Sophie Lovell interviewed Dame Zaha Hadid for uncube magazine no. 37 in September 2015. It turned out to be one of the last published interviews with the architect before her untimely death in March 2016. uncube dedicated an entire issue to the controversial architect whose work undisputedly pushed the technical and formal boundaries of building: “To mark the occasion of her 65th birthday, we have consciously put aside for a moment the headline news fodder about working conditions in Qatar, Tokyo Stadium mudslinging and interview fiascos that you can read about everywhere else, to focus on the actual architecture. Issue no.37 is a portrait of a singular architect whose star has burned a glorious path from her birthplace in Baghdad, through the unbuilt/unbuildable wilderness years, to running a 400-strong office translating her unmistakable forms into the built environment all over the planet.”

Sadly, uncubemagazine.com is no longer online, but here is the full interview:

HADID

Waiting for Zaha is what happens to many who come into her orbit. She is, after all, an international figure heading a global concern operating dozens of projects worldwide. But as much as she is a leading starchitect, she is also someone who polarises opinion like no other – and far beyond the realm of architecture. Why is that actually? In seeking to find out, uncube’s Sophie Lovell’s patience paid off, and she encountered a reflective architect deeply involved in her work in all its facets.

Sophie Lovell: All high-profile architects experience criticism at some time or another, but do you feel you have had more than your fair share? Do you feel you are sometimes misunderstood?

Zaha Hadid: I’m a woman. I’m an Arab. I’m an architect. Biology and geography define the first two; the third has taken forty years of hard work. But hard work is not always enough. For a large part of those forty years, some of the biggest difficulties that I faced were brought about not by my work, but by my existence as a woman, or as an Arab, or indeed, as an ‘Arab Woman’. Ignorance and injustices, large or small, blatant or subtle, deliberate or – and perhaps worse – casual, not even recognised by their perpetrators.

I’m Iraqi; I live in London; I don’t really have a particular place, and I can say from my personal experience, it is actually very liberating. Perhaps it was my flamboyance rather than being a woman that was the reason I didn’t fully fit into the culture at hand. I think, on one hand, it’s made me much tougher and more precise – and maybe this is reflected in my architecture.

SL: Looking at your work, the diligence you apply in preparing by hand, in terms of sketches, drawings, or paintings for each new project, has been particularly noticeable. Do you have a routine or a regular path that you follow when approaching each new project concept?

ZH: Painting formed a critical part of my early career as the design tool that allowed us the intense experimentation in both form and movement – leading to the development of a new language for architecture. The painting was always a critique of what was currently available to us at the time as designers, as 3D design software didn’t exist. There has been a complete shift in the last, say, thirty years, to now doing some projects only on the computer.

My paintings really evolved 30 years ago because I thought the architectural drawings required a much greater degree of distortion and fragmentation to assist our research, but eventually it affected the work, of course. I’m not a painter – I have to make that quite clear. I can paint – but I’m not a painter – as the paintings we created were always part of the research for our architectural projects. The paintings I’ve done are very important to me, and if I did them again, I’d do them in a very different kind of way, but they were very important at the time.

In the early days of our office, the method we used to construct a drawing or painting or model led to new discoveries. We sometimes did not know what the research would lead to – but we knew there would be something, and that all the experiments had to lead to perfecting the project. And these are the journeys that I think are very exciting, as they are not predictable.

SL: The design processes in your projects over the years could be seen to have shifted from extremely warm, visceral, hands-on skills to a colder, machine-calculated and drawn, hands-off discipline. Would you agree? How does one maintain the warmth and vivacity in parametric design?

ZH: It is a different kind of operational psychology today.

Previously, in an architect’s office, you’d have each individual do almost everything: make a model, design, answer the phone or make a slide presentation. Now, you have people who specialise in all the different aspects of the design and construction process, so we’ve worked hard to establish a collective research culture in our office where many talents can feed off each other’s ideas and experience.

The developments that computing has brought to architecture are incredible, and as such, the work can handle the much greater complexity and flexibility that clients require today. Computing has enabled an overall intensification of relationships – both internally within the buildings as well externally with the context.

I am, however, concerned that no one today really knows how to draw a plan. It took me 20 years to convince people to do everything in 3D, with an army of people trying to draw the most difficult perspectives, and now everyone works in 3D on the computer – but they think a plan is a horizontal section – it’s not. The plan really needs organisation via a diagram.

