Finnish artist Sandra Kantanen approaches photography as a gateway to the imagined, rather than a tool for capturing objective reality. Her work reveals a unique, boundary-less technical philosophy, that pushes the medium beyond the constraints of the lens, challenging the viewer to question where the photograph ends and the painting begins.

At first glance, one might assume her ethereal landscapes are the result of mixed oil paints and traditional layering. In reality, these are photographs of natural environments-ranging from the forests of her native Finland to the mountains of Asia-subjected to profound digital and physical manipulation.

Born in Helsinki in 1974, Sandra Kantanen emerged as a key figure within the internationally celebrated Helsinki School of Photography. Her academic foundation was built at the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture in Helsinki, but the pivotal shift in her artistic trajectory occurred around the year 2000, when she moved to China as an exchange student.

Studying traditional Chinese landscape painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Kantanen became deeply influenced by Eastern philosophy. She was struck by how ancient masters did not aim to document the landscape, but to idealize and sublimate it.

During her travels through China's sacred mountains, she witnessed the stark tension between the pristine, spiritualized nature depicted in ancient silk scrolls and the harsh realities of modern industrial pollution and tourism. This dissonance became the catalyst for her practice: a lifelong pursuit to capture an "impossible" landscape – a space existing somewhere between memory, myth, and optical distortion.

While pixel-distorted landscapes are her most famous signature, Kantanen's broader photographic practice is remarkably diverse. She does not rely on a single technical trick; rather, she experiments across different series, constantly redefining how a photographic image can behave:

The Smoke Works and Pixel Manipulation: In her most renowned series, Kantanen physically intervenes in nature before the shutter even clicks. By releasing colored smoke bombs into remote forests – such as those near her home in Hango, Finland-she creates a surreal, psychedelic atmosphere that disrupts the mundane scenery. She then takes these digital files and subjects them to deep manipulation: blurring horizons, stretching data, and manually forcing pixels to flow so that the photograph mimics the fluidity of liquid paint.

Botanical Studies and Scanners: Shifting away from vast landscapes and pixel-stretching entirely, her floral still lifes and botanical works explore organic decay up close. For these, she often utilizes large-scale formats, long exposures, or even flatbed scanners instead of traditional camera lenses. These methods evoke the rich, allegorical depth of Dutch Golden Age painting, focusing on the intimate textures and slow passage of time in nature.

By moving fluidly between physical staging, scanner art, straight capture, and digital distortion, Kantanen constantly destabilizes our perception of what a photograph can be.

Over a career spanning more than two decades, Sandra Kantanen has earned widespread international acclaim for her innovative contributions to contemporary visual arts.

Her work has been showcased globally, with major exhibitions at venues like the Purdy Hicks Gallery in London, Paris Photo, and a comprehensive retrospective at the Turku Art Museum.

Kantanen's influence is cemented by her inclusion in the permanent collections of some of the world's most respected institutions, including the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Brooklyn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki. Her monographs, published by Hatje Cantz, serve as a testament to an artist who does not merely use technology, but bends it to the eternal service of beauty.

Emily Kraus's (New York, 1995) works left me unbothered by anything externally existing. I am frozen, trapped and stunned by the unidentified. It's almost like falling in love – you were not prepared, you didn't ask for it, yet it's one of the best feelings that can happen to the human being.

When the art is a part of the artist's mind, body and soul – you can feel it from the innermost dedication to the practice. That form of connection can be compared to the billions of invisible thinnest threads that remain unbroken between the artist and the artwork, even when they are far apart. They are mutually nourishing and will never be independent again.

When you look at the painting and can almost physically feel the presence of the author - that's when the purest form of revelation is unfolding in front of you.

The first glance was not followed by the question "How?". I was too occupied dealing with jitters. The second one brought me back to consciousness, ready to be curious about how it was achieved.

Lack of immediate curiosity about technique corresponds to the artist's belief that the work should live on its own – the communication with the viewer relies on an individual reflection as the clearest translator of visuals.

Emily Kraus works in tandem with a self-invented structure, made of a scaffold with planks and rotating poles, on which the canvas is stretched. This approach gives a unique opportunity to rotate the surface and at the same time creates a cube-like enclosed space. From inside, the artist is applying the oil paints, and then rotates the canvas before the paint dries – as it moves through the poles, the paint gets smudged. The repeated steps result in the glitchy signature visual code.

As the canvas is geometrically structured, the result of the whole image is unknown until the end of the work, which takes approximately one month.

There is a beauty in the uncontrollable. The nature of each painting is not in the pursuit of visual appeal, but in a momentary decision, whether the following gesture belongs to this emerging artwork or not. Through this profound significance of the process, based purely on the artist's feelings, the painting accumulates a powerful, spiritual memory.

This mechanism was influenced by the time when Kraus was studying in her second year at the Royal College of Art, which coincided with COVID-19 and the lockdown. She was assigned a cube studio 2.5 by 2.5 metres. The limited area of the room hampered Kraus's intention to paint with large gestures, experimenting with her body and space. To expand the possibilities of her practice in existing conditions, she stretched the canvas along all the walls using shower poles and wooden brackets. The canvas could be rotated, erasing the boundaries of the contained space.

The concept of confinement as part of a wider perception of space was on the artist's agenda before. Emily Kraus explored the boundaries of objects, places, and the relations between them. Moreover, she practiced meditation, which ultimately reconfigures the whole existing world, making it seamlessly broad and possible to totally fit in one's mind at the same time. Accumulating reflections along with a small studio space prompts a question about how one can find freedom when physically confined and how space cannot free us from the mind's cage.

As Lucian Freud stated – "Everything is a self-portrait". These words can't be more accurate when talking about art. The sublime essence of Emily Kraus's oeuvre is definitive, rather than chaotically formed – she holds a BA in Religious Studies from Kenyon College. The choice was influenced by Kraus's self-questioning of the meaning of life.

The profound influence of Emily Kraus on the contemporary art world is reinforced through the recognition by major institutions: as one of the Artsy Vanguard 2026, recipient of the Hopper Prize, and shortlisted for both the Hopper Prize and the John Moores Painting Prize, she continues to make discoveries through every new work, establishing her strong path.

Every architecture student is taught to revere the right angle, and every architecture student eventually notices that nothing outside the studio is at ninety degrees. Not the coastline, not the ribcage, not the river, not the way people cross a square – they cut the corner, always, which is why the grass on any campus dies diagonally before it dies anywhere else. The grid is not nature. The grid is a filing system. It won because it was cheap to draw with a T-square, cheap to price by the square metre, and cheap to defend in a planning meeting to a committee that had already stopped listening.

So for a century the curve was something you paid extra for and then justified in writing. Curved wall, custom formwork, a contractor breathing through his teeth, and a quantity surveyor wearing the expression of a man reading a hospital bill in a foreign currency. You were allowed exactly one – in the lobby, where visitors would see it and investors would feel it – and then the building went back to being a filing cabinet with windows, a nice reception desk and a coffee machine nobody had specified.

What ended the arrangement was not a manifesto. Manifestos had been available since 1919 and had built almost nothing. It was arithmetic. Between roughly 1990 and 2015, software borrowed from people who make aeroplanes and cars got good enough to describe a doubly curved surface precisely enough to cut it, cost it, insure it and – the unglamorous miracle at the bottom of this entire story – get a fabricator in a shed outside Zaragoza to produce panel 3,417 so that it meets panel 3,418 on a wet Tuesday in October, with a tolerance measured in millimetres and a foreman who does not care about your concept.

The five buildings below all sit inside that window, and they are habitually filed together under words designed to prevent thought: blob, parametric, organic, iconic – the last one deployed almost exclusively by people who want your signature on something. Look closer and they agree on nothing at all. One is a sculpture that happens to contain a museum. One is a landscape doing an impression of a building. One is a shopping centre having an existential crisis at 330,000 square metres. One is a traffic diagram that grew a skin and a Mercedes badge. One is a snowdrift with excellent acoustics and a free roof.

In every case the shape is the argument, not the wrapping paper. The interesting work – the part that survives the photograph – is establishing what each one is arguing for, who paid for the argument, and what it cost after the ribbon was cut. Because all five arrived with an invoice, and only some of them were worth settling.

01 · Frank Gehry Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Bilbao · opened 18 October 1997 · the sculpture that ate a city’s reputation

Reconstruct the pitch meeting for a moment. It is the early nineties. Bilbao is a port city with dying shipyards, a poisoned river, serious unemployment and a security situation that kept tourism reliably elsewhere. The Basque authorities propose that the remedy is a franchise of a New York museum, built on the derelict docks, designed by a Californian known internationally for chain-link fencing and an unresolved personal thing about fish. And they will pay for it themselves: eighty-nine million dollars.

The commission itself was decided in three weeks. Guggenheim director Thomas Krens shortlisted three architects – Gehry, Arata Isozaki, Coop Himmelblau – handed each ten thousand dollars, and asked for a concept. Isozaki sent sketches of an elliptical, four-storey block. Coop Himmelblau proposed transparent cubes. Gehry sent something that looked like nothing anyone had asked for, and got the job.

By every reasonable standard this should have ended in a public inquiry. Instead it became the most imitated urban gesture of the century, and the taxes it generated covered the construction bill inside three years.

