Table of contents for May 2013 in Dwell

In this issue we examine that idea by selecting homes that offer exuberant responses in unexpected locales, while embracing and promoting their own interpretations of modernity. It’s important that Dwell continues to travel, actively seeking incredible design beyond our own borders. Through constant exploration we establish where modern design and architecture are today—and where they’re going tomorrow. We visit six continents, uncovering scores of modern homes and emerging designers. We are drawn to the inherent whimsy expressed in Casa Serpiente, in Peru, and to our cover story on the Plane House, a spacious abode nestled on an island hilltop in the Aegean Sea. Architect Julien De Smedt’s loft apartment in Brussels—one of three residences he maintains in as many countries—is a domestic setup that speaks to his peripatetic lifestyle. Another…

For our second annual Young Guns report, we scoured the globe for the emerging designers and products that you need to know now. In addition to tracking this year’s vanguard, we also take a at what 2012’s inaugural class is making and where its rising stars are headed. ENGLAND: Philippe Malouin From his studio in London’s Hackney Central borough, Philippe Malouin is constantly testing ideas. “It’s sort of a cross-pollination of failed experiments that eventually leads to something interesting,” he says. Malouin and his team of three often extrapolate a lesson and apply that to something else, like a “failed” attempt to create electronic components. From that emerged a structural system of sorts, which then yielded the truss-like Gridlock furniture series. Canada native Malouin studied industrial design at the University…

Project: La Piscucha Architect: Cincopatasalgato, cincopatasalgato.com Location: La Libertad, El Salvador Architect José Roberto Paredes’s crowning achievement is the freestanding concrete roof that wraps around the structure. The tent-like form—with an area of 2,150 square feet—extends past the perimeter of the house to shield it from the elements. Triangular sails fold over the portions that receive the harshest sunlight. The landscape around La Libertad, a municipality ten minutes south of El Salvador’s capital city, offers much in the way of natural wonders: a volcano in the distance, swaths of untrammeled forest, and coastline renowned for its world-class surfing. It’s no surprise that this breathtaking backdrop figured prominently into architect José Roberto Paredes’s concept for a new house that’s sculptural and attuned to its environment. Paredes’s hallmark move is playing to…

Kitchen Confidential Four years into his tenure at a former metal factory, revamped a decade ago by the architects BOB 361, architect Julien De Smedt is enjoying the pleasures of home. “I spend so much time in hotels and restaurants,” he says, “so I really like to cook when I’m here.” The founder and principal of JDS Architects splits his time between Brussels, Copenhagen, and New York, but finds himself more and more in his Belgian home. In the open kitchen, De Smedt installed stainless steel rolling carts from Ikea to stand in as the kitchen island. “The carts are the kind of thing you find around the Bowery in New York at restaurant suppliers,” he says, “which I didn’t know at the time, or I would have had some…

3 BACKYARD Otlukbeli Cad., Bebeköy Sok No: 4, Etiler/011-90-212-287-15-00 Local, organic ingredients and jazz are served on a brick-framed “porch” and a sloping Gatsby-ish lawn, dotted with lantern-hung trees and a panoramic view over the city. backyardistanbul.com 4 SALT SALT Beyoðlu, İstiklal Caddesi No: 136, Beyoðlu/011-90-212-377-42-00 Museum, gallery, and exhibition space Salt doesn’t just archive art and design; it makes them. Look for films, lectures, and eclectic interiors by young designers, as well as cafes, bookstores, and even a rooftop garden by Fritz Haeg. saltonline.org 5 GEORGES HOTEL GALATA Serdar-I Ekrem Sokak, No: 24, Galata–Beyoðlu/011-90-212-244-24-23 This one-year-old hotel features a popular bar where expats and locals gather. Rooms are decked out with sleek marble bathrooms, modern furniture, and lighting that’s been handcrafted by Turkish wood-workers and metals-miths. georges.com/en 6 ARMAGGAN…

