COLBY MUGRABI FINDS SURPRISING CONNECTIONS BETWEEN FASHION, ART, ARCHITECTURE, AND DESIGN ON MINNIE MUSE

In his first book, the photographer captures one of Los Angeles’s iconic thoroughfares with an eye to abstract imagery, finding coherence in Southern California’s diverse sprawl.

The London-based firm brings its incisive understanding of both physical and social history to new and renewed projects ranging from Juergen Teller’s studio and a Paul Smith store to the nonprofit contemporary art exhibition center Raven Row.

Fall’s sharp shapes and clean lines play off of the stark Brutalist architecture of the Bronx Community College in John Guerrero and Katelyn Gray’s editorial from our new issue, starring Charlee Fraser.

With the opening of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture this weekend, take a look back at our feature on its architect and his global perspective—and his early sketches of the dazzling new museum.

A pared-back retreat near Portugal’s Atlantic coast offers a secluded retreat from the everyday.

The architect trio has become an art-world favorite thanks to its sensitive, insightful designs for museums and galleries, as well as its gorgeous models, objects of desire in their own right.

The German artist’s latest show revisits landmarks from the city where she first learned to be a photographer.

The young Japanese architect’s enchanting designs challenge our expectations in a new group show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

The location of Jean-Marc Houmard’s latest property—the heart of colonial Granada, Nicaragua, one of the oldest cities in South America—may surprise those who are familiar with its owner from his urbane New York City eateries, Indochine and Acme, but Tribal Hotel remains true to his taste. Whereas Houmard’s restaurants offer a tropical feel in a city environment, Tribal Hotel brings a curated beauty to a quiet place. Designed in the Mid-century Modern ӕsthetic with rural whims, Tribal has an unassuming façade, but is warm, and boasts simple elegance within. Truly a boutique hotel, Tribal offers five suites, each with a terrace and each different from the next, but all hand-designed in a signature style and replete with one-of-a-kind, Nicaraguan artisanal pieces.

The Fobe House in Marrakech, Morocco, is strikingly contemporary. At first glance, it’s all starkness and contrasts, a cascade of sharply-angled white structures speckled across an arid landscape. Infinity pools, floating terraces, and a mysterious neon glow are all present, each detail adding to the disparity between modernity and the home’s surroundings—really nothing, save the Atlas Mountains at the horizon.

Less glamorous with less money and less crowds, the Venice Architecture Biennale is the ugly stepsister to the Art Biennale’s Cinderella held in alternating years. There were anxious expectations for Rem Koolhaas, author of the seminal Delirious New York and founder of the far reaching and influential office OMA, who was tapped to take the helm and set things right. Critics have applauded his encyclopedic “Fundamentals” exhibition that resides in the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, as well as his autocratic decision to steer all the national pavilions to focus on the rise of modernism over the last hundred years. A commanding commissioner, Koolhaas has organized one of the most cohesive biennales in recent memory. Standouts included the Korean Pavilion, whose attempt to bridge North and South Korea through architecture garnered the Golden Lion, and the clever and funny Russian Pavilion as an international trade fair promoting the modernization efforts of its motherland.

The turnover at 57 Walker Street is heavy this autumn, with five different designer-architect collaborations taking their turn in the small Chinatown storefront that is the site of this year’s BOFFO Building Fashion series with barely more than a week each to set up. But despite appearances to the contrary—the taped floor, the exposed ceiling, the scaffolding, the dust—the Patrik Ervell pop-up shop is indeed open and ready for business.

The brothers behind Leong Leong Architecture—Chris, 33, and Dominic, 32—have received great attention from their peers—they won the New Practices award from the American Institute of Architects in 2010—and the fashion industry alike, collaborating with Opening Ceremony, Siki Im, and 3.1 Phillip Lim to create the spaces that help define those brands. Their most recent building, 3.1 Phillip Lim’s flagship store in South Korea, is their second project with the fashion designer (the 3.1 Phillip Lim shop in Los Angeles is also a Leong Leong design), who asked the brothers to share their thoughts on Ellsworth Kelly, the meeting place of fashion and architecture, and what should be done about Penn Station.

Rarely is high design an experimental attempt at anonymity. The boastful form, an often lofty dismissal of convention, seeks to teach by stepping above or outside boundaries, suggesting progress is solely a movement toward the future. What, then, if one revisits the past? Treehotel, a collection of modern structures in the unvisited woods of northern Sweden, posed the question when architectural firm Tham & Videgård Arkitekter unveiled its design several years ago: a mirrored glass cube suspended from a tree outside the village of Harads, sixty kilometers south of the Arctic Circle. To stumble upon the cube in its boreal surroundings is to experience Philip Johnson’s Glass House turned inside-out: eye-to-eye with yourself in the expanse, you are suddenly aware of solidarity in an environment not your own. But cross the connected rope bridge, hands clasped on a railing ten feet in the air, and you’re made an invisible viewer of that same stretch. The structure, celebrated and praised, is the product of that never-ending dialectic between industrialists and environmentalists, out of which we have finally learned that man’s expansion can be a collaborative process.

With winter approaching, thoughts and plans begin turning towards the Caribbean, where even now extravagant new resorts are opening every season. One of the most stunning, from the burgeoning Viceroy chain, sits between two crystalline bays on the West End of Anguilla, a British island just east of Puerto Rico and north of Saint-Martin. A grid of thick columns and cantilevered horizontals of silver travertine—like a ’60s update of Frank Lloyd Wright—the Viceroy Anguilla, now just over a year old, marks a sharply minimalist turn from the traditional tropes of resort architecture. The main sensation is one of lightness and air, although guests are reassured that when Hurricane Earl passed by late this summer, those who stayed indoors barely noticed.

If the week’s unseasonable heat has you worried about global warming, a trip to West Chelsea might help soothe your soul. At the far end of 23rd Street, in the shadow of the High Line, sits a large block of ice. This ice―actually a glacial cavern of carved styrofoam―is the fourth in a series of pop-up shops that form the Building Fashion project, the brainchild of arts organization BOFFO and architect and designer Spilios Gianakopoulos. The current iteration, which opened last Friday with a party, where Metric performed an acoustic set, co-hosted by The Last Magazine and Droog, features Richard Chai’s men’s and women’s collections, and was designed by the artist-architect partnership Snarkitecture.