SL: You had an exhibition entitled “Form in Motion” in the US in 2012. Can you explain how important motion is to you in your work and how it differs, say, from the futurist notion of the representation of “speed”?

ZH: I’ve always been interested in how our movement through space affects architecture. As in the frames of a film: not seeing the world from one particular angle, but having a more complex view. We view the world from so many perspectives – never from one single viewpoint – our perception is never fixed. This movement through space is very critical in all buildings, which also impacts our perception of time and the relationships we establish with our built environment. It differs from the pure perception of speed.

For example, in our Kartal masterplan design for Istanbul, located in a large derelict industrial area to the southeast of the city on the Marmara coast, we established a fluid grid which builds up over time. Sections of the grid develop as an entire plot or only at the intersections; it is fluid in that it changes in time, programme and space. This gradation allows a process of ‘incomplete composition’, where a project grows organically over time, but looks and feels complete at any given point in its evolution.

SL: You are mostly famed for your stand-alone cultural projects, but more recently, I notice, there are housing projects as well, such as the new development in Milan. What, in your view, is the extent of responsibility for an architect in terms of where their building ends and the surrounding urban, rural or social fabric begins?

ZH: Architecture can carry within it an inherent sense of vitality and optimism; the ability to connect communities and build their futures. Ecological sustainability and social disparity are the defining challenges of our generation, and an architecture of inclusivity offers solutions to these key challenges.

As an architect, your client is no longer a single person or type of person; your client is everyone. All buildings should have a civic component. Even a commercial high-rise building should offer a civic programme – public spaces in which people can connect with each other and use as their own. Developers in both the public and private sectors must invest in these public spaces. They unite the city and tie the urban fabric together.

SL: What else needs to change?

ZH: There has been a move in many of the world’s cities over the past years towards walled, private spaces. As architects, we must react to this. Over many centuries, architects have been trying to liberate the city, to open it up, to make our cities more porous and accessible. Building these gated communities within the city, like mini Kremlins, is a huge step backwards; it is a very archaic way of living.

Part of architecture’s job is to make people feel good in the spaces where we live, go to school, or where we work – so we must be committed to raising standards.

There’s enough total wealth today that all people should have a good home, not just the very rich.

SL: How important is it for you to consider the entire lifecycle of your buildings – where materials come from and where they go after their natural life is ended, and how do you feel about the idea of your buildings being adapted and changed in the future?

ZH: We certainly consider the requirements of adaptability for the long-term use of any project. We cannot predict the future, but we can always try to anticipate it.

Architecture does not follow fashion, political or economic cycles – it follows the inherent logic of cycles of innovation generated by social and technological developments. Contemporary society is not standing still, and its buildings must evolve with new patterns of life to meet the needs of its users. I believe what is new in our generation is the much greater levels of social complexity and connectivity.

Contemporary urbanism and architecture must move beyond the architecture of repetition and compartmentalisation, towards an architecture of flexibility that addresses the complexities, dynamism and densities of our lives today.

SL: You have an extraordinary way of pushing not only forms, but materials as well to their limits. Have you at times had to wait for material development to catch up in order to realise what you really want to do?

ZH: We have a whole section of our office researching new design and construction techniques. The office maintains this ongoing research and experimentation, and there is always a lot of collaboration with engineers and with people doing experiments with materials to work on new discoveries and push them into the mainstream for the wider benefit. What is interesting now is a new worldwide collective research culture in architecture that allows many diverse talents and innovative ideas to feed into each other’s ideas and disciplines.

SL: What recent material breakthroughs particularly excite you, and which ones are you still waiting to happen?

ZH: One such innovation would be sophisticated architectural skins that can take almost any shape and have the structural, weatherproofing, and insulation properties compressed into a single layer and can be easily fabricated and assembled anywhere.

3D printing is also opening a totally new universe of possibilities: complexity will no longer be restricted by the need for simplification or design rationalisation – enabling the cost of a wall to be defined by its volume and weight, and not its shape (building a curved wall will be no more expensive than building a straight wall), allowing the architecture to be much more articulate and rich.

Applying 3D printing in the construction industry can greatly reduce the energy consumption of a build. The energy used to transport construction materials to the site and material waste on-site are considerable. By 3D printing only the material we need, there will be no offcuts and no excess of materials. The designs will also be more sustainable. For example, potentially adding shading where needed, and calibrating windows and openings to give the best possible performance. We already address these aspects of sustainability in design, but requirements to minimise costs often demand repetition and standardisation. In the future, with 3D printing, such constraints will no longer be necessary.