$89m construction cost €100m in taxes, first three years 4 million visitors, first three years 1.3 million visitors in 2025

Read those four figures in sequence, because they are the entire reason every mayor on earth has since wanted a strange building. Within three years the museum had generated an estimated €500 million of economic activity and about €100 million in taxes – the building paid for itself and then started sending money home. Almost no piece of public architecture in history can produce that receipt. It is why the phrase “the Bilbao effect” exists and why it has been misapplied roughly once a month ever since.

The design myth – Gehry crumples paper, hands it to an engineer, engineer weeps – gets the direction of travel exactly backwards. His office did work obsessively in physical models. The reason those models became a building rather than a lawsuit is CATIA, software written for the aerospace industry and adapted by his team to digitise the model and hand fabricators surfaces they could genuinely produce. Every panel is a numbered, tolerance-checked object with somewhere to be. The building looks like it was assembled during an argument. It is in fact among the most disciplined objects of its decade: a jazz solo that took nine months to write out in full.

It looks improvised. It is the most disciplined thing on the river.

Then there is the skin, which is the finest story in twentieth-century cladding and almost nobody tells it properly. Gehry originally intended stainless steel. What stands there is 33,000 titanium sheets, four-tenths of a millimetre thick, sixty tonnes in total – titanium being an aerospace metal nobody had ever used on a building at that scale, for the excellent reason that it costs a fortune.

Except that in the early 1990s, briefly, it didn’t. The Soviet Union had built the Alfa-class attack submarine with a titanium hull; when Russia decommissioned the last of them, the metal flooded the world market and the price collapsed, undercutting stainless steel at precisely the moment Gehry was choosing a material. Which means the most photographed building of the late twentieth century is wrapped in decommissioned Cold War submarine stock. That shimmer over the Nervión is the peace dividend, rolled to 0.4 mm and bolted to a museum. No architectural historian would have dared invent it.

What Bilbao actually proved is more qualified than the export edition admits. The city also rebuilt its metro, cleaned the river, moved port functions downstream and ran a long, dull, properly funded regional plan into which the museum was inserted as the photogenic component. Cities that ordered the sculpture without the accompanying twenty years of work received a sculpture. Several received a very expensive empty sculpture – a lesson available free of charge and almost never taken.

My favourite thing about the building is the doorman. Guarding the entrance is Jeff Koons’s Puppy: a twelve-metre West Highland terrier upholstered in live flowering plants, watered and gardened continuously so that it never goes bald. A titanium cathedral of the international avant-garde, defended by an enormous dog made of petunias. Bilbao understood the thing its imitators never did – the whole enterprise works far better when it declines to take itself entirely seriously.

02 · Zaha Hadid Architects Heydar Aliyev Center

Baku · opened 10 May 2012 · the floor that ran away up the wall

Zaha Hadid spent the first two decades of her fame as the most celebrated architect alive with almost nothing standing. She won Hong Kong’s Peak competition in 1983 with paintings that looked like shattered glass caught in flight; unbuilt. She won Cardiff Bay Opera House in the mid-nineties and watched the funding dissolve beneath a campaign that had a great deal to say about her being difficult and nothing intelligent to say about the design. For years she was the profession’s designated genius-in-waiting: brilliant, unbuildable, foreign, female – take your pick of which of those the committees were actually objecting to.

Baku is what happens when that imagination is finally handed a hillside and a quarter of a billion dollars.

57,500 m² floor area over eight levels 74 m at the crest of the fold 1,000 seats in the auditorium ~$250m estimated cost

The move is single and absolute: take the ground, lift it, fold it over the auditorium and the library, bring it back down. Plaza, façade and roof are one continuous surface and the building flatly refuses to say where any of them begins. Nothing performs visible heroics – the structure is a space frame concealed behind the white skin, sweating quietly, while the architecture out front maintains that none of this required effort. It is the swan principle, executed across 57,500 square metres.

Then you go inside, which is where the imitators are exposed. Curving the outside is now easy; the tell is whether the geometry survives the front door, or whether you are handed a rectangular room with a suspended ceiling and a fire escape sign. Here the auditorium is carved from identical logic – oak flowing from balcony to ceiling with no joint anywhere confessing that several different trades were involved. Hadid had been painting rooms like this since the 1980s, when they existed only as canvases in group shows. In Baku the painting and the building are the same object, which very few architects in history have got to say.

Now the paragraph the coffee-table books leave out. The building is named for the late president of Azerbaijan and was commissioned under the government of his son, who succeeded him in office. It belongs to a very old genre – the national culture palace as portrait of the ruling family – and it went up in a city being remade at speed, with residents in the wider redevelopment area reporting demolitions and evictions they had not agreed to. When London’s Design Museum gave it Design of the Year in 2014, the prize arrived with a public argument attached, and the argument was not about the roof.

The swan-neck logic even extends to comfort. Tucked inside the folds are enclosed winter gardens several storeys tall, planted with real trees under glass, so the white curves have somewhere warm and green to land. It is an odd thing to grow indoors in a city built on oil rather than water – and it works precisely because nothing about the building apologises for the extravagance.

Both things are true simultaneously, and the discomfort is the honest response rather than a failure of criticism. It is a masterpiece of surface geometry, probably the purest built expression of everything Hadid spent thirty years drawing. It is also a monument financed by an oil state to the father of its sitting president. A magazine that prints only the first sentence isn’t publishing criticism, it is publishing a brochure – and the building is strong enough to survive being described accurately, which is more than most monuments manage.

03 · Zaha Hadid Architects Galaxy SOHO

Beijing · completed 2012 · four moons over the second ring road

Same office, same year, entirely different client: SOHO China, the developer run by Zhang Xin, which buys architecture the way other people buy watches – visibly, expensively, and with a clear understanding of what the signature does for resale. The brief was offices and retail on a major artery in central Beijing. The answer was four rounded volumes fused by bridges at several levels: 330,000 square metres across eighteen floors, with the space between them shaped into flowing courtyards instead of the customary windswept nothing developers leave between towers.

330,000 m² floor area – near six Heydar Aliyev Centers 18 floors 67 m height 4 fused volumes, bridged at several levels

The interiors are the genuine achievement and also the most quietly sinister thing in this essay. Balconies sweep past one another in unbroken bands; nothing squares off; the eye is never handed a corner where it can stop and rest. Stand on the third level and your gaze slides around the atrium like water going round a bath, and your feet follow, because that is what bodies do when the geometry keeps moving. It is genuinely beautiful. It is also, in retail terms, a machine engineered to stop you standing still long enough to decide you would rather go home.

Which brings us to the fight, and it was a real one. In 2013, when the building was nominated for the RIBA’s Lubetkin Prize, the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Centre publicly objected, arguing that the development had “caused great damage to the preservation of the old Beijing streetscape, the original urban plan, the traditional hutong and courtyard houses, the landscape formation, and the style and colour scheme of Beijing’s unique vernacular architecture.” That is not a complaint about taste. It is a complaint about manners – a heritage body informing an international jury that the object under celebration had bulldozed the argument rather than won it.

And it lands, because a continuous, self-resolving geometry is superbly equipped to ignore whatever it happens to stand beside. A building made entirely of curves has no edges with which to meet anybody. It does not argue with the street; it declines to concede that the street was speaking. You can admire the object and still grant the point – I do both – and then notice the detail that settles it: everything generous about Galaxy SOHO faces inward. The courtyards are lovely, and they are private. That is an accurate description of a great deal of twenty-first-century development, and it is not a compliment.

None of which stopped Galaxy SOHO winning the RIBA International Award that same year – the letter and the trophy arrived within months of each other. International juries and municipal heritage bodies were, and still are, answering two entirely different questions.

04 · UNStudio Mercedes-Benz Museum

Stuttgart · opened 19 May 2006 · the traffic diagram that grew a skin

Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos do not begin with a shape. They begin with a problem in movement, draw the problem, and let the form be the consequence – which is why the practice is called UNStudio rather than something with two surnames on the door, and why this is the least self-indulgent building in this essay by a comfortable margin.

UNStudio won the competition for the site in 2001. The museum took five years to build – long enough that half of Stuttgart watched the trefoil rise out of a hole in the ground and had an opinion about it before a single car went on display.

The problem: Mercedes-Benz wants to tell two stories at once. The chronological one – here is 1886, here is the first automobile, keep walking through a century – and the thematic one, in which racing cars live with racing cars and delivery trucks with delivery trucks. Two narratives, one volume, and a visitor who will be justifiably furious if made to walk the first one twice to reach the second.

The answer is a double helix. Two ramps wind down through the building around a central void, never meeting, each carrying one of the stories, with crossings at every level. You ride to the top and descend. You may be a completist and take the century in order, or defect to the trucks whenever the mood strikes, and either way you are always going downhill and never lost. The plan is a cloverleaf of three overlapping circles with the middle removed – and the triangular atrium that produces is, quite deliberately, the shape of a Wankel rotary engine.

A shrine to the engine, in the shape of an engine, organised as a double helix. Corporate architecture is rarely this literate about itself.

16,500 m² of exhibition space 4,800 m² the footprint it stands on 160+ vehicles on display 800,245 visitors in 2023

Hold the first two numbers against each other, because they contain the whole trick: 16,500 square metres of exhibition standing on a footprint of 4,800. The building is nearly three and a half times larger than the ground it occupies, and it manages that not by stacking flat plates but by winding a continuous ramp through the air, so circulation and exhibition are the same square metre used twice. There is no wasted corridor anywhere in it. In a museum full of objects weighing as much as small buildings, it also means the twisting concrete has to span with almost nothing in the way of a bus.