10 Supercerebral, that is. Turkish, scarf-covered Selva Gürdoðan, 33, and tall, pale Dane Gregers Tang Thomsen, 38, founded architecture firm Superpool in 2006. A 2003 graduate of SCI-Arc and an alum of the Aarhus School of Architecture, respectively, the couple met while working at the Rem Koolhaas Office for Metropolitan Architecture. One of five studios selected to participate in the Audi Urban Future Award 2012, Superpool researches how to mix robotics with concrete. Their book, Mapping Istanbul (left), will prove a boon to local architects, planners, and policy makers alike. superpool.org…

Project: Casa Serpiente Architect: 51-1 Arquitectos Location: Lima, Peru Casa Serpiente, or “Snake House,” is named for the way its undulant form twists through a tree-studded garden in Lima, Peru. It almost never rains in the Peruvian capital—the second-largest desert city in the world, after Cairo, Egypt—so trees are precious here. But this grove had even greater significance for its owners, a husband and wife named Irzio and Lisette. Irzio fondly remembers playing here as a child, when it was his parents’ backyard. So when the couple decided to build their new home in this green oasis, the husband recalls, “There was never any question: The trees had to stay.” A restaurateur and entrepreneur, Irzio had acquired the family home, a 1940s colonial, years earlier. Now the couple’s idea was…

The products, furniture, architects, designers, and builders featured in this issue. 25 In the Modern World China by Philippe Malouin for 1882 Ltd. 1882ltd.com Hardie stools by Philippe Malouin for Kvadrat kvadrat.dk Rabbit and the Tortoise by Studio Juju for Living Divani livingdivani.it Luxury Towers by Studio Juju for Oki Sato and K% nendo.jp Fifty chair and Star13 carpet by Dögg Guðmundsdóttir for Ligne Roset ligne-roset-usa.com Singaplural Design Week iffs.com.sg Roule trays and Tourne bowls by Pauline Deltour for Discipline discipline.eu A Tempo stool by Pauline Deltour for Alessi alessi-shop.com 57 Backstory JDS Architects jdsa.eu BOB 361 Architecten bob361.com Flytta stainless steel kitchen cart and Urban chairs by lkea ikea.com Stacked shelving system by JDS Architects for Muuto dwr.com Other One armchair by Leif Jorgensen, dining chair by Hee Welling,…

5 TWEETS @DesignByKrystle: This beautiful home has caused me to add #prefab to my #wishlist. Thx, @dwell, for the fab article! @kiehmana: Really can’t fault my 9yo son for hoarding our @dwell magazines in his room. #developinganeyefordesign. @loveofbrooklyn: Wow, the interview with Jens Risom at his prefab beach house on Block Island is beautiful. Well done, @dwell. @lltripp: Homemade soup, a glass of red, and my first @dwell issue of 2013: Monday, you’re all right. @KiaPorterPhoto: Crazy workday, so taking a minute to disappear into the dreamy world of @dwell...ahhhh, so much better… I loved your magazine long before I ever built furniture professionally. I used to have a day job, ride mountain bikes, go on dates with my girlfriend, and dabble in building modern furniture as a hobby in…

With its diverse architectural landscape and community that thrives on robust design discourse, Los Angeles is an ideal home for the annual Dwell on Design show. In June, the city will, once again, host and inspire the great minds who descend upon it each year, further elevating our collaborative exploration of the built—and even the unbuilt—environment. In concert with the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. initiative, which consists of citywide exhibitions throughout the spring and summer, Dwell on Design will welcome a panel made up of curators from the Getty Center, MAK Center, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) for a discussion on underexplored periods of L.A. modernism, including the 1970s and the contemporary modernist era. The Getty Conservation Institute’s architecture and design curator Christopher…

EXTRAS THE INTERNATIONALS From singapore to Spain, join us on our globetrotting adventures in architecture with a bevy of slideshows and videos of several of this month’s featured homes. First, explore ten design destinations in Istanbul with our interactive map; then, skip a few time zones for a video of Steven Holl’s south Korea house, featured on p. 64. dwell.com/globetrotting VIDEO MODERN VIEWS WITH MARVIN When Dwell president Michela O’Connor Abrams and her husband, Alan, embarked upon a renovation of their home—beginning with a southern-facing wall—they partnered with Marvin Windows and Doors to bring the plan to life. in this video, we show how the project aims to maximize light and views. dwell.com/marvin FACADE FOCUS BEAM ME UP The thatch of 34 wooden beams projecting up out of the Nowita…