This interview with the architect Zaha Hadid by Sophie Lovell was for uncube magazine issue no. 37: “Zaha”, September 2015.

“Where Potsdamer Platz has its glass corporate towers, shopping centre and nondescript gastro offerings, Checkpoint Charlie is littered with fast‑food chains, souvenir stalls and vacant shopfronts: little more than a deconstructed gift shop selling a deconstructed history.”

Sophie Lovell revisited Checkpoint Charlie in her hometown of Berlin for the “Borders” issue of the Architectural Review. Now a cluttered tourist trap facing fresh waves of development, the former border crossing between East and West Berlin sits uneasily between disneyfication and memorialisation – always becoming, never being.

Article link here.

“45 years after completion, this crazy superstructure works because it is modest by design and because it has been continuously cared for. It’s Big Housing meeting Big Car without a pile up because its architects did their research; because they believed their primary social responsibility towards quality of life; and because their clients continue to carry that through.”

I wrote about the Schlangenbader Straße Estate in Berlin for June 2025 “Roads” issue of The Architectural Review  The “Schlange” (snake), as locals call it, is a late 1970s superstructural landscape by Georg Heinrichs, Gerhard Krebs and Klaus Krebs, with a motorway running through it that is not as well-known as it probably should be. With new photography by the excellent Felix Koch.

Article link here.

Our 5th S72+ dinner was on our home turf of Berlin, together with the socially responsible architectural enterprise TOMAS, transformation of material and space. The theme “Burned Out  & Empty” was an invitation to discuss ideas on repurposing built space and sustainable construction in Berlin at a time of acute housing shortages and no environmental budget left to build new. The next stage of Berlin’s built future needs to be radically different. Our guests were Regula Lüscher, former Senate Building Director and State Secretary for urban Development and Housing in Berlin; Dag Ortkrass, Managing Partner at Diete+Siepmann Ingenieurgesellschaft; Thomas Beyerle, Professor of Real Estate Economics and Real Estate Research; Andreas Krüger, Managing Director of Belius GmbH; Lena Brühne, Managing Director of Art-Invest Real Estate Management; Olga Graf, food activist and Managing Director of Markthalle Neun in Berlin; and Hannes Bäuerle, Managing Director of Materialbank.

“The financial market wants maximum security and predictability, and building reactivation doesn’t offer that. But if sustainability and innovation were the yardstick for investment strategies, then that would change too.” – Regula Lüscher

“Space activation must be considered holistically and with a view to the future. This means: conversion instead of new construction, reusing materials, incorporating local ecosystems.” – Dag Ortkrass

“In times when society is becoming more and more divided, places and spaces for encounters and interaction are needed. Places where people, who might otherwise not come into contact, can interact. I also believe that such innovative initiatives should be owned by the city.” – Olga Graf

Our chef: Jonas Merold, our sponsors: Materialbank and Rosenthal, our photographer: Friedrich J Richter, our location: a temporary space in Mollstrasse 1, Berlin, which was originally built to house the GDR National News Service ADN.

The functionalist design philosophy of Dieter Rams and his colleagues in the 1960s was a direct response to the dark horrors of totalitarianism and fascism. It grew out of a strong belief in designing a more democratic, more egalitarian world within, full of light and labour-saving devices for ‘users’ (not ‘consumers’) – products that gave people the freedom of choice in the interiors of their homes to complement the rise of democracy without.

Read Sophie’s opinion piece on the (mis)use of Dieter Rams’ designs as signifiers in the TV series “Severance” here.

studio_lovell was invited to co-design an immersive dining experience and give a keynote talk at the Hotelschool The Hague for their Future of Food course in Amsterdam. We talked about learning to ask better questions and understanding ingredients as expressions of systems. And about all the different values expressed in the words used to talk about food and how changing some of those words can help change systems, by design. And we collaborated with tutors Joost de Vos and Robert Gallicano to develop a series of dishes in the multi-course dinner revolving around rocks and minerals – from cooking and baking with stones and edible clays to using pebbles as flavour vehicles and metaphors. We also talked about learning to ask better questions and understanding ingredients as expressions of systems. And about all the different values expressed in the words used to talk about food and how changing some of those words can help change systems, by design.

