SPECTRUM

SPECTRUM An essential survey of architecture and design today

PETER SHIRE: TOWERS WITH RANCH DRESSING Edited and designed by Peter Shire and Lisa Tchakmakian Hat & Beard Press 472 pages, $125

Peter Shire: Towers with Ranch Dressing evaluates the ways in which towers have influenced the artist’s work as signifiers of “nostalgia, joy, memory, and anxiety.” Utilizing film stills, archival photography, collages, and sketches, the book provides a rich snapshot not only of Shire’s career but of California culture. The book will be published in a special edition of 1,000.

BOOK From Teapots to Towers

Perhaps best known for his involvement with Ettore Sottsass and his Italian design and architecture group Memphis at the height of Postmodernism, Los Angeles native Peter Shire remains an iconic figure whose playful attitude and radical irreverence continue to push boundaries while subverting ideas of taste and defining California culture and design.

Although a handful of books on Shire’s work—particularly his ceramic teapots—exist, an unprecedented volume, Peter Shire: Towers with Ranch Dressing, takes a deep dive into the artist’s fascination with tall buildings as a symbol of his life and work in L.A. “Los Angeles began as a pueblo surrounded by land grants—or ranchos—from the king of Spain,” Shire says, explaining the book’s title. “There still remains an aspect of the rancho system—land which sometimes translates into real estate and has made a goofy mess of pop culture crossed with avarice, confused aesthetics and objectives in building and style. What could make for more of a goopy mess than ranch dressing?”

With an introduction by the artist and original essays and contributions from Andrew Berardini, Anna Katz, Bobby Klein, Jim Heimann, Aaron Rose, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, the book is oversaturated with sketches and drawings, images of Shire’s public sculptures in and around L.A., tall towerlike teapots, and archival photography of various towers sprinkled throughout the Southern California landscape.

“I adore towers. They are giant jungle gyms for adults, always attracting my attention, whether I’m walking, driving, or flying,” Shire says. “Towers to the max.” –Leilah Stone

RESIDENTIAL Arboreal Living

Following the renovation and expansion of a historic farmhouse in Parma, Italy, its residents now dine beneath the leafy boughs of a towering indoor tree.

Rising almost three stories, the 33-foot-tall ficus sends a burst of green over the open-plan living, dining, and kitchen areas of the 5,400-square-foot house, owned by Francesco Mutti, CEO of international tomato sauce brand Mutti, and his family.

“The client has a number of animals and is deeply engaged with the countryside,” explains Carlo Ratti, founding partner of Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA), who conceived a design driven by biophilia in collaboration with Italian architect Italo Rota.

The tree, called Alma (“soul” in Spanish) by the client, grows from a rectangular bed of grass at the center of a sun-dappled wing, where weathered steel that Ratti selected for its “aged finish that evokes the farmhouse’s history” drops down the retouched and repainted brick-and-plaster facade. To better accommodate the tree, the design team specified a new metal roof, seven feet higher than the rest of the building’s volume, lavished with six skylights.

By the tree’s base is a 40-foot-long table of fossilized kauri pine. Paired with handcarved cedar stools and pushed against a new glass wall on the building’s southern flank, it’s at the same elevation as the surrounding meadow. Meaning an evening’s aperitivo spread might be exactly eye level with a curious Piero, the resident donkey.

The gutted and newly reconfigured interior’s seven interconnected rooms are in direct dialogue with the tree, with perforated glass and brick walls and weathered steel rods providing subtle spatial division without blocking light. Resin flooring embedded with soil and orange peels—a technique Ratti developed for the Italy Pavilion at Dubai’s recent World Expo— expands the natural feeling. “This was a little bit of experimentation with a new type of organic resin we developed thinking about locally sourced, zero-distance architecture,” Ratti explains. Following Spain, Italy is Europe’s second-largest orange producer. —Mairi Beautyman

Rarely one to take on a residential project, Ratti made an exception for this converted farmhouse and granary (hence the property’s name, Greenary). Its focal points include a 33-foot-tall ficus and a floating steel stairway.

The Victoria & Albert Museum’s latest exhibition, Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear, was designed by local architect Jayden Ali of JA Projects with the goal of challenging the social, historical, and environmental intersections of fashion and masculinity. Pictured: Craig Green’s spring 2021 collection (left) and Orange Culture’s autumn/ winter 2020 Flower Boy two-piece set (right).

EXHIBITION Presenting As Male

Last month, one of the most hotly anticipated exhibitions in the U.K. opened at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear, developed in partnership with Gucci, celebrates “the artistry and diversity of masculine attire and appearance” through various media, including a bronze Auguste Rodin sculpture, the Renaissance Portrait of Prince Alessandro Farnese, and iconic fashion campaigns, as well as film and performance.

The V&A tapped local architect and designer Jayden Ali of JA Projects to design the exhibition, keeping in mind the goal of “challenging the idea of historical masculinity as portrayed within British institutions,” Ali explains. In the first gallery, he notes, “you’re presented with all of these cisgender white male bodies [represented] in the objects, while five-meter-high drapes are printed with deconstructed black male bodies—fragments of limbs, torsos, and thighs. It’s a pretty incredible thing.”