So this is, technically, the hardest object in the group and the only one whose difficulty is entirely invisible. The showmanship went into the structure and none of it into the photograph, which is presumably why it has never had the magazine career of Bilbao or Baku and – I suspect – exactly how the engineers wanted it. Eight hundred thousand people a year walk down it without once wondering how it stands up. That is not a failure of the architecture. That is the highest compliment the discipline has to give.

05 · MAD Architects Harbin Opera House

Harbin · broke ground 2011, opened 2015 · a snowdrift you can buy tickets for

Ma Yansong worked in Hadid’s office before founding MAD, and the inheritance is legible in every surface. What he added is an argument about where the curves come from. MAD’s recurring claim is shanshui – mountain-water – that the Chinese building tradition is about landscape rather than object, and that architecture should behave like terrain instead of standing on it like a trophy. That is an easy thing to say in an interview and a hard thing to prove in aluminium. Harbin is the proof.

Consider the site. Harbin sits on the Songhua river in a province where winter is a six-month administrative fact, where the great annual festival is built from ice blocks sawn out of that same river, and where the temperature does things that make a Central European feel warmly towards his own miserable January. MAD gave it a low white mound in the wetland, clad entirely in white aluminium and read explicitly as a drift – a building at ease with snow because it is already shaped like snow. There are 470 parking spaces underneath it, because terrain is a metaphor and this is still China in 2015.

MAD won the project the ordinary way, for once: an open international competition in 2010, for a masterplan covering roughly 180 hectares of wetland along the Songhua – not just the theatre. The opera house is the one building from that plan the world actually looks at, but it was never meant to stand alone. It's the punctuation mark on a much longer sentence about the river.

1,600+ seats in the grand theatre 400 seats in the studio theatre ~79,000 m² building area 0 tickets required for the roof

That last figure is the one that earns my respect, and it isn’t a joke. A public path is carved into the façade and climbs the outside of the building to a rooftop plaza anyone may walk up: no ticket, no performance, no dress code, nobody at the top checking whether you belong there. An opera house – the single most status-anxious building type in existence, a typology whose entire architectural history consists of staircases designed to be seen ascending – hands its best view to people who will never buy a seat. Every other opera house on earth spends its budget teaching you that the foyer is not for you. This one gives away the roof and asks for nothing.

Then you step inside and the temperature of the architecture changes completely. The main hall is lined in Manchurian ash, milled into surfaces that read as eroded rather than assembled; MAD have described the guiding image as a block of wood hollowed out by hand. After all that arctic aluminium, walking into that warm grain does something almost physical – the pupils adjust, the shoulders drop. Ice outside, hearth inside. It is the oldest move in northern architecture, performed at the scale of a 1,600-seat theatre with a CNC mill.

That division of labour is the thing I keep returning to. Outside, curvature is climate. Inside, curvature is acoustics and warmth. Nowhere in the building is curvature merely curvature-because-it-photographs-well – and after two decades of buildings that were precisely that, the difference is not subtle. It is the difference between a form with a reason and a form with a publicist.

Afterword what the curve costs

Twenty-five years on, the technology won and the rhetoric aged like milk. Nobody says “parametricism” aloud any more without a small apologetic cough. Doubly curved surfaces are ordinary industrial output; a competent mid-size practice can model, cost and procure one before lunch. The revolution succeeded so completely that it stopped being interesting, which is the customary fate of successful revolutions.

What has not become ordinary is keeping the results alive. A panelised skin is thousands of joints, and joints are where water goes to work. Sealant has a service life measured in years, not centuries, and 33,000 panels means 33,000 opportunities to be wrong. Masonry fails slowly and legibly – a stain, a crack, a conversation with a mason. A curved composite skin fails invisibly, then suddenly, then expensively. That invoice never appears next to the renderings, and it is the most reliable omission in architectural publishing.

Stone ages in public. Cladding just quietly stops being waterproof.

The second bill is urban, and much larger. A continuous surface is a closed argument: it resolves internally and leaves the street almost nothing to hold on to. Bilbao gets away with it by anchoring a waterfront that had nothing else and repaying its own construction cost in tax within three years. Harbin gets away with it by handing over the roof. Galaxy SOHO – on the evidence of the neighbourhood it landed in and the objection its own heritage body filed in public – does not. Curvature is not inherently generous or hostile. The only question that has ever mattered is whether the geometry left anywhere for the city to touch it.

So, a bet on which of these five reaches 2100 with its reputation intact. Stuttgart, because two stories genuinely needed to share one volume and a helix is the honest answer – the only building here whose shape could not be exchanged for a different one. Harbin, because a free public roof in a city that cold is a gift rather than a gesture. Bilbao survives on its receipts and its dog. The other two are magnificent, and magnificence, as any facilities manager will tell you, arrives with a maintenance schedule and a sealant contractor on speed dial.

None of which is an argument for returning to the filing cabinet. It is an argument for asking the question almost nobody asked between 1997 and 2015, in the euphoria of discovering that the software would let you draw anything at all: what is the curve for? Answer it honestly and you get Harbin, where the shape is the weather and the roof belongs to everybody. Fail to, and you get a spectacular photograph, a leak on the third floor, and a building that was better before it was finished.

Sources Guggenheim Museum Bilbao – the museum on its own building: areas, galleries and the titanium skin – guggenheim-bilbao.eus Association for Project Management – the project economics, and why titanium was briefly cheaper than steel – apm.org.uk ArchDaily – Heydar Aliyev Center – drawings, structure and project data – archdaily.com Dezeen – the open letter from Beijing’s heritage body over the Lubetkin nomination, 2013 – dezeen.com UNStudio – Mercedes-Benz Museum – the trefoil plan and double-helix circulation, from the architects – unstudio.com MAD Architects – Harbin Opera House – building area, seating and the public rooftop route – i-mad.com Photographs: freely licensed via Wikimedia Commons, each credited in its caption.

Contemporary Polish design has arrived at a moment of profound, quiet maturity. To walk through the studios of today’s leading architects and furniture designers is to encounter a language of rigorous minimalism, tactile raw materials, and a deliberate structural honesty. Yet, this modern clarity is not a rejection of the past - it is the culmination of a century-long dialogue regarding what it means to create with a national soul.

To understand this current precision, one must look back to the Young Poland (Młoda Polska) movement of the 1890s. Emerging at a time when Poland was politically erased from the map, the movement acted as a vital act of cultural resistance. Polish artists, much like their peers in the British Arts and Crafts movement, rejected the soulless standardization of the Industrial Age. Instead, they sought to construct a national identity through the arts, fusing architecture, furniture, and textiles into a "total work of art" that was heavily steeped in local folklore, symbolism, and a romanticized connection to the land. It was a movement born from a desperate need to preserve a culture that was under existential threat.

Modern Polish design has inherited this deep-seated ethos of artisan integrity, but it has undergone a striking evolution in its execution. Where the artists of Young Poland once relied on intricate, heavy ornamentation to assert their heritage, today’s designers have chosen the path of subtraction. They have systematically stripped away the romantic veneer of the past to reveal the structural skeleton underneath.

The result is a design language that feels unmistakably Polish, not through the repetition of folklore, but through an unwavering commitment to architectural discipline. In these contemporary spaces, the warmth of tradition is now expressed through the inherent quality of materials – the grain of wood, the weight of stone, and the thoughtful geometry of a form. It is a transition from the decorative to the essential.

By focusing on the quiet beauty of proportion and the tactile reality of the everyday, today’s creators have moved beyond the struggle to define an identity. They have built one that is self-assured and globally resonant – a sophisticated bridge between the ancestral pride of the 1890s and the minimalist, structural reality of the present.

Wiktoria and Filip Bielicki

Wiktoria and Filip Bielicki operate at the intersection of structural rigor and tactile sensitivity, creating objects that function less as mere furniture and more as deliberate anchors within a space.

The first sight on their cabinets give us a riddle. The convex surface of the doors hide more than an abstract forms - light and shadow interplay framed the cast of branches, leaves, snags, trunks and mosses that are laid in chaotic composition. Later the intersection of natural objects are scanned in 3d for further incremental aluminum sheet forming by KUKA robot.

Technologies become an instrument of detailed stamping of fragile organic structures with elaborate surfaces, that freeze in time forever.

The visual stealthiness and modesty of represented natural elements is achieved by the use of matte mono material and simple geometrical forms of cabinets. The part of the design is allocated to light - more accurately, to the shadows caused by it - convex relief is a consistent dialogue with the environment.

The idea of preserving the nature without a direct use of materials sourced from it is an example of impressive contemporary Polish design, that prove its ingenuity deprived of radical independence from the past and the environment.

Zofia Wyganowska

Projects under the signage of Zofia Wyganowska Studio are executed with a rigorous attention to Polish heritage, bridging the gap between historical craft and contemporary restraint. The interiors are characterized by a light, airy quality, where tactile materials and contrasting volumes exist in a state of deliberate equilibrium. Operating within a strictly curated color palette, Wyganowska emphasizes clarity, allowing self-explanatory furniture - often crafted from raw, natural materials - to dictate the mood of the space.