The S72+ dinners are collaborations between studio_lovell and like-minded partners with guests chosen from various disciplines. Our aim is to encourage knowledge exchange and expand the conversation around the table over shared food. We co-hosted this iteration with  Poggenpohl, curating three dinners in three locations: Hamburg, Düsseldorf and Stuttgart. Our topic of conversation was “New Standards of Luxury”. Our chef was Jonas Merold. And our guests were leading figures from the fields of furniture design, furniture fairs, porcelain manufacture, fashion, product design, experimental engineering, museum direction, wine-making, luxury brand marketing and more. 72 hours after each S72+ dinner (the time it takes to fully digest a meal), we ask our guests what they took home from the conversation.

“To me sensuality is a luxury. In a fast time, it can be a challenge to connect to your senses and engage in critical thinking. But I believe this is what our time needs from us.” – guest Melchior Grau, co-director of Grau

“Luxury is in the moments that take you beyond the everyday. Everyone is driven by something different and tries to shape the world in their own way. Only encounters beyond the everyday can make you realise how diverse life can be.” – guest Jan Knippers, Director of the ITKE

Luxury is giving a project time to mature – an almost impossible option in any industry. Luxury is also being able to buy something again and again.” – guest Insa Doan, Art Director at Rosenthal

See more guest quotes at studio_lovell’s Instagram and Instagram stories.

Photos © Jordana Schramm, Daniela Meise, Marko Seifert

Table service courtesy of Rosenthal

“The word “iconic” is representative of a toxic, destructive paradigm. It belongs to a mindset of dominance over people and nature, where humankind is perceived to be discrete from nature, not part of it, and where some people are more equal than others.”

Read the full article here.

“Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design”

Dieter Rams

During the early stages of working on this book, I travelled to Osaka, Japan, for an exhibition about the work of Dieter Rams in the context of twentieth-century design. On the evening after the opening, we were sitting in a bar at the top of a high-rise hotel, looking out through huge plate-glass windows at the nocturnal panorama of the dense industrial Osaka cityscape. It had been a long day of press conferences, opening speeches and seminars followed by a Japanese banquet in Dieter Rams’s honour, and now I was in the company of a small group of people including Klaus Klemp, the exhibition’s co-curator, Mark Adams and Daniel Nelson from Vitsœ, Dieter Rams and his wife Ingeborg, and Rams’s good friend and advisor Britte Siepenkothen, enjoying a nightcap of Japanese whisky.

We were quietly discussing the day’s events when Dieter Rams, who had worked hard all day and appeared tired, suddenly said, ‘Why on earth do we need another book about me?’ At the age of seventy-six, Rams had been famous as a designer since he was twenty-five and despite acknowledging that having people interested in your work and ideas is no bad thing, he hated all the limelight and media attention. ‘I want nothing to do with this star designer machine,’ he added, suddenly getting rather worked up. We all looked at him. Apart from the fact that, as one of the most respected industrial designers in the world, he was a ‘star’ whether he liked it or not, the reason why the world needed another book had been made absolutely clear earlier in the day in the huge auditorium packed with young designers and design students hanging on to Rams’s every word. A particularly beautiful and precise speech at the symposium by the Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa, who praised Rams’s oeuvre of what he aptly called ’correct design’, highlighted the level of respect there is for his work among today’s top professionals in the field. Klaus Klemp was the first to speak up: ‘Dieter,’ he said, ‘you still have work to do – to communicate and bring your message across to the young people.’ There was a chorus of assent from all those present.

Mollified, Rams agreed that this was a good reason to do another book. ‘But,’ he added, looking at me very intently, ‘it should be an empty book that says something important.’ In this respect, I have perhaps failed in my task. How do you write an empty book about someone whose working life has covered more than half a century and who has designed well over 500 products, and at the same time transmit all the complex interrelationships and contexts in which these products came into being? It would all be much simpler if one could state that Dieter Rams’s work and principles arose from him alone. But Rams would be the first to say that what constitutes his ‘work’ as an industrial designer is inseparable from the systems and networks through which it was produced. As such, assigning individual authorship to his work is, to some extent, meaningless. He could never have resolved his concepts without the ideas of his predecessors and his contemporaries, in what was an extraordinary era of worldwide growth and change. He could not have produced the things he did without the other designers at Braun, nor without the technicians, the managers, the materials manufacturers, the vision of the company’s original owners and even the marketing department. The same goes for his furniture design with Vitsœ, albeit on a smaller scale. Even beyond this vast network of people required to create his products, the designs themselves were modular and thus system-related. In nearly every instance, there are complex interrelationships within and between his designs: the improvements of individual components, how the products work with one another, how they are related aesthetically and in terms of intent, and how they function in the home. Last but not least, Rams’s products – in fact, his whole attitude and his principles – are geared towards the end user: they have to fit into the social systems, the lives and homes of a multitude of different kinds of people, and serve all of them discretely, reliably and comfortably. It would be wrong to remove the work of Dieter Rams from these contexts and yet trying to explain them has involved many words and many pictures. I trust he will forgive me for not writing an empty book, but there was much that needed to be said about his extraordinary life and work in order to transmit the essence of his message: ‘less but better’.

