Video: Hero Worship: Mugler Menswear Spring/Summer 2012

01.16.12 Fashion | By The Editors

For his second menswear collection for Mugler—done in collaboration with designer Romain Kremer—creative director Nicola Formichetti kneels before the fluorescent altars of neo-realism, science fiction, and hyper-masculinity.

Food, Clothing, Shelter, Art: “Cultural Emergency in Conflict and Disaster”

01.18.12 Architecture | By Ian Volner

Once, following a public reading, legend has it that someone asked the American poet John Ashbery why his work only rarely takes on explicitly political topics and ignores the plight of the oppressed and the displaced. To which the poet replied, “I think you’re confusing poetry with the Red Cross.” The authors of Cultural Emergency in Conflict and Disaster would disagree. For them, art is a “basic need,” one that “imbues life with a sense of worth” and that ought to be reckoned along with food, water, and medical supplies.

Laces, Adidas’s Research and Development Center, by Kada Wittfeld Architecture

01.20.12 Architecture | By Spencer Bailey

When developing Laces, a 667,000-square-foot, mall-like research-and-development building at Adidas’s main campus in Herzogenaurach, Germany, near Nuremburg, Kada Wittfeld Architecture sought to build an inconspicuous structure that opens up to its surroundings. To that end, the firm hoisted its entrance up two floors via steel supports, implemented a flat, mirrored facade, and covered its six-story exterior with windows.

Catherine Yass: Photographer and Filmmaker

01.23.12 Art | By Marina Cashdan

Early in Catherine Yass’s career she made a serendipitous discovery. “I loaded the film wrong,” she says, “and [the negative] came out in different colors.” This happy accident led to what has become Yass’s signature technique, in which the photographer-filmmaker overlays a blue “negative” transparency (where light and dark are inverted on the negative of a photographic print) and a “positive” transparency (the normal form of a photographic image), each taken within a few minutes of the other. From this, she makes a large-scale composite print, usually displayed in a lightbox.

New Matthew Marks Gallery Uses Ellsworth Kelly Sculpture as Architecture

01.26.12 Architecture | By Erica Bellman

When Matthew Marks visited Ellsworth Kelly to ask the 88-year-old artist to make a piece for the gallery owner's new space in Los Angeles, Kelly was at first noncommittal. Marks’s second journey to Kelly's upstate New York studio, however, finally proved fruitful. “I walked into his library and found that he had put this black bar across the top quarter of the architectural model,” Marks said. “With this simple gesture, Ellsworth turned the whole building into a work of his.”

The New Guard: Benjamin Hubert’s Material Focus and Hands-On Approach

01.27.12 Design | By Tiffany Jow

Benjamin Hubert is no stranger to applause. The 27-year-old Londoner is among Britain’s most decorated young designers, owning prizes from the British Design Awards, Elle Décor, and 100% Design’s Blueprint Awards. But when a phone call from out of the blue informed him that Patricia Urquiola had hand-picked him for Architektur & Wohnen’s prestigious Audi-Mentorpreis award, he was caught off guard. “Usually you know in advance if you’ve been chosen to win something,” Hubert says. “This was a complete surprise.” Earlier this month, he was whisked off to Germany and honored at an opening party for IMM Cologne, with Urquiola at his side making introductions to her reputable friends.