While many of the objects and outfits on view represent “conventional” masculine attire, the exhibition also points to the fluidity of dress and gender expression, whether through Harris Reed’s Fluid Romanticism collection or a photograph of nonbinary musician Sam Smith donning pearls.

Ali notes that while the earth tones of the first gallery reference the origins of man and “the revelation of the body,” the cool blue curtains and generous presence of glass in the final third represent industrialization, the Anthropocene, and “where fashion meets the city.” Here, Ali hopes to remind viewers of “the incredible amount of energy it takes to produce glass, but also the carbon-hungry existence that underpins [urban life] and the fabrication of garments.” —Giovanna Dunmall

LIGHTING Endless Options

Suspended, mounted, or kinetic— pure cylindrical forms become brilliant luminaires in the solutions offered within Cyls, a collection from Spanish manufacturer Estiluz in collaboration with Mermelada Estudio. Utility and capacity for customization are robust because the LED fixtures are available as pendants, sconces, or uplights, and in table- and floor-lamp versions. Standard satinlike finishes include black or beige, while some options can be specified with a white pearl translucent polyester shade and a black polished marble base. Corded lamps feature an on/off switch, whereas hardwired fixtures can be made dimmable. estiluz.com —Joseph P. Sgambati III

Artful Illumination

The billowing, mouth-blown glass shades of Lodes LED Flar diffuse a rich glow reminiscent of traditional storm lanterns. Conceived by French designer Patrick Norguet for the Venetian heritage lighting company, Flar marries decorative objects with forwardthinking lighting design. The bulbous shades, available in 18.5 and 24.6 inches, sit atop a 3D-laser-cut base that blooms beneath them in metallic finishes of Champagne and Terra, reflecting accents of pink, orange, and brown. The cable-mounted power switch features a dimmer to modulate intensity and ambience. lodes.com —J.S.

EDUCATION Sensory Solution

Birmingham, U.K.–based design studio Dual Works has completed a new creative space for people with complex disabilities, including deaf-blindness, in a project that rethinks “the interface between arts and social care.”

Designer-makers Zoe Robertson and Steve Snell have created flexible storage systems, flip-up desks, and a mobile art cart for a community center in Birmingham, U.K., called Sense TouchBase Pears. In the process, the pair has had to learn how people with multiple impairments use their senses to communicate and understand their world.

The project, which opened in late 2021, embraces tactility and inclusive design. Large braille panels with contrasting colors create sensory spaces that are both aesthetic and functional, with orange used to reference the branding identity of the client, the nonprofit organization Sense.

The designers were inspired by how users of the art studios read stories to one another through objects and materials kept in story bags. “We’ve never been comfortable with anything that is kept behind glass,” says Snell. “We’re interested in things you can touch and experience. We wanted to create openness, beauty, and design quality.”

Robertson adds: “Social care settings can be very stark and clinical and don’t actually function for the groups that use them. Our client wanted to change that and bring warmth to the space.”

Aspects of the Dual Works design will now be adopted in other Sense arts buildings across the U.K. According to Stephanie Tyrrell, the Sense group’s head of arts, these spaces will ensure “people with complex disabilities are creative leaders, now and in the future.” —Kim Megson

Design studio Dual Works used birch plywood to give furnishings a calming tone, while ample use of pegboards allows users to curate the space, displaying equipment such as musical instruments and SUBPACs, which generate sound and vibration.

PUBLIC ART Urban Forest

A design firm specializing in “using light and darkness to enhance the visual environment” has activated the dynamic, forest-inspired facade of Copenhagen’s new wood-burning power plant.

Speirs Major’s lighting design for the BIO4 facility, which is located only a mile from the city’s downtown, is meant to draw the public’s attention to the Danish capital’s transition to renewable energy.

The building, designed by Gottlieb Paludan Architects, is clad in hanging tree trunks, creating a thicket that is 19 feet deep. A prominent staircase takes visitors from ground level up through the trees and to the roof, providing views into the plant’s interior along the way, and across to neighboring Sweden from the top.

“We wanted a very natural effect,” says Speirs Major senior partner Keith Bradshaw. “We really liked the idea that you are looking into a forest at night, and it is beautiful and enticing, but at the same time kind of unsettling. Often in stories about forests— be it ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ The Blair Witch Project, or even Bambi—you have that sense of being beckoned in. When you get close to this facade, you really do feel like the light of a forest is moving through. It is very, very suggestive.”

Designed to be a symbol for the city, the plant is lit in tones of warm white under normal circumstances but transforms into a dramatic red on Danish Constitution Day and a striped rainbow during Pride.

“The effect is really special,” says Bradshaw. “The building has this ability to say, ‘We’re part of this city and we’re part of this nation.’ ” —Kim Megson

By day, natural light creates a dappled shadow effect through the trees (above). After dark, layers of immersive illumination continually shift in speed, focus, and intensity to cast patterns that never appear the same way twice (top). The Speirs Major team relied on extensive testing and physical and virtual modeling to design the installation, but it was executed partly using traditional theatrical projection techniques.