The world has changed since I wrote this book but the message within it has not. It seems a more fragile place than ever, yet in much more in need of context. It would be even harder to write an empty book that says something important in 2023 than it was in 2011. Dieter is now in his nineties. He moves a little slower but his passion for mending the world through design is undimmed. His wife Ingeborg sadly passed away in 2022, Britte, his manager, who kept the show on the road and secured the sound basis for Dieter’s historical legacy through the Rams Foundation is enjoying her well-earned retirement. Klaus is now running the Foundation. Mark, along with his family and team, continues to put Rams’s principles into practice as well as people and planet first with Vitsœ.

Although design has also moved on a great deal in terms of technology, materials and requirements since Dieter’s heyday, the internet has helped make him into something of an ‘icon’, a synonym for values and principles and the capacity for reflective intelligence in industrial design. Long after most of the products Dieter and his team designed have gone out of production (but not use, there is a thriving vintage market for certain objects) ­his name remains a benchmark for younger designers in a field flooded with change and responsibility.

Why is that? Of course, it’s true to says that, as a designer of consumer goods, Dieter Rams helped fill the world with more “things” at a time when commercial production exploded towards the resulting environmental tipping points we are faced with today. But it is also true to say that he did this with a passion for quality and usability that was often at odds with the interests of company profits. Dieter has been expounding for years to anyone who would listen about the need to make “less but better” in the face of catastrophic over-consumption. Now, at long last, the world might just be starting to listen.

“Trompe is mega-mannerist. Haut faux. It went so well with the rise of Neo-Liberalism in the 1980s. It makes perfect sense to revisit trompe in this era of snake oil salesmen, war criminals and fake news. It’s fake and it’s ostentatious but it’s also all about skilled sleight of hand, and strategic trickery. Take a step to the left and you will see it for the empty façade it really is.” Brief musings on trompe l’oeil for For Scale

Design thinking should be substituted for “food thinking” to enable humans to create properly holistic systems that no longer cause ecological chaos, writes Sophie Lovell.

“What if there was another, more relational way of approaching the design process? One that is based not on things or problems but on building and maintaining healthy relationships instead? A non-binary approach that is adaptive, and embraces context, equity and equality, allowing for even contradictory interests of myriad stakeholders. One that is less causal, more entangled….” Read the full article here.

“In the face of REALLY BIG UNSOLVABLE PROBLEMS, you can “lie down, curl up, try not to cry, cry a lot” in your shapeless DIY pillow fort. Or you can embrace your fear, hug it close, and whisper in its ear: “Shhhh, I own you now”. Putting your arms around the “radiance of a thousand suns” and making it your bitch is the vibe for a grown-up Bond villain lair. What’s not to love about a cuddlable nuclear floof that’s all BLOFELD’S KITTY ADORBS VIBES with just a hint of shag pile about it?”

Exposure Therapy: The Atomic Cloud as Décor

In a mood almost definitely triggered by THE 96TH ACADEMY AWARDS (2024), let us discuss the relevance of “atomic mushrooms” in décor.

Here we are again in one of those moments of massive apocalyptic angst, reminded of nuclear ARSE-nals thanks to OPPENHEIMER and the Atreides stockpile on D. VILLENEUVE’s Arrakis, not to mention the RIDICULOUS NUMBER of REAL, cartoonish Bond-type villains queueing up to conquer the world right now.

And yet, the “atomic mushroom” for the home we are talking about is not menacing. It is “HUGGABLE”:

The atomic mushroom in question is one of the Huggable Atomic Mushrooms by designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby feat. Michael Anastassiades. They made two: Priscila, which is in the MoMA, and then the other, less-known one – which is ten times more gorgeous because IT’S SO FLUFFY – called Seminole (after the eponymous 13.7 kiloton Enewetak Atoll nuclear explosion of 1956^[1]) and is a “therapy object” from their superbly titled series of DESIGNS FOR FRAGILE PERSONALITIES IN ANXIOUS TIMES from 2005. (How naive we all were; how prescient they were.)

