest record, Random Access Memories, Raftery says, “What is
particularly innovative about it is they looked to the past as much as to the
future. It does feel kind of timeless. I don’t think in 30 years we’ll listen to
this album and think it was recorded in 2013.” On interviewing the group’s
fellow cover star, Gisele Bündchen, for On the Cover, contributor Derek
Blasberg (top right, with Bündchen) says, “Gisele is intoxicating. That face,
that body, the energy, the joy. She is the most beautiful show on earth.”
ON THE COVER
NUMBER-ONE STUNNER
How supermodel Gisele Bündchen leveraged keen business instincts
and a lingerie deal to become the world’s highest-paid model—
and why the fashion industry has been catching up to her ever since.
28
FASHIONABLE LIFE
Clockwise from near
right: Bündchen posted
this photo of herself
and stylist George
Cortina on Instagram,
where she has over
700,000 followers, on
the day of her WSJ.
cover shoot; the model
in a 2011 ad for Isabel
Marant; with her
husband, Tom Brady, at
the Costume Institute
gala in 2013; in a Chanel
ad from this fall.
of Brazilian martial art capoeira. “You’re always trying to balance everything, but it can’t be 100 percent
all the time. Sometimes when you are a great mom,
you’re not so great at your job. And then when you’re
good at your job, you’re not so great of a mom or a
good wife. It’s a dance that never stops. But it’s beautiful. I’ve never been happier.”
Bündchen’s packed days are meticulously organized on her iPhone with the Cozi app, which synchs
the entire family schedule, from kids’ play dates to
her press appointments to Brady’s football practices.
Every single hour is accounted for and each family
member is color-coordinated: She is purple, Brady is
blue, and when the whole family needs to be at the
same place, it’s in red. “I know what everyone is doing
every second of the day,” says Bündchen.
Most mornings start around 6 a.m. Before heading
either to her home office, where she works on her own
fashion and accessories lines, or to a modeling job, she
spends time with the children. (The couple has homes
in Boston, New York and Los Angeles.) Vivian comes
with her to photo shoots. “If I’m with my kids, I’m not
answering my phone. You can’t reach me. With my
husband, too. If I’m at work, then I’m at work. If I’m
with you, I’m with you. I am in that moment, and there
is nothing else.” The family prefers dinner at home,
and Bündchen and Brady are rarely seen out at social
occasions. One exception is the annual Met Costume
Institute gala in New York City, where they are consistently one of the glossiest couples on the red carpet.
While work and family commitments dominate
Bündchen’s schedule, she says her trick to keeping
it together is her hour. “It’s important to me to have
some time for myself. So one hour a day is mine. It
may have to be at 4 a.m. or whenever the kids are
napping or not home, but it’s in the schedule. I read
a book. I meditate. I make something. I need to nourish myself in order for me to give to everyone else.”
—Derek Blasberg
TOP MODEL
Clockwise from right:
On the Harper’s Bazaar
cover, February 2001;
on the Victoria’s
Secret runway in 2002;
walking the runway
for Givenchy in 2012;
in Boston with her
children, husband and
dog, Lua, this past
May; on the cover of
French Vogue’s June/
July issue, 2012.
FROM TOP TO BOTTOM: COURTESY OF ISABEL MARANT; PHOTO BY DIMITRIOS KAMBOURIS/
GETTY IMAGES; COURTESY OF IMG MODELS; COURTESY OF CHANEL; COURTESY OF HARPER’S
BAZAAR; GETTY; © REUTERS/CORBIS; FIRSTVIEW.COM; INEZ AND VINOODH/TRUNK ARCHIVE;
© JAMES HAYNES/SPLASH NEWS/CORBIS
G
ISELE BÜNDCHEN MAY be the most powerful
model in the world—but that’s not what she
prefers to call herself. “I’m self-employed,”
says the 33-year-old Brazilian. “[Modeling
has] always been a business.” This year, she topped
Forbes’s list of highest-paid models for the seventh
year in a row, beating out the likes of Kate Moss and
Miranda Kerr by tens of millions of dollars. The magazine reported that she made $42 million, though she
rolls her eyes at the figure. “Who are they speaking
to when they come up with these numbers? Not my
accountant, that’s for sure.” Whether the number
strikes her as high or low, she leaves unsaid.
How did Bündchen, who was scouted at a shopping
mall in her native Rio Grande do Sul when she was
14, rise from mere model to multiplatform business
tycoon? Selectivity, she says. After becoming the most
in-demand face and body on the runways of Paris and
Milan in the late 1990s—in 1999, Vogue put her on the
cover and declared “The Return of the Sexy Model”—
she developed a knack for taking exactly the right
steps in her career at exactly the right times.
High risk yields high reward, and nothing was more
risky than her decision to sign with Victoria’s Secret in
2000, making her one of the first in her field to bridge
the once-taboo divide between luxury fashion editorials and commercial work. It was a canny maneuver
that proved light-years ahead of the rest of the fashion industry, though such high-low blurring has
since become the norm. After Bündchen signed with
Victoria’s Secret, it ballooned from a prosaic bra brand
into a lingerie powerhouse with a world-famous fashion show—ultimately helping to net her a reported
$25 million per year. (She wore the company’s famed
Angel wings for the last time in 2007.) She inked lucrative deals with luxury brands such as Chanel and David
Yurman. Anne Nelson, her agent since she was 17, says
that in Brazil, “she is a god.”
These days, Bündchen is picky about which jobs
she takes not because she’s cultivating an image but
because of domestic obligations. In 2009, she married Tom Brady, quarterback of the New England
Patriots, and is now mother to Benjamin, 3, and Vivian,
8 months, and stepmother to Brady’s son, 6-year-old
John Edward Thomas, from his previous relationship.
“When you’re by yourself you only make decisions for
yourself. But when you have a family, you’re making
decisions for your whole family.” She now turns down
multimillion-dollar jobs if they require her to leave the
country or have obligatory personal appearance days
in the contract.
When asked to describe how she manages the roles
of wife, mother and supermodel, she offers a metaphor: Ginga, the basic back-and-forth swaying step
WSJ. M AGA ZINE
b erlut i.c om
Jeremy I ron s, i n it i ate d by Pe ter S el ler s
soapbox
the columnists
WSJ. asks six luminaries to weigh in on a single topic. This month: Innovation.
nick
cAve
nASSiM
tALeB
Ann
pAtchett
Dr.
LUke
MinDy
kALing
chriStinA
toSi
“I’ve always been a
maker. Even as a kid,
I’d get hand-me-downs,
redesign them, try to
find my own identity.
It was just creativity
through innovation
with surplus materials. For me, the body is
a carrier. I’m a messenger, and I think of
myself as a messenger
before I’m an artist.
In my studio, when I finish a piece, I know when
it’s done because all of
a sudden there’s just
this breath. We photograph the work and
then it goes into the
receiving room. After
it’s picked up, I never,
ever see it again. Ever.
The only time I might
see it is when I install
it in a show. And I turn
around, look back and
say goodbye. It’s a
really weird thing. But
it goes back to being
a messenger. I’m here
to deliver these deeds
through this medium.
I don’t have ownership.
What I’m doing when I’m
looking back is looking
to make sure that I delivered the message fully.
And then I move on.”
“If you look at the
history of innovation,
you discover that the
process is much less
intellectual than you
might think. Less
rationalistic, in the
sense of being derived
from the top down.
Much less dominated
by schools. And, typically, driven entirely
by tinkering. Tinkering
is just people doing
what they like to do.
The results come and
often they don’t even
recognize them. It’s
not purposeful—often
the result has nothing to do with what
people start with. You
look for India, you find
America. If you want
a breakthrough, don’t
specify where you’re
going. In the long run,
the more randomness,
the more you’re going
to be helped. I have no
plan when I wake up
in the morning. I have
absolutely zero idea
where I’m going. The
minute I’m bored with
something, I move on
to something else. Life
is too short—I follow
stimuli.”
“I wouldn’t wish any
more innovation
on fiction than has
already arrived. With
some things, we try
to improve, improve,
improve, and then we
realize it’s not better. I’ve done that
with recipes so many
times. You mess and
mess with it, making
it better, and then you
go back and make it
the first way again and
think, Actually, that
tastes a lot better. My
dog—nobody’s going to
improve on this dog.
The innovation of the
family pet? It’s not
going to get any better.
Bookstores: still absolutely the best way to
buy a book. My husband
has lots of classical
vinyl records, and there
are days when I come
downstairs on a weekend morning and he’s
playing Shostakovich,
and it’s really lovely.
You can have the iPod
playing while you brush
your teeth all you want,
but to come into the
living room and hear
that record on the
turntable—it’s deep.”
“There are a number of
ways for innovation to
happen. Collaboration
is one. Another is just
searching for greatness.
Early in my career, a
well-known manager
told me that a hit song
is like a million right
decisions in a row. There
are so many things that
can throw it off. You
have to have a little bit
of an insane drive to get
there. With music, a lot
of days you start out
pretty much uninspired.
And then, all of sudden,
you’re inspired. I spent
three hours noodling
around with nothing,
and then one minute
this idea came—boom!
Lightning in a bottle.
But then you’re like,
okay, now where do I go
from here? Producing
it is a lot of trial and
error. You might spend
another three hours
trying out wrong things,
wanting to give up and
then—boom— another
idea happens. I usually
just keep trying. I’m very
stubborn. It’s easy
to write a good song,
but it’s hard to write a
great song.”
“The hardest thing
about comedy is when
you can sense the effort,
and you are repelled
by it. When you have a
group of comedy writers
in a room, it’s weird,
because your job is to be
funny, but it can’t show
too much effort. When
we get to a funny area,
we’re talking about a
heightened, documented
conversation that we’re
having with our funniest
friends. We have to shut
off the parts of the brain
that make it something
we’re stressed about,
like work. It’s all about
observation and interactions, but I don’t need
to go to an art exhibit or
Burning Man to get an
idea. In fact, it’s just the
opposite. The more I run
errands or do chores,
the more inspiration I
find. I get more out of
filling my car with gas,
getting it washed and
returning some stuff to
Best Buy than I would
going to the library.
So much of writing is
repeating back into the
script a funnier version
of the thing you’ve just
experienced.”
“One of the ways I hang
on to creative or innovative ideas is by being
a lunatic about notes.
I have a desk, a laptop,
notebooks, loose papers
littered with Post-its,
notes written on the
backs of business cards,
even written on cardboard ripped from a box.
I always try to organize
the process so I feel like
less of a lunatic, but
oftentimes something
just bursts out of my
head and I know if I don’t
capture it immediately,
it will disappear. So I
embrace the craziness
and grab whatever
is closest—which is
sometimes a Sharpie
in someone’s apron or
a pen in someone’s ponytail—and scribble on
whatever is close by. But
at the same time, when
it comes to innovation,
there’s a beauty to limiting yourself: backing
yourself into a corner to
force your creative mind
back into itself until it
implodes into something
exponentially greater
than it once was—kind
of like nuclear energy.”
Cave is a performance artist,
sculptor and dancer.
Taleb is a statistician and
author of The Black Swan
and Antifragile: Things That
Gain From Disorder.
Patchett is an author whose
latest book, This is the
Story of a Happy Marriage,
is out this month.
Dr. Luke is a music producer
and songwriter, who has worked
with artists such as Katy Perry
and Rihanna.
Kaling is a former writer
and actress on The Office
and the creator and star
of The Mindy Project.
30
Tosi is the chef, founder and
owner of Momofuku Milk Bar.
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t he worl d of cult ure & s t y l e
what’s news.
nov ember 2013
CAMERA READY
Gia Coppola,
granddaughter of
Francis and niece
of Sofia, shows off
her laid-back native
Californian style in
a biker jacket by
Saint Laurent by
Hedi Slimane.
COMING UP COPPOLA
With her directorial debut, Palo Alto—a film about California teens that’s already earning rave reviews—
26-year-old first-time director Gia Coppola proves she’s ready to take on the family business.
BY LOGAN HILL PHOTOGRAPHY BY MONA KUHN STYLING BY JACQUI GETTY
New York Beverly Hills Boston South Coast Plaza Atlanta Houston Crystals Forum Shops Fashion Show Mall Ala Moana Tysons Corner Waikiki
wsj. m aga zine
33
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THE ROCKET
JET SET
How the final frontier became
the next great vacation destination.
—Jesse Will
2001
Businessman Dennis Tito buys
a $20 million “ticket” to board
the Russian craft Soyuz and
becomes the first space tourist.
He spends six days on the
International Space Station,
against NASA’s wishes.
L
IKE HER AUNT SOFIA and her grandfather
Francis, Gia Coppola looks unflappable—
perhaps, even, unimpressed. Sitting in the
lobby of the Intercontinental hotel during
the Toronto International Film Festival, Gia, 26, is so
still and angular she’s practically sculptural: cropped
bangs, sharp cheekbones and a trim black leather
jacket so supple it looks like it could melt under the
glare of all this attention.
Here for the world premiere of her debut film, Palo
Alto, she is well aware that cynics will wield her family’s 24 Oscar nominations against her—but she’s
gotten used to charges of nepotism. “My name does
help me get in the door, but it doesn’t do the work
for me.” The offended, she says simply, “don’t have to
watch it if they don’t want to.”
As it happens, Gia doesn’t need to engage her
critics on this particular front: Variety called Palo
Alto—based on the semi-autobiographical short story
collection by the actor James Franco, about aimless
suburban California teens—“a remarkably assured
feature debut.” The Hollywood Reporter called it
the “best feature film directed by someone named
Coppola in a number of years.”
The film, which she adapted, dramatizes the stupid mistakes, dumb crushes and profane cruelty of
high school teens. Emma Roberts—niece of Julia
Roberts—plays April, a girl juggling the affections of
a young friend and those of her lecherous soccer coach
(played by Franco). Nickelodeon star Nat Wolff plays
an insecure wild child. And in the role of the character
Franco based loosely on himself—an arty, pot-smoking
romantic—Gia introduces Jack Kilmer, a family friend
and, yes, son of former Batman Val (who happens to
play April’s Xbox-obsessed father). She even gave her
mother, stylist Jacqui Getty, a supporting part.
With Palo Alto, Gia says she sought to counterprogram the staged semi-reality of MTV shows like
Teen Mom and mainstream teen rom-coms. On set,
she channeled teenage-hood in more ways than she’d
anticipated: “As a first-time director, you act a lot like
a teenager. I made decisions because I was hotheaded.
My skin broke out. I was trying to understand who I am.”
Her childhood was split between Los Angeles and
34
NEW DIRECTION
Clockwise from top left:
Nat Wolff, left, and Jack
Kilmer in Palo Alto; Gia on
set; with James Franco
at the 2013 Venice Film
Festival; with Francis
Ford Coppola at this year’s
Telluride Film Festival.
2002
PayPal billionaire Elon Musk
founds SpaceX, a company
devoted to getting payloads
into space inexpensively. He
invests $100 million of his own
money into the project.
2004
British entrepreneur Sir
Richard Branson announces
Virgin Galactic, a company
offering suborbital flights into
space for $190,000.
2006
Anousheh Ansari becomes
the first female space tourist.
The Iranian-born, U.S.-based
entrepreneur wears the flags
of both her homeland and the
U.S. on her spacesuit.
her grandfather’s Napa Valley estate, and she struggled
as a student. “I didn’t get good grades. I knew I wanted
to be creative but didn’t know how. [Directing] just felt
like my calling, I guess, as I got older.” While majoring
in photography at Bard College in upstate New York, she
began to experiment with film, making shorts for hip
clothing labels like Zac Posen, Opening Ceremony and
Diane von Furstenberg. She also shot DVD features on
the set of her grandfather’s film Twixt, and slyly says she
learned to give her crew 45-minute lunches, “because
[Francis] says an army marches on its stomach.”
Gia doesn’t have another project in mind just yet,
though she says she’s determined to build a career
like her aunt’s, to whom she owes her greatest debt
as a filmmaker. Her father, Francis’s son, GianCarlo, died at age 22 in a boating accident, when her
mother, who was 19 at the time, was pregnant with
her. She is named after him: Gian-Carla. “I definitely
had periods in my life when I felt like something was
missing, but I was lucky to have these really close
relationships with my family.”
She pauses for a few seconds. “It’s weird, because
I’m older than [my father] lived to be, and he wanted to
be a filmmaker,” she says. “So I feel like I have someone
looking out for me. I feel like I’m doing this for him.” š
2010
SpaceX becomes the first
private company to launch and
return a craft from orbit, after
its patented Dragon spacecraft
rides a Falcon 9 rocket 186 miles
into the stratosphere.
2013
Bus tours of Spaceport America,
the first commercial spaceport,
located in southern New Mexico,
begin. The facility features a
terminal by Norman Foster and
a nearly two-mile-long runway.
2014
Expected inaugural flights for
Virgin Galactic. Justin Bieber
and Leonardo DiCaprio have
reportedly signed up for seats.
2015
Intended date of moon flyby
from Space Adventures,
a Virginia-based company.
Tickets are $150 million each.
2018
Proposed launch of privately
funded flybys of Mars in
the Dragon spacecraft. Dennis
Tito’s Inspiration Mars
Foundation is looking for
donations—and, ideally, a man/
woman team to make the trip.
WSJ. M AGA ZINE
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2002
’N Sync member Lance Bass
trains for months in preparation
for a Russian flight to the ISS,
but his voyage is nixed at the
last minute.
WH AT ’S NE WS
TIMEWALKER VOYAGER UTC
ON TREND
TECHNO LACE
SPECIAL EDITION
2
3
BUY THE BOOK
STOCK PHOTOS
Beginning in the 1950s, Magnum
photographer Dennis Stock recorded
1
a vivid array of urban subcultures
that were just beginning to grip the
popular imagination, from Harlem jazz
4
musicians to the Village Beats—not
to mention ad men and movie stars
(he followed James Dean across the
country, taking memorable portraits
A CUT ABOVE
1. Reed Krakoff bag,
$2,590, reedkrakoff
.com 2. Christopher
Kane dress, $2,365,
Saks Fifth Avenue
3. Balenciaga boot,
$1,195, 212-206-0872
4. Burberry Prorsum
skirt, $2,495, burberry
.com 5. Aurélie
Bidermann cuffs, $975,
Barneys New York
6. Aquazzura boot,
$995, 212-826-8900
like the one above). This month, Reel
Art Press remembers his work with
5
American Cool. “He wanted to capture
the human essence, had no interest in
the obvious, and most of all, he hated
condescension,” says Michael Shulman,
Magnum’s current director. “Stock
approached everything and everyone
6
with honesty, like a poet.” —Toni Garcia
SWEET SUBVERSION
Usually it’s the cake that gets to steal the show. But nothing is as usual when it comes to Tea with
Georg, a new set of teatime tableware by Scholten & Baijings for Danish luxury design house
Georg Jensen. With characteristic restraint, the young Dutch duo has whisked together the
aesthetics and tea-making cultures of Scandinavia and Japan. “There is a natural connection
between the two, appreciation for traditional handicraft and the beauty of the physical material,”
says Carole Baijings. The nine-piece stainless steel and porcelain collection—including the cake
stand ($270) and set of espresso cups and saucers ($110) seen here, available at georgjensen.com—
makes the timeworn ritual of high tea seem like a modern must. —Sarah Medford
COURTESY OF DIOR (RUNWAY); PHOTOGRAPHY BY F. MARTIN RAMIN (TECHNO LACE & SWEET SUBVERSION), STYLING BY ANNE CARDENAS (TECHNO LACE); ©DENNIS STOCK/MAGNUM PHOTOS (STOCK PHOTOS)
This season designers like Raf Simons (Dior Couture,
left) chose to update the peekaboo appeal of
antique lace with materials like perforated leather
and gold presented in a bold palette.
Wherever the journey takes you, the second time zone synchronized
with Universal Time Coordinated (UTC) lets you keep track of all
y our global interests. Automatic movement. Second time zone
with 24-hour display and day/night indication. 42 mm stainless-steel
case with satin-finished bezel. Crafted in the Montblanc Manufacture
in Le Locle, Switzerland.
MON T BL A NC .COM
36
WSJ. M AGA ZINE
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TIME MACHINES
FAST TEMPO
Mechanical watch inventors have been grappling with some of the same challenges for over 500 years: how to make a
timepiece that creates its own energy; how to deal with gear-stopping magnets. Now, with the arrival of technological advances
like 3-D modeling and materials such as silicon, the makers of these hand-constructed watches are overcoming timeworn
roadblocks. “There are many ideas to look at again that did not work the first time,” explains Stephane Oes, the research
and development manager of Girard-Perregaux. Here, four of today’s most cutting-edge collectibles. —Michael Clerizo
GIRARDPERREGAUX
THE H2
Liquid is a known nemesis of
watches, but this piece uses
it to display the time: Two
miniature bellows pump
transparent oil and
fluorescent-green-tinted
water through a glass tube,
advancing the distance
between the numerals every
60 minutes. Since oil and
water don’t mix, the precise
spot where they meet within
the tube replaces the
traditional hour hand.