Inspired by a never-performed symphony he discovered in a book by avant-garde composer John Cage, architect Steven Holl has designed a masterful home and gallery in Seoul that fuses architecture and music. Project: Daeyang Gallery and House Architect: Steven Holl Architects Location: Seoul, South Korea It took István Anhalt five years to compose his massive 1967 Symphony of Modules, and, when it was finished, he estimated it would take at least 50 hours of rehearsal for an orchestra to master its mere 28 minutes of music. Today, the score and its supporting materials—diagrams, charts, graphs—occupy four large boxes; the symphony has never been performed. Yet it has had an odd afterlife, unheard but never entirely forgotten. In 1969, the composer John Cage published Anhalt’s sketch of the symphony in his…

8 The interior designers at four-year-old firm Paratoner hung their shingle in Istanbul’s Tophane neighborhood—the city’s oldest industrial zone—amid a slew of art galleries, dilapidated wooden houses, and small workshops. From its design studio located directly above a street-level showroom, the group makes furniture and lighting that are chunky and colorful, clean-cut but voluptuous. Make sure to watch the stop-motion furniture animations they produce, including one featuring a marauding gang of Rubic table lamps (right) in natural oak and epoxy lacquer. paratoner.com.tr…

11 Tucked away in the labyrinthine hallways of Istanbul’s Topkapı Palace is a medieval document that, 600 years after it was written, sheds light on the city’s burgeoning contemporary design scene. The 98-foot-long Topkapı Scroll is a compendium of 114 individual geometric patterns for wall surfaces and architecture. Used by craftsmen responsible for building the Islamic world, the scroll illuminates the role of geometry as a primary design conceit for the area’s hybrid Eurasian culture. Today, that same geometry is a subtle but strong undercurrent for many craft-based Istanbul designers, marshaling a uniquely Eastern way of working in the modern world. Furniture designer Sema Topaloĝlu modifies wood-carved motifs from her native Caucasus region into obtuse constellations of circular forms. They are then translated into interior furnishings made by both tradesmen…

Project: Plane House Architect: K-Studio Location: Skiathos, Greece “My dream was of a summerhouse whose design alone, rather than any added-on decoration, made it beautiful,” says Athenian Achilleas Mourtzouchos, who, with his girlfriend, Alexia Leandros, brother Odysseas, and a passel of extended family and friends spends much of the summer here as well as long weekends the rest of the year. The Plane House—an idyllic vacation home perched on a mountain on the Greek island of Skiathos—was a hugely personal and collaborative project between the Mourtzouchoses and another set of brothers, their architect buddies, Dimitris and Konstantinos Karampatakis, of Athens’s K-Studio. “I’ve followed his career closely,” says Achilleas of his childhood friend Konstantinos. “All I requested was two master bedrooms, one for Odysseas and one for myself, but otherwise I…

Architect Georg van Gass could have stopped the special effects after creating an elevated foundation that allows the prefab home to hover over the landscape. Instead, he went one step further by adding a delicately poised cantilevered exterior wall that appears to slice the deck in half. The impressive visual balancing act relies on a concealed steel truss and has a multitude of uses: The wall prevents visitors from seeing the surrounding vistas until they enter the home, shields the Farnsworth House–inspired bedroom from outside eyes, and carves out a private sanctuary from the main patio space. The wall’s granite stones, called Koppie stones after the Afrikaans word koppie, which means “hill” or “outcrop,” are abundant in the area. They were often used for the homes of the neighborhood’s original…

Sarah Amelar In researching Casa Serpiente—the Lima, Peru, home of a restaurateur and a chef (“Peru,” p. 80)—Sarah Amelar had a hunch she might need to use her palate. So, she slipped incognito into one of the husband’s restaurants—just to make sure the culinary sensibility was as modernist and cool as the house. (It was.) Amelar’s articles have appeared in such publications as the New York Times and Architectural Record Oriana Fenwick Frankfurt, Germany–based illustrator Oriana Fenwick’s realistic pencil drawings have been published in magazines such as Acquired Taste and Sneakers Magazine, among others. “Creating the portraits for Young Guns (In the Modern World, p. 25), was a great experience as my favorite motif is the human face,” she says. Philip Kennicott The Washington Post’s art and architecture critic Philip…