It took almost two more decades for home therapy décor to really become a thing. During the Pandemic, lockdown loungers stuck at home all day busied about coddling themselves in comfort nests. Pillow forts became de rigueur. Giant bean bag dog beds for people made from washable plush appeared unironically in our feeds. As the anxious times increased, loungescape trends began to morph more and more towards kindergarten-coloured, round-cornered, chubby furniture. A veritable “childlike” design fest of regression instead of retro.

One could view a white mohair huggable atomic mushroom designed in 2005 as some kind of precursor to all this whimsy, but as a paragon of conceptual/speculative design, there is so much more to read into “Seminole” as a home décor object. This is not comfort décor, it is therapeutic decor. Subtle difference.

In the face of REALLY BIG UNSOLVABLE PROBLEMS, you can “lie down, curl up, try not to cry, cry a lot” in your shapeless DIY pillow fort. Or you can embrace your fear, hug it close, and whisper in its ear: “Shhhh, I own you now”. Putting your arms around the “radiance of a thousand suns” and making it your bitch is the vibe for a grown-up Bond villain lair. What’s not to love about a cuddlable nuclear floof that’s all BLOFELD’S KITTY ADORBS VIBES with just a hint of shag pile about it? Don’t be shy, embrace the evil.

“END TIMES CORRESPONDENT” IN THE FIELD

I, personally, got to cuddle one of Dunne and Raby’s Huggable Atomic Mushrooms once because I featured the one and only “Seminole” ever made in an exhibition called “FREAK SHOW” (2010) at the now-defunct Helmrinderknecht gallery in Berlin. RESULT: I can vouch for the queasy haptic deliciousness of the experience: somewhere – appropriately – around the level of snuggling with a “LET THE WORLD BURN” silver Persian.

Freak Show

“FREAK SHOW”, the exhibition, was named after a 1991 interactive CD-ROM by LOUISIANA ART-ROCK BAND “The Residents”. The whole thing was about speculative design without mentioning the word “speculative”, which is understandable because it was 2010 and ATOMIC PILLOW-makers Tony and Fiona hadn’t coined the term yet, as they later would. Instead, my “FREAK SHOW” catalogue notes waxed lyrical about “context” and “conceptual design” and how the designers in this exhibition^[2] were the designer “freaks” – freaks being crucial to design and interior décor because they don’t easily get embarrassed and can produce many absurd things without concern for the market, children of Gaetano Pesce that they were (“Fly my pretties”), AND YET, in a typical Capitalist twist, the market did, in fact, FIND (some of) THEM.

In a thoroughly anti-market mood, I intended to ask some “WHAT IF?”s about design FREAKdom with this exhibition, but Fiona and Tony put it much better in the preface to their book “SPECULATIVE EVERYTHING” (2013, ISBN: 978-0262019842) which included in its subtitle the exceptional phrase “SOCIAL DREAMING”:

“In a consumer society like ours, it is through buying goods that reality takes shape. The moment money is exchanged, a possible future becomes real. If it did not sell it would be sent back, becoming a rejected reality. In a consumer society, the moment we part with our money is the moment a little bit of reality is created. Not just physical reality or cultural but psychological, ethical, and behavioural. This is one of the purposes of critical design – to help us become more discerning consumers, to encourage people to demand more from industry and society as critical consumers.”

I would love to say the Huggable Atomic Mushroom series went into production. Every home should have one and that’s the truth. But Priscila remained a limited series and Seminole a one-off. They didn’t even reach heady design art market prices in the boom years despite having a shitload more shaggy depth and decor comfort value than, say, one of Ron Arad’s veritably VICIOUS and bloody uncomfortable Tempered Chairs.

Back in 2007, when I was writing a book on Design Art called Limited Edition, the year before the bottom began dropping out of all sorts of markets, the New York designer Marcus Tremonto told me that the Huggable Atomic Mushrooms were “at the more difficult end of the market” and selling for just 2,000 GBP a pop – a pittance in “Design Art” terms. But the Huggable Atomic Mushrooms are not Design Art, they are the best of what design could be. They invite fear into the domestic space and play with it.

Giving comfort in anxious times by helping to overcome residential fear should be every home improver’s goal: Décor for EMPOWERMENT, not regression. It’s time to gear up.

Riveting Sidenote

Design Art was perfect for all those nouveau cash-riche collectors of the noughties who’d made bucketloads in over-pumped markets. It represented accessible art investment, so you didn’t need to know much about it or buy into the whole old money thing to splash out. If it went with the living room décor in your Aspen retreat, you acquired it. All you had to do after that was remember not to sit on it.