$129,000, Cellini Jewelers
THE CONSTANT ESCAPEMENT
LOUIS VUITTON
TAMBOUR TWIN CHRONO
This timepiece will appeal to
customers who adore fine
watches and yacht racing in
equal measure. With this
limited edition of 30, one
can now tell time while also
tracking two yachts engaged
in competition. A pair of
subdials track the vessels’
progress, while a third
displays the difference in
speed between them.
Since the mid-1700s,
watchmakers have tried to
create a Constant Force
Escapement (CFE)—a device
that controls the internal
springs while releasing
energy. In this piece,
between two wheels
reminiscent of butterfly
wings, an S-shaped silicon
blade vibrates back and
forth—the first smoothly
functioning CFE on the
market. $123,500, 646-495-9915
BREGUET
CLASSIQUE CHRONOMÉTRIE
Magnets are to mechanical
watches what Kryptonite is
to Superman: Credit cards,
security equipment and even
cabinet doors can cause them
to break down. Breguet has
devised a counterintuitive
solution to prevent outside
interference: rare magnetic
pivots placed inside the
watch, in addition to parts
crafted from silicon rather
than steel. $40,000, breguet.com
Price upon request, louisvuitton.com
THE NEW MUSEUM
How does an architect go head to head with an iconic building? That was the challenge
Renzo Piano faced when designing an expansion of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort
Worth, Texas—widely considered a masterwork of the late Louis Kahn. “Renzo knew
he had to walk a very fine line between being deferential to the Kahn building while still
leaving his own mark,” says Eric M. Lee, director of the Kimbell. Piano’s structure is an
elegant low-slung pavilion that sits across a grassy plaza from Kahn’s original—“the right
distance for a conversation,” says Piano. Opening on November 27, it will be used primarily for temporary exhibitions, and features two sections connected by glass passageways
and a façade that appears to hover next to its neighbor. “You can see and feel the light,”
says Lee, “and it puts you in a great frame of mind for looking at art.” —Alastair Gordon
38
WSJ. M AGA ZINE
PHOTOGRAPHY BY F. MARTIN RAMIN (FAST TEMPO); PHOTOGRAPHY BY ROBERT POLIDORI COURTESY KIMBELL ART MUSEUM, FORT WORTH, TEXAS
HYT
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STUDY IN DESIGN
SO BRAZILIANT
THE CAUSE
PAPER PARISH
In February 2011, an earthquake severely damaged George
Gilbert Scott’s 1904 Neo-Gothic cathedral in Christchurch, New
Zealand. Now, a soaring cardboard structure (above) imagined
by Tokyo-based architect Shigeru Ban will stand in its place—
for the next half-century, at least (Ban designed it to last just
50 years). It features 98 water- and fireproof cardboard tubes,
which support a polycarbonate roof, with space for 700 parishioners. Ban designed the cathedral for free and told a crowd
recently, “I want to continue building monuments that will be
loved by people.” —Jesse Will
SCENT SENSIBILITY
This month, 15 artists take
over Paris’s Grand Palais
with visual work inspired
by the classic perfume
Miss Dior. Included in the
show are a houndstooth
floor tapestry (far left) by
New York–based Polly
Apfelbaum, who worked
with Oaxacan weavers on
the project—an artisanal
ode to the most ethereal
of accessories.
40
When Pritzker-winning
Brazilian architect Oscar
Niemeyer needed furniture,
he turned to the designer
whose taste he most admired:
Joaquim Tenreiro. Much like his client, Tenreiro was a pioneer
in adapting the European modernist style to the climate of
Brazil. He focused on wicker and local hardwoods to create
pieces that were formal yet light, such as the cane and roxinho
wood chair, from 1960 (above). Famed across his homeland,
Tenreiro has remained surprisingly unknown abroad—though
that will change with a show of his work this month at R 20th
Century Design, in New York. Two powerful advocates of
his work have come together to create the exhibit and sale:
architect Annabelle Selldorf will design the installation, while
art dealer Gordon Veneklasen will curate it. One of Tenreiro’s
masterpieces is a three-legged chair with inlaid stripes in five
different woods. “It’s a totally impractical piece of furniture,
unstable and uncomfortable,” laughs Veneklasen, “but it’s very
special and unique.” r20thcentury.com —Mark Ellwood
WSJ. M AGA ZINE
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: BRIGIT ANDERSON; TENREIRO: PHOTOGRAPH BY SHERRY GRIFFIN/R 20TH CENTURY; COURTESY OF DIOR;
RAINBOW NIRVANA HOUNDSTOOTH, 2012, DYED WOOL, 214 X 247 INCHES, JASON MANDELLA, COURTESY OF DIOR
SCREEN IN
ROSE WOOD A ND
L ACQUERED
WOOD PA NEL S ,
196 5 .
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INTERIOR LIFE
1 - 800 - 853 - 59 58
MILAN’S DESIGN MAVEN
SULW H A SOO
CRE A M W I T H
RED GINSENG
E X T R AC T
Known for infusing artisanal handicrafts with Asian and African flourishes,
Italian design icon Paola Navone is taking to the world stage this fall. Her work
overseeing the interiors of lush new Como hotels in Phuket, Thailand, (opening
this month) and in Miami Beach (opening in December) comes on the heels of her
recent collaborations with two U.S. retail giants: a 20-piece bedroom line for
Anthropologie and a 140-item dinner set for Crate & Barrel. Even as she expands
her reach, the influence of her early days in Italy’s 1980s avant-garde design
circles is evident in her love of whimsical touches, loud colors and squiggly lines.
Below, she talks to Christopher Ross about hospitality and the value
of imperfection.
ON POINT YAMU BY COMO, PHUKET: “I don’t like hotels that are beautiful, and
then, when you wake up in the morning, you don’t know whether you’re in
Berlin or Fiji. Since we are in Thailand, we wanted to design a Thai environment. We produced a lot of the furniture in the country. We used a lot of woven
materials, ceramic and wood. There’s a lot of orange, referencing monks’ robes.
It feels very stylish, very today and informed by the savoir faire of the country.”
ON WHAT MAKES A GOOD HOTEL: “Location is important, but more important is
the hotel’s atmosphere. I want to feel at home in my mind, not just physically. I
want a place where I can work or do nothing or just
sleep—basically I want to feel like I’m in a cocoon.”
DOLCE DECOR
From top: Paola Navone;
her teacup and saucer for
Crate & Barrel; Nuvola
armchair for Gervasoni.
ON WORKING WITH CRATE & BARREL: “My first com-
ment to Crate & Barrel was that their shop was too
perfect. It’s all so organized—everything shown
in lines, by size, in columns. So our project was to
bring a little messiness and chaos to it.”
ON BEING A PIONEER OF SHABBY CHIC: “Shabby
things are thought of as imperfect, yet I promote
imperfection in my work. I don’t see it as meaning that something’s broken, but as a sign of
human identity.”
42
P ERRICONE
MD OV M W I T H
EGGSHEL L
MEMBR A NE
GI V ENCH Y
SERUM
W I T H BL ACK
A LGA E
THE BE AUT Y OF
BETTER SKIN
This season, the science of perfect
pores advances with three skin-care
launches—all with groundbreaking
ingredients poised to be the latest
buzzwords in beauty. For its new
serum, Givenchy has sourced fattyacid rich black algae and sap from the
depths of the ocean for its capacity
to strengthen cells’ ability to protect
against environmental damage, while
Dr. Nicholas Perricone has turned to
the collagen-regenerating powers of
eggshell membranes—harvested and
adapted for human cellular function for
the first time ever. And then there’s the
concentrated dose of youth-enhancing
red ginseng that Sulwhasoo is now
delivering to smile lines via a hydration-boosting hyaluronic acid-spiked
patch—much more of the moment than
mere fingertips. —Celia Ellenberg
From top: Sulwhasoo Microdeep Intensive
Filling Cream & Patch, $195, neimanmarcus
.com.; Perricone MD OVM (available Dec. 1),
$165, perriconemd.com; Givenchy Le Soin Noir
Sérum, $410, givenchybeauty.com.
WSJ. M AGA ZINE
POIS MOI COLLECTION
FROM TOP LEFT TO BOTTOM LEFT: COURTESY OF COMO HOTEL; COURTESY OF PAOLA NAVONE; COMO CUP AND SAUCER, PAOLA NAVONE COLLECTION
COURTESY OF CRATE AND BARREL; COURTESY OF PAOLA NAVONE; PHOTOGRAPHY BY F. MARTIN RAMIN. STYLING BY ANNE CARDENAS (BETTER SKIN)
HAUTE
HOSPITALITY
The Verandah room,
designed by Paola
Navone, of Como’s
new luxury hotel in
Phuket, Thailand—
one of two new hotel
projects from the
Italian designer.
ROBERTOCOIN.COM
wh at ’s ne ws
screen time
hIghs and lowe
watching hours of video—including unedited
interview footage—to get a sense of how JFK
spoke extemporaneously. Lowe was shocked
at the difference in cadence between his
formal speeches and his off-the-cuff conversational tone. “He didn’t speak to his friends in
the same way he said, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner,’ ”
says Lowe. “I worked very hard on the accent.
Also, the hair.”
For the last few years, Lowe has also
starred on the NBC sitcom Parks and
Recreation, playing the hilariously uptight,
obsessively fit and ceaselessly genial Chris
Traeger, a role he will walk away from after
this season. Of his departure, Lowe says,
“Leaving Parks and Recreation would be a lot
harder if I wasn’t going at the same time as
[costar] Rashida [Jones].”
Lowe has other irons in the fire, including
a follow-up to his best-selling Stories I Only
Tell My Friends: An Autobiography from 2011.
Slated for early next year, the sequel of sorts
is called Love Life. “Writing the first book was
the most rewarding experience of my life so
far,” says Lowe. “The second book gave me the
chance to include details from my life after
The West Wing and a few more salacious bits,
like my first time at the Playboy Mansion, back
when I was 19.” —Brekke Fletcher
on displ ay
good
materIal
The anonymous artists’ collective known
as Bruce High Quality Foundation has
opened a tuition-free art school, participated in a retrospective at the Brooklyn
Museum and hosted their own art fair: the
Brucennial. Vito Schnabel, who organized
the Brucennial, is co-curating a two-part
BHQF show alongside art advisor and
collector Mark Fletcher, opening November
8 in New York. BHQF will install a sculpture inspired by a monument of King George
III in Fletcher’s Washington Square showroom, while Schnabel’s gallery will exhibit
Play-Doh replicas of the 17,331 objects in
the Greek and Roman collection at the Met
(right). Says Schnabel, “They love to bring
together the high and low.” —Minju Pak
44
the new gstaad
The alpine enclave of Andermatt has been long overshadowed by
glossier Swiss resort towns like Gstaad and Verbier, but that
oversight will be corrected this December with the opening of the
Chedi Andermatt, a 106-room hotel set among nearly 350 acres—
part of a larger area development that will include chalets and an
18-hole golf course. Asian flourishes (a sushi and tempura bar)
accentuate the sumptuous feel of the estate, which boasts 200
fireplaces, a vast wine collection and a 26,000-square-foot spa.
Best of all, the ski slopes are guaranteed to be less crowded than
neighboring ones—at least for now. —Alicia Kirby
wsj. m aga zine
REFRESHINGLY TRANSPARENT
©2013 JetSuite® All Rights Reserved. All flights operated by JetSuite Air, FAA Air Carrier Certificate #9SUA667M.
the Candelabra and weren’t amazed
by Rob Lowe’s performance as Dr. Jack
Startz—the stretch-faced, squintyeyed plastic surgeon in Steven Soderbergh’s
Liberace biopic—you should sit down and
watch it again posthaste. Speaking from
L.A. recently, Lowe recalled the grotesquely
realistic scenes during which he performed
pseudo-surgeries: “It was just me and Steven,
a whole day on my feet, slicing up a prosthetic
Michael Douglas [who played Liberace]. Now
I could probably give you a really cheap facelift, if you wanted me to.”
Playing real people is often challenging for
actors, the fear being that their performance
might tip into cheap caricature, without
nuance or insight. But Lowe’s embodiment of
Dr. Startz—a famously dubious doctor-to-thestars—signals just how far this former 1980s
heartthrob has come as an actor.
This month, Lowe takes on his most
recognizable real-life role to date: playing
President John F. Kennedy in Killing Kennedy,
premiering on the National Geographic
Channel on November 10, about the assassination of the former president. To prepare, the
self-professed Kennedy fanatic did extensive
research, reading several biographies and
CLoCkwise from top Left: pauL wiLLoughby (rob Lowe) the bruCe high QuaLity foundation, the greek and roman CoLLeCtion of the metropoLitan museum of art: 2003. 407.7, 2nd Century
b.C. to 2nd Century a.d. - 2013 C.e., pLay-doh on steeL, 63 x 27 x 14 inChes, Courtesy of the artist and vito sChnabeL
I
f you saw this year’s HBO film Behind
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ARGUS PLATINUM RATED
fashion & design forecast
MARKET REPORT.
november 2013
Clean
sweep
Aura
a new dawn of color
Things aren’t so black and
white when a dash of pink is added
to otherwise simple pairings.
photography by Jennifer Livingston
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50
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the exchange.
leading the conversation
november 2013
8:00 a.m.
Parker’s explosively cluttered
office—which includes items
ranging from Jimi Hendrix’s
Fender Stratocaster to Olympic sprinter Michael Johnson’s
gold shoes—reflects the CEO’s
eclectic design sensibility.
tr acked
MARK PARKER
Nike’s top executive combines technical savvy with a sophisticated aesthetic eye.
BY CHRISTOPHER ROSS PHOTOGRAPHY BY MICHAEL FRIBERG
W
Willem de Kooning
Ten Paintings, 1983–1985
ERE YOU TO RUN into Mark Parker,
Nike’s CEO, on the company’s pristine
Beaverton, Oregon, campus, you might
mistake him for one of the 21 PhDs who
work in the athletic powerhouse’s top-secret research
lab. Creative-casual duds (blazer, polo, jeans, Nike
Roshe sneakers) and a professorial bearing (quiet
intonation, short beard, slight stoop) make it difficult
to square this somewhat unassuming figure with his
position as the fourth-highest-paid head executive in
the country. A fanatical devotion to sneaker design
and a technical fluency rare among CEOs propelled
the 58-year-old Nike lifer to the top perch of the footwear and apparel giant, which has reached annual
revenues of $24 billion, up 60 percent since he was
appointed in 2006. “Have you heard the Japanese
word otaku?” he muses. “It means being deeply
wsj. m aga zine
obsessed by the details of something. I relate to that.”
As a track star at Penn State (and an early tester for
the magazine Runner’s World) who put in double-digit
mileage daily, he used to tinker with his own running
shoes, and it was this right-brained DIY sensibility that landed him at Nike’s R&D lab in Exeter, New
Hampshire, in 1979 as a young designer. He went on to
work with the late Nike cofounder Bill Bowerman, the
hard-edged University of Oregon track coach whose
motivational quotes now adorn the walls of Nike
stores. Fast forward 34 years later, and Parker is still
directly involved in shoe construction, walking into
meetings holding his Moleskine graph-paper notebook filled with doodles and wearing new prototypes
on his feet—to the great alarm of his minders, charged
with keeping said prototypes under wraps.
Parker has an uncanny eye for good design, whether
it’s the two recent megahits he green-lit at Nike—the
ultralight Flyknit sneakers and the chic body-datagathering FuelBand—or the works of surrealist
painter Mark Ryden, whom he counts as a friend and
whose pieces he collects. Parker’s cutting-edge sensibility is in part derived from his social network of art
and music luminaries—which includes Kanye West
and artist Tom Sachs—whose members congregate at
salon-like gatherings he occasionally throws. As he
looks forward to the 2014 Olympics and World Cup
(Nike will be producing shoe models and apparel that
will be used by the athletes), his greatest advantage
may be his ability to synthesize the input of disparate
influences, from lab engineers to downtown artists.
And beneath it all, he can still hear the old refrain his
former boss, Bowerman, challenged young designers
with: “Is that the best you can do?” >
55
t r ack ed
t he e xch a nge
2
8:30
a.m.
Grabbing a coffee
hours
shortly after arriving at the office.
An early riser, he’s been up since
five and has already worked out.
Amount of time he worked out that morning,
primarily weight-lifting and spinning.
He exercises two hours a day four times a
week, and one hour a day on the other three.
8,000
pieces
in Parker’s art collection, which includes
work by Andy Warhol. He prefers to
visit artists’ studios, instead of going
to galleries.
11:38
a.m.
Mobbed on campus
1
lifelike bust
by a group taking a tour. Parker is a celebrity in Asia, where he is often recognized
on sight and asked to pose for photographs.
of Abraham Lincoln in Parker’s office, made
from the president’s death mask. He
considers Lincoln his model for leadership.
10:11
a.m.
A morning
check-in meeting
with brand president
Trevor Edwards. Left:
One of Parker’s drawings.
His hand conceals a yetunreleased new design.
Above: An early Nike shoe
model in Parker’s office.
15:32.5
The world record
for women’s 5,000 meters at the National
Track Championships, set by Parker’s wife,
Kathy, in 1978. It’s since been broken.
$500
Amount Phil Knight
and his former coach, Bill Bowerman,
each pledged when they founded Nike, then
called Blue Ribbon Sports, in 1964.
2
dogs
in the Parker household: a Chihuahua
and a mixed-breed pooch rescued from
Hurricane Katrina.
200
meters
Distance the first prototype of Flyknit
sneakers traveled before falling apart.
Over 100 prototypes later, they nailed it.
12:15
p.m.
Reviewing
shoe fabrics
in Nike’s materials library
with Hannah Jones, vice
president of sustainable
business and innovation. Nike has tested the
environmental impact of
70,000 different fabrics.
56
3
kids
in the Parker family: Jennifer, 30,
Megan, 27, and Matthew, 25.
It’s not the high-grown arabica. Or our deep connections with farmers. Or the extreme
care we use to sort and select our beans. It’s that we do all these things together, all the time.
Because we know exceptional coffee can only come from exceptional coffee beans.
$35.2M
Parker’s compensation
in 2012, up from $11 million in 2011.
wsj. m aga zine
© 2013 Starbucks Coffee Company. All rights reserved.
t r ack ed
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$800
Cost of the used Winnebago
3:32 p.m.
Discussing the cultish,
limited-edition HTM line
Nike converted into an innovation office.
Bringing the space up to building codes cost
many, many multiples of this.
with legendary designer Tinker Hatfield
(creator of the best-known Air Jordan
models) in the Winnebago–turned–
conference room. H stands for Hiroshi
Fujiwara, the other series’ designer,
T for Tinker, M for Mark.
2:59
Time set on the clocks
in the Winnebago meeting room, said to be
a reference to the sub-three-hour marathon.
85
motion-sensor detectors
glued onto Olympic decathlete Ashton
Eaton’s body in the Nike Sports Research
Lab. Digital renderings of his form can
be used to create physical models of his
body with a 3-D printer.
150
emails received
20 sent.
$90,300
Winning eBay bid
for limited-edition Nike Air Yeezy II
sneakers, designed by Kanye West, one of the
highest prices paid for a pair of Nike shoes.
2:05 p.m.
In the research lab,
Nike-sponsored Olympic
decathlete Ashton Eaton practices his start off the blocks,
as Parker—and motion-sensor
cameras—look on.
6:55
p.m.
Taking off
to stop by Portland’s Nike store
before heading home. He has dinner
(salmon and rice) with his wife at
8 p.m., walks the dogs, watches the
news and is in bed by 11:30 p.m.
30
calls received
10 made.
250
acres
make up Nike’s campus, which includes
soccer and track fields, swimming
pools, basketball courts, gyms, saunas
and a Japanese garden.
500
total models
5:20
p.m.
Photo op
with Nike employees competing in that weekend’s
Hood to Coast event, the
largest relay in the world,
in which teams of 12 runners cover 199 miles.
58
made of the 2003 BMW Alpina Z8. Parker
drives one to and from work that day.
6’
4
”
Parker’s height
Among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies,
roughly 58% are six feet or taller,
according to one study—only about 14.5%
of all U.S. men are this tall.
wsj. m aga zine
t he e xch a nge
up starts
click, BiD, collecT
Acquiring a pedigreed piece of art used to be the cloistered
domain of dealers and auction houses. But now these three
companies are seeking to revolutionize the centuries-old business
by making art as easy to buy online as a pair of shoes.
A
few years ago, the British-born auctioneer Alexander Gilkes was hatching a plan
with Aditya Julka, a biotech entrepreneur,
to launch an online contemporary art auction company. They envisioned the company—which
they dubbed Paddle8—as a luxury site that would
revolutionize the art market the way Net-a-Porter did
for fashion retail, and sought the advice of a Harvard
Business School professor to assess their theory. After
hearing them out, the professor marched over to his
desk and promptly wrote a check for $50,000. “Now
there’s no excuse,” he told them. “Go get started.”