A vital component of her signature aesthetic is the handling of surface texture. Whether achieved through intentional craftsmanship or the patient patina of time, these surfaces grant her projects a depth that feels both lived-in and meticulously composed. This commitment to materiality is matched by her active integration of contemporary Polish art and design, effectively turning her interiors into galleries of local creative dialogue.

This synthesis of tradition and modernism is perhaps most evident in her collaboration with the niche perfume store, Mood Scent Bar. Within this retail environment, Wyganowska integrates pajaki as a rhythmic counterpoint to the store’s minimalist architecture. By suspending these intricate, geometric structures against the sleek, stark lines of the display shelves, she recontextualizes folk art into a striking sculptural installation.

Karolina Merska

Mentionig "pajaki" is inseparable with art historian Karolina Merska, who gives a renaissance to this traditional Polish element. Pajaki ( from pl. spider) is a traditional pendant accessories made out of straw and paper, which were hanging from the ceiling in the village houses. It’s believed that they bring luck, protect from evil and deliver prosperity.

As in its historical roots, pajaki continuous to bring joy in the modern interiors. Hand-crafted suspended structures with various details is embraced in dynamism. The movement of decorative accumulations with pompons, straw and flowers is a focus of attention, reminding about rich and eclectic heritage of Poland.

Yet, beyond this vibrant exterior lies a profound architectural discipline. Merska does not merely replicate the past; she refines it, distilling the complex, cosmic geometry of the pajaki into a form that resonates with contemporary silence and light. By isolating these intricate silhouettes, she forces a reconciliation between the ephemeral nature of the materials – straw and paper – and the enduring weight of cultural memory.

Ala Savashevich

Ala Savashevich’s handwoven works operate as a stark, intellectual subversion of the tactile warmth we typically associate with loom-based traditions. While her choice of technique is deeply embedded in the lineage of Polish folk weaving, she systematically strips away the decorative joy of the craft to expose its underlying structural logic.

In these pieces, the act of weaving is no longer a search for aesthetic softness or domestic ornamentation. Instead, it becomes a method of mapping tension. By utilizing raw, sometimes industrial materials or monochromatic palettes, she transforms the fluid movement of the hand into a static, architectural grid.

It is here that the dialogue with Polish tradition becomes most visceral. Traditionally, the weaver’s labor was a communal, stabilizing force, a way of binding the domestic environment together. Savashevich retains this binding quality, yet she directs it toward a critical examination of social and historical boundaries.

Her textiles function like blueprints of restraint – they are woven with the same obsessive precision as her sculptural objects, forcing the viewer to confront the fact that our traditions are not merely decorative overlays, but are, in fact, the very warp and weft of our ideological fabric. It is a brilliant, quiet form of resistance, where the ancient craft of the loom is turned into a lens for modern, analytical inquiry.

Ania Jaworska

Ania Jaworska is an architect and designer whose practice operates at the precise intersection of fine art and architectural theory. Having honed her craft through formal education at both the Cracow University of Technology and the Cranbrook Academy of Art, she approaches design not as mere product creation, but as a conceptual interrogation of space and behavior.

Her work is defined by a bold, reductive vocabulary – frequently utilizing geometric rigor to challenge our perceptions of utility. The SET series, showcased at the Volume Gallery, serves as a poignant example of this methodology. In pieces like the Unit 2B (Coffee Table), Jaworska moves beyond the surface-level function of furniture, instead treating the object as an archetype. By employing stark, monochromatic palettes and monolithic forms, she strips away the superfluous to reveal the essential masses.

Her design language is an intellectual exercise in balancing playfulness with profound structural discipline. Jaworska’s practice is a testament to the fact that when form is executed with absolute clarity, it ceases to be just an object and becomes a deliberate, spatial statement.

Marcin Rusak

Marcin Rusak’s creative practice is deeply rooted in his personal heritage as the descendant of several generations of flower growers, a background that anchors his exploration of ephemerality, nature, and the concept of beauty. This connection to Polish agricultural traditions serves as a vital bridge between the historical significance of the land and a contemporary design language that questions our modern habits of overproduction and excess consumption.

His studio acts as a laboratory for the intersection of preservation and decay, creating works that challenge the perceived permanence of our material world. By treating his projects as evolving experiments, Rusak reframes the mundane details of daily life into profound experiences, using botany as a lens to reconsider our relationship with time and aesthetic value.

This approach aligns with the broader trajectory of modern Polish design, which seeks to transcend mere decoration by imbuing functional objects with narrative depth.

Nowadays Polish Design is a quintessence of devotion to the craftsmanship, that has proclaimed the cultural identity for decades. Aspiring to create against the backdrop of utilitarian minimalism, architects and designers translate their vision, continuing to shape a unique national narrative that amazes the creatives around the world.

Tadao Ando is one of the most influential architects of 21st century, who challenges the conventional definition and boarders of architecture. His unique approach showcased the rethinking of traditional Japanese principles through bold shapes, materials and spatial organizations. In this article we are going to reveal the core principles of his philosophy and its cues.

Background and Influences

Tadao Ando was born in Osaka (once called the “City of Water”) in 1941. He was born as the first twin, but then his parents decided to separate them. Tadao Ando was raised by his maternal grandmother in a simple neighborhood with a variety of craftsmen, woodworkers, and others. He spent days in their workshops working with materials, builds airplanes and ships. It would be fair to say that this environment served as a foundation for the life-learning the renowned architect pursued.

From the age of 17, being influenced by his twin, Ando started to take up boxing. This sport has shaped his fighting spirit, which helps him in the future life.

In the early 20s, during the period of 1962-1969, after the Japanese ban was lifted, Tadao Ando took a trip to Europe, United States and Africa. He took a ship from Japan to the Soviet Union, where he went to Moscow with a week-long Trans-Siberian Railway. During that trip, he saw many countries and had an indisputable architectural experience, which would later become the basis of his famous quote:

“Architecture encompasses things that cannot be captured through the media. This is why architects must travel; architects are made through traveling”

Despite an acquaintance with numerous buildings in different countries, his desired destination for this journey was the heritage of Le Corbusier, who nourished his interest in architecture.

He got to know a French iconic architect by chance, finding his manuscript in an old secondhand bookshop. The value of this book lies not in the actual price but entirely in the footprint it left on Tadao Ando's life and career. The architect was fascinated by the projects and recalled that he had traced Corbusier’s early sketches so many times that the paper had become almost black. Furthermore, he admitted that while thinking about his own projects, he thinks about what Le Corbusier would have said about it and how he would evaluate it.

Tadao Ando didn’t receive formal training in any field, but opened his firm, “Tadao Ando Architect & Associates,” in 1969 in Osaka, after returning from his long “field-study” in various countries, that, along with the Japanese spatial philosophy and books about architecture, shaped his way of thinking. Ando didn’t pursue an empirical way of learning by being a student of other architects, as his stubbornness and temper always led to dismissal.

The first attempts in design were with small wooden houses, interiors, and furniture. However, it's been 6 years of his practice before he completed the Row House (Azuma House), which gave him praise and recognition through the prize from the Japanese Architectural Association.

Another project executed in the late 1970s, the Rokko Housing complex, was widely published and emphasized its importance in the architectural field beyond the local context. It's inserted into a slope at the foot of the Rokko Mountains, allowing panoramic views. Remaining loyal to the rigid grid and geometry, Tadao Ando nonetheless worked in a more elaborate form and composition, proving that simplicity is a conscious, but not limiting, choice for his philosophical embodiment.

The following projects strengthened the tendency for transboundary recognition. Such buildings as Church on the Water (1988) in Tomamu, Hokkaido or Church of the Light (1988-89) in Ibaraki, Osaka promote their author as an architect with a deep spiritual understanding of the space and nature connection. In spite of Japan being the only country to host his projects by the end of 1980, the influence has changed the status quo, and in 1991 the Modern Museum of Modern Art gave an exhibition dedicated to Tadao Ando, indirectly labeling him “one of the preeminent living architects in the world”.

Throughout the whole career till nowadays Tadao Ando designer more than 300 constructed projects all over the world.

We can name three main pillars of his approach, influenced by the background:

Traditional Japanese architecture. Growing up in Japan in residential common dwellings inevitably influences the perception and the initial idea about certain aspects. However, according to Tadao Ando's words in the interview with Toshio Okumana, he doesn’t use any traditional architectural elements, but wants to evoke the feeling of it, through adaptation of emotional sensitivity, rather then direct physical elements. The last is an artificial addition to the building, which nevertheless keeps it standardized without enhancing the perceptive depth and significance, which are laid between the obvious presence of elements. The approach is not mimicry of the form, but the mimicry of feeling.

Ephemeral and intangible over physical. Tadao Ando is inclined to give a predominant role to the ephemeral elements in architecture, which is commonly recognized as solid and structural matter. However, the consistent presence and monumentality perform as a background for important factors, such as light, which deal with subtle susceptibility. Most probably this intention is directed by the experience which architect exposed himself to at teenage years: around the age 15, he went to study old rural houses to impress upon himself the traditional Japanese space.

Study of architecture through travelling and experience of the space. As it was a major part of his self-taught architectural education, the concentration on the feeling and emotions in his own projects keep the same significance.