Project: Profile House Architect: Black Line One X Architecture Studio, bloxas.com Location: Brunswick East, Australia After more than ten years in a 930-square-foot house in Melbourne’s inner suburb of Brunswick East, Paul and Margaret Mazur—as well as their two kids and Margaret’s mother—simply needed more room. The extra 900 square feet of living space and a luminous courtyard designed by the architecture firm Bloxas fit the bill nicely with their warm wooden material palette and a clear agenda of sustainability. The real aesthetic trick though, isn’t on the inside but on the western exterior. Here, a facade and fence wrought from hardy, inexpensive, local timber provides a bit of privacy for the residents while cutting an arresting streetside figure. It looks as though the addition itself has been halved down…

The latest class of Dutch designers is creating poetic yet practical furniture, lighting, and goods that go way beyond wry humor. Veering away from the wit-first conceptual design that has defined the Netherlands for the last two decades—typified by übercollective Droog—young designers are once again making more objects for daily use. We searched the country and found fresh ideas in ateliers from Amsterdam to Duivendrecht to Eindhoven. New Duivendrecht Industrial designers Frederik Roijé and Victor le Noble founded New Duivendrecht—a manufacturer of contemporary pieces by young Dutch designers—less than a year ago in an unlikely creative hot spot: Duivendrecht, a town located southeast of Amsterdam. The company yields well-crafted, usable designs—with plenty of that famous Dutch tongue-in-cheek sensibility—that can all be made affordably. “Most young designers produce very limited editions…

Istanbul is a city of chaos, improvisation, and irony, where a canon of calls-to-prayer ripples through a secular republic five times a day. Megaprojects born of an unsustainably strong economy rule the day: The city is carving a 30-mile canal—a second Bosporus—from the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara and a cross-continental metro tunnel, from Europe to Asia, beneath the strait. Last fall, Turkey’s first design biennial took imperfection as its theme and gave the world its most comprehensive catalog of Istanbul’s rich polyphony of ad hoc design. This city of 13 million may be one of the oldest in civilization, but its history of modern design is just getting started. Here we take a look at some of Istanbul’s established and emerging talents, along with the design destinations…

9 Tardu Kuman spent a lot of time thinking about things before he began making them. In college in Istanbul, he studied philosophy—Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Deleuze. Becoming a full-fledged designer happened gradually and took him full-circle from mid-1980s Paris, where he made jewelry, to 1990s Athens, where he made art objects and furniture out of salvaged railroad ties, and finally, in 1995, back to Istanbul to found Stoa Design. Today, traditional craftsmanship may be suffering locally, but it creates an opportunity for makers like Kuman to practice old methods with a modern touch. He incorporates new forms to show the ability of natural materials, like the hot metal he pours into knots set in wooden tabletops. “In this complicated life, I want to make things simple,” Kuman says. “My work doesn’t…

12 Making their Tophane storefront work overtime, Lab Tasarim’s architects and interior designers also run a furniture showroom. The aesthetic is upcycled modern: On a second glance at the work, visitors realize that the designers have inventively Frankensteined their furniture together out of found objects—from bedsprings and tea trays to brass pipes and mismatched chair legs. Lab Tasarim exemplifies a recent trend toward using retail to showcase experiments concocted in the “laboratory” of a practice in the hopes of attracting potential architecture and interiors clients, who then also find gems with which to populate their newly fashioned spaces. labtasarim.com…

Project: Surat Villa Architect: Matharoo Associates Location: Surat, India On the fringes of the Indian city of Surat, some 150 miles north of Mumbai, behind a towering concrete wall, stands an 18,000-square-foot villa known simply as the “House with the Wall of Light.” The house, carefully concealed from passersby, was built by Matharoo Associates, led by India-based architect Gurjit Singh Matharoo, for a couple with three teenage daughters. “Our house was designed to fulfill the needs of both my family and my business,” says the owner. “Although we wanted a modern home, it had to be one that was totally compatible with our traditional lifestyle.” Surat is a rich city—or rather some of its inhabitants are: More than 80 percent of the world’s diamonds are cut here. Business—mainly in precious…