Since then, tech start-ups specializing in art sales
have raked in millions in funding, collaborated with
top galleries, auction houses and art fairs, thrown
glitzy parties—and forced skeptics to reconsider their
position. Paddle8, which Gilkes and Julka launched in
2011, has tripled its base of bidders in the last year
and scored $10 million in backing from investors
including an owner of Chanel (through the investment firm Mousse Partners), the venture capital firm
Founder Collective (which has funded BuzzFeed and
Uber), artist Damien Hirst and the Russian billionaire
Vladimir Yevtushenkov. Its high-society connections are also garnering buzz: British royal Princess
Eugenie is joining its business development team
this fall. Its rivals include Artsy, an online art platform officially launched last year, which has attracted
high-powered angels such as Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt and Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey.
Artsy, which matches buyers with more than 30,000
artworks for sale based on users’ past preferences,
recently unveiled an app that allows people to buy art
from their smartphones. Meanwhile, Artspace, a twoyear-old direct-sales company, sells artworks priced
anywhere from $50 to more than $2 million and has
raised $13 million from investors to date.
All three sites are attempting to democratize a more
than 200-year-old industry whose secretive mores and
nuanced relationships have made it opaque to outsiders. They offer a curated selection of art, art advisory
services and tools to discover new work, drawing not
just established collectors but neophytes who have felt
60
excluded from the market. There’s significant money
to be earned: Online sales are still a fraction of an
estimated $56 billion global art market, but a recent
report by Hiscox projected those sales would rise from
$870 million last year to $2.1 billion by 2017.
“The arts scene is globalizing, so the feeling is
that people can’t afford to not engage with an online
platform, as opposed to three or four years ago,” says
Russian collector Dasha Zhukova, an investor who
became Artsy’s creative director last year.
Her bullishness is echoed by Gilkes. “The art world
is catching up with the eBay generation,” says the
34-year-old Eton graduate. The idea for Paddle8 arose
when Gilkes was working as an auctioneer at New
York auction house Phillips de Pury (now Phillips).
While leading benefit sales, he noticed nonprofits were
focused on selling gala tickets rather than choice artworks that would be auctioned at such events. “These
were gold mines for acquiring works by blue-chip
artists, and it was the same 200 people who were getting access to these works,” he says. In 2010, he was
introduced to Julka, the 32-year-old cofounder of two
bio-tech companies who was interested in building
his own art collection. By the end of that year, Gilkes
quit his job to begin developing the company full time,
while Julka tackled the legal and business side.
Their plan was simple: Let the auction houses chase
seven-figure trophies; they would stake out works
priced at less than $100,000, including smaller pieces
by brand names like Cindy Sherman and Jeff Koons.
Such works are less popular at brick-and-mortar auctions because they don’t sell for enough to make the
associated costs worthwhile—even a less expensive
piece must travel to an auction house for display, racking up large shipping and insurance bills. Paddle8
doesn’t incur such costs, since all of the works are
shown online. (After the sale, a third party ships the
pieces directly from a storage facility to the buyer.)
Such tactics have helped attract backers. David
Frankel, managing partner of Founder Collective, bet
on the company because it is working around the margins of the big auction houses. “Strategically, do you
want to become Sotheby’s online? The answer is no.” >
PADDLE8
adit ya julk a & alex ander gilkes
Julka, top left, and gilkes launched their
online auction site in 2011. since then, they
have secured $10 million in backing from
sources including artist damien hirst and
an owner of chanel. works sold through
paddle8 include an untitled cindy sherman
piece, middle, which went for its estimate
of $70,000 and hirst’s 2010 woodcut
Methionine, bottom.
wsj. m aga zine
portrait by weston wells, courtesy paddle8; cindy sherman, Untitled, 2010/2012. color photograph, 34.75 in x 24 in. courtesy of the artist and metro pictures, ny.
© 2013 damien hirst, Methionine, 2010. color woodcut, 24.5 in x 32 in.
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carter cleveland & sebastian cwilich
cwilich, far left, joined founder cleveland
to run the website. they count dealer larry
gagosian and twitter cofounder Jack dorsey
as investors and dasha Zhukova as creative
director. mario testino’s portrait of Kate
moss, middle, sold through artsy, as did
simen Johan’s untitled work, near left.
embarrassed to talk about the fact that we do parties
at all; that’s what start-ups do right before they fail,”
says Cleveland, who nevertheless says the events are
critical to business. “I found out the hard way, a great
product and a great technology is not enough. You
need to have a brand that people believe in and trust.”
As start-ups try to distinguish themselves from
their rivals, the jockeying for name recognition is getting intense. Artspace is staking a claim on speedy
sales: While other art sites often require users to wait
for an auction or contact a representative to buy a
work, everything on the site is available immediately.
Customers can drop a $2.5 million Cy Twombly or a
$50 dead chicken portrait in their cart and check out.
“You just click and buy it,” says art patron Chris Vroom,
who cofounded Artspace with former DailyCandy
chief operating officer Catherine Levene. Their site
features work from an international roster of galleries
and museums. One Australian customer, for example,
recently purchased works from London’s White Cube
gallery, New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art
and the Munich publisher Schellmann Art.
Earlier this year, Artspace drew a round of
backing from investors including Clear Channel
Communications CEO Bob Pittman and Staples
founder and former chief executive Tom Stemberg.
Maria Baibakova, a Russian heiress and contemporary
art collector, was recently named strategic director.
“Artspace benefits both the supply and demand sides
of the art world, creating new sources of revenue and
enabling more people to buy contemporary art,” says
Baibakova, who was drawn to the Artspace model,
which is also commission-based.
Now established companies are trying to get in on
the business: Christie’s will hold at least 50 onlineonly auctions this year, with nearly half of all online
buyers describing themselves as first-time customers and some of their purchases falling right in the
$10,000 sweet spot favored by the start-ups. “My feeling is that we will see players come in and out of the
market rapidly over the next two years, as this relatively new online marketplace evolves,” says Steven
Murphy, chief executive of Christie’s International.
Amazon, which recently launched an art store, is
relying on brand recognition to draw clients. The company entices member galleries—so far there are more
than 180 of them—with overnight access to Amazon’s
more than 200 million customers worldwide.
Some art executives predict the herd of new online
art collectors will thin. “At least 50 percent of them
will go away,” says Jacob Pabst, CEO of Artnet, a longstanding online art presence, which has had a bumpy
track record with auctions. Of art start-ups generally, he adds: “There are questionable business plans,
there’s a lot of money going into those companies, and
sometimes I ask myself if it’s not too much.”
But these digital newcomers believe they’re finally
cracking the code to selling art. At Artsy, pitches to
investors no longer spiral into philosophical debates
over whether collectors would ever surf the web for a
masterpiece. “We don’t field that question anymore,”
says Cleveland. “It’s no longer really an issue.” •
courtesy of artsy; mario testino, Kate Moss, 2008 30 x 24 inch, pigment print courtesy of danZiger gallery; simen Johan from the series Until the KingdoM CoMes
Untitled #172, 2013 digital c-print © simen Johan, courtesy yossi milo gallery, new yorK; sophie elgort courtesy of artspace.com; John chamberlain Bellonion 2005
sculpture, 13 x 18 x 15.5 in. courtesy of artspace deborah Kass enoUgh already 2012 neon sculpture, 18.5 x 14 in. courtesy of artspace
ARTSY
Artsy founder Carter Cleveland launched his
company after realizing there was no website cataloguing images of all the art in the world. “I thought
that was a weird gap on the Internet,” says 27-yearold Cleveland, who was a computer science major at
Princeton. In 2008, he began developing the idea while
still an undergrad, initially as an educational project.
He turned his idea commercial after graduation, with
the involvement of investors like art dealer Larry
Gagosian. (Wendi Murdoch was also an early investor.)
The site is organized around the Art Genome Project,
a collaboration between art historians and computer
scientists who map connections between works of art.
Based on the buying history of Artsy users, the site
recommends new works and charges a commission for
any resulting sales. Artsy also began charging a subscription fee on new galleries joining the site.
Some backers, like Earthlink and Boingo founder
Sky Dayton, believe Artsy will expand the restricted
art market: “I think it can be 10 times bigger than it is
today,” he says. One way to do that is the iPhone app,
which allows users to buy works of art mostly priced
under $10,000. When Hugh Jackman tweeted about it,
the app page logged 4,000 visitors in under an hour.
Celebrity endorsements like that have proven to be
such effective marketing that Artsy frequently throws
splashy events to attract the attention of collectors:
a beachside barbecue sponsored by Chanel during
Art Basel in Miami Beach last year drew MoMA PS1
director Klaus Biesenbach and Los Angeles County
Museum of Art director Michael Govan. “I’m always
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Architizer and WSJ. Magazine presented the inaugural
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Mikheil Saakashvili
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Atmosphere
ARTSPAcE
chris vroom & catherine levene
Vroom, near right, met levene at the 2010
webby awards when they were seated
together. they launched their direct-sales
website in 2011 and have raised $13 million in
funding. works that have sold through the site
include pricier pieces like John chamberlain’s
2005 sculpture, middle, which went for
$510,000, and a more affordable deborah Kass
sculpture, which sold for $18,000, far right.
62
Benjamin Prosky, Xavier Nolot
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Follow us @WSJnoted
Charles Renfro, Bjarke Ingels
Joshua David, Robert Hammond
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t he e xch a nge
bre ak through
supercharged
A young Croatian engineer built the fastest electric car in the world. Now his innovative
designs are being licensed by manufacturers building the next generation of supercars.
BY andY Isaacson
M
ate Rimac guides the Concept One—a
prototype electric sports car he first
designed when he was 21 years old—onto
a stretch of road in Sveta Nedelja, a suburb west of Zagreb. The cherry-red vehicle is low, sleek
and hardly subtle. Stepping gently on the accelerator,
Rimac propels the car to 60 mph in less than three seconds. Jerking the steering wheel, he screeches through
a roundabout before returning us to the parking lot
outside Rimac Automobili—the Croatian engineer’s
automotive start-up—where he flings the car into a
tight circle, pinning me hard against my seat.
“I’m not showing off,” says Rimac through a haze of
tire smoke. “I want to show you that the technology is
reliable enough to do crazy stuff with an electric car.
It’s not just something that looks pretty at an auto
show. We can build it today. We just need scale.”
Unofficially, the Concept One is the world’s fastest
accelerating electric automobile. The car spreads 1,000
hp across four motors—one for each wheel. As the car
turns a right corner, the front right wheel can break for
64
a fraction of a second while the rear wheel generates
power. It’s an innovation that Rimac, now 25, points to
as the “kind of stuff you can’t do with an engine,” and
which defines the Concept One, in his self-confident
estimation, as “the sports car of the 21st century.”
The official Guinness records for the world’s fastest accelerating electric automobile, which hang on
the wall of the company’s airy white-tiled showroom,
belong to a converted 1984 E30 BMW parked in the
adjacent shop. Rimac uses the boxy green vehicle as a
“test mule” for technologies his company develops. He
built that car when he was 19. At the time, Rimac had
been winning international competitions for an electronic glove he devised in high school that functions as
a keyboard and mouse, and came up with an idea for a
car mirror system that eliminated blind spots.
After licensing his mirror invention to a European
automotive supplier (Rimac is bound by an agreement
not to disclose its name), by 2008 he’d earned enough
money to buy the used BMW, which he then began
entering into “drifting” competitions (a motor sport
in which the car goes into a controlled skid). When
the engine blew up after a few races, Rimac decided
to marry his passion for cars and electronics. He’d
always revered Nikola Tesla, the Croatian-born inventor and electrical engineer, and it occurred to Rimac
that an electric motor—a source of instant power, free
of cumbersome spark plugs and oil filters—would yield
a superior sports car. “It wasn’t about making the car
environmentally friendly,” he says. “The performance
is just much better.”
It took Rimac six months to convert the BMW into
an electric car, using off-the-shelf components. Back
at the Croatian racetrack, he was mocked. “What are
you doing with this washing machine? Can I charge my
phone with it?” competitors joked. Something always
broke after each race, but Rimac kept tinkering,
designing all the parts himself. The car eventually
became “quick enough to whoop a Tesla in a street
race,” as one auto blog reported. By 2010, Rimac’s DIY
vehicle was trouncing even gasoline-powered cars.
“At that point, it started to get serious,” Rimac tells
previous page: photography by andy isaacson; this page: courtesy of rimac
test DRIVe
mate rimac in his
showroom with the
concept one.
me. A Croatian businessman approached him on behalf
of Abu Dhabi’s royal family. They wanted to see a prospectus. “They said, ‘We want two cars,’ ” he recalls. “I
was like, ‘We’re just a couple guys in a garage.’ ” He set
to work on the Concept One.
What began as a hobby then turned, almost by
accident, into a business. Today, Rimac Automobili
employs 22 people, mostly Croatian engineers (the
one non-Croatian employee, the company’s head of
sales, came from Tesla Motors). Thinking it would be
wise to hire someone with actual car-making experience, Rimac Automobili initially brought in an
engineer from BMW. But his high salary, and the specialization he’d grown accustomed to from working in
the car industry, were not a great fit for the company’s
start-up culture, where the guy who makes the brakes
also orders the parts for it.
“It was a learning curve—we made mistakes,”
Rimac admits. “But eventually I realized we were
doing something right: developing cars for a lot less
money than big car manufacturers and managing to
beat them in many fields. We have an advantage starting with a blank sheet of paper. There’s no heritage
that we have to incorporate into the design.”
For the first year, Rimac, then 22, hobbled along
on a shoestring, helped by some seed money from his
father—a shopping-center developer—and the promise of investment from Abu Dhabi. “I sold everything
I had just to pay the rent,” he recalls. In a superstitious mood, Rimac and his girlfriend, Monika Mikac,
the company’s head of public relations, concocted a
reverse incentive: They vowed to swear off two of their
biggest vices—chocolate and potato chips—for an
entire year if the company finished a prototype for the
Concept One by the 2011 Frankfurt Motor Show.
When the Concept One debuted in Germany, the
industry took notice: The all-wheel-drive vehicle
reaches a maximum speed of 190 mph and boasts an
average range of 150 miles on a single charge. The
power-to-weight ratio is on par with a Formula One
engine. Rimac replaced conventional mirrors with
cameras, linked by fiber-optic cables, and added a few
other luxury flourishes, like self-closing doors.
Most of the components—almost everything but
the battery cells and air bags—are developed inhouse. Rather than use molds to make the wheels or
pedals, as is typical in mass production, two large
milling machines cut parts out of solid aluminum
blocks, a costly process that enables the company to
adapt quickly to design changes. “Only Formula One
cars or spaceships are made this way,” Rimac explains.
“Nikola Tesla had to go to America to be successful. I
wanted to stay here to give young Croatians a chance
to work on something interesting.”
With only one complete commercial vehicle sold to
a European car manufacturer, the company was desperate for revenue. What sustains Rimac Automobili
is designing and producing various components—
electric power trains or battery management
systems—for other automotive companies. Recently,
Applus Idiada, an automotive engineering company in
Spain, commissioned an electric supercar made with
the windows and roof of the Concept One but built to
different specifications. Rimac has sold batteries to a
“iF bmw wants to
DeVeLoP a suPercar
with an eLectric
Power train, the
best one on the
market is From us.”
–mate rimac
mIssIon contRol
the interior of the
concept one features
an entertainment/
gps system (above
left) and a digital
dashboard (left)
that displays vehicle
information via
animated graphics
(above right).
company that’s building levitating trains, and he hints
at a breakthrough in the works for “the next generation of braking systems.
“We can design and build prototypes fast and
inexpensively, and not just for electric cars. We make
chassis, electric parts, molds—all under one roof. But
if BMW wants to develop a supercar with an electric
power train, the best one on the market is from us,”
Rimac says. “Our technology could end up in a highvolume product under a different brand. If we had
sufficient funding, we probably wouldn’t do this kind
of stuff. It’s a simple matter of survival. Enzo Ferrari
started to make road cars just to finance his race
cars—he did it to pay the bills.”
Building a show car to drive business to its engineering services is a strategy that many auto companies
adopt, explains Christoph Stuermer, an industry analyst with IHS Automotive in Frankfurt. “Part of Tesla’s
business plan is to license out other technologies.
There are similarities there,” says Stuermer.
Looking ahead, Rimac intends to ramp up
production of the Concept One, release a new model
every two to three years and keep slashing the sticker
price. (The car currently lists for $1 million.) He views
his target customer as more of a Bugatti or Ferrari
enthusiast, rather than a Tesla driver. Indeed, Rimac
brushes off comparisons with Tesla, not just because
he believes his company occupies a different market, but because Tesla’s $465 million in federal loans
places the company on an unequal playing field.
Although Rimac Automobili has carved out novel
revenue streams, questions over its financing still dog
the company. “The government won’t help us, banks
won’t give us loans and there aren’t foreign investors
in this region,” Rimac says. This hurdle is one shared
by scores of other electric automobile upstarts operating out of garages and universities: Capital is scarce.
Still, Rimac may be able to get by producing a handful of Concept Ones a year, appealing to that niche of
customer that manages to keep high-performance
automakers like the Italian supercar manufacturer
Pagani afloat. For now, he can keep eating chocolate. •
wsj. m aga zine
t he e xch a nge
de sign
A lighT Touch
Michael Anastassiades has earned
mid-career acclaim for his elegantly
minimal designs with one simple rule:
Never be a slave to fashion.
BY Jen Renzi
balancinG act
clockwise from far
left: the cyprus-born
designer; the string light
for flos, with its superlong cord; his ic lighting
collection for flos,
which debuts in march;
a tip of the tongue lamp;
his meditation stool in
statuary marble.
66
clockwise from far left: Jasper fry; string light for flos, courtesy of michael anastassiades; Jasper fry; tip of
the tongue, courtesy of michael anastassaiades; meditation stool, courtesy of michael anastassaiades
all aGlOW a single angle lighting fixture by
michael anastassiades suspends an opaline-glass
sphere on a polished brass stem.
courtesy of michael anastassiades
T
wo decades into his lauded career,
London-based product designer Michael
Anastassiades has found himself in the
odd position of becoming a breakout star.
In September, the 46-year-old designer mounted a
site-specific installation at the Berlin concept store
Andreas Murkudis. His ethereal Mobile Chandeliers
debut this month at Ralph Pucci’s New York and Los
Angeles showrooms, while an exhibition of his work
opens soon at the Point Centre for Contemporary
Art in his native Cyprus. And after years of eschewing collaborations with major manufacturers in
his favored medium—lighting—he introduced two
buzzed-about collections with Italian company Flos
at the Milan furniture fair this spring. All of which
is why he’s been the object of the kind of fervor typically reserved for neophytes, not cult figures whose
clients include fellow British heavyweights like John
Pawson, David Chipperfield and Ilse Crawford.
Newfound attention aside, Anastassiades has
always been concerned with staying power, both
professionally and aesthetically. His mission is to
create designs that withstand the vicissitudes of
fashion. “I’m not interested in making props,” says
the designer, whose Mediterranean warmth is tempered by a Zen calm (it’s unsurprising to discover
that he moonlighted as a yoga instructor for 10 years).
His pieces are at once stridently contemporary and
timeless—so reductive as to look like abstract studies in materiality. Hemispherical Meditation Stools in
statuary marble have the exalted bearing of fine-art
objects; his cheeky Tip of the Tongue lamp balances an
opaline-glass sphere on the edge of a satin-finish brass
cylinder, as if about to roll off; while his Beauty Mirror
is a fluid droplet of gold-plated stainless steel, polished to a reflective sheen. “My design language is to
eliminate, removing all the excess to expose the idea,
so that it comes out in the strongest possible way,”
Anastassiades says. “By using the inherent quality of
the material, you have a greater chance of not creating
a pop item.”
With lighting, there’s the added complication of
devising something that looks as good switched off as
it does on. “I don’t think about lighting as a physical
object so much. It has to work in a different dimension,”
Anastassiades explains. His fixtures often seem integral to their surroundings—take the String series for
Flos. The design embodies many of Anastassiades’s signatures, including an elemental form whose apparent
simplicity belies complex engineering. A spare LED-lit
glass globe or triangular pendant levitates from a long
black cord, the span of which allows it to be strung
from wall to wall to ceiling in any configuration. “It was
challenging technologically, figuring out how to transfer the current along an endless length of extremely
thin cable without losing power,” he says. (He credits
Flos with solving that technical conundrum.)
The String light is both high-concept—the cord itself
becomes an expressive gesture, drawing calligraphic
lines in the air—and practical, enabling overhead illumination in rooms lacking a ceiling conduit. Indeed,
even his most sculptural creations are born of function. “I’ve designed many pieces purely out of need,
things I couldn’t find for my own home,” he says.
That home, a terraced brick building in London’s
Waterloo district, is a working laboratory—one he’s
spent the past 15 years gut-renovating into a minimalist modern haven, with occasional assistance
from Belgian architect Wim de Mul. Most recently he
converted the street-front section of his ground-floor
studio into a little shop, screened by an enigmatic
window vignette. It’s open by appointment only, but
anyone intrepid enough to find the discreetly placed
doorbell will likely be buzzed in. “It has become a place
where clients can experience the products in context
and gain insight into the process behind the design,”
he says. “It’s also become a platform to showcase
experiments that I’m working on at a particular time.” Anastassiades moved into the space shortly after
establishing his practice in 1994. He entered the
design world somewhat through the back door. As a
teen, he worked as an assistant in artists’ studios near
Nicosia, where he grew up, and then moved to London
to study civil engineering at the Imperial College.