Architectural Philosophy and Design Principles

“Tension in acceptance”

There is a strong belief penetrating the Japanese architecture framework, concerning the blend of the outside environment and the interior space. The borders between the above-mentioned dual definitions are meant to be softened, visually and physically melting into each other to avoid the rigid division. This idea of harmonious coexistence of antagonist spaces found its base in philosophy and historical relationship with nature, and it is supported by many strategies in the Nippon Koku.

However, Tadao Ando had directly defined, both verbally and in his projects, that his mindset is occupied with the idea of the necessity of rejection. According to his words, acceptance means setting down one’s guards, allowing for excessive inflow into the interior, which by these means is losing its certainty. The reason lies in the absence of tension in the act of rejection. Thus, the renowned architect is convinced that tension should be an indisputable part of acceptance as well as in the architectural context, tension signifies the confrontation between exterior and interior, underscoring the importance of the places in a building of their contest.

Walls, as the strongest border between the intrinsic and extrinsic, play a significant role in Tadao Ando's approach �� he works with thin materiality and by specific positions with intervals creates openings to allow the structure accept even in the act of prime rejection. Walls are perceived as a “sword”, which cuts the landscape, sky, wind, and sunlight in order to promote new disclosure. This act of manifestation is not seen as a cruelty to the exterior, but as a ceremonial and sacred deed, with assimilating nature as an equal part of architecture.

“Essentials of human life”

Tadao Ando is known for his minimalist approach, reflected by the boldness and fine clarity of his ideas. It touches upon walls and the spatial arrangement. However, the simplicity of the walls and their raw forms and finishes is not based on mere aesthetic considerations; its foundation is deeply rooted in Ando’s philosophy of life. He believes that contemporary culture is characterized by a loop of satisfying unconstrained and never-ending desires, so he raised a silent question about what contributes to the richness of life and what is essential. Through his projects, he is conveying a supposed answer with the underlying meaning of true abundance, which is translated in simplification, elimination of surface decoration, and employment of symmetrical compositions.

Architectural silence

The striking quietude of the architect’s projects is defined by his faith that architecture should remain silent and let the presence of changing nature to be dominant, staying tolerant to the passage of time, hourly, daily, and seasonal transformations, that nurture a finer sensitivity in humans.

Revitalization of nature connection

According to Tadao Ando, the population growth and urbanization after World War II made it impossible to preserve the core base of traditional Japanese residential architecture – connection with nature and openness to it. In his projects, this principle goes beyond the mere tribute to the historical value, but rather is performed as a main builder of the concept, shape and mass distribution.

“Voids as a part of architecture”

If the architecture can be compared to sculpture, than its fair to make a correlation with the void mass relation. Even if the observation of these two media is irrelevant, it helps to scale down the building structure and start to perceive it mainly in masses. Tadao Ando had a strong persuasion that it's essential to leave blank spaces in project design, and endow them with the same significance as the man-made intervention. The interstices should bear their intrinsic logic within the structure, and this approach enhances the value and the individuality of the architecture.

Light is an important controlling spatial factor

Tadao Ando has a focal focus on the role of light in the built environment. He believes that the architecture is not about walls, floor, and ceiling, but about the contained world outside. This space can be changed not only by the form, but also by the means of directed light. If the more grounded correlation is to be made, the way light defines the character of the rooms resembles the fireplace in a traditional home . The light can be manipulated in different ways to create a gentle environment for habitats.

Restricted vocabulary

This principle of Tadao Ando’s works is directly perceived by every observer, even the one with no experience in architecture or any related field. The paradox of the limited use in different categories of built structure is the correlation between the level of limitations and the visual and sensory effect. Moderate material palette, strictness of forms, and dignified simplicity of spatial relations result in a visually attention-getting object, also through the difference with the natural and man-made environment.

One of the most remarkable examples, that, according to the architect's words, encapsulates all of his principles and emphasizes the essence of the whole oeuvre is a Row House Sumiyoshi (Azuma House) in Osaka, Japan, constructed in 1976. The residential module is located in a dense urban environment, and its rectangular shape is divided into three equal parts, where the middle is dedicated to the open courtyard, connecting habitats with nature, exposing them to changing weather conditions every time they want to go from one part of the house to the other and emphasizing the priority of nature even in the challenging conditions. The equality of the open part and its obligatory binding function encapsulates Tadao Ando's approach to incorporate blankness.

The chosen material is unfinished concrete, which is also a substantial characteristic of the prominent architect. It creates a moderate appearance of the house, not trying to evoke warmer feelings, but rather keeping true to the material and shifting the attention to the intrinsic values and meanings. The envelope of the Azuma House is not designed to impress; the facades of Tadao Ando’s buildings do not respond to the modern expectations of superficial satisfaction in every aspect.

Tadao Ando's philosophy is unique, and it can't be more accurately conveyed than through his words. In his essay “A Wedge in Circumstances,” he explained his approach to the residential space – the house is a stage for living; therefore, the manner of entertaining and the paths are very important. He is convinced that the architectural plan shouldn’t be perceived from the inside – once a visitor steps into the space, it's not important for him/her to comprehend the layout, he/she should cognitively comprehend the embraced space. That’s the reason for asymmetrical, variable, and unpredictable space relations in his projects.

There is a preconception that pleasure derived from an art piece, or the smile it evokes, somehow lowers its value and strips it of the grand title of “Art.” However, this is simply not true.

Art can speak loudly without words, making it an indisputable instrument for materializing self-reflection or addressing social and political concerns. Yet, if we look at the etymology of the word, “art” is not historically related to “seriousness” or anything of the sort; it takes its roots in hand-related craft, brilliantly mastered and executed. This origin automatically deprives art of any mandatory obligations and legitimizes its right to just be.

As was mentioned, art serves as a reflection of social, political, gender, or other issues. It can be a medium for personal introspection or a vehicle to deliver complex ideas in diverse shapes and forms. But an artist still can create playful objects following an intrinsic desire to feel the material, to experiment with shapes and colors, to master techniques, and to bring a piece of joy to everyday life. And being playful is not synonymous with being superficial. All objects carry the background, beliefs, vision, intentions, and concerns of their creators - they are simply expressed through a different lens.

Taking everything too seriously is a dead end - and it certainly shouldn't cross your mind when you are choosing a new piece for your home. Ultimately, the baseline is your personal preference. If you only approve of strict beige and black forms, or conventional mediums and subjects, that is wonderful! My only concern is when people don't even allow themselves to consider a piece that might spark a moment of delight. We constantly hear: “It looks so great, it will go beautifully with my walls and my other paintings.” But next time, try asking yourself a different question: Does it make me smile? Colorful and playful objects possess a unique quality that others lack - they inject pure happiness into a room. We don’t think about this often enough, focusing instead on how trendy a piece is or how it makes our home look. But how does it make us feel?

Colorful and playful objects possess a unique quality that others lack - they inject pure happiness into a room.

Interior design is not just a setting, a static picture, a composition, or a color palette. It is a living environment that embraces and enswathes you. We are used to considering an interior as an external component of our existence, positioning ourselves merely as spectators. In reality, the moment we step into a space, we are absorbed by it, invisibly adopting its mood and yielding to the irresistible influence of its atmosphere. There is even a specific branch of science - neuroarchitecture - that studies how the environment affects our cognitive performance, as well as our psychological and physical well-being. Mostly, these effects are triggered by spatial characteristics, color psychology, and the tactile properties of materials. However, there is one element that often falls off this scientific list but still has a major impact on how we experience a space: details filled with irony and fun.

In reality, the moment we step into a space, we are absorbed by it, invisibly adopting its mood and yielding to the irresistible influence of its atmosphere.

I believe that when you introduce playful objects into an environment, it expands the boundaries of the mind. It gives you non-verbal permission to think freely - not just to push against conventional frames, but to forget they even exist.

Below, you will find a selection of artists whose objects are guaranteed to bring an unexpected smile to your face.

Lola Mayeras

French designer Lola Mayeras grew up in the South of France with a ceramist father, so her artistic heritage and exploration of colors and shapes began to form in early childhood. She worked as a fashion designer before launching her own design studio in 2020. During the lockdown, she rediscovered her father’s workshop in her hometown and followed an inner desire to create in a medium familiar to her since youth.

Her background in fashion preserved her love for draping, but now her target objects are furniture and sculptures. Her most frequent signature element is the button-down shirt - it stands still in the form of a vase, is modestly stacked in a sculpture, or effortlessly draped over the corner of a wooden table. The latter is my personal favorite among all her amazing pieces: a restrained, natural ceramic mass with a wrinkled, azure-blue shirt seemingly falling onto the floor.

Lola Mayeras also manages to create anthropomorphic vases with ears and earrings that look perfectly natural an all senses. The balance of form and scale is so fine that it makes you question why other vases lack these symmetrical details. It is bold yet in harmony.

Recently, she has expanded her practice to work with metal and textiles. If you are in search of unique bedding, you can order the “It’s a Mess” set, featuring a trompe-l'œil print of scattered clothes. The light-hearted essence of her objects, along with chosen color palette, is deeply inspired by her childhood in the South of France, where enjoying a sun-filled life was a daily routine.

The light-hearted essence of her objects, along with chosen color palette, is deeply inspired by her childhood in the South of France, where enjoying a sun-filled life was a daily routine.

