Pico, the debut tile project from Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec

04.09.12 Design | By Spencer Bailey

“Ceramic-tile techniques have existed for a million years,” says Erwan Bouroullec, who runs an eponymous design studio in Paris with his brother, Ronan. “They’re a part of mankind, and there are many examples of old tiles that are pretty rough, done with the minimum technique.” For Pico, the duo’s debut tile project made by Italian ceramics manufacturer Mutina, they sought a return to this stripped-down tradition, using modern-day methods only for pouring and compressing grains. Why? Because “in this century technology has evolved so much that, strangely, tiles have become incredibly fake,” Erwan says. “Any kind of surface can be put on tile. The idea that tile express only what it is has been totally lost.” The brothers’ goal: to recapture tile’s natural characteristics.

Amsterdam’s ShaGa Studio Makes Sustainability Innate

04.11.12 Architecture | By Ian Volner

ShaGa Studio may sound a bit like a reggae record label. In fact, it’s a Netherlands-based design firm, one whose international and intellectual outlook is as broad and varied as the backgrounds of its designers, Shany Barath and Gary Freedman (whose first names combine to form its title). The life-and-work partners met as architecture students at Technion International School of Engineering in Haifa, Israel. Together, they moved to Holland for graduate school and then to England to study at the Architectural Association. They still commute to the A.A. two days a week, teaching courses in London, and then wing it back to Amsterdam to work on projects for their now two-year-old firm.

John Pawson Retrospective at Munich Technical University’s Architecture Museum

04.20.12 Architecture | By Guy Anglade

Through May 20, the Munich Technical University’s architecture museum is hosting a retrospective chronicling British minimalist designer John Pawson. Photography that serves as the heart of the show, which is filled with images and materials collected from his monographs A Visual Inventory and Plain Space (both from Phaidon), as well as Katalog, the museum’s monograph collection of Pawson’s architectural models. “I’m not photographing things and saying, ‘this is a marvelous piece of art,’” says Pawson. “I’m just photographing what catches my eye: color, pattern, texture, and nature.”

Noe Duchaufour-Lawrance Renovates a Chalet in the French Alps

04.23.12 Interiors | By Spencer Bailey

Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance, a 37-year-old French architect and designer known for his organically shaped restaurant interiors and products for the likes of Baccarat and Ligne Roset, admits he never wanted to make a residential project. But when a couple came to him to renovate their three-story, 6,775-square-foot chalet comprising two buildings—one dating to the 1950s, the other to the 18th century—in Saint-Martin-de-Belleville in the French Alps, it was an offer he couldn’t refuse. “It wasn’t about profits,” he says. “It was about making something we’d all be proud of.”

“No Nails, No Lumber”: The Bubble Houses of Wallace Neff

04.27.12 Architecture | By Ian Volner

There’s a particular poignancy to “No Nails, No Lumber,” Jeffrey Head’s new book on the work of architect Wallace Neff—though you’d hardly know it from reading the book. The Southern California-based Neff was a successful designer of sumptuous Spanish Mission-style mansions for celebrity clients like Douglas Fairbanks and Frederic March, but beginning in the 1930s, Neff spent the next three decades on an unusual side project: the development, marketing, and construction of semi-spherical, cast-in-place concrete houses. The press and the public called them igloos; he preferred the title Airforms, or bubble houses.

“Site and Sound” and the Hidden History of Opera House Architecture

05.16.12 Architecture | By Ian Volner

Design writer and independent scholar Victoria Newhouse’s new book, “Site and Sound,” is more fun than any niche-audience, coffee-table-ish architecture book has a right to be. Subtitled “The Architecture and Acoustics of New Opera Houses and Concert Halls,” the book escapes the orbit of the typical typological survey partly through the charm and novelty of its subject, and partly through Newhouse’s own brisk approach through the earliest amphitheaters of the ancient Greeks, the grand spaces of the Renaissance and of the 19th century, to the forward-thinking and acoustically fine-tuned halls of today.