After obtaining a master’s degree in industrial design
from the city’s prestigious Royal College of Art, he had
a tough time breaking into the profession. “I was fed
up with knocking on doors, with trying to fit within
the system,” Anastassiades recalls. Becoming his own
manufacturer “was the only way to maintain creative
flow. I didn’t want to just leave my designs on paper.”
Like a one-man band, he conceives, develops, produces, distributes and retails his line of poetically
minimalist luminaries and accessories, sold through
his website as well as prestigious showrooms like
Matter, Luminaire and Nilufar. Although he initially
relied on local artisans to fabricate components, in
2007 he began outsourcing globally to keep pieces
as affordable as possible. It took him two years to
set up a network of family-run workshops capable
of producing handiwork to his exacting standards:
marble sculptors in Italy; glassblowers in the Czech
Republic; and metalworkers in India.
Anastassiades’s business model is something of
an anomaly in the industry, which tends to favor two
extremes: licensing designs to large manufacturers,
who oversee the minutiae of production; or making
pieces entirely by hand in one’s own studio, which generally limits production to small editions with prices to
match. Spearheading his own production has offered
myriad benefits. “Not having to fit within a certain
box, you really have to discover who you are,” he says.
“It allowed my work to mature and for me to grow the
business in a responsible way.” It also permitted him to
balance commercial pursuits—including products for
Puiforcat, Rosenthal, Lobmeyr and Swarovski—with
more experimental exercises: His conceptual pieces
are part of the permanent collections of the Museum of
Modern Art and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum;
he’s envisioned runway shows for avant-garde fashion
designer Hussein Chalayan; and he’s mounted site-specific installations at the Hagia Sophia, Vienna’s MAK
Museum of Applied Arts and Swedish design institution Svenskt Tenn.
Most importantly to Anastassiades, making his
own work has allowed him to keep a close eye on
quality and craftsmanship. He still personally signs
off on every piece, which is no small task; last year
alone he produced some 1,000 Ball Lights, his best
seller, which retail for about $800. And he collaborates closely with his artisans to develop and refine
the finishes for which he is renowned: laboriously
rendered patinas that are the result of a human
touch yet have a precision and uniformity that seems
almost machine-made. “Fine detailing is crucial; we
pay great attention even to parts that aren’t visible,”
Anastassiades explains. “The finish has to be right—
even if viewed in absolute darkness.” •
wsj. m aga zine
LUCKY
GUYS
SUPER TROOPERS
With their identities hidden
under trademark helmets,
this year’s Entertainment
Innovators, Guy-Manuel de
Homem-Christo, left, and
Thomas Bangalter of Daft
Punk, happily leave the
modeling to Gisele Bündchen.
On Bündchen: Gaultier
Paris blouse and stockings,
Gianvito Rossi pump and
Harry Winston bracelet. On
Daft Punk: Saint Laurent by
Hedi Slimane tuxedos.
WW1 RÉGULATEUR Pink Gold · Limited Edition to 99 pieces · www.bellross.com
For details see Sources,
page 110.
ENTERTAINMENT INNOVATOR
DAFT
PUNK
2013
With the runaway success of their fourth studio
album, Random Access Memories, and the
inescapable “Get Lucky,” the ever-evolving robot
duo has made 2013 their knockout year.
By Brian raftery
PHOtOGraPHy By terry riCHarDSOn
StyLinG By GeOrGe COrtina
70
O
n some days this summer, the robots
would rise, get into their cars and pull
onto Sunset Boulevard or Melrose
Avenue—streets that, with their sunsloshed vistas and waving palms,
seem engineered for windows-down,
volume-up music listening. Yet no matter what radio
station they turned to, the robots were greeted by the
same song, one they recognized right away. There was
the supple, shoulder-lifting guitar lick; that sturdy,
urging drumbeat; and the aerial chorus that functions as a brag, a mission statement or
both: We’re up all night to get lucky. And
though Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel
de Homem-Christo—the two French musicians better known as the robo-attired duo
Daft Punk—usually make a point of never
listening to their past creations, they’d
always let the music play. Despite having
lived with the song for more than a year,
even they weren’t sick of “Get Lucky.”
“It’s an unexpected, simple, very cool
surprise,” says de Homem-Christo. “Seeing
the next car is listening to it, and people are
nodding. Or the other day, at a restaurant,
seeing kids and mothers having a birthday
party, and they’re all dancing. I know it
can be annoying, having it everywhere like
that, but it seems to have spread.”
It’s a midsummer afternoon, and Bangalter and
de Homem-Christo are sitting in a control room at
Conway Recording Studios in Los Angeles, the city
that serves as their stateside headquarters. The space
is dominated by a gargantuan console teeming with
hundreds of buttons and knobs. It looks like the kind of
device that, were you to flip the wrong switch, would
accidentally launch a drone strike on Palm Springs.
A little over a year ago, the two men were working out of this room, overseeing the final mixes of
not only “Get Lucky”—a song so huge, it would sire
endless remixes and remakes—but also much of
Random Access Memories, their fourth studio album.
Bangalter and de Homem-Christo describe their creative process as “research and development,” and for
Random, they worked without deadlines or budgetary constraints, with the hope of capturing the scope
and sound of mammoth studio-crafted records from
the ’70s and early ’80s—a time when cost was not a
key consideration, and when a hit album had the same
reach and life span of a hit movie.
72
As they were finishing up, Bangalter says, “We had
a very strong sense of happiness. It was like a weird
fantasy: Let’s make a record like it’s the ’70s. But we
were very puzzled by the way it would clash with
today’s world.”
This is understandable, given that, on paper at
least, the album would seem like a potential disaster—
a record that found the duo turning away from the type
of sound that’s made Daft Punk one of the most memorable and unpredictable acts of the last 20 years. Ever
since their 1997 debut, Homework, Daft Punk’s been at
the vanguard of electronic music, creating one sample-jacking, endorphin-morphing hit after another.
And the group’s ultrarare, mega-elaborate live shows
helped set the standard for today’s lucrative, spectacle-driven electronic-dance music festivals.
On Random, though, Bangalter and de HomemChristo moved toward live instrumentation and a big
studio sound. And, after years of working largely on
their own, they brought in a raft of collaborators that ranged from strikingly
of-the-moment (Pharrell Williams) to blatantly anachronistic (Paul Williams, the
former Muppets collaborator and writer of
such Nixon-era classics as the Carpenters’
“We’ve Only Just Begun”).
The resulting album features not only
the lushly produced disco of “Get Lucky,”
but also a career-recapping spokenword history lesson from 73-year-old
Italian producer Giorgio Moroder; an
eight-minute power-ballad featuring
Paul Williams, a choir and a 65-person
orchestra; and a handful of downer synth
ballads that sound like they’re being performed by a GPS device that’s gone off
its Wellbutrin. Sonically and culturally, Random
resembles nothing else produced in 2013.
Yet it’s turned out to be the biggest album of the
group’s 20-year career, aided by a past-forward marketing campaign and, of course, the inescapable “Get
Lucky.” At a time when audiences for everything in the
mass-culture continuum—from summer blockbusters to top 10 TV shows—have fractured and dwindled,
“Get Lucky” proves that, every once in a while, a song
can transcend being merely an affable sing-along hit
and become an omnipotent force across all ages and
genders. It’s like “Hey Ya!” or “Crazy in Love”—a song
we’ll pretty much be hearing until we die.
This was, in some ways, Daft Punk’s hope all along.
Ever since the early ’90s, when they were teens in
Paris, Bangalter and de Homem-Christo have rarely
settled on living in one era at a time, instead interrogating the past, the present and the future all at
once. “When we first met,” says Bangalter, “we were
already listening to music that was 20, 30 years older,
or watching movies that were 50 or 60 years older.
I think that’s what we tried to do with Random. The
only objective was to create something that could
have a certain kind of timelessness.”
B
ecause they’ve taken great pains to
obscure their identities over the last
two decades—with goofy masks or
elaborately opaque robot helmets—a
somewhat tenuous mystique surrounds
the duo. Earlier this year, a photo of the
two men, taken during what appeared to have been a
booze-pong party at Columbia Records headquarters,
found its way onto Gawker and the Huffington Post.
The incident appears to have only mildly irked Daft
Punk, but not for the reasons you’d expect. “We didn’t
play beer pong,” Bangalter says, laughing. “I don’t
even know what beer pong is.”
As anyone who saw that photo knows, the members
of Daft Punk pretty much look like dudes who would
listen to Daft Punk. Bangalter, 38, is tall and lean, with
a light beard and an easy smile; on the day we meet,
he’s dressed in a gray Hüsker Dü T-shirt, light gray
jeans and slip-on sneakers, his hair hidden beneath
a blue-and-red Patagonia hat. De Homem-Christo,
39, has shoulder-length hair and heavier scruff and
is wearing white sneakers, tight black pants, a dark
T-shirt that says “Bad Attitude” and a wishbone pendant around his neck. He has a reputation for barely
talking in interviews, but after initially appearing to
doze off on the sofa, he becomes nearly as talkative as
his longtime friend and partner.
The two first met in 1987, as eighth-grade art kids
at Paris’s Lycée Carnot, where they were surrounded
by aspiring bankers (both come from creative backgrounds: de Homem-Christo’s parents ran an ad
agency, while Bangalter’s father was a successful
songwriter). It didn’t take long for them to find one
another. “[The school] was a factory for making businessmen,” says Bangalter. “Anybody who had a certain
aspiration for something creative, whether it’s movies or music or design, would stand out.” They struck
Robot JunioR
Gisele Bünchen with
two of the pop duo’s
children, playfully
dressed up like their
incognito fathers.
Valentino Haute
Couture dress, Azzedine
Alaïa belt, Gianvito
Rossi pump and
Wilfredo Rosado ring.
“ThE RObOTs
ARE VERy
METhOdIcAl,
buT AT ThE
sAME TIME VERy
sENsITIVE—NOT
IN A NEgATIVE
wAy, buT VERy
OpEN. ThEIR
MusIc Is AlwAys
IN cONsTANT
puRsuIT
Of fEElINg.”
—phARREll wIllIAMs
Jam SeSSion
Keep things simple
with a body-conscious
swimsuit by Lisa
Marie Fernandez with
Christian Louboutin
shoe and Bulgari
necklace, this page, or
pump up the volume
with a Giorgio Armani
Privé overcoat
and top, opposite.
up a conversation about film—The Lost Boys being
the first of many movies they’d watch and discuss
together. Later, they’d produce their own fanzine,
Banane Mécanique (Clockwork Banana), the first
issue of which featured a mash-up of the poster for
A Clockwork Orange and the cover of the album The
Velvet Underground & Nico.
And though Bangalter and de Homem-Christo both
obsessed over vintage acts such as the Doors and Jimi
Hendrix—and would spend hours at the library, looking at microfiche of old rock magazines—it would
take years for them to make music together. Their
first song was a short loop of drum machine and bass,
recorded at Bangalter’s home. “We were ripping off
this bass line, thinking we were doing something
extraordinary,” says de Homem-Christo now, smiling
at the memory.
Later, they’d form a ramshackle guitar band,
Darlin’, before immersing themselves in the growing rave movement, regrouping as Daft Punk and
releasing a series of singles, finally culminating in
Homework, which was recorded in Bangalter’s bedroom. It’s a buoyant, grabby debut, anchored by the
underwater thump of “Around the World” and the
prowling, glitchy bass of “Da Funk.” The album was
a critical hit, even in the states, and established Daft
Punk as madcap dance-floor alchemists.
It also earned them a reputation as reluctant semistars. When they’d play gigs, de Homem-Christo
would hide behind equipment or turn his back, Miles
Davis–style, to the audience. “I was too shy to be confronted by any kind of audience,” he says. “Going to the
blackboard at school was the worst torture.” To promote Homework, they wore goofy animal masks, kept
a safe distance from the press and didn’t
appear in videos, preferring surreal clips
directed by the likes of Spike Jonze and
Michel Gondry.
For 2001’s Discovery, Daft Punk
introduced a new look, in the form of
impenetrably sleek robot getups. They
also debuted a new sound: a mix of softrock haze, guitar-shredding rock and
meticulously
coordinated
goofiness.
The record yielded Daft Punk’s thenlongest-charting hit, “One More Time,” a
new millennium ode to unyielding good
times that, considering how the rest of
the decade turned out, now sounds equal
parts ebullient and poignant.
76
Daft Punk’s music would continue to mutate over
the coming years and albums, from the aggro Human
After All (2005) to the swelling, orchestra-aided Tron:
Legacy soundtrack (2010). With each new release, the
robot masks would undergo some new iteration. For
Bangalter and de Homem-Christo, the masks function as a way to ensure privacy: They like being able
to go out without being harassed, and they strive to
keep their personal lives as undocumented as possible
(neither cares to discuss his family, though both have
children, and Bangalter is married to French actress
Élodie Bouchez).
In later years, as the duo got more famous—their
legendary 2006–2007 tour found them playing gargantuan arenas—the helmets let them avoid all the
insincere glad-handling that comes with being recognized, especially in the music industry. “You feel it’s
not real when people are, like, petting your back all
the time,” says de Homem-Christo. But, perhaps most
importantly, being cloaked in head-to-toe
suits—the most striking iteration of which
was designed, with glittery sleekness, by
Saint Laurent’s Hedi Slimane—and voicealtering electronics grants the members
of Daft Punk the ability to disappear from
even themselves. “It allows you to forget
what you’ve done and what you are,” says
Bangalter. “For us, the idea of always starting from scratch is really interesting.”
It’s an ethos that goes all the way back
to their early days, right after they came
up with “Da Funk.” The track was such
a crowd-pleaser that Bangalter and de
Homem-Christo set out to make a soundalike sequel. It would have been an easy hit,
but the song was such an obvious unsatisfying self-homage, they decided not to release it. “That
was a big change of direction,” de Homem-Christo
says. “We said, ‘Let’s try something totally opposite,’
and from that day, we never did the same thing.”
B
angalter, quick and springy, is leading me around the room at Conway,
where they worked not only on
Random, but also on several tracks for
Kanye West’s Yeezus album. He shows
me a gorgeous Steinway piano in one
corner, and a booth where they oversaw the Gary
Glitter–gone–tribal drumbeats of West’s hit “Black
Skinhead.” In their early years, Bangalter and de
Homem-Christo preferred to do much of their work at
home studios, but Random opened them up to “stuff
we couldn’t really do at home,” says Bangalter, gesturing around a large recording area. “We were like,
Okay—clap—let’s experiment.”
Random began in earnest in 2008, when Bangalter
and de Homem-Christo moved their gear into a giant
studio and began playing around. Inspiration came
from Tron, which they were still in the midst of scoring, and which required them to work with a full
orchestra. Though they’d collaborated with other
musicians in the past—most notably on the 2007
West single “Stronger”—as Tron progressed, they
found themselves energized by the prospect of incubating a more open-ended creative community. They
started to see their role on Random less as musicians
and more as filmmakers, shepherding a large group
of disparately talented people and uniting them
behind a single vision.
So Bangalter and de Homem-Christo ditched their
samplers and began a years-long series of recording sessions, traveling to Los Angeles, Paris and New
York. As with any project they undertake, Bangalter
says, making an album “is so day-to-day. We don’t
have a road map or a master plan.”
Perhaps no track exemplifies their calculated
capriciousness better than “Get Lucky,” which took
more than a year to record. Bangalter and de HomemChristo had been working on the track since 2008, but
the song’s sparkling guitar lines weren’t in place until
they met with legendary guitarist and producer Nile
Rodgers. At first, the three men just talked.
“Their discussions with me were holistic discussions,” notes Rodgers, who provided “Get Lucky” with
its spiky backbone riff. “It was like, we’re treating this
record as if the Internet doesn’t exist. And I interpreted that as, we’re approaching this record the way
we approached records in the pre-digital era. Which
meant performances had to have a linear life: a beginning, a middle and an end. And those performances
had to be played pretty damn good.”
After some discussions about what the group was
trying to achieve, Rodgers took out his guitar and
started playing. The riff for “Get Lucky,” Rodgers
says, came “right there on the spot. When I first
started playing, it was a little too complicated. You
could see this look on Guy-Man’s face, which was not
Continued on page 110
ciRcuit bReakeR
Even a robot will warm
to the charms of a
Chanel Haute Couture
dress and skirt. On Daft
Punk (throughout):
Saint Laurent Stage
Wear by Hedi Slimane.
Model, Gisele
Bündchen; makeup,
Frank B; hair, Duffy;
manicure, Karen
Gutierrez.
For details see Sources,
page 110.
GOING MOBILE
D’Aloisio, who turns
18 this month, is
the mastermind
behind Summly, a
summarization app
that sold to Yahoo!
earlier this year for a
reported $30 million.
technology InnoVAtoR
NICK
D’ALOISIO
2013
When a Hong Kong billionaire emailed a London tech start-up
to inquire about investing, he didn’t realize its entire workforce
consisted of a single kid working in his bedroom. Meet the
18-year-old who became an overnight millionaire by inventing
an app that may revolutionize how we read on the go.
By Seth StevenSon
PhotoGRAPhy By dAvid BAiley
79
D
’aloisio began designing iPhone
apps nearly the moment the app store
opened in 2008. He was 12 years old,
working on a Mac in his bedroom in
the London district of Wimbledon.
Because he was too young, he signed
up for the Apple developer’s license using his father’s
name. He’d taken no formal computer science classes
80
“I’d neVeR hAd contAct fRom
An InVestoR. And now
heRe’s An emAIl supposedly
fRom A hong kong
bIllIonAIRe. It sounded
dodgy. I dIdn’t Respond.”
–nIck d’AloIsIo
BOY WONDER clockwise, from far left: D’Aloisio, age 13, working at his laptop;
appearing on the Today show in march, after the Yahoo! sale; at the Digital life
Design conference, in munich, 2012; with actor Stephen fry, an investor in Summly,
in an advertisement for the app; displaying the summarization app on his iphone.
at school, and neither of his parents (Diana and Lou,
a lawyer and a business executive, respectively) knew
much about tech. Instead, he learned how to program
almost entirely by himself, scouring websites and
watching instructional videos. His first coding effort resulted in an app that
played audio snippets from speeches by his idol, Steve
Jobs, whose unauthorized biography he’d recently
devoured. “It was rejected by Apple for every reason,”
D’Aloisio says now, laughing. “Copyrighted audio,
poor functionality, too simple.” Another early design
allowed users to touch a picture of wood, producing a
knocking sound. A third transformed a smartphone
screen into a treadmill for your fingers. That one
earned about $120 in sales on its first day.
When he wasn’t programming or doing schoolwork, D’Aloisio began to fill his spare time reading
about natural language processing. He’d studied
languages as diverse as Latin and Mandarin, and
became fascinated by concepts like grammatical
frameworks, morpheme parsing and the 1960s work
of the linguist Richard Montague. “He’s my favorite,” D’Aloisio enthuses. “He theorized that natural
language could be described like a syntactical programming language.” As he scanned the Internet for knowledge, D’Aloisio
decided that what he really needed was a better way
to determine, at a glance, what was worth reading. He
envisioned a summarization tool that used language
theory to give a meaningful synopsis in fewer than
400 characters. “There are two ways of doing natural language
processing: statistical or semantic,” D’Aloisio
explains. A semantic system attempts to figure out the
actual meaning of a text and translate it succinctly. A
statistical system—the type D’Aloisio used for
Summly—doesn’t bother with that; it keeps phrases
and sentences intact and figures out how to pick a few
that best encapsulate the entire work. “It ranks and
classifies each sentence, or phrase, as a candidate for
inclusion in the summary. It’s very mathematical. It
looks at frequencies and distributions, but not at what
the words mean.”