Erwin Wurm

Erwin Wurm’s work is a prime example of playful irony masking serious social themes – messages that are difficult to read at first glance, but become an inseparable part of the experience once uncovered.

As a pioneer of conceptual humor who has won the hearts of art lovers worldwide, Wurm famously gifts bags, sausages, sweaters, and other everyday items with arms and legs. He is the creator of puffed cars, bloated houses, and anthropomorphic pickles, all reconsidered through simple shapes and actions. This simplicity should by no means diminish the artist's value; rather, it reflects a genuine mastery of a highly readable visual language, which then collides with absolute unpredictability.

Ultimately, the absurdity in Wurm’s art serves as a sharp response to the pressures of contemporary society, such as overconsumption, the overwhelming weight of public opinion, and our obsession with self-representation through the things we own. Underneath the cheerful packaging lies a profound commentary on the modern human condition. Yet, the presence of this hidden depth never compromises the pure, joyful look of his pieces – they remain effortlessly delightful objects that you want to return to again and again.

Yet, the presence of this hidden depth never compromises the pure, joyful look of his pieces – they remain effortlessly delightful objects that you want to return to again and again.

Funny Ollas

Swedish designer Fanny Ollas has a background in textile and fashion, that reflects in her elegantly ornamented vases. Each vessel looks like a fairy character, who live by your side rent-free and has all the rights to do so.

The gentle tones and integration of faux fur, lacing, strass and pearls shape the magical tinkling appearance to every piece, yet they carry a certain state of melancholy. Her work revolves around thoughts about vulnerability, body, demands, fears, relationships and what is hidden behind our facades.

Pablo Picasso

The legendary Spanish artist always called himself an experimenter, and there can't be a more accurate description for the vast broadness of his work. Although he didn’t focus on irony as a core theme, the vessels he produced in large quantities in the South of France at the Madoura Atelier are a perfect reflection of the playful component in the artist's oeuvre.

By the end of World War II, Picasso was already a living legend, an acclaimed genius, and a millionaire. But this success had a backfire effect - he grew tired of academicism and the solemn, rigid attitude toward art. In turning to clay, he seemed to permit himself to become a child again.

"I can draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like a child," - Pablo Picasso

The comical faces he painted on pitchers were an act of pure play and an expression of the absolute happiness he felt while living on the sunny coast with his young muse, Françoise Gilot. After the horrors of war, the tragedy of Guernica, and deep personal crises, creating vibrant, humorous tableware became a form of art therapy for him.

The comical faces he painted on pitchers were an act of pure play and an expression of the absolute happiness he felt while living on the sunny coast with his young muse, Françoise Gilot. After the horrors of war, the tragedy of Guernica, and deep personal crises, creating vibrant, humorous tableware became a form of art therapy for him.

These pitchers were never meant to sit behind glass in dusty museums. Picasso originally intended for his ceramics to be affordable and used in everyday life - for pouring wine or holding fruit - so that people could smile at those amusing, hand-painted faces over breakfast.

Matthew Centeno

Improvisation and an open-minded approach sit at the heart of Matthew Centeno’s creative process. Through highly detailed craftsmanship, he transforms ordinary balloons into captivating shapes that instantly speak directly to the inner child in everyone. His ultimate goal is to break through the monotony of daily life, nudging the audience to rediscover their forgotten sense of curiosity.

While foil balloons are the ultimate indicators of celebrations and holidays, they are inherently temporary. Unlike flowers, which have already become a staple of casual home decor, balloons still belong firmly to the category of special occasions. Centeno's wall-mounted porcelain balloon with a smiling face serves as a permanent reminder that every single day is special.

Sébastien Gaudette

What can be more pleasent than the sticky notes with cheerful inscriptions, that make you feel warm every time you see them? Sebastien Gaudette creates the tromp-l’œil sculptures from aluminium, which will stay on your wall forever. It’s the kind of art that doesn’t have to suit your interior but rather contribute to your mood and emotional well-being. I need to admit that the small size of the work adds to the spark of discovering it around - it’s like a piece of magic which you unexpectedly run into and freeze for a moment to smile for a second and go back to the errands.

The central pillar of the Gaudets' work is not the inscriptions but the recreation of paper folding. However, even within this framework, we find the component of delightful familiarity combined with childish excitement. For example the paper planes of different colors, made from a lined notebook sheet. Finding it on the chest of drawers or coffetable among books and vases would be a wonderful time machine to the carefreeness of youth.

It seems like we are frightened to let the art entartain us.

Whether you are an art - collector, - lover, - enthusiast or just start your acquaintance with bounderless art world, start noticing the objects that not only challange you, question or provocate, but also can evoke warmful memories, create a new one or simply makes you smile almost unreasonably.

Sometimes your joy is an artist goal - surrender to its power.

Walk through this apartment once and you'll clock the polka dot, the burl veneer, the pair of painted dogs watching from three different walls. Walk through it twice and you'll notice none of them ever appears the same way twice – the dot changes scale on every surface it lands on, the veneer goes from tabletop to cabinet front to a single framed square the size of a postcard, and the dogs shift from grey to black-and-white to a single cropped blue portrait, as if the same idea keeps being translated rather than repeated. That's the real subject here: not a look, but a small, disciplined set of decisions a home can apparently sustain across five very different rooms without ever repeating itself outright.

Up close, this is not a printed polka dot – it's drawn, each mark an irregular blot with its own weight and edge, the kind of variation that happens when a hand repeats a gesture rather than a machine repeating a die-cut. At sofa scale that irregularity does real work: a perfectly regular dot this large would read as upholstery fabric behaving like wallpaper, decorative and slightly cheap. An irregular one reads as texture – closer to the fur it's clearly quoting than to a print. The skirted coffee table underneath, in the same dot at a smaller, denser scale, is the one piece of furniture in the room dressed rather than upholstered – a wood disc on a fabric petticoat, a deliberately strange thing to set next to a sectional this architectural. A small metal cone sits on that table next to a stack of books – the same silhouette the bedroom lamp repeats later, at a completely different scale, in a completely different material, though nothing about this room announces that yet.

The same idea, translated five times, is a collection. The same idea, copied five times, is a theme.

Burl is wood at its least geometric – the pattern comes from a tree's stress response, a knot it tried and failed to grow around, so no two panels of it can ever be book-matched the way straight-grain veneer can. Using that much of it, at this many scales, only works because everything touching it is so plain: a clean-lined credenza, a cantilevered shelf with no visible bracket, a floral armchair with soft, boneless-looking arms. That chair is the one curved, patterned object let into a room otherwise built from straight edges and one wild, unrepeatable grain – the same trick the polka dot pulls next to the burl nightstand in the bedroom, just in a different material. A second cone turns up here too, catching the light on the same low round table – small enough to miss, insistent enough that once you've seen it once, you start looking for it everywhere else in the apartment.

Repeat an object enough times, in different sizes and different materials, and it stops being decoration and starts being a signature.

Three paintings of the same subject, three different colour treatments, and not one of them hung as a matching set – that's the tell that this is a collection built by eye, not ordered as a triptych. The chairs here do the same quiet work as the sofa's dot: a floral fabric, blue on white, wrapped around a frame with almost no right angles in it, so the pattern reads as movement rather than upholstery. Underneath, the same burl slab from the living room reappears as a table edge, thick enough to read as solid wood rather than veneer on plywood – the one place in the apartment where the material gets to be the whole object instead of a surface on top of one. The table's legs are polished to a full mirror, which does something the burl can't: it doubles the room instead of just decorating it, folding the chairs and their floral fabric back into the reflection like a second, slightly bluer dining room underneath the real one.

This is the same fabric logic as the sofa, run through a full range of scales in a single room: one dot on the curtain, a different-weight dot on the coverlet, a third scale entirely in the woven stripe underneath it, and a fourth blue-toned dog watching over all of it from a single cropped portrait rather than a full pose. Nothing here is trying to match – the curtain's dot and the bedding's dot are close enough to belong to the same family and different enough that the eye keeps working to place them, which is most of why the room reads as layered instead of themed. Pull back and the bed itself is doing the same layering trick as the room around it: a ribbed brown blanket, a striped waffle throw, and the dot coverlet on top, three different textures stacked the way the three dog portraits are stacked across three different rooms – repetition disguised as variety, or maybe the other way around.

A cone tapers to a point with no seam, generated by nothing more than a straight line spun around an axis. Underneath it, a hexagon built from two stacked prisms, six flat planes each, closing on itself because six is the only number under ten that divides 360 without a remainder. One shape has no edges at all; the other is almost nothing but edges – and setting the cone's point directly above the hexagon's centre is what lets two unrelated families of geometry read as a single object. Behind both, the dot grid is the strictest geometry in the apartment, fixed interval, no dot more important than its neighbour – except that up close every mark is drawn, not stamped, the same disciplined irregularity holding the whole home together at every scale it appears. By the time the cone reaches this nightstand, it has already appeared twice as a small object on two different coffee tables – which means the lamp isn't introducing a new shape into the apartment so much as finally giving one of its recurring shapes somewhere serious to stand. The lamp is the one line in the frame that refuses the grid: its shade tips toward the pillow at almost exactly the angle a person leans in to say one last thing before a room goes dark – the single object here allowed to behave like it has somewhere to be.

