Topic
Architecture
Tadao Ando taught himself architecture, fought briefly as a professional boxer and won the Pritzker Prize in 1995. His Church of the Light in Ibaraki, finished in 1989, cuts a cross into a concrete wall and lets the sun do the rest. Architecture covers buildings like that and the designers whose ideas carried into furniture and clothing. Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919 and later moved it to Dessau, where the school's own building opened in 1926. In the 1950s Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret planned Chandigarh, the new capital of Punjab, and Jeanneret designed the teak and cane chairs that filled its offices. Donald Judd turned buildings in Marfa, Texas, into permanent homes for art. Arne Jacobsen designed the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen down to its door handles and chairs. The guides to Kyoto, Copenhagen and Milan point to buildings worth the detour. The stories stay with what you can see and touch on a visit, from the finish on poured concrete to the way light falls across a room at a certain hour.
Stories
Grooming4 min read
Aesop and the Cult of the Brown Bottle
A hairdresser in Armadale mixed essential oils into hair color in 1987. The shops that followed never looked the same twice.
By Quiet Menace Editors /
Design4 min read
The Wassily Chair Was Never Kandinsky's
A bicycle, a Bauhaus workshop and an Italian who needed a better name than B3. How Breuer's steel tube club chair got a painter's first name.
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Travel5 min read
Daikanyama and Nakameguro: Tokyo's Slow Shopping Hill
A select shop that moved uphill in 1979, a bookstore wrapped in its own logo and a river where the cherry branches meet over the water.
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Travel5 min read
Roma and Condesa: Mexico City's Art Deco Comeback
A neighborhood laid out by a circus owner, a racetrack you can still jog around and the earthquake that emptied both before they came back.
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Travel4 min read
Le Marais, Paris: A Style Guide to the Old Marsh
Royal squares, salt-tax mansions and a 2013 concept store on a side street. The Marais rewards anyone who walks it slowly.
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Travel4 min read
Berlin Mitte: Squats, Galleries and the Long Walk West
A margarine factory turned art institute, a department store with four lives and the East Berlin streets that taught the city how to shop again.
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Design5 min read
The Bauhaus Lasted 14 Years and Rewired Design
A school that changed cities twice, lost three directors and was shut down by the Nazis still decides what your furniture looks like.
By Quiet Menace Editors /
Design4 min read
USM Haller, the Office Furniture That Became a Flex
A Swiss locksmith's grandson, an architect obsessed with systems and a Paris bank order for 600 workstations. The chrome grid is still being bolted together.
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Design4 min read
Donald Judd Built Furniture Because Stores Failed Him
A pair of sinks, a bed for his kids and a small town in far West Texas. How the minimalist sculptor ended up designing furniture by the dozen.
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Design5 min read
Pierre Jeanneret's Chandigarh Chairs and the Fakes Problem
Government office chairs from a planned Indian city became a luxury status object. Then came the scrap auctions, the reconstructions, the replicas and the police.
By Quiet Menace Editors /
Design4 min read
Tadao Ando, the Boxer Who Taught Concrete to Be Quiet
No architecture degree, a short career in the ring and a lifetime of poured concrete. How Tadao Ando went from a tiny Osaka house to Paris, Malibu and Naoshima.
By Quiet Menace Editors /
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