An early iteration of Summly, called Trimit, was
featured in Apple’s app store in July 2011 on a list of
new and noteworthy offerings. There it was noticed
by the influential Silicon Valley blog TechCrunch and
quickly came to the attention of an investment group
led by Li Ka-shing. When D’Aloisio was approached
over email by Li’s people at Horizons Ventures, he was
only 15—and so far mostly managed to conceal that
fact. He’d never met with anyone in the tech world
face to face, and the information he’d listed when he
registered Trimit spoke only vaguely of a London
technology company. It failed to mention that the company’s management and technology teams—in fact, its
entire workforce—consisted of a single kid in a suburban bedroom who wasn’t yet old enough to drive. “I thought I was going to sell the app in the Apple
store for a pound or two each, and then I’d use the
money to buy a new computer,” says D’Aloisio. “I’d
never had any contact from an investor before. And
now here’s an email supposedly from a Hong Kong
billionaire. It sounded dodgy. I didn’t respond the
first time. They had to email me again.” D’Aloisio was
accompanied by his mother and father (“they were
a bit bewildered, it was kind of insane”) as he took a
meeting with Horizons Ventures’s representatives
in London in August 2011. The meeting ended with
D’Aloisio receiving a seed investment of $300,000. As fall arrived and school began, D’Aloisio felt
immense pressure to deliver for his backers. He
needed to whip his algorithm into better shape, so he
contracted a team of Israeli coders who specialize in
natural language processing. Searching on Google, he
found and hired a retired professor living in Thailand
previouS pAge: courteSY nicholAS D’AloiSio; peter krAmer/nbc newSwire viA
gettY imAgeS thiS pAge from top: nADine rupp/gettY imAgeS; ASSociAteD preSS
U
pon hearing, in March of this year,
reports that a 17-year-old schoolboy had sold a piece of software to
Yahoo! for $30 million, you might well
have entertained a few preconceived
notions about what sort of child this
must be. A geeky specimen, no doubt. A savant with
zero interests outside writing lines of code. A twitchy
creature, prone to mumbling, averse to eye contact. Thus it’s rather a shock when you first encounter Nick D’Aloisio striding into London’s Bar Boulud
restaurant, firmly shaking hands and proceeding to
outline his entrepreneurial vision. To imagine him in
person, picture a Silicon Valley CEO blessed with an
easy manner and 97th percentile media skills. Picture
a guy who can confidently expound (while maintaining steady eye contact) on topics ranging from Noam
Chomsky’s theories to the science of neural networks
to the immigrant mind-set to the Buddhist concept
of jnana. And now picture this fellow trapped inside
the gangly body of a British teen who might easily
be mistaken for a member of the pop boy band One
Direction—clad in a hipster T-shirt beneath a fitted
blazer, hair swooping over his forehead, taking bites
of a cheeseburger between bold pronouncements.
The app D’Aloisio designed, Summly, compresses
long pieces of text into a few representative sentences.
When he released an early iteration, tech observers
realized that an app that could deliver brief, accurate
summaries would be hugely valuable in a world where
we read everything—from news stories to corporate
reports—on our phones, on the go. The app attracted
the interest of investors around the world, ranging
from Hollywood celebrities to Hong Kong billionaire
Li Ka-shing, the wealthiest man in Asia. In 2011, at age 15, D’Aloisio closed a seed round
of funding from Li Ka-shing. A year later, Summly
launched, and within a month it had attracted 500,000
users and became the number-one news app in 28
countries. The Yahoo! sale capped off a remarkable
run for someone not yet out of high school. But it’s not
mere technological savvy that sets D’Aloisio apart.
Since long before he could shave, he has been driven by
an intense curiosity and a desire to make some sort of
mark on the tech world. Not just to create but to build
and, yes, to monetize. He’s lately begun taking meetings with the likes
of Marissa Mayer and Rupert Murdoch. (Murdoch is
chairman of News Corp, which owns The Wall Street
Journal.) Though D’Aloisio’s net worth at this point is
merely eye-popping, not obscene, in his own youthful
way he seems every bit as formidable as relative grayhairs like 27-year-old Tumblr founder David Karp or
29-year-old Facebook wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg.
“He captivates a room,” says Joshua Kushner, founder
of Thrive Capital, an early backer of Summly. “He is
incredibly self-aware for his age.”
who’d written seminal books on the topic. “He became
our main scientist,” says D’Aloisio. “He now works at
Yahoo! in the Sunnyvale office.”
Meanwhile, he was being ferried around the globe
to tech conferences, getting introduced to other potential investors. D’Aloisio made a remarkable impression
on everyone he crossed paths with. “He has an eerie
maturity,” says Andrew Halls, headmaster of the
King’s College School in Wimbledon, which D’Aloisio
has attended since he was 11. “He has an extraordinary
articulateness in the face of situations that, for me,
even as a 54-year-old, might be terrifying.”
“I was blown away by him,” Kushner recalls. “The
first time I interacted with him was at News Corp,
when he was meeting with Murdoch, and I was looped
in to provide perspective. Nick described the vision
of what he was trying to accomplish. And he was providing insight to Rupert.” D’Aloisio’s stage presence,
coupled with the deep-pocketed credibility brought by
Li, attracted a large group of benefactors to Summly,
including Ashton Kutcher, Yoko Ono and Stephen Fry. D
’aloisio has been quoted opining
that “time is the new currency.” It’s
the driving notion behind Summly.
It’s also a strangely wise observation
from a 17-year-old. At that age, many
of us had more time on our hands than
we knew how to fill without plummeting into severe
boredom. It’s easy to forget—conversing over lunch in a
London café or strolling through the Tate Modern—that
D’Aloisio was born in 1995 and has not yet graduated
from high school. Or that he still lives in his childhood
bedroom, in a cozy upper-middle-class home. As I chat
with his parents, he excuses himself to work on his
computer. Slouching down the hall in his stocking feet,
hems of his skinny jeans brushing the hallway carpet, it
is the most kidlike you will ever see him.
D’Aloisio’s parents came to England from Australia.
His father, Lou, has worked in commodities for BP and
Morgan Stanley, while his mother, Diana, is a corporate lawyer who also serves as her son’s contractual
representative. They always knew D’Aloisio was an
extremely inquisitive child. “But he was our first, so
we didn’t think it was anything out of the ordinary,”
says Diana. (D’Aloisio’s brother, Matthew, is 14.) They
stress that despite his impressive accomplishments,
he remains a normal kid. Or at least as normal as a kid
can be when he’s making offhand references to Markov
models and stochastic processes. “He still goes out on
weekends, still goes to parties,” says Diana. “He’s got a
girlfriend. All the things you do at 17.”
D’Aloisio himself strives to maintain a bubble of
normalcy. He dates the same girl he did before the
whirlwind hit. And though he’s stopped attending
school—he’s too busy to sit in class while overseeing
Summly’s development—he still gets his work from
his teachers and meets with them regularly. He cherishes the fact that his circle of friends knows little of
his life as a budding industrialist. When I met him, he
was about to head to Greece for a weeklong vacation
with a pack of high school pals. For now, D’Aloisio isn’t touching the money. “I’m
too young to appreciate the value of it,” he insists.
“I don’t have a mortgage, I’m 17. To me, a hundred
pounds is a lot. Take that as a benchmark.” Though
he’s not allowed to comment on Summly’s sale price,
when pressed he allows that he might one day like to
deploy his newfound riches as an angel investor. No
one around him seems to think there’s a danger that
the money will ruin him or that he’ll be tempted to
spend the rest of his life dissipating on a beach. “He’s
pretty well grounded. You wouldn’t believe how frugal he is,” says Diane. “He’s got a great engine,” says
Lou. “He won’t stop at this.”
Perhaps the more interesting question is what
drove Yahoo! to shell out that reported $30 million
for a single app. To be sure, Summly’s text-compression abilities dovetail nicely with Yahoo!’s new focus
on mobile utilities. Along with Yahoo!’s $1.1 billion
purchase of the blogging service Tumblr and the
launch of an acclaimed new weather app, the Summly
move marks a commitment to owning the tiny real
estate of the smartphone screen—and serving advertising to the youthful eyeballs that tend to gravitate
to mobile devices.
But there’s little doubt this was also an “acquihire,” in which the person being bought is just as
important as the product. D’Aloisio is now working
full time in Yahoo!’s London office, and his youth, his
energy and his undeniable it-factor have brought the
formerly musty tech giant a much-needed injection
of cool. Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer—who lends the
company some of her own it-factor—praises his “commitment to excellence in design and simplicity” and
says she is “inspired by the creativity and tenacity
Nick brings to his work.”
While D’Aloisio spends 80 percent of his work time
retooling and improving Summly (which has already
been integrated into Yahoo!’s iPhone app), the other
20 percent is devoted to imagining the expansive
challenges he’ll take on next. He predicts there will
be summarization programs that do for video what
Summly does for the written word. He has grand
thoughts about using technology to aid learning and
would like to help fellow autodidacts while disrupting
the old educational models. As for his own education: He’s weighing whether
to enroll in university in England or maybe the U.S. to
be closer to Silicon Valley. Or perhaps he’ll skip college
entirely and just focus on his work. “I absolutely want
to start another company,” he says. “Serial entrepreneurs get addicted to creation. I want to be passionate.
I feel really bad when I’m not doing something new.” •
architecture iNNOVatOr
DAVID
ADJAYE
2013
With his plans for the Smithsonian’s African
American museum and a host of other
groundbreaking projects—from Manhattan
to Moscow, London to Lagos—Adjaye
is forging a new kind of global architecture.
82
82
GXTTXR CRXDXT
GXTTXR CRXDXT
BY IAN VOLNER PHOTOGRAPHY BY SZE TSUNG LEONG
MONUMENTAL
ACHIEVEMENT
Adjaye near the
construction site of
the National Museum
of African American
History and Culture,
in Washington, D.C.
84
set the basic aesthetic parameters of his practice: a
penchant for simple, bold form-making, combined
with a distaste for preciousness in materials.
The promise of those first projects attracted major
institutional commissions—including the Nobel
Peace Center in Oslo in 2005, and Denver’s Museum
of Contemporary Art two years later—but it was the
2008 economic crisis that obliged Adjaye to look still
further afield and set up satellite offices in Germany
and the U.S. “The catalyst for us was the downturn,”
says Adjaye. “We had to undergo a total restructuring.
Basically we had to go big or go home.” Remaking his
firm as a truly global practice has led to bigger projects overseas and a furniture line with famed design
house Knoll. More importantly, it’s revealed a new and
startlingly original cultural agenda, one that connects
Adjaye’s intrepid design approach to his background
and outlook.
between African American cultural traditions and
their common roots in Africa itself.
But what makes the museum, and Adjaye’s whole
oeuvre, so refreshing isn’t merely the way it suggests
a general feeling of “African-ness.” Okwui Enwezor,
a critic and director of Munich’s Haus der Kunst, is a
longtime friend, and as he observes, Adjaye “is looking at the complexity of African design not in order to
appropriate an ethnographic or anthropological sensibility but to reintegrate it.” In other words, Adjaye
wants to make some of the features of African design
culture a normal, fluid part of the language of contemporary architecture.
His recent work shows him tying together a dense
bundle of cultural strands: The graphic abstraction
and layered, textural quality of the Smithsonian
project not only echo traditional African design but
also the 20th-century urban architecture of Africa
that Adjaye saw as a boy; that architecture, in turn,
drew on European precedents, which themselves had
been informed by the art of Africa that had inspired so
many early modernists.
The vectors of influence point in every direction—
“meshed,” as Enwezor puts it, in the web of Adjaye’s
work. Rough in their materiality, muscular in their
forms, Adjaye’s buildings communicate in a new cosmopolitan idiom, creating a conversation that draws
in Lagos and Washington, the East End and Harlem.
A
DJAYE WAS BORN in Dar es Salaam,
Tanzania. His father was a globe-trotting diplomat who entered the foreign
service of his native Ghana shortly
after independence. In the early days
of leader Kwame Nkrumah’s republic,
the elder Adjaye was one of a cadre of energetic, educated young men who were poised to transform Africa
after centuries of colonial repression. The Pan-African
movement that Nkrumah inspired sought to weave
the continent together in a shared political and social
fabric—one that looked beyond individual borders
to forge a broader sense of African identity. Postings
took the family as far away as Egypt and Lebanon, so
the Adjaye boys (three in all, David the eldest) had a
multinational upbringing that seemed, for a while at
least, to be an extension of the Pan-African project. It
was a time, and a spirit, that remains a touchstone for
the architect. “My father articulated a set of ideals to
me, always very softly,” recalls Adjaye. “Just certain
points about being strong about your identity, about
who you are and not being intimidated by other cultures. And to understand that there’s a world that
exists beyond national boundaries.”
Those ideals have reemerged in Adjaye’s design for
the National Museum of African American History
and Culture on the National Mall in Washington,
D.C., expected to open in 2015. Beating out a number
of larger, more senior firms, such as Foster +
Partners and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Adjaye and
his collaborators won the job four years ago with a
proposal that will look unlike anything on the Mall
today. It is a building replete with African motifs. As
seen in digital renderings, the structure appears as
stacked inverted pyramids, a silhouette inspired,
says Adjaye, by Yoruban sculpture. The patterning
of the decorative bronze grilles on the museum’s
façade, reminiscent of African metalwork, will allow
light to filter into the building in a beguiling pattern,
just as with the thatched lattices of some traditional
African dwellings. The museum’s very form, squatting massively on the last real buildable plot near to
the Washington Monument, seems to suggest the
earthy monumentality of such ancient African sites as
Timbuktu and Great Zimbabwe. As he puts it, Adjaye’s
objective is to establish a kind of “classical” African
sensibility, an architecture capable of forging a link
“david’s very
instinctive,
and very
expressive
about what
he loves.”
–duro olowu
A
courtesy of adjaye associates (all)
HISTORY LESSON
A rendering of the
African American
museum, inspired by
Yoruban sculpture.
to the foreman’s office. In the car en route to a construction site, over lunch or coffee, his phone rings
with near metronomic regularity. Since his practice
now has branches in four cities on three continents
(London, New York, Berlin and the Ghanaian capital of
Accra), it’s almost always office hours somewhere. But
it’s not just his employees on the line. In the midst of a
riff on West African history, the protocol team for the
president of Gabon rings him to schedule a meeting.
Not two minutes later, the phone goes off again, this
time on even more pressing business. “It’s my fiancée,”
says Adjaye, who’s been engaged to business consultant and former model Ashley Shaw Scott since last
year. “We’ve got a wedding to plan.
“Half the world thinks we’re already married,”
jokes the architect, hanging up. “It says so on my
Wikipedia page, which is a mistake.” As a result, along
with the challenges of guiding a major global design
firm, Adjaye now has to field inquiries from friends
and relatives wondering why they weren’t invited.
Of course, a mastery of logistical multitasking is de
rigueur for anyone at the helm of a 70-employee firm
that’s won multiple awards from the Royal Institute
of British Architects and the American Institute
of Architects. But Adjaye has had to acquire a high
degree of managerial savvy in record time. “It’s just
the last five years or so that all this stuff started to
happen with the practice,” he says—eliding, with that
“stuff,” a half-decade of career developments that
have produced some of the most compelling architecture of the 21st century.
The UK-based designer has been an object
of interest to architectural cognoscenti since
establishing his own practice in 2000, building up a
substantial catalogue of residential projects in and
around London for high-profile clients like actor Ewan
McGregor and artist Chris Ofili. His early houses
courtesy OF
COURTESY
of ADJAYE
adjaye ASSOCIATES
associates
T
HE NEW AFFORDABLE apartment complex going up at the corner of 155th
Street and St. Nicholas Avenue in the
uppermost reaches of Manhattan cuts
an unlikely figure.
This is Sugar Hill, after all, so
named in the early 20th century by African Americans
who flocked to what they considered the sweet spot
of Harlem—now an area of 100-year-old brownstones and stately apartment buildings. In outline,
the high-rise, which will also provide housing for
the homeless, is a big, chunky block with a serrated
upper story; its bulk, along with its ridged panels of
graphite-cast concrete, give it more than its share
of grit and brawn. Yet look closer at those panels:
Visible from the right angle and in the right light, the
cladding bears the traces of a floral pattern, enormous roses etched into the rough surface.
For all its scale and strength, the building has
a rapport with its urban environs: The blooms
reference the decorative motifs on some of the nearby
apartments, while the jagged mass echoes the angled
row houses along St. Nicholas Avenue. This is a
structure that doesn’t attempt to blend in, but instead
establishes an unusual type of architectural dialogue,
speaking to its surroundings with a forthrightness
and intimacy that’s rare for any building, much less an
affordable housing development in an underprivileged
neighborhood. Few architects could have pulled it off—
but for David Adjaye, the ability to speak to experiences
and to people outside the norms of his profession has
become a hallmark. It’s what has led the designer to the
crowning moment of his career: the commission for
the National Museum of African American History and
Culture in Washington, D.C. Adjaye, 47, talks to just about everybody. On-site
in Harlem, he breaks his stride to show a job applicant
djaye’s pursuit of intercultural dialogue is a natural choice for someone
whose upbringing and schooling left
him to fill in the blanks for himself.
Being from every place and no place,
and with parents whose education
had come at the hands of European-trained teachers,
Adjaye has had to spend years cobbling together the
artistic and technical knowledge he relies on in his
work. “I’ve had to teach myself pretty much everything I know about African history,” he says—and
much of what he knows about architecture, as well.
The decline of Nkrumah’s political project in the
mid-’60s marked the end of the original Pan-African
dream, and though the Adjaye family remained in the
diplomatic corps for years, they rarely returned to
Ghana. When Adjaye’s youngest brother was struck
with an illness that left him severely brain damaged,
the Adjaye family gave up the roving life for a new
and more stable one in England. The change took
some getting used to. “It was my first cold climate,”
says Adjaye, who was 13 at the time. “I remember the
first time I saw snow. I was screaming at my brother
to look outside—we’d only seen it in cartoons before.”
The move affected the designer’s spatial sensibility,
too: Accustomed to open doors and sunny courtyards,
Adjaye suddenly found himself confined to the stuffy
quarters of London townhouses. In warmer cities,
he notes, “there’s this blurred relationship between
inside and outside. It strengthens the connections
between neighbors, creating more of an extended
sense of community.” Finding a new way of mediating that interior-exterior divide has been a major
preoccupation of his work ever since, as in the Harlem
apartments, where a forecourt and interior playground space for the complex’s on-site child-care
center give it a village-ish feel at the ground level.
ARTFUL APPROACH
left: the Moscow
school of Management
near skolkovo, just
outside Moscow. adjaye
was inspired by the
russian futurist artist
Kazimir Malevich.
PUBLIC SERVICE
above: a rendering of
the sugar Hill project
in Harlem. right:
adjaye designed two
idea stores, which are
libraries, in london’s
east end, including this
one on chrisp street.
pHotogrApHy By
pHotoGrapHy
by ed suMNer (dirty House); courtesy of adjaye
AdjAye associates
AssociAtes (all)
(All)
Adjaye’s early interest in problems of space and
planning didn’t exactly translate into any ambition
to become a designer. “The architecture happened
really late,” he says, and almost by accident. Adjaye’s
first love, and his true calling, in a sense, was art; in
a family of scientists, civil servants and accountants,
he chose to enroll in an art program at Middlesex
University. While there, a group of acquaintances
asked him and a classmate to design a London café.
The project was a surprise hit, appearing in the pages
of an English design publication, and soon Adjaye
found himself fielding offers from architecture firms.
Leaving behind his purely artistic ambitions, he
worked for years with prominent London offices like
Chassay + Last and Pentagram. Remarkably, where
most architects spend years pursuing a studio degree,
Adjaye’s formal education amounted to only one year at
London South Bank University (whose faculty deemed
his professional experience to be education enough) followed by a master’s degree at the Royal College of Art.
During the latter two-year interval, he spent much of his
time traveling—to East Asia, to the Mediterranean—
looking at buildings rather than sitting in a classroom
thinking about them. “I think that most architectural
training trajectories are really about coming under
the tutelage of specific schools, specific teaching trajectories,” says Adjaye. Unencumbered by that kind of
baggage, Adjaye has been free to find his own path in a
way few of his contemporaries can.
“David’s very instinctive, and very expressive
about what he loves,” says fashion designer Duro
Olowu, another close friend. Adjaye’s architectural
method, though always informed by his research into
the art and history of Africa and elsewhere, is more
NEW FORMS clockwise from top: a rendering of adjaye’s
seven-block multiuse development in doha, Qatar;
london’s dirty House, built for the artists sue Webster and
tim Noble; the Bernie Grant arts centre in tottenham.
intuitive than analytical, and this may explain why he
counts so many artists as friends and clients. Olafur
Eliasson, the Danish-Icelandic installation artist,
shares with Adjaye what he feels is a decidedly artistic
investment in the experiential quality of space: “What
we’re interested in is the psychosocial tension of a surface, a material, how one creates an atmosphere,” he
says. “David just uses a different toolbox.”
The architect’s active, creative temperament
(combined with the natural garrulousness that keeps
him constantly chatting with construction workers
and waitresses) makes him well suited to the business
of opening up new offices in foreign countries
and jetting off to client meetings in Trinidad and
Shanghai. Still, the growth of Adjaye’s practice isn’t
just a matter of expanding his business, but a key part
of his broader cultural project. Particularly important
are the host of new commissions afoot in Africa, and
the Accra office he recently opened to pursue them.
“The growth of African countries”— between 8 and 15
percent of GDP in some economies, he notes—“has created a new confidence on the continent,” and Adjaye
is looking to tap into it. Adjaye sees the continent as
fertile soil for exactly the kind of high-design, iconic
new architecture he’s creating in Washington, and
with no other “starchitect”-caliber office between
Johannesburg and Cairo, he’s effectively first on the
scene. Adjaye isn’t just bringing Africa to the world—
he’s bringing the world to Africa.