Three coffee-table cones and one lamp aren't a coincidence. They're the closest thing this apartment has to a signature.

None of this explains why the apartment feels calm rather than styled – restraint does that, and so does resisting the urge to match anything exactly. But counting how many times the same dot, the same burl, the same cone, and the same painted dog show up in five rooms, at five different scales, is a decent way to start noticing why some homes read as collected and most just read as decorated.

Imagine Vienna in the last years of the nineteenth century: a city drunk on its own reflection. The Ringstrasse glittered with palaces dressed in borrowed history – a Greek parliament here, a Gothic city hall there, a Renaissance opera in between. It was magnificent, and it was exhausted. Behind the gilt, an entire generation of young painters and architects had begun to suspect that their city was building museums to a past that had never quite belonged to it, while the present – electric, anxious, alive – went unpainted.

On the third of April 1897, a group of them stopped waiting for permission. Led by a thirty-four-year-old painter named Gustav Klimt, they resigned in a body from the Künstlerhaus, the official artists' association that controlled every important exhibition in the city. They called their new movement the Vereinigung bildender Künstler Österreichs – the Union of Austrian Artists – but history remembers them by the word they chose for the break itself: Secession.

They were not a school. They shared no single style, no common manifesto of technique. What bound them was a conviction – fierce, simple, and impossible to compromise – and they cut it in gold above the door of the building they would soon raise. It read: to every age its art, to art its freedom.

To Every Age Its Art

The Secession announced itself the way a thunderclap announces a storm – with a poster. For the first exhibition in 1898, Klimt drew Theseus slaying the Minotaur, the young hero of a new art putting the old monster to the sword, while Pallas Athene, goddess of wisdom and just war, stood guard at the margin. The censors made him add a screen of trees to hide Theseus's nakedness. It was the first of many quarrels the Secession would pick with a public that did not yet know it wanted to be provoked.

Their creed had a name too – Ver Sacrum, the 'sacred spring.' In ancient Italy it was the rite by which a people, in a time of crisis, dedicated the coming generation to a fresh start. The Secessionists borrowed the phrase for their magazine, a square, exquisite journal in which text and image were designed as one living surface. To open an issue of Ver Sacrum was to hold the movement's philosophy in your hands: that a wine glass, a typeface, a chair and a painting were all art, and all equally worth perfecting.

Der Zeit ihre Kunst. Der Kunst ihre Freiheit. – To every age its art. To art its freedom.

The White Temple

A movement needs a home, and the Secession built one unlike anything Vienna had seen. The commission went to Joseph Maria Olbrich, barely thirty, a pupil of the great Otto Wagner. What he produced in 1898 was less a building than a declaration: a cubic, white-walled temple of pure geometry, stripped of every historical ornament, crowned with an openwork dome of three thousand gilded laurel leaves. Vienna, half-scandalised and half-delighted, nicknamed it 'the golden cabbage.'

Look closely at the façade and you find the movement's spirit written in plaster: three solemn owls, sacred to Athene, and above the entrance those defiant golden words. Even the decorative details were designed by members of the group – the owls and foliage by Koloman Moser – so that the building itself became a total work of art, a Gesamtkunstwerk, in which architecture, sculpture and ornament spoke a single language.

The People

The Secession was never a one-man movement, but it began, unmistakably, with one man. Gustav Klimt was the son of a gold engraver, and gold would never leave his work. He had made his name – and his fortune – painting decorous allegories on the ceilings of the very Ringstrasse palaces the Secession would rebel against. Then, at the height of his respectability, he turned. His art grew strange, erotic, ornamental and unafraid; his patrons grew nervous; and Klimt, serenely, kept going.

In Pallas Athene of 1898 you can already see the future arriving. The goddess is armoured in hammered gold, her gaze cool and frontal, and in her hand she holds a tiny naked figure – Nuda Veritas, naked truth, holding up a mirror to a society that preferred not to look. It was Klimt's private motto made visible: the artist owes the age not flattery, but honesty.

If Klimt was the movement's heart, Otto Wagner was its conscience turned to stone and iron. Already famous, already past fifty, the professor could have coasted into a comfortable old age of neo-Baroque commissions. Instead he threw in his lot with his own students, declaring that 'something impractical cannot be beautiful' and that the architecture of a new age must be born of new life, new materials, new needs.

Wagner's buildings still stun. On the Linke Wienzeile he sheathed an entire apartment house in blossoming majolica tiles, flowers climbing five storeys into the Viennese sky – practical, weatherproof, and gloriously alive. And at Karlsplatz he built a pair of railway pavilions so elegant that the city's commuters passed each day through works of art, green iron and white marble stitched with golden sunflowers.

Koloman Moser was the movement's quiet universe. Trained as a painter, he designed everything: postage stamps, stained glass, book covers, furniture, the owls on the Secession wall, the very pages of Ver Sacrum. If the Secession believed that art should saturate ordinary life, Moser was the proof – a man who could make a letterbox as beautiful as an altarpiece.

Josef Hoffmann took that belief and built an empire on it. In 1903, with Moser and the banker Fritz Wärndorfer, he founded the Wiener Werkstätte – the Vienna Workshops – a cooperative of craftsmen determined to make objects of total quality, from cutlery to entire houses. His grids and squares were so rigorous that colleagues nicknamed him 'Quadratl-Hoffmann,' Little-Square Hoffmann. The nickname was a joke; the influence was not. His purity of line runs straight through the twentieth century into the design language we still live inside.

And Joseph Maria Olbrich, the young architect of the temple itself, gave the movement its face. He did not stay in Vienna long – the Grand Duke of Hesse called him to Darmstadt to build an entire artists' colony from the ground up – but the golden dome he left behind still crowns the city, and still keeps its promise, a century and a quarter later.

The Beethoven Exhibition

Everything the Secession believed came together, once, in a single room. In 1902 the fourteenth exhibition was conceived as a temple within the temple: a shrine to Ludwig van Beethoven, the artist as hero and prophet. At its centre stood Max Klinger's polychrome statue of the composer enthroned like a god; around the walls, twenty-one members contributed works meant to be seen together, as a single act of devotion. And along three walls Klimt painted the Beethoven Frieze – thirty-four metres of longing, suffering and deliverance.

It begins with the yearning of humankind, drifts through the temptations and terrors of the world – the giant Typhoeus, a monstrous ape, and the Gorgons of sickness, madness and death – and resolves, at last, in art and love. The frieze was painted directly on the wall, meant to be destroyed when the show closed. It survived by accident, and today it is one of the supreme achievements of European painting.

But the frieze does not end in darkness. It climbs toward a choir of angels and closes on an embrace – a naked couple locked together beneath a golden sky, and above them the words of Schiller that Beethoven set to music in his Ninth Symphony: this kiss to the whole world. It is the Secession's deepest belief, painted large: that art, in the end, is a form of love, and love a form of deliverance.

The Break, and the Gold

Movements are mortal, and the Secession's unity did not survive its success. By 1905 a rift had opened between the 'stylists' around Klimt, who wanted art and craft and commerce to fuse completely, and the 'naturalists' who feared the movement was becoming a shop. Klimt and his circle – Moser, Hoffmann, Wagner among them – resigned. The group they had founded eight years earlier went on without them; so, gloriously, did they.

For it was in the years just after the break that Klimt entered his golden phase, and painted the picture that would eclipse everything else: The Kiss. Two figures kneel at the edge of a flowering meadow, wrapped in a single robe of shimmering gold, the man's patterns hard and rectangular, the woman's soft and circular, the whole world dissolved into ornament around them. Everything the Secession had argued for – the union of painting and decoration, the fearlessness before beauty, the gold inherited from a father's workshop – arrives here, complete.

The Secession Building still stands on the Friedrichstrasse, its dome still gilded, the Beethoven Frieze still glowing in the basement below. The words above the door have not changed in a hundred and twenty-eight years: to every age its art, to art its freedom. It remains, perhaps, the finest thing a group of young artists ever dared to promise – and one of the very few such promises that the world went on to keep.

Yesterday, on July 7th, 2026, something special happened in the life of the EPRIS editorial team. Mariia Ivanova – our editor-in-chief, and the person whose brainchild this journal is – officially became a Bachelor of Architecture. Years of drafting, models, and sleepless nights before her thesis defense are behind her now. A new chapter begins – and we couldn't let it pass without marking it here, on the pages of EPRIS.

It's no secret that an architect's eye runs through every issue of EPRIS – in the way we talk about space, light, and detail. Today, that eye earned its official credentials.

Those who worked alongside her on this issue know the ritual well: studio lights on late into the night, tracing paper covered in revisions, a cup of coffee gone cold beside the model she kept rebuilding until it finally felt right. That same restlessness – the refusal to settle for ‘good enough’ – is what has shaped this magazine since its very first page.

A Heart Made of What Inspired Her

Some of these buildings she has visited in person, sketchbook in hand. Others she has only ever seen in photographs. We hope that one day, she gets to see every single one of them with her own eyes.

Architecture taught me to see the structure behind the beauty. EPRIS taught me to tell others about it. To me, they're two languages for the same feeling.

The EPRIS editorial team congratulates Mariia on her degree, and thanks her for the inspiration that lives in every issue of the journal. This diploma marks a new chapter – and we suspect it won't be the last one worth celebrating. We're glad you're reading it with us.