I’m allowed to hate on Design Art because I wrote BOTH the books (EXPERT remember?) The other one is Furnish: Furniture and Interior Design for the 21^st Century (Gestalten, 2008) – and I’m talking about it here because it gives the context in which the “Designs For Fragile Personalities in Anxious Times” came about.

2005, when the Huggable Atomic Mushrooms were made, was right at that peak capitalism, peak Glasnost moment in which Design Art blossomed. It was exemplified by the auction price jumps for Marc Newson’s RIVETING late ‘80s, limited edition, Lockheed Lounge. (You know the one, it’s the shiny piece of furniture Madonna is balancing awkwardly on at the start of her 1993 “Rain” video.) Marc Newson made the Lounge in an edition of 10+2. In 2000, Christie’s sold one at auction for 105,000 USD. In 2006, Sotheby’s sold one for 1 million USD, which was then sold privately for an estimated 2.5 million shortly afterwards, and so on. Eternal growth: design for profit’s sake.

For T-1000-style chaise longue fans with compromised (or frozen) asset portfolios, Vitra’s functionally pointless, decorative Nippes (German word, look it up, Deepl is wrong, it doesn’t mean nipples), 1:6  SCALE miniature of the Lockheed Lounge is currently on offer online at the reduced price of 1097 Euros. It will, of course, NEVER give you the comfort of a Huggable Atomic Mushroom. It’s not at all fluffy, but it could, at a pinch, serve as pet décor for a very small pet.

You can’t really blame designers for trying to make a buck in the auction house back then, what with dwindling royalties and job security. Being a designer was starting to get really stressy too, because design was suddenly supposed to step up and solve all the world’s problems instead of just making nice things for the home like most people expected. It’s hard being misunderstood, so making hard-to-sit-on furniture was a logical retaliation.

For Scale is authored by David Michon

For Scale and Sophie Lovell go tone to tone on the topic of beige.

“Beige is the ULTIMATE symbol of end-stage capitalism… It is the most dangerous colour of all. In the 2020s, beige sofas started to wriggle like articulated maggots across interior shots: all rounded edges for people who don’t want to adult. Beige-in-beige lounges are a desert landscape. A sterile void. It’s beige as denial, a massive, pouty, self-indulgent sulk in the face of change. It’s an end-of-days attitude loaded with indifference.”

Read the full debate here.

The first monograph on the Danish architect and designer David Thulstrup, whose approach combines his Scandinavian heritage with a modern design language. David Thulstrup’s award-winning international and multi-disciplinary practice includes everything from residential architecture to interiors for restaurants, stores, and hotels, as well as designs for furniture and lighting.  More than 250 specially commissioned photographs, floor plans, architectural drawings, mood boards, process photographs, and four in-depth case studies, including his design for the interior and furniture for the new Noma restaurant in Copenhagen, illustrate more than 20 architectural and interiors projects, as well as 16 designs for furniture. This book traces Thulstrup’s life and influences from his childhood and education in Denmark, up to the present day, demonstrating his unique approach to design.

For the podcast series The Design Dialogues, Elizabeth Choppin, Editor-in-Chief of Design Anthology UK meets Sophie Lovell and her daughter Orlando, co-founders of The Common Table and editors of Taste and Place: A Design Hotels book to talk about food, regional identity, culinary heritage and travel.

“This is hephaestian furniture crafted to endure industrial-strength wear and tear with a half-life that could reach into millennia. It is both a direct contradiction of the planned obsolescence of our age and a metaphor for the Anthropocene – we can never, ever, throw away all the things we have made.”

Sophie Lovell was asked by designer /artist Philippe Malouin and The Breeder, Athens to contribute her essay “When You Cut into the Present, The Future Leaks Out” to Philippe’s “Steel Works” book alongside an interview by Felix Burrichter and Drew Zeiba and another critical text by Maria Cristina Didero.

From 1999, Sophie Lovell was Germany Correspondent, then Germany Editor at Wallpaper* magazine. During that time she brought and covered many features, profiles and news items to the magazine’s pages as well as online. From interviews with the likes of James Turrell, Virgil Abloh, Jonathan Ive, Dieter Rams, Stephen Burks and Konstantin Grcic to editing the Germany Supplement she accompanied the development of the magazine through its first four editors-in-chief until moving on to focus on her projects with studio_lovell in 2022.

