Don’t be fooled by his mellow, self-effacing demeanor: Architect Thomas Phifer is a master of his craft, designing daylit, minimalist buildings that meld the ideals of classic modernism with 21st-century innovations.
When Svetlin Krastev and Dessi Nikolova had their second child, they saw two options: Go broke buying a bigger apartment, or renovate their existing 620-square-foot home.
“I’ve told customers, ‘Maybe you don’t need another chair,’” Chris Houston says. “Even though I sell things, I do like to remind people that you don’t need to own it to appreciate it.”
Manhattan-based Project Projects may be a graphic design studio, but it works in all dimensions, on the page and off.
“We’re not trying to follow any trends or do anything ostentatious,” says Paul Georgeson, founder of furniture company Misewell. “We want our pieces to look great in 30 years rather than turning into hideous eyesores. We want our customers to pass this stuff on to their grandkids.”
When Jay Atherton and Cy Keener met in grad school at the University of California, Berkeley, they discovered in each other a rare constellation of common interests: minimalist architecture, rock climbing, and “not talking.”
Inspired by the Seinfeld episode where Kramer rescues a Merv Griffin Show set from the trash, artist and professor Jon Rubin built a ’70s-style talk-show set in the back of a Pittsburg restaurant, aiming to “use waffles to lure people into public storytelling.”
In the land of large mountain lodge wannabes, two California natives tuck Utah’s first LEED for Homes–rated house onto the side of Emigration Canyon.
In construction-mad Beijing, “development happens at a crazy speed, like a tsunami,” says Matthew Xinyu Hu. The 2008 Summer Olympics bore the brunt of the bad rap, but in truth, Beijing’s historic city center had been at risk for far longer.
Gesturing at the wood-and-iron house he designed for his family three years ago, the Buenos Aires–based furniture designer and architect Alejandro Sticotti declares, “It was like putting in a UFO, like something from Mars.”