There is a peculiar kind of silence that inhabits old doorways – a silence woven from centuries of hands pressing against timber, of keys turning in iron locks worn smooth by ten thousand evenings. Stand before a weathered portal in Lisbon's Alfama, and you can feel it: the grain of the wood holds the oils of five generations of palms, the hinges remember the rhythm of a family's comings and goings, and the threshold stone – scooped concave by two hundred years of footsteps – maps the topology of human habit more faithfully than any census. A door is never merely an architectural element. It is the most intimate surface a building offers to the street, the frontier between the public and the private, the place where a city's soul greets its visitors. To restore a door is to perform surgery on the memory of a place.

Door restoration is not merely carpentry. It is an act of archaeological tenderness, a conversation between the living and the vanished. When a conservator peels away layers of paint – cerulean blue over terracotta over bone white – they are performing stratigraphic analysis, reading the autobiography of a building one pigment at a time. Each colour corresponds to a decade, each crack charts a winter survived, each replaced hinge marks a family that once named this threshold home. The paint cross-section, examined under a stereomicroscope at 40× magnification, reveals not just hues but binders: the linseed-oil grounds of the eighteenth century, the lead-white primers of the Napoleonic era, the alkyd enamels of the mid-twentieth century, each layer a forensic timestamp more precise than any archive.

A single historic door can harbour up to twelve discrete paint strata. In Saint Petersburg, conservators from the 'Dveri s Pomoek' collective have documented pre-revolutionary pigments – Prussian blue, chrome yellow, genuine vermilion – entombed beneath Soviet-era PF-115 enamel. Some of these pigments had not absorbed a photon of visible light for over a century before the scalpel exposed them.

The fundamental tension in door conservation sits between two imperatives that the uninitiated often confuse: restoration and conservation. Restoration implies returning an object to a specific historical state, which demands interpretive choices – which century's appearance do you privilege? Conservation, by contrast, aims to stabilise the object in its current condition, arresting decay without erasing the patina of time. The modern consensus, codified in the Venice Charter of 1964 and refined by the Burra Charter of 1979, leans decisively toward conservation: intervene minimally, document exhaustively, and ensure reversibility. Every epoxy fill, every dutchman splice, every re-gilded surface must be distinguishable from the original upon close inspection, and removable without damaging the host material.

The door is the first sentence the building speaks to the street. Destroy it, and you erase the opening line of a story that took centuries to compose. Replace it with a replica, and you have written fan fiction in the margins of a manuscript.

Consider the materiality of a Pombaline door in Lisbon's Baixa district. After the catastrophic earthquake of November 1, 1755 – which killed between 30,000 and 50,000 people and levelled 85% of the city – the Marquis of Pombal commissioned a radical reconstruction based on proto-seismic engineering. The resulting Pombaline architecture introduced the 'gaiola pombalina' – a flexible timber-frame cage embedded within masonry walls, designed to flex rather than fracture during tremors. The doors of these buildings were crafted from Brazilian peroba rosa (Aspidosperma polyneuron) and pau-marfim (Balfourodendron riedelianum), imported from the Atlantic colonies: dense, resinous hardwoods with an interlocking grain that resists both marine humidity and the torsional stress of seismic movement. The joinery is mortise-and-tenon throughout, with wedged through-tenons at the stile-and-rail junctions – no nails, no screws, only the geometry of wood locking against wood.

Restoring a Pombaline door begins with a condition survey. The conservator taps the panels with a small brass mallet, listening for the dull thud of sound wood versus the hollow resonance of internal rot. Moisture content is measured with a pin-type meter: readings above 20% indicate active fungal colonisation, typically Serpula lacrymans (dry rot) or Coniophora puteana (cellar fungus). Insect damage – the sinuous galleries of Anobium punctatum (common furniture beetle) or, in tropical hardwoods, the broader tunnels of Lyctus brunneus (powder-post beetle) – is mapped with a dental probe. Only after this forensic inventory does physical intervention begin.

The treatment protocol follows a strict hierarchy. First, consolidation: a low-viscosity epoxy resin (typically a two-part system with a 3:1 ratio of resin to hardener, viscosity below 500 centipoise) is injected into delaminated panels and decayed end-grain through 2mm drill holes, penetrating the cellular structure by capillary action. The epoxy cross-links within the wood fibres, creating a composite material that retains the original surface texture while recovering structural integrity. For more extensive losses, the conservator cuts a 'dutchman' – a precisely fitted wooden insert, grain-matched to the surrounding material, bonded with a reversible PVA adhesive rather than an irreversible epoxy, so that future conservators can remove and replace it without collateral damage.

Hardware receives parallel attention. The wrought-iron strap hinges of a seventeenth-century door were not mass-produced but hand-forged: each pintle was drawn from a single bloom of smelted ore, the surface bearing the distinctive hammer-scale texture of a charcoal forge operating at approximately 1,100°C. When corroded, these elements are stabilised with a tannic acid conversion treatment – the tannins react with the iron(III) oxide to form iron(III) tannate, a stable, blue-black corrosion-resistant layer – rather than sandblasted, which would erase the forging marks that constitute the object's technological signature. Missing nails are reproduced using traditional heading tools: a nail rod is drawn through a swage plate, headed in a nail header, and given the characteristic rosehead profile by four blows of a ball-pein hammer, replicating a seventeenth-century technique documented in Moxon's 'Mechanick Exercises' of 1677.

Travel eastward, and the doors of Tbilisi reveal an entirely different grammar of beauty – one rooted not in post-catastrophe rationalism but in the exuberant decorative traditions of the Caucasus. In the labyrinthine streets of the Old Town, Art Nouveau doors with oval stained-glass windows in lead came coexist beside austere Georgian carved panels depicting grapevines and mythical beasts, executed in local walnut (Juglans regia) with chip-carving techniques unchanged since the Middle Ages. The celebrated Kaleidoscope entrance at 3 Betlemi Street – known locally as 'Gallery 27' – scatters Caucasian sunlight through a mosaic of coloured glass into a hundred chromatic whispers on the stairwell walls. The Shalimov House at 13 Lado Asatiani Street still guards its angel frescoes above a threshold where, legend maintains, the poet Nikoloz Baratashvili once paused to compose a verse on the nature of longing.

The Tbilisi Development Fund's 'New Tbilisi' project has systematically restored historic entrances on Atoneli Street since 2020, at a documented cost of 414,886 Georgian Lari per pair of entrances. The scope of work reads like a surgical protocol: restoration of marble floor and stair treads, conservation of wooden doors and windows (including re-glazing with period-appropriate crown glass), casting and installation of missing cast-iron balustrade details from silicone moulds taken from surviving originals, and – most remarkably – the uncovering of forgotten wall paintings sealed behind plaster for decades. At 31 Atoneli Street, workers removing a layer of Soviet-era cement render discovered a polychrome mural depicting pastoral scenes, its original casein binder still viable, the pigments – earth ochres, ultramarine, and bone black – as saturated as the day they were applied.

Florence offers the most technically documented example of door restoration as high art. Lorenzo Ghiberti's Porta del Paradiso – the gilded bronze Gates of Paradise at the Baptistery of San Giovanni – underwent a twenty-seven-year conservation at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure that concluded in 2012. The challenge was formidable: five centuries of atmospheric corrosion had deposited a crust of copper carbonates (malachite and azurite), sulphates (brochantite), and chlorides (atacamite) over the original mercury-fire gilding – a technique in which gold leaf is amalgamated with mercury at approximately 350°C and applied to the bronze surface, the mercury then driven off by controlled heating, leaving a microscopically thin but extraordinarily durable gold film.

The restoration team, led by conservators Annamaria Giusti and Mauro Matteini, developed a bespoke Nd:YAG laser cleaning protocol. The laser, operating at 1064 nanometres wavelength with pulse durations of 8 nanoseconds, selectively ablated the dark corrosion products through differential absorption: the dark crust absorbed the infrared radiation and vaporised, while the underlying gold – highly reflective at this wavelength – remained unaffected. Thermal modelling ensured that the instantaneous temperature rise in the gold film never exceeded 50°C, far below the threshold that would cause micro-cracking or delamination. Where the corrosion was too tenacious for laser alone, controlled chemical poultices of EDTA (ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid) at 5% concentration in deionised water were applied through Japanese tissue paper for precisely timed intervals, chelating the copper ions without attacking the substrate. The result: each of the ten panels, depicting scenes from Genesis to the story of Solomon, emerged with the luminous splendour that Michelangelo himself praised when he named these doors worthy of Paradise.

Speed is irrelevant when you are restoring something that took three generations to build. The Nd:YAG laser removes corrosion at four square centimetres per hour. Ghiberti spent twenty-seven years casting these doors. We spent twenty-seven years cleaning them. The symmetry is not accidental – it is respect.

Saint Petersburg – that northernmost Venice of granite and fog – holds a singular position in the cartography of endangered doors. The pre-revolutionary entrances of the Petrogradskaya Side, with their linden-wood (Tilia cordata) panels and wrought-iron transom grilles, represent some of the most imperilled specimens of urban ornament in Europe. The volunteer collective 'Dveri s Pomoek' – 'Doors from the Dump' – was founded by engineers Valentina Mann and Andrei Troshkov and designer Alexander Artemyev, who