S72+ is a new collaborative dinner series by studio_lovell, founders of The Common Table. It grew out of our desire to (quite literally) expand the conversations around food. We believe the best way to bring people together to exchange views and experiences is around a table. So, together with Vitsoe, our co-host for this first dinner in Berlin, we gathered twelve individuals of different ages and from a range of different industries and disciplines, including design, technology, architecture, manufacture, publishing, compliance, food and distribution, to join us at the table and talk about a pivotal issue of our time: supply chains. The location for this interdisciplinary dinner discussion was the living/work space of Arch+ magazine in Berlin. studio_lovell will continue their dinner series with varying partners in different disciplines and industries. Each time there will be new guest constellations, new locations and new topics for discussion. Just as we continue to seek out the people and projects forging ways towards a better, fairer food future with The Common Table, the S72+ dinners aim to help put some of those projects into action through new connections and inspiration.

Photo © Lena Giovanazzi

Hotels are unique storytelling hubs. They are defined by travel, but also by locality. Hotels are the first ports of call for the traveller to encounter first-hand new places, people, produce, cultures, tastes and techniques. And what better way to experience a visceral connection—a “taste of place”—than through food?

So Taste and Place: The Design Hotels Book is a food book with a difference. It takes the reader on a global journey with contributions from leading food writers, upcoming chefs and culinary innovators through examples of forward-looking ideas and inspirational practices. And all of this from a different perspective: a widening of the beam of focus to help show that if you pull on one string, you move all the others.

The book’s broad and inclusive embrace of food is richly illustrated with surprising examples found in and around selected Design Hotels™ locations. The stories in this volume go beyond the dish, the kitchen and the dining room. They explore the connectivity between food and locality, provenance, production, people, landscape and architecture from a holistic perspective. They are the binding agents for sharing new encounters with Design Hotels™’ readers, guests and hoteliers.

From regional terroir through the kitchen to the community, the stories gathered from special people behind the scenes, include tales and methods of self-production, social engagement, collaborative work practice, respect for cultures and ingredients, rethinking food waste and visionary big-picture hospitality.

From a big picture perspective, the mother and daughter team Sophie and Orlando Lovell of studio_lovell developed and edited this book for Design Hotels to encompass connective storytelling by respected writers, including LinYee Yuan, Gisela Williams, Ursula Heinzelmann and Nicholas Gill alongside newer talents such as Carla Bragagnini and Jake Potashnick. The journey through the chapters is designed to be a cyclical one of nourishment and renewal.

The themes are visually brought to life with specially commissioned photography from Marina Denisova, Vivek Vadoliya, Robbie Lawrence, Arnaud Montgard, Yuna Yagi, Stephanie Füssenich, Daniel Lober and Maureen Evans, with illustrations by Hanni Pannier. This book is a journey through food and culinary understanding from the terrain of Swiss and Japanese mountains and valleys, via the ancient island of Crete, Umbrian olive groves and the Oaxacan coast, dropping in on young kitchen teams in Ukraine and the Peloponnese along the way as well as exploring innovative practices in the Caribbean, Mexico and Indonesia.

How can we travel responsibly? How can we give back more than we take? As we look for ways to transition from a high-carbon to a low-carbon world, the ecosystem of a hotel seen through the lens of food provides a perfect microcosm to better understand bigger system changes. With this book, we at Design Hotels™ reflect on what we bring to these processes in terms of the hospitality we support and want to see in the future.

The Common Table is a publishing platform for food futures and systemic change founded and edited by Sophie Lovell and Orlando Lovell.

Through The Common Table, we share stories and ideas about food from around the world by people who are searching for ways to fix it. Our goal is to understand how systems of production, distribution and consumption can be changed – and to help identify the people and projects forging ways towards a better, fairer food future.

As a mother-daughter creative duo, living together in Berlin, we have many years of experience in all things design, architecture – and food. Our home has always been a place where we have cooked and hosted many meals and fed heated discussions with wonderful guests. Now we have extended our kitchen table and turned it into something bigger: a virtual workplace and a platform for change – through food.

We are starting this platform by inviting as “dinner guests” to our virtual table people we love, people who inspire us, people we would like to know more about and people we believe should be heard. Together we will ask, share, gather, investigate and exchange.

If you have inspiring stories or thoughts to share about changing the food system, feel free to reach out, we’d love to hear from you. All are welcome at The Common Table.

Email us at hello(at)thecommontable.eu