Africa, it seems, is ready. “Already, you find that
people are sort of looking outward a little more, wanting more than they’ve had previously,” says interior
designer Reni Folawiyo. She recently commissioned
the architect to design her new concept store, Alara,
set to debut later this year in Lagos, Nigeria. The
building’s translucent screens seem a nod to the brises
soleils of African modernist buildings, like those of
British architect Maxwell Fry, while their patterning
plainly connotes the geometries of African textiles.
Configured as a series of open volumes, the building
suggests the same clustered, communal feel as one of
Adjaye’s new public libraries in Washington, D.C. And
the concept store is only the beginning. Among his
ongoing projects in sub-Saharan Africa is the master
plan for a new 500,000-square-foot resort in Princes
Town, Ghana, only a couple miles from the seaside
fortifications where Europeans once traded for slaves
bound for the New World.
The sheer volume of Adjaye’s current workload
reinforces the appearance of a designer determined
to bring his message to everyone: from the visitors
to the weaving facility he’s designing for Maiyet in
Varanasi, India, to the fashionistas who will flock to
his new boutique for Proenza Schouler in New York’s
Soho, to the families who will find homes in the striking tower rising dozens of blocks to the north. His
eagerness to connect with so many different people
on so many different levels is essential to understanding his work. “I think making space is also about
expressing yourself and verbalizing your feelings,”
says Eliasson. “When David is talking or thinking,
he’s actually building.” For the architect, the way forward remains a matter of “unpacking my instincts,”
of going from project to project, idea to idea. But what
he’s moving toward bears a striking resemblance to a
new architecture for a global age. •
87
refined edge
A bold and beautiful
makeup design,
as styled by Pat
McGrath for WSJ.
Model: Diana
Moldovan at IMG;
hair, Neil Grupp.
fashion innoVaTor
PAT
McgrATh
2013
From backstage at runway shows for top designers to the research lab
of Procter & Gamble, one highly inventive makeup artist sets the trends
season after season—and single-handedly changes the face of beauty.
By Derek BlasBerg
PHOTOgraPHy By Ben HasseTT
89
trends come from a woman who
wears very little of it herself.
In fact, Pat McGrath, one of the
fashion and beauty world’s most
sought-after artists, wears very
little color at all, preferring all-black ensembles
whether she’s backstage at a runway show or holding court at a fashion event. Which isn’t to say she
isn’t colorful. Within the multibillion-dollar cosmetics industry, McGrath, the global creative-design
director for Procter & Gamble, is something of a
legend—creating new looks on the runway and then
distilling them into innovative products that find
their way into cosmetics aisles and beauty counters
around the world.
Just how in demand is she? Supermodel Linda
Evangelista puts it like this: McGrath is the only
makeup artist who can cause a job to fall apart if she’s
unavailable. Most of the time a shoot is canceled
because they can’t get a date on the photographer.
“Sometimes, it’s the model,” she says. “But I’ve seen
things get canceled because they can’t get Pat. That’s
how important she is.”
Photographer Steven Meisel rarely, if ever,
works without her, and top fashion houses—including Prada, Dolce & Gabbana, Christian Dior, Louis
Vuitton and Gucci—all count on her for runway
nights they trolled makeup counters for new products. For Pat—the youngest of three children—these
mother-daughter trips were mandatory. “I was hothoused into the industry without even realizing it.
Every Friday night, she would take me to the store.
We would look for pigments that worked on black
skin. There might be one color a month. She’d say,
‘That’s it! There’s a blue that works on us, it’s not
ashy.’ ” McGrath’s mother mixed her own colors and
creams, which is how McGrath still works today. “And
I’d be standing behind her weeping, because I didn’t
want to be there. Then it ended up being my career.”
After completing her A-levels, she moved to
London in the early 1980s, just as the city was experiencing an explosion of colorful club kids. “I was
obsessed with the New Romantics, such as the Blitz
Kids, Boy George, Spandau Ballet: My friends and I
would stalk them down along the King’s Road,” she
says. Once, when she was loitering outside the Radio
1 studios, a DJ from the station noticed her unusual
makeup: She’d used a red lipstick on her eyes and
cheeks to create a dewy, rosy glow. “She said, ‘Why
don’t you do my makeup like that?’ ” McGrath recalls.
“And I said, ‘That’s a real job?’ ”
McGrath never went to beauty school or trained
professionally—the DJ suggested a makeup course,
but it turned out to be too expensive. Instead, she
learned by trial and error, often experimenting on
“we go on these incredible journeys. it might be
blade runner or a Fellini movie or bette davis.
whether it’s a byzantine cathedral For dolce
& gabbana or a modern Film noir look For prada,
it’s always an incredible journey.” —pat mcgrath
shows and campaigns. Self-trained and charismatic,
McGrath has become a muse to photographers,
a mother figure to models and one of the fashion
world’s most inventive talents.
“We go on these incredible journeys,” McGrath
says of her creative process. “It’s always something
different. It might be Blade Runner or a Fellini movie
or Bette Davis—I could lose it over Bette Davis’s
lashes. Whether it’s the Byzantine cathedral for
Dolce & Gabbana or the modern film noir look we did
for Prada, with the wet hair and undone makeup, it’s
always an incredible journey.”
McGrath’s energy is renowned in the industry.
Evangelista recalls visiting Meisel at Pier 59 Studios
one day while he was shooting a fashion spread featuring an exotic dancer. McGrath was in the center
of the action, throwing dollar bills at the dancer and
egging her on. “She’s directing, she’s correcting,
she’s collaborating,” says Evangelista. “She’s part
of the whole process. A lot of what she does is not in
the makeup chair.”
McGrath, who is in her forties, grew up in
Northampton, a small town north of London, with
her “fashion obsessed” mother, Jean McGrath, a
Jamaican immigrant. Together, they would watch
classic films (everything from Blonde Venus to Taxi
Driver) and scour the local thrift shops. On Friday
90
her own face. (The trick of applying lipstick to eyes
and cheeks, which she popularized in the ’90s, was
something she stumbled upon as a young girl, she
says, “because stealing eye shadows from my mother’s drawer was difficult, but I could snatch a couple of
lipsticks and she wouldn’t notice they were missing.”
This technique later became the basis for her liquid
eyeliners.) Some of her earliest jobs were as an assistant to British editor Kim Bowen on underground
fashion shoots around London for magazines like
Blitz and i-D, where she later became beauty director.
“I did whatever they told me to: sweep up, get coffee,
hold a light. I was just so happy to be on those shoots
and participating in the creative process.”
It was model Amber Valletta who, in the early
’90s, told Meisel about a new makeup artist she
thought he’d love. Valletta said McGrath was talented and had a wicked sense of humor. Sure enough,
when Meisel met McGrath in 1996, the two hit it off.
His first impression? “She needed a new wig. And
I knew I had found a soul mate.” The duo went on to
create a series of iconic images for American and
Italian Vogue, introducing bold new colors to what
was then a conservative cosmetics market in the late
’90s and dreaming up radical new beauty regimens
into the new millennium. Meisel says their experiences together on set could inspire a miniseries.
“Every day is complete insanity,” he says. “From
strippers during breakfast, to wheelchairs during
lunch, to screaming and fighting all day long, we are
constantly tripping and falling over each other.”
McGrath is notorious for traveling with an entourage—her team can climb to 50 during the busiest
days of the fashion season—and for carrying a vast
library wherever she goes: 75 bags filled with reference materials (books on film and art history,
Polaroids of head shots, vintage magazines) and
products (creams, mascaras, lashes, foundations,
gloss, pigments, fabrics, sequins). She requires two
vans, one car and four motorbikes. McGrath will leave
a fashion show when the models have barely left the
runway to speed ahead to the next on a chauffeured
motorbike, weaving through traffic. And there’s no
cutting back on the baggage because she knows she
has to be prepared for whatever a designer might
throw at her. Last year’s Louis Vuitton show required
48 models to wear 10 pairs of false eyelashes each,
all procured from McGrath’s kits. “I’ve never seen
someone travel with so much in my life,” says model
Naomi Campbell, sighing. “And that says something,
coming from me.”
Despite her formidable array of gear, McGrath uses
brushes only sparingly, preferring to warm up the
makeup and pigments with her hands, blend colors on
the back of her palms, and apply them with her fingertips. “She uses her fingers to paint the way Van Gogh
used a brush,” says Givenchy designer Riccardo Tisci. McGrath’s contribution as a makeup artist goes
well beyond cosmetics. “I think in another life Pat
could have been a comedic actress,” Campbell says.
Whether backstage or on set, she cracks jokes, does
impressions and keeps the energy up and everyone on
their toes. Stefano Gabbana of Dolce & Gabbana says
she is “absolutely hilarious.” Tisci calls her “funny,
joyful, insane and addicted to connection.” On set,
she always pushes her team beyond its limits. “She
doesn’t just do her job and hang up the brushes. She
gets the big picture, and that’s a true professional,”
adds Campbell.
An undeniably influential chunk of her career was
spent collaborating with John Galliano on runway
looks for Christian Dior and the designer’s eponymous line. (Galliano was fired from Dior in 2011, after
an anti-Semitic rant. Raf Simons replaced him at Dior
and Bill Gaytten now designs John Galliano; McGrath
still does makeup for both houses.) Runway moments
from Galliano, with McGrath’s use of neons, gold
foil and ridiculously long lashes, are credited with
reintroducing colorful pops to the modern makeup
palette. Lady Gaga specifically acknowledges
Galliano’s fall/winter 2009 collection—inspired
by Ukrainian brides, at the height of McGrath and
Galliano’s collaborations—as the inspiration for her
“Applause” music video.
McGrath has fond memories of working with
Galliano. She laughs as she describes how he and the
late Steven Robinson, Galliano’s head of studio at
the time, would invent the most outlandish, ridiculous story as the official “brief” for a runway show.
“But at the time, I didn’t know that most of it was
fake!” McGrath says. References could be as varied
as Queen Tut, Joan Crawford or a female matador.
“They’d make up these wild tales, and I would sit
PAT’S PiCKS highlights from
McGrath’s career, chosen by the
makeup artist herself, include
her work for fashion magazines,
runway shows and advertising
campaigns. “every day is complete
insanity,” says photographer
steven Meisel, a frequent
collaborator who shot nearly all
the magazine covers and features
on this page. “from strippers during
breakfast, to wheelchairs during
lunch, we are constantly tripping
and falling over each other.”
SHOCK Of THe neW
from far left: A cover for
Italian Vogue, 1997; versace
advertising campaign
from 2000, shot by Meisel;
Karolína Kurková, starring
in a Marilyn Manson–
inspired fashion shoot for
American Vogue, 2001.
Top lefT: RIchARD
ToP
RichaRd BuRBRIDGe,
BuRBRidge, couRTesy of Dolce
dolce & GABBANA/sølve
gaBBana/sølve suNDsBø
sundsBø , couRTesy of coveRGIRl/
coveRgiRl/ sølve suNDsBø
sundsBø ResT: sTeveN
sTeven MeIsel
Meisel
M
any of today’s leading makeup
MAd ABOUT HUe
clockwise from
above: A cover for i-D
magazine from 2004,
shot by Richard
Burbridge; a fashion
spread from Italian
Vogue, 2006; covers
for Italian Vogue, from
2004 and 2005, left.
HigH COnTrAST clockwise
from above: Italian Vogue, from
2009; 2008; and a cover from
2008; American Vogue, 2007.
PAinTed LAdieS
Above: An advertising
campaign for Dolce &
Gabbana lipstick, 2010.
Above left: A look from
John Galliano’s spring
2010 collection. left:
Prada’s spring/summer
2011 ad campaign,
photographed by Meisel.
Right: linda evangelista
in W magazine, 2011.
THe eYe HAS iT
Above: cover of Italian
Vogue, 2003. Below: A
coverGirl advertising
campaign from 2013.
“When you Walk
into a room
and there are
racks and racks
of beautiful
clothes, do you
really Want to
ruin it all With a
bad lipstick?”
ALL POLAROIDS
All
PolARoIDs couRTesy
COURTESY of
OF PAT McGRATh
MCGRATH
–m cgrath
there furiously writing everything down. Then I’d
come back seven hours later with a concept.” That’s
how many of their most provocative looks—such as
the haute-couture female Egyptian pharaohs with
royal-blue faces and gilded eyebrows in 2004—came
to pass. “He would be like, ‘Is she going to get it?’
And I always did. Half of the things they said to me
weren’t real, but I took every single word completely
seriously, and we’d push the look as far as it could go.”
She says her years collaborating with the designer
were some of the most inspiring of her career.
Galliano’s dismissal was an emotionally difficult time for many people in the fashion industry,
including McGrath. That’s because she forges tight,
intimate relationships with her peers. Nearly everyone contacted for this story—from models Campbell
and Evangelista, to the new faces Meisel routinely
plucks from obscurity, to stylists and designers—
uses the same nickname for McGrath: “mother.” In
a field where the relentless pursuit of perfection and
beauty is often more valued than having a sense of
humor, McGrath’s lighthearted maternal instincts
stand out. She often feels like a mother hen to the
entire industry. “But not only to the young girls,”
she says. “I work with girls who are 16 and women
who are 60. That’s what is so brilliant about our
industry now.”
Off the runway, McGrath is responsible for
many of the last two decades’ worth of makeup
trends, including the dewy, plump skin that was
so popular during the late ’90s and the use of crystals on eyes and lips, fashionable in the 2000s. At
Procter & Gamble Beauty—where she was hired
in 2004 and now oversees CoverGirl, Max Factor
and Dolce & Gabbana: The Makeup—McGrath
helps translate the trends she sets on the runway
into affordable, accessible products. The 10-pairthick eyelashes that she whipped up for Louis
Vuitton in 2012—those led to CoverGirl’s two-step
Bombshell mascara. More recently, she created a
foundation in response to today’s “selfie culture,”
so there wouldn’t be a need to retouch—a response
to more and more women taking pictures of themselves with cell phones and instantly posting them
on the Internet. “Women are not going for that
super-glowing, supershiny skin because you don’t
look that good when you’re doing a selfie,” notes
McGrath. Thus, she introduced Perfect Matte Liquid
Foundation for Dolce & Gabbana: The Makeup,
which is more forgiving when captured by today’s
high-definition cameras.
“Pat has a gift for pioneering new trends and
techniques, season after season, that women
around the world take inspiration from,” explains
Esi Eggleston Bracey, vice president and general
manager of Procter & Gamble Beauty. “She’s a terrific business partner. Our success is her success,
and vice versa.”
McGrath’s creativity has touched other industries, too. In what has become one of her more widely
seen looks, in 2011, she worked with director David
Fincher to transform Rooney Mara from a freshfaced American girl to the pale-skinned Goth icon in
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. “I went to Stockholm
and spent two solid days on her, 22 different makeups, just pushing all the boundaries and having fun,”
SnAP MAgiC A Polaroid of McGrath taken in 1996, with makeup by steven Meisel, styling by Paul cavaco and
hair by Garren. opposite: Polaroids of McGrath’s makeup designs for Dior, among the many hundreds of archival
images she carries with her for reference.
she says. “I would love to do more film.” She has books
in the pipeline, and other makeup-based products,
though she says she’s too superstitious to discuss
them now. Despite the buzz about whether she will
launch her own line of makeup products, she smiles
at the prospect but remains mum about a time line.
The majority of people she works with now are her
friends, or “her children,” as she calls them. (“I’m
sad when it’s the last shot, because I don’t want to
leave her,” Campbell says.) Even so, she admits that
she sometimes still gets nervous around the talent.
Two names spring to mind: Oprah and Madonna. The
queen of daytime TV had McGrath on her show several times to talk about makeup, and she did Oprah’s
makeup on her 1998 Vogue cover. With Madonna,
McGrath is often requested for editorial work, and
she was responsible for her makeup in the influential
Louis Vuitton campaign in fall 2009.
What’s it like to work on these women? “Your
throat is closing. Your brow is sweating,” she says.
“But, in a way, I’m always a little nervous on any
job, which is a good thing. I don’t want to let people
down. When you walk into a room and there are racks
and racks of beautiful clothes, do you really want to
ruin it all with a bad lipstick?” She says an anxious
desire to constantly create is what still fuels her
work. “Every day is the beginning of your career. So
it doesn’t matter if it’s a new model, or Madonna, you
have to be nervous.” She lets out a laugh and winks.
“Obviously extra nervous with Madonna.” •
93
humanitarian innOVatOr
ALICE
WATERS
2013
A pioneer of farm-to-table cuisine and founder of the
legendary Chez Panisse, Waters changed the
way Americans think about food. After rebuilding
her restaurant this summer from the ashes of
a devastating fire, she’s leading an expansion of the
Edible Schoolyard—and championing her cause
as urgently as ever.
By howie Kahn
PhoToGRaPhy By william aBRanowicz
EAT, PRAY, LOVE
Alice Waters, whose
14th book, The Art of
Simple Food II, has just
been published, standing
by a bench honoring
one of the donors of the
Edible Schoolyard in
Berkeley, California.
95
L
unch with Alice wAters begins with
Alice Waters telling you what you’ll be
eating for lunch. “We need to have a
little pasta,” she says, checking out the
ever-changing menu at Chez Panisse,
the iconic Berkeley, California, restaurant she has owned and has established a platform
of ethical eating around for the last 42 years. “We
definitely want a little pasta.” Waters is surprisingly
buoyant this late summer afternoon, given that less
than a day earlier her home of 30 years—a two-bedroom craftsman-style bungalow a few blocks from
the restaurant—was burglarized. The thieves took
her jewelry, including precious family heirlooms
she intended to give to her daughter, Fanny, who
was turning 30 that week. “I hear a lot of items from
robberies turn up at the Saturday flea market,” says
Waters, who is wearing black tights, ballet flats and a
blue tunic with brocade trim. “I thought we should go
on Saturday to take a look.”
Waters has demonstrated this kind of pluck and
unflappability for decades, but it’s been especially
noticeable this year. In March, Chez Panisse, one of
Berkeley’s most beloved landmarks and a cornerstone of American food culture caught fire. Waters
received the call on a Friday, at around 3 a.m., and
hurried over to survey the damage. Part of the façade
was badly burned, including the wisteria plant that
covered it, and both the upstairs and downstairs
interior porches, which held several tables each,
were destroyed. “It was really hard,” Waters says
of the blaze, holding back tears. “It felt like we were
starting a new restaurant, all over again.” When
Chez Panisse reopened at the end of June—with salvaged redwood carpentry (joined without a single
nail), copper light fixtures and a new silver-leaf ceiling (the wisteria is currently being rehabilitated
off-site)—it was clear that Waters, with the help of
countless friends and colleagues, had imbued the
space with a renewed sense of magic. But fighting
the odds, fixing the damage and regaining things
that have been stolen or lost, materially and culturally, has always informed Waters’s mission—both in
the restaurant and beyond. “There’s a lot of social
repair needed,” says the theater and opera director
Peter Sellars, who met Waters a decade ago at the
Telluride Film Festival. “What Alice offers is a recipe for total restoration.”
Waters, now 69, first moved to Berkeley as a
20-year-old transfer student in 1964. She had grown
up in Chatham, New Jersey, eating tomatoes from the
victory garden her parents planted after World War
II. “I certainly fell in love with taste first,” she says.
Campus politics and protests, however, led Waters
to ultimately believe that a connection could and did
exist between activism and food. While attending
a massive Free Speech Movement rally in Berkeley,
Waters listened to words that would change her life.
“America is becoming ever more the utopia of sterilized, automated contentment,” said Mario Savio, one
of the movement’s charismatic leaders. Once Waters
heard that, she felt the urgency to contest that false
utopia and replace it with something far more vital.
The following year, while studying abroad in
France, Waters found what would prove to be her
medium—not just cooking and eating, but the
96
ceremony, morality and soulfulness surrounding
it. “When I returned to Berkeley in 1966 to finish
college, I knew I wanted to live the way my French
friends did,” Waters writes in 2011’s 40 Years of
Chez Panisse: The Power of Gathering, one of her 14
books (her latest, The Art of Simple Food II, came
out last month). “These were people who thought of
good food as an indispensable part of life, for whom
each day was punctuated by food-related decisions.
Eating together was the most important daily ritual
in their lives, a crucial and nonnegotiable time when
the flavors and smells of roasted chicken and sizzling garlic, the crunch of crusty bread and the taste
of local wine drew out everyone’s most passionate
ideas and feelings.”
Before Waters set out to open her own restaurant—a place that would host her newly discovered
way of life—she first became a teacher, studying the
Montessori method in London in 1968. “It’s about the
kids becoming engaged,” she says, forking a morsel of
salmon onto my plate. “As they get more involved in
the lesson, the teacher becomes less important and
ultimately leaves the kids to run it themselves.” It’s
an ethos Waters herself has embraced, from her time
teaching kindergarten to her ongoing outreach work
with Berkeley middle-schoolers to her current plans
to share her vision with high-schoolers all over the
world. “We need radical ideas for high school,” says
Waters. “The kids could run the cafeterias as sustainable businesses completely by themselves.”
With the food and teaching components firmly in
place, a trip to Turkey in 1969 revealed to Waters, then
23, one final, formative lesson that would, in combination with the others, generate her wide-ranging
influence on the culture. “The people in Turkey just
gave,” says Waters, pushing a plate of plump mulberries in my direction. “They gave with no expectation
of getting anything in return. I had never experienced
anything like that, and I aspired to that kind of hospitality and giving.”
For a moment, I get lost in the mulberry—an exemplar of ripeness, a trigger for the senses—which is
precisely what Waters wants. Because this mulberry
is not just a mulberry: It’s also an idea, a political
statement and a manifestation of values she has put
forth to the mainstream over the course of her four
decades of public life. Long before anybody had ever
heard of a Slow Food movement, and decades before
the term “organic” had any traction outside of communes, co-ops and California, Waters was embodying
these concepts on a daily basis in her two-story restaurant on Shattuck Avenue, which first opened its
doors in the summer of 1971.
“We decided we were going to buy only organic food
for the restaurant,” says Waters. “And we were going
to pay whatever the farmer needed to be paid.” Carlo
Petrini, who founded Slow Food, an international
organization dedicated to the growth, promotion
and understanding of traditional foodways, credits
Waters, now his movement’s international vice president, with changing the way we talk and think about
food. “It’s not only related to taste,” he says. “It’s also
about environmental sustainability, health and dramatically raising the profile of small-scale farmers,
who are now able to have a new and direct relationship with consumers.”
“To Alice, There is
no difference
beTween
declAring her
poinT of view
on food issues
And cooking
in The kiTchen.
everyThing
is connecTed.”
–dAvid chAng
Waters’s efforts have economic implications, too.
“They’re the basis of a new food supply and delivery chain,” Petrini says, referring to the growth of
locavorism and organic farming. For all her points
about the sensuality of the mulberry and her inviting
approach to cooking—one that has brought her the
attention of the Obama administration, visits from
the Clintons and Prince Charles and an audience with
the Dalai Lama—Waters is also dead serious about
her role as a reformer. Changing economic patterns is
no accident; it’s the intended result of a decades-long
campaign. Nothing would please Waters more than
putting a huge dent into the profit margins of agroindustrial giants. And that mission, she believes,
starts in the schools.
W
hen it comes to her restau-
rant, Waters has always resisted
making it bigger or opening outposts—expansions that might
dilute the Chez Panisse brand.
Her Edible Schoolyard Project,
on the other hand, is intentionally scalable. In less
than 20 years, its massive growth has already established a lasting humanitarian legacy.
It all started with a comment Waters made to a
local newspaper in 1995: The school she passed every
day on her way to Chez Panisse, Martin Luther King
Jr. Middle School, looked neglected. Neil Smith, then
the school’s principal, read the remark and reached
out to Waters, who had long been an important progressive voice in their community, hoping she could
help improve things. Upon visiting Smith, Waters
came up with the concept for the Edible Schoolyard
Project off the top of her head.
“It was nothing I’d been thinking about,” says
Waters, “but then I saw this huge expanse of land and
this unused mess of a cafeteria with these amazing
high ceilings, and I told Neil, ‘We have to grow food
here, serve the food in free, healthy school lunches,
which is a basic human right, and refurbish this
cafeteria, and then the kids can be involved in the
cooking.’ I remember saying to Neil, ‘There is no
compromise. This is all or nothing.’ ” Smith agreed to
Waters’s terms, and the next year an asphalt wasteland was converted into the first Edible Schoolyard.
Today, over 2,000 schools, spanning all 50 states and
29 countries, are following Waters’s original model.
NatUre’S BOUNty
Clockwise from top
left: At the Edible
Schoolyard, children
harvest tomatoes; a
garden with flowers,
berry bushes and bay
leaf trees; a sunflower;
feeding the chickens, a
daily task for students.
98
thinking about food production and the long-term
ill effects of it on our health and well-being in this
country.” Streep continues, “Alice’s genius was to
understand that change would need to come from the
youngest people, the next generation, and to place
her hope in the spring garden, not the one hardened
by frost and time. The movement is currently disseminated from teacher to student—and, in a reverse
process, from child to parents.”
gxttxr Crxdxt
A
s the edible schoolyArd moves
toward its third decade, Waters aims
to expand its curriculum into high
school programs, like at Edible Sac
High, a Sacramento charter high
school—housed within the secondoldest high school west of the Mississippi—where
Waters’s ideals have been incorporated. It’s an effort
Mayor Kevin Johnson says will “radically transform
how children view their relationship to food and, by
extension, the world around them.” Waters also plans
on extending her reach in South America. “The first
lady of Chile just came for a visit,” she says, “and governments from that continent seem so willing and so
open toward Edible education in a way they aren’t in
other places in the world. I’m trying to go through the
doors that are open. I have never wanted to push.”
Her other priority is to figure how to fully fund
the Edible Schoolyard mother ship in Berkeley in
a way that doesn’t solely depend on fund-raising.
Characteristically, Waters wants to do this by creating something slowly, by hand—something that
people can delight in but that also communicates
her values. “Maybe it’s a tortillaria, making organic
tortillas,” she says. Then Waters begins to riff, making it clear—like in the moment she conceived the
Edible Schoolyard—that she’s hardly capable of
thinking small.
“Maybe we could do a tortillaria that would make
tortillas for the schools. And maybe this could happen around the country to fund Edible Schoolyards
all over. I want to do something where we have a message on the package so they’re hot, they’re wrapped
in the news of the day. I want it next to a print shop
so we can print the paper, wrap the tortilla and send
it out. Kind of like our daily bread, our daily news,
something that’s nourishing, something kids love,
something that is putting Monsanto out of business.”
When contacted, a Monsanto representative reasoned that the $56 billion global conglomerate and
Waters aren’t so dissimilar. “We share with Ms.
Waters a common enthusiasm for local and sustainable agriculture because to us, all agriculture is
local,” says Wendy Reinhardt Kapsak, who works in
Monsanto’s public affairs department. “We develop
seed varieties that can endure the agricultural challenges farmers face unique to their locale—from the
vegetable farmer in California to the small shareholder farmer in the developing world.”
Heading out of the Edible Schoolyard, closing the
wrought-iron gate behind her, Waters looks back
toward the mulberry tree, pointing out that industrial
production could never create a thing with so much
grace. “We need to have everyone speaking as loudly
and as creatively as they can,” she says, “to turn the
world around. And to bring it back to its senses.” •
All ImAgES
ImAges thIS
thIs pAgE:
pAge: All CourtESy
Courtesy of thE
the offICE
offICe of AlICE
AlICe WAtErS,
wAters, IntErIor
InterIor And ExtErIor
exterIor of ChEz
Chez pAnISSE
pAnIsse photo By
by AmAndA mArSAlIS
mArsAlIs
BIRTH OF A LEGEND
Clockwise from top
left: waters’s meal card
from the sorbonne,
1965; the kitchen at
Chez panisse; the
restaurant’s exterior;
waters outside Chez
panisse in 1971, the year
it opened; at a market
in paris. opposite:
with students, under
an elephant heart
plum tree at the edible
schoolyard.
From the Edible Schoolyard
in Berkeley, the view extends
out toward the majestic Marin
Headlands and the Golden
Gate Bridge, but the grounds
themselves are even more
magnificent. “We’ll go right
to the mulberry tree and see
whether it’s ripe,” says Waters
(a photograph of Waters standing beneath this tree hangs in
the National Portrait Gallery).
She passes a patch of ground
cherries, a plot for corn and
sunflowers, and rare varieties
of apples hanging from a trellis. A dozen or more chickens strut
freely in Waters’s wake. “They
are incredibly good pets,” she
says. “And they lay every color egg imaginable.”
A group of middle-school children who have
all spent time tending to the crops gather around
Waters and express their gratitude. Regardless of
whether they’ve met her before, they love her for
what she’s delivered to their school and to their
lives. Waters is treated with the same reverence in
the Chez Panisse kitchen. She oversees the menu
more than she cooks it, and she divides her time
equally between the restaurant, the global expansion of the Edible Schoolyard and what a colleague of
hers describes as “being Alice Waters”—mentoring,
influencing and traveling to advocate for her cause.
“Alice is an always-relevant badass,” says David
Chang, the Momofuku founder who, subscribing to a
position Waters invented—that of the activist chef—
sits on the advisory board of the Edible Schoolyard
NYC in Brooklyn. “To her,” he says, “there is no difference between declaring her point of view on food
issues and cooking in the kitchen. Everything is connected. This is someone who has been fighting for
an edible education for our youth for years now and
isn’t showing signs of stopping.”
The Schoolyard represents everything Alice
Waters stands for and acts as a communal cornerstone, fostering both educational and personal
growth. The food here is grown slowly, naturally,
intentionally and by hand. It sparks ideas about
social responsibility, ecology and
autonomy—not to mention science,
math, language and history, since the
garden is about curriculum and not just
an extracurricular activity. Overall,
the program represents a shift away
from industrial dependency and toward
people dealing with themselves and
each other on a human scale. Its founder
remains unrelenting about spreading
her message.
“Alice’s signal qualities as a person
are her radiant humanity, optimism
and formidable energy, but with a light
touch,” says Meryl Streep, who met
Waters in 2004 at a Natural Resources
Defense Council gala. “I think these
account for much of her success in
dealing with conventional bottom-line
art INNOVatOr
do ho
suh
2013
From three-dimensional fabric sculptures
of his parents’ house in Korea to an intimate
drawing of his New York studio, Suh’s
work investigates the idea of home—and what
it means to belong in the 21st century.
By julie l. Belcove
PHoToGRAPHy By jAmes mollison
100
A
fter Korean-born artist Do Ho Suh
moved to London a few years ago
to be with his wife, he missed his
adopted home of New York. He kept a
500-square-foot live-in studio there,
in a former sailors’ dorm in Chelsea,
and began to contemplate ways of memorializing it.
Many of Suh’s most famed sculptures had reimagined his homes—in translucent fabric or resin, or as
a painstakingly detailed, oversize dollhouse—from
his childhood in Seoul and his young adulthood in the
United States. This time, though, he wanted to make a
drawing. Except Suh was not content to sit in a chair
with a pad and pencil and render what he saw. Instead,
he covered every inch of the interior—walls, floors,
ceiling, refrigerator, window air conditioner—with
paper, then rubbed with a blue-colored pencil, the way
a child might preserve the memory of a leaf in the fall.
“Rubbing is a different interpretation of space. It’s
quite sensuous—very physical and quite sexual,” says
Suh, wearing a T-shirt and shorts on a late summer
day in his London studio. “You have to very carefully
caress the surface and try to understand what’s there.”
That dictum could easily apply to the entirety of
Suh’s oeuvre, which has explored the varying meanings
of space, from the smallest territory we occupy—our
clothing—to our homes and homelands. Issues of
memory, history, displacement, identity and the body
all come into play. In an age of exponentially increasing globalization, Suh’s consideration of what it means
to belong strikes a nerve. His almost uncanny ability to
hit these major touchstones of our time—and do it with
the lyricism of a poet—has made him one of the most
internationally in-demand artists of his generation.
Suh has fashioned a monumental emperor’s robe
from thousands of soldiers’ dog tags and precariously
perched a fully furnished house on the edge of a roof
seven stories up. He has used his personal history of
wearing uniforms—from schoolboy to soldier—as
the basis for a self-portrait, and set an army of tiny
figurines under a glass floor, inviting viewers to walk
on the artwork without necessarily even realizing it.
In Suh’s mind, it all has the same origin: “Everything
starts from an idea of personal space—what is the
dimension of personal space,” says Suh. “What
makes a person a person, and when does a person
become a group? What is interpersonal space—space
between people?”
“The whole approach is quite rich,” says Rochelle
Steiner, professor at the USC Roski School of Fine Arts,
who is working on a book about Suh’s drawings. “He’s
been very, very inventive.”
With a boyishly round face and a playful grin,
Suh looks younger than his 51 years by a decade, but
he exudes the seriousness of a veteran artist. It’s a
disposition he knows well: His father, Suh Se-ok,
is a well-regarded abstract painter in Seoul. After
secondary school, the younger Suh had hoped to
become a marine biologist, but with a poor math
score standing in his way, he applied to art school at
the last minute and was accepted. He studied traditional Korean painting before following his first wife,
a Korean-American grad student, to the states in 1991.
The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) was the
only American art school to accept him, and though
he’d already earned a master’s degree in Seoul, RISD
insisted he enter as a sophomore. Still, immigrating
alleviated some of the pressure of being his father’s
son. “I felt relieved when I went to the states,” he says.
“I felt much more freedom. I realized the danger of
having a father like mine—he’s going to always come
up—but in the U.S. my father is nobody.”
Asked how his father regards his success, Suh says,
“I’m not sure if he feels proud of me. I don’t know if he
feels competition. He doesn’t show those things.”
At RISD, Suh couldn’t get into the classes he most
wanted to take and ended up enrolling in The Figure
in Contemporary Sculpture. “It changed the course
of my life,” Suh says, adding that the professor, Jay
Coogan, “is responsible for my becoming a sculptor.”
Presented with the first assignment—use clothing to
consider the human condition—Suh delved into ideas
about the body, a topic that was taboo in Korea. Around
the same time, the Rodney King riots erupted in Los
Angeles, and news images of armed Korean immigrants protecting their stores made Suh think for the
first time about how non-Koreans perceived his ethnic
group. His classmates, he recalls, all younger than he,
related neither to the immigrant experience nor to the
mandatory military training that every Korean man,
himself included, must endure.
Fastening thousands of army dog tags to a military
jacket, Suh created his first major sculpture: Metal
Jacket. The modern-day coat of armor touched on
many of the themes—personal space; the tension
between the individual and the group; the inevitable
culture clashes that arise with human migration—
that continue to preoccupy his work, and it also
became the prototype for Some/One, the imposing
robe made of dog tags. From a distance, the viewer
sees each sculpture as a single silvery surface. Only
upon closer inspection does it register as a mosaic of
in Seoul—a traditional slope-roofed hanok, quite out
of style when his father commissioned a former carpenter at the royal palace to build it from reclaimed
wood in the 1970s—in dreamy fabric, suspended from
a gallery ceiling. “It has an interesting narrative,” he
says of his childhood house. “But then, every building,
every space, has that. It’s just not told.”
Using fabric gave the pieces a ghostlike quality.
Viewers were invited to enter some of the installations, heightening the sensation of being in a home,
or the memory of one. Suh recalls how his brother,
an architect, was disconcerted to see strangers wandering under a version of their family home at a 2000
exhibition at New York’s P.S. 1 museum.
Fallen Star 1/5 (2008–11), one of his best-known
works, takes a more solid model of that hanok and
“do ho is exploring issues of what divides us
and what unites us as human beings.” —jay coogan
studio visit
Renderings of a
traditional Korean
hanok and newspaper
clippings. Opposite:
Toy models by the
Japanese comic artist
Kow Yokoyama.
102
dog tags, each representing an individual soldier.
Coogan, now the president of the Minneapolis
College of Art and Design, recalls his reaction to Metal
Jacket: “Oh my gosh! His work was so fantastic. It was
ambitious in scale and in the kind of global ideas he
was working with.” Coogan, who has remained close
to Suh, adds, “Do Ho is exploring issues of what divides
us and what unites us as human beings.”
In 1997, Suh scored a prestigious two-person show
at New York gallery Gavin Brown’s Enterprise before
earning an MFA from Yale and moving to Manhattan.
As he continued to exhibit new work, his hauntingly
powerful pieces about the nature of home quickly
gained notice. He made versions of his parents’ house
crashes it through the wall of a carefully furnished,
dollhouse-like re-creation of the apartment building
where he lived in Providence. Contrary to most viewers’ assumptions, his various home pieces are not
exact replicas. “It’s intrinsically impossible to make
them exact,” he says. “I wanted to achieve something
intangible. It’s about memory, time spent in the space.”
In addition to exploring ideas about culture shock,
Suh’s works can have a sense of humor—a house
teetering on a roof seems to be winking at The Wizard
of Oz—and also a sense of loss. There is, of course,
the rubble of the walls in Fallen Star 1/5, but even in
a dog tag piece, viewers are left wondering what happened to the tags’ owners, since only in death does a
soldier part with the metal identification. Net-Work
(2010), which was installed on a Japanese beach for
the Setouchi International Art Festival, looks like a
fishing net from a distance; only up close is it clear that
Suh constructed it from scores of shiny figurines, each
one’s arms and legs outstretched to another’s in the
shape of an X. The piece was shown during typhoon
season, and though the organizers insisted on securing it, Suh would have been content to see it wash away
with the tide. “I thought it would be a beautiful thing to
happen to the piece—nature comes and takes my piece
away, takes it to the ocean, and the work disappears.”
Says his longtime friend and fellow artist Janice
Kerbel: “The works in a way are like him—they’re
these very gentle things, almost like specters. There’s
something ethereal about Do Ho—he doesn’t seem to
belong to the place he’s in.”
In 2010, Suh moved to London to join his second wife,
Rebecca Boyle Suh, a British arts educator. Their first
daughter was born soon after; their second followed
this past summer. “I’ve been following my loves,” Suh
says of his continent hopping, adding with a laugh, “it
was never a career move.” If anything, London has been
tougher to adjust to than the United States. “Things are
so different here. I feel like it’s a completely different
language, mentality and humor. I miss a lot of American
values—like being straightforward and more relaxed.”
His life in London revolves around family. He
is not one to join the art world social scene. “His
commitment to his practice is so intense,” says Kerbel,
who is also based in London. “He’s a quiet person and
keeps very much to himself. He needs that time to be
alone and in his head.”
Suh maintains an international practice, taking
intercontinental trips two to three times per month,
including frequent stints in Korea, where the
fabric pieces are sewn. Much of Suh’s sculpture is
OppOSITe pAge, bOTTOm LefT: RUbbIng pROJeCT, COURTeSY The ARTIST AnD LehmAnn mAUpIn, neW YORK AnD hOng KOng; OppOSITe pAge, bOTTOm RIghT: CauSE & EFFECt, 2007, ACRYLIC, ALUmInUm DISCS, STAInLeSS STeeL CAbLe, mOnOfILAmenT, 112.2 x
78.74 InCheS, eDITIOn Of 3, InSTALLATIOn vIeW, hITe COLLeCTIOn OCTObeR 11, 2010 - mARCh 4, 2011; ThIS pAge: 346 wESt 22nd StrEEt, apt a, CORRIDOR AnD STAIRCASe, neW YORK, nY 10011, USA, 2012, pOLYeSTeR fAbRIC, meTAL ARmATURe, InSTALLATIOn vIeW,
21ST CenTURY mUSeUm Of COnTempORARY ART, KAnAzAWA, JApAn, 2013, © DO hO SUh, COURTeSY The ARTIST AnD LehmAnn mAUpIn, neW YORK AnD hOng KOng
interior view Left: One of Suh’s life-size rubbing
projects. Above: Installed at Western Washington
University, 2011’s Cause & Effect is comprised of thousands
of figurines of men stacked in piggyback formation.
TOp LefT: SOmE/OnE, 2003, STAInLeSS STeeL mILITARY DOg TAgS, nICKeL-pLATeD COppeR SheeTS, STeeL
STRUCTURe, gLASS fIbeR ReInfORCeD ReSIn, RUbbeR SheeTS, eDITIOn Of 3, © DO hO SUh, COURTeSY The
ARTISTS AnD LehmAnn mAUpIn, neW YORK AnD hOng KOng; TOp RIghT: FallEn Star, 2012, STeeL-fRAme
hOUSe, COnCReTe fOUnDATIOn, bRICK, ChImneY, gARDen, LAWn ChAIRS, TAbLe, hIbAChI-STYLe gRILL,
bIRDbATh AnD bIRDhOUSe, InSTALLATIOn AT STUART COLLeCTIOn, San diEgO, phOTO: phILIpp SChOLz
RITTemAnn, COURTeSY The ARTIST AnD LehmAnn mAUpIn, neW YORK AnD hOng KOng.
personal space
Above: Suh constructed
Some/One, 2003, from
stainless-steel military
dog tags and nickelplated copper sheets.
Right: Fallen Star,
2012, is a 70-ton house
awkwardly perched on
the roof of the engineering
school at the University
of California, San Diego.
“I waNted tO
achIeVe
sOmethINg
INtaNgIble.
It’s abOut
memOry,
tIme speNt IN
the space.”
—dO hO suh
playing house
Suh’s 348 west 22nd Street,
apt. a, Corridor and Staircase,
installed at the museum
of Contemporary Art in
Kanazawa, Japan, which
opened november 2012.
site-specific, and even when it isn’t, it’s still contextspecific. “I have to anchor myself to the context—the
physical site or history,” he says. When he was asked
to make a piece for South Korea’s National Museum
of Modern and Contemporary Art, which is opening a
new branch in Seoul this month, Suh considered the
location of the museum itself—the site of the former
palace—and the gallery the piece will be installed in,
an expansive room called the Info-Box that has a view
of the palace’s last remains. In response, he created
Home Within Home Within Home Within Home Within
Home, a small hanok completely encapsulated by Suh’s
first American home in Providence. The extra three
“homes” in the title refer to the museum, the palace
complex and Seoul. At a scale of 1:1, it is the largest fabric sculpture by volume he has ever made.
Also on his immediate agenda: his first drawings
show, at Lehmann Maupin’s two New York galleries.
Slated for September 2014, the dual exhibition will
feature excerpts from his Rubbing Projects. (One of the
pieces is so big the gallery cannot accommodate the
full structure.) Says Steiner, “I’ve never seen anybody
use paper and line in such a multifaceted way.”
Suh is also making a video-performance piece
that considers cooking as a type of personal space:
He plays the host of a TV show, with his mother, as
the chef, teaching him a recipe. He has recently taken
on more architectural assignments as well, conceiving the Korean gallery for the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art and is in discussions to design an
actual house in the UK, the details of which are still
under wraps. “As my career has developed, you have
more opportunities,” Suh says. “That’s the great
thing about getting old.”
There is an often-overlooked political undercurrent
to Suh’s work. For the 2012 Gwangju Biennale in
South Korea, for example, Suh recalled the massacre
of civilians that followed a protest there in 1980.
“News was censored, so we didn’t know what was
going on,” Suh says. “When I read the newspaper
it was a patch of blanks—that never left me. When
school started we students heard what happened in
Gwangju from students who were there. Everything
was fragmented. I was living only four hours away and
didn’t understand what was happening—it made me
think about the problems of writing history.”
In response, Suh made rubbings of three spaces
around the city. “That’s a lot of rubbing,” he laughs. He
and his crew wore blindfolds for one of the rubbings,
both as a means of intensifying the already tactile
experience of an unfamiliar place and as a metaphor.
“I didn’t want to pretend to know about Gwangju,” he
says, offering the analogy of tourists visiting a city’s
standard landmarks. “You don’t pay attention to the
space between the landmarks, and the way we look at
history is the same—we only remember the so-called
important historical events.”
Therein, Suh says, lies his challenge as an artist.
“It’s an existential question of what we believe in this
world—there are a lot of holes, but we try to believe it’s
whole, the way a lot of people see the house [sculpture]
as an exact replica. There’s a lot of rupture and gap.
The role of the artist is to see those ruptures.” •
105
design innOVATOR
thomas
woltz
BENCH MARK
Landscape architect
Thomas Woltz at the
Hudson Yards site,
where he is responsible
for designing a
6.5-acre park atop
a $750 million deck,
constructed over
active train tracks.
2013
With his highest-profile project to date, the
greening of New York City’s $15 billion Hudson
Yards development, this advocate of environmental
sustainability is tapping into the power of a
well-designed urban landscape to reveal our shared
history—and find a more harmonious future.
By AlAstAir Gordon PHotoGrAPHy By AdriAn GAut
I
am always looking for the story of a site,”
says landscape architect Thomas Woltz, while
standing at the north end of Manhattan’s High
Line greenway on West 30th Street and looking out over the 26-acre urban anomaly called
Hudson Yards, one of his latest projects. Below
him, men in hard hats are erecting scaffolding amid
the cacophony raised by backhoes, dump trucks and
jackhammers. In this agitated cluster of urban infrastructure, Woltz sees parkland that’s just waiting to
be nurtured into harmony. “City blocks are like stands
of trees; the open areas like meadows; the drainage
networks like creeks. These are all complex living
systems,” says the 46-year-old principal of Nelson
Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects (NBW). “Every site,
whether an asphalt parking lot in New York or a rain
forest in New Zealand, has embedded energies that
inform the design process.” Hudson Yards is the brainchild of real-estate
mogul Stephen Ross, founder and chairman of Related
Companies, and this, his latest mega-development,
106
is being hailed as the largest real-estate project in
American history. It consists of more than 13 million
square feet of mixed-use real estate, 850,000 square
feet of retail, 5,000 residential units, a school, cinema, restaurants, fresh markets, a hotel and as many
as 12 “supertowers” by brand-name architects like
David Childs, William Pedersen and Elizabeth Diller.
With the first stage slated for completion in 2018, it is
already garnering comparisons to Rockefeller Center.
Woltz and his firm, who were selected over several
more established firms competing for the commission, play no small part in the orchestration. He points
to the middle of the site, where the Public Square, a
6.5-acre plaza of his design, will be built, describing
it as “the city’s living room” filled with lush gardens,
formal allées and beds of blooming flowers, all laid out
in sweeping geometric patterns with fountains, cafés
and space for outdoor art exhibitions and events. Landscape architects often fall somewhere
between architect, urban planner and “outdoor decorator,” as Woltz puts it. “Most people think we select
the plants and call it a day,” he says. But he sees himself
more as a storyteller, one who embraces the complexity of modern life while seeking meaning and narrative
in both natural and man-made environments. He’s
grounded in horticulture—his great uncle, Dr. Carlton
Curtis, was chair of botany at Columbia University—
and Woltz is able to recite the proper botanical name
of every plant he uses. Before embarking on a project,
he typically delves into extensive biological research
including cataloguing every living species on a site—
which he calls a “bio blitz.” And rather than imposing
a trademark look on every commission, he strives to
respond to the specific conditions—the climate, soil,
indigenous flora and fauna—of each location. (Woltz
frequently quotes environmental activist and poet
Wendell Berry: “If you don’t know where you are, you
don’t know who you are.”) His work is very much about
knowing the spirit—what the ancients called the
genius loci—tailoring it for both humans and animals,
and favoring the subtle over the showy. A high point is
as likely to be the restoration of a native meadow as a
107
Railroad, began excavation of the first tunnel to cross
the Hudson River from Manhattan to New Jersey.
“Thomas has been quietly integrating environmental sustainability into his advocacy and design
for years,” says Leslie Greene Bowman, president
and CEO of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, with
whom Woltz has developed a landscape stewardship
master study for Jefferson’s 2,500-acre plantation
at Monticello, in Virginia. “He invites dialogue with
voices of ancestral use, archaeology, environmental
stewardship, historical narratives and social benefit,
and his genius results from listening to those voices
and creating a chorus to propel innovative thinking.”
t
he youngest of five , Woltz grew up on
a 500-acre working farm in Mount Airy,
at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains
in northern North Carolina. The experience gave Woltz a visceral appreciation
of agriculture: Not only did the farm
boast herds of cattle and tobacco fields, but his parents
grew all their own vegetables. When he was 7, part of
the family farm was transformed into a golf course,
which he now looks back on as a defining moment.
The giant earth-moving machines that were shaping
the fairways and bunkers simultaneously intrigued
and horrified him. “I realized at an early age that land
could be manipulated in both good and bad ways,” he
says. “But I had no sense that my professional work
would one day be spent addressing these same issues.”
His formal interest in landscape design developed
years later, when he moved to Venice to work for Italian
architect Giorgio Bellavitis after graduating from the
University of Virginia with degrees in architecture,
architectural history and fine art. “Venice taught
me that it doesn’t necessarily take plants to make a
landscape,” says Woltz. “Through pavement, public
plazas, water, walls, streets, sunlight and variations in
shadow, all kinds of modulations could be achieved. I’d
always considered landscape to be forests, fields, parks
and gardens. Only after living in a city that offered none
of these did I realize that everything was landscape.”
This view became fused with a larger interest in
the environment when he returned to UVA to pursue
graduate studies in both landscape architecture and
architecture. There, his mentor, Warren Byrd, taught
Woltz “that plants needed to be understood in the context of a larger ecology.” After graduation, Woltz began to work for his former professor and subsequently became a full partner
in the firm that had been founded by Byrd and his wife,
Susan Nelson, in 1985. “My definition of landscape
expanded to a spatial language of abstraction, placemaking and memory,” says Woltz, who today is the
sole owner of the company that now has 36 employees, with offices in New York, Charlottesville and San
Francisco. “We’re always seeking to ground our projects so
they’re not merely decoration,” Woltz says, explaining how he begins every project by making numerous
site visits, taking note of existing plants and geology, the amount of rainfall and the path of the sun
MEADOWLANDS Clockwise from top left: Woltz’s
designs include a terraced garden at Iron Mountain House,
a home in Connecticut; Orongo Station, a sheep farm in
New Zealand; the garden of a Manhattan townhouse; beds
of herbs at the Medlock Ames Winery in Napa Valley;
Orongo Station’s Endeavor Garden, showcasing plants
gathered by explorer Captain James Cook’s team in 1769.
© ErIC PIASECkI/OTTO; © MArION BrENNEr; © ErIC PIASECkI/OTTO; © MArION BrENNEr x 2
brightly planted cutting garden. Before submitting plans for the bird- and pedestrian-friendly park he is planning for Hudson Yards,
Woltz and his team examined everything from the
site’s premodern history to the complex engineering
of a seven-foot-thick steel and concrete “platform”
that is required to cover the train yards and support the park and buildings above. The gigantic
$750 million air-cooled deck—spanning six city
blocks—will protect trees, flowers and pedestrians
from the high temperatures generated by the active
train yards. He also sought to balance the needs of
the developer with those of the city. As with most of
NBW’s projects, special consultants were brought in
to inform the design team. Steven Handel, a Rutgers
University biologist, explained urban ecologies and
the importance of native plants to attract birds and
other pollinating fauna. (Accordingly, Woltz selected
a range of native New York species—sweet gum trees,
hornbeam, bald cypress—that can tolerate extreme
urban and climatic conditions.) Bry Sarte, an expert
in sustainable storm-water management, was consulted about ways to capture condensation from the
glass-clad skyscrapers and recycle it for irrigation,
while the historian Jill Jonnes taught the team about
the history of tunnels and rail lines. “These are all
voices of the site,” said Woltz, whose plans include
a proposed eight-story observation tower—a kind of
grand garden folly with a double-helix stairway—as a
central feature. It would mark the spot where, in 1904,
Alexander Cassatt, president of the Pennsylvania
across the sky. He feels the dirt and smells it for clues.
“When we’re in doubt, we always go back to the site.”
Elements that are often hidden or overlooked by other
designers are given a central role in Woltz’s work.
At the Medlock Ames Winery, for instance, which he
designed on the site of a former general store and gas
station in Healdsburg, California, rainwater was redirected through a network of swales and rain gardens
planted with native grasses, not shunted into a corner
behind chain-link fencing. Woltz also pays especially
close attention to the well-being of small animals.
“Amphibians and birds are a visible harbinger of site
health,” he says. “If we make it safe and habitable
for them, then it’s good for everyone.” (At one rural
project, consulting biologists noticed the absence of
native leopard frogs. Woltz lessened the slope of the
banks around a pond according to their recommendations, and the frogs returned.) “Thomas has a great curiosity about all forms of
wildlife,” notes Dr. James Gibbs, a professor at SUNY’s
College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Gibbs
has collaborated with Woltz on the conservation of a
’30s-era apple orchard in Yailyu, Siberia, and a farm
outside of Charlottesville, where he suggested introducing boards to provide protection for salamanders,
slugs and snakes. Woltz responded with a checkerboard of wooden planks laid out in the forest like an
environmental art installation that also provided a
natural habitat. Meanwhile, for a family’s private home
on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Woltz created a “sky
meadow” planted with wildflowers, native grasses
and river birches to offer a habitat for migratory
songbirds. He also transformed a small sixth-floor
terrace with a living wall featuring thyme, rosemary
and strawberries. “The whole project became about
nesting and nurture,” he says, “for both the client’s
family and the birds.” Woltz’s most innovative project to date is the epic
master plan he designed for Orongo Station, a 3,000acre sheep farm in Poverty Bay, New Zealand—begun
in 2001 and completed in 2012—that includes formal
gardens, waterworks, ecological and cultural reclamation programs, and an integrated farming system
that has become a model for sustainable land management in that part of the world. Gardens were inspired
by indigenous tribal culture and the vernacular traditions of sheep farming, and Woltz collaborated with
Maori elders on a restoration and expansion of their
traditional burial grounds. He preserved ancient
earthworks and planted more than 500,000 trees to
help regenerate the formerly unregulated, overgrazed
lands. Seventy-five acres of fresh- and saltwater wetlands were rerouted through a waterway that curves
through the property and spills into a lagoon. At the
suggestion of a biologist, he also had predator-proof
fencing and solar-powered speakers installed to play
the songs of endangered migratory birds. “Now there’s
a massive population of sooty petrels, fluttering shearwaters and gannets who fly in to lay their eggs without
fear of being attacked,” he says.
The current popularity of Woltz’s holistic approach
to landscape design, as well as the high-profile Hudson
Yards commission, has catapulted him into orbit with
a handful of top competitors in his field: firms like
West 8, James Corner Field Operations and Michael
Van Valkenburgh Associates. He and his team are at
LOOK OUT
Woltz’s plans for
the Hudson Yards
site include ecofriendly choices,
such as systems that
recycle rainwater
and the planting of
native tree species.
work on an array of projects, from an interpretive farm
center for Cornwall Park in Auckland, New Zealand, to
a 120-acre expansion of the Coastal Maine Botanical
Garden in Boothbay, Maine, that will showcase native
coastal ecologies. Simultaneously, the firm has begun
work on a woodland amphitheater and the restoration
of a historic spring at Centennial Park in Nashville,
Tennessee, and is creating a six-acre park at the center
of a mixed-income community in New Orleans.
Despite traveling constantly from site to site,
Woltz tries to make time wherever he goes to slow
down. On his last visit to Florida, he went snorkeling
in the Ocala National Forest, and on a recent trip to
Vancouver he rented a bike and rode through Stanley
Park, noticing how the lodge-pole pines shone in the
afternoon light and how the Fannin Range appeared
to dive into Vancouver Harbor. “We underestimate
the power of the designed landscape to move us emotionally and to tell us stories about where we have
been as a culture,” says Woltz. “One of the reasons
I get up every morning with so much energy is the
urge to make this profession, and the landscape itself,
visible to the public,” he says, before he walks away,
heading east on 18th Street. •
109
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Daft punk
Continued from page 76
so approving but respectful, and I knew I wasn’t in
the right place yet. But that’s how all my stuff starts
out. I do complicated things first, simplify it, then
work backwards.” Rodgers would wind up contributing to three songs on the album, including the most
recent single, “Lose Yourself to Dance.”
Months later, after shaping the track on their
own, Bangalter and de Homem-Christo summoned
Pharrell to their studio in Paris. Once again, they
didn’t start playing right away. Instead,
they listened to a few singles Pharrell
had been working on and talked music.
“They were feeling the same way I was,”
Pharrell says. “That everything now is
so programmed, it’s missing the human
element.”
“They’re very methodical, but at the
same time very sensitive with how they
make their music,” Pharrell continues.
“Not sensitive in a negative way, but very
open. And their music is always in a constant pursuit of feeling. That’s a recurring
theme in every piece of music they make,
and that’s not a human trait to me; it’s
more characteristic of a robot.”
After giving the jet-lagged Pharrell
a superstrong over-the-counter French stimulant,
Bangalter and de Homem-Christo cued up a rough
draft of “Get Lucky” and asked if he was interested
in working on it. “For the most part, they let me roam
free,” he says. “They introduced it as a blank canvas:
What are you hearing; what are you seeing? We did
so many takes of different parts, because they like
to capture something perfect. And perfect doesn’t
mean that every syllable is sung correctly. Perfect
means it touches the soul.”
When it was all over, Pharrell got back on a plane.
He was so exhausted, he could barely remember what
he’d sung.
H
ere are a few oft-spoken truisms
about the music industry in the year
2013: Pop songs, even big ones, are
lucky if they can dominate the airwaves for more than a few weeks;
the major-label system is a slowly
smoldering empire in decline; the best way to ensure
a chart-topping, culture-conquering album is to
shake the tendrils of some deep-pocketed mega-corp
(Samsung, Bud Light) that has as much to with music
as it does with, say, llama husbandry.
These are all, sadly enough, pretty much wellfounded realities at this point. But the release of
Random, and its ensuring success, has proved to
be, at the very least, a temporary rebuke to the way
music has been sold in the last decade.
Bangalter and de Homem-Christo had funded
the record’s production, but instead of releasing it
independently, they turned to Columbia Records,
one of the oldest major labels in the world—and
also one of the last. “Before we’d heard the record,
we met with them to talk about their philosophy,”
110
says Columbia Chairman Rob Stringer. “Their
attitude was, records do still sell, if they have
quality and imagination behind them. We talked
about campaigns that were really based on the
golden age of the record industry, in the ’70s
and ’80s, when the Sunset Strip was as much about
music as it was about movies.”
Random was introduced using a mix of retro
showmanship and new-media cunning. Instead of
announcing the record online, the band teased it with
a brief, vague ad on Saturday Night Live, a clip that
featured little more than their helmeted visage and
a quick snippet of “Get Lucky.” That was followed by
billboards in cities like New York and London; a series
of YouTube interviews with the likes of Pharrell and
Rodgers; and a reveal of the album’s track-listing on
the video-sharing app Vine.
The buildup to the record was so steadily intriguing that, as Random’s release date came closer, its
success felt like a fait accompli—which is strange,
given that, for all their success, Daft Punk had never
broken into the top 40 in the U.S. So when the album
finally debuted at number 1, no one was surprised—
in part because of its persuasive marketing, but also
because, by that point, “Get Lucky” was beginning to
lodge itself in the country’s collective hippocampus.
And though it never actually reached the top of
the singles charts in America—denied entry by Robin
Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” also featuring Pharrell—it’s
hard to think of another song this year that proved as
joyfully egalitarian, or as reliably escapist, as “Get
Lucky.” “People are in a time or a place when they
wanna feel again,” says Pharrell, when asked why the
song took off. “The Internet has brought on so much
ubiquity. When you can get the news real-time, and
with 7 billion people on the planet, odds are, there’s
gonna be bad news. I think we’re all ready to hear
music that takes us away and allows us to have a good
time again. Most people just want to be happy.”
There’s another music-biz axiom that Daft Punk’s
flouted this year, much to the chagrin of its fans:
Namely, that when you’ve got an album as big as this
one, you’ve got to get out and play it live.
The group’s last tour—during which they performed in a massive light-up pyramid—ended in
2007. The shows have become legendary: Like
Woodstock, they’re the kind of gigs people remember fondly, even if they weren’t actually there. Daft
Punk never had a problem selling out huge venues,
but the group’s scarcity has only increased their fans’
demand for more stage time.
As proof, witness the group’s only live appearance
this year, at the MTV Video Music Awards. They were
originally supposed to appear on Comedy Central’s
The Colbert Report, but after what host Stephen
Colbert later claimed was interference from MTV,
the duo pulled out. (MTV, Colbert and Daft Punk all
declined to comment.) As it turns out, the VMAs
wound up being Daft Punk’s only strategic misfire of
the year—after all the buildup to their appearance, it
was deflating to watch two guys in robot suits simply
help hand out an envelope onstage.
As of now, the group has no plans to play live, even
though the electronic-dance field they’ve inspired
has grown into a multimillion-dollar industry, and
despite the fact that there are no doubt millions of
fans (and certainly a few business associates) who
would love to see them hit the road.
“We’re not sensitive to any kind of pressure,
because the most valuable thing we have is our
own freedom and creative dreams,” says Bangalter.
“There’s less value for us in a big bag of money than in
a creative idea we want to fulfill. The world we live in
today is slightly off because money makes the world
go. So we’ve had the freedom to always pick the thing
that makes us the most happy.”
Still, it seems a given that at some point Bangalter
and de Homem-Christo will decide to reimagine
their live show, in the same way they rewired their
sound. After all, a song like “Get Lucky” only comes
along once or twice a career, and as much as the
robots love watching our reactions to it from the
safety of their cars, it’s hard to believe they won’t
want to see that joy amplified, illuminated and
shared, and among thousands of faces all at once.
After all, they’re only human. •
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still life
MArc NewsoN
The renowned designer shares a few of his favorite things.
photography by annabel elston
“The image on The lefT is my great-uncle, whom I was
close to. He was a musician, obviously in his rockabilly
phase there. Below that is a photo from my wedding
day. My wife and I are wearing outfits by Azzedine
Alaïa, who’s an old friend. Next to that is a miniature of
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Vitra. It’s as well made as the real thing, an extraordinary feat. Beneath that is the Talby mobile phone I
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appears in a number of anime films. To the right are
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112
I’m fascinated by people who make knives—they’re
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it there; it’s like mowing your lawn. To the left are my
sketchbooks, which are a bit like diaries—my visual
way of recording memories. Above are my Pilot inks
and pen—I love writing with them, getting ink on my
fingers. The leather Purdey cartridge bag was a present from my wife, who is a keen shot. The tapestry
pig is by Wim Delvoye, probably my favorite contemporary artist. There are no seams on it—that’s what’s
magical about it—and in terms of scale, it’s absolutely
accurate. Below is a picture of my daughters, who I’m
obviously very keen on—I just love them to bits. I was
shocked to learn that my daughter Imogen had made
me that green car. There’s still hope that she’ll be a
petrol-head like me.” —As told to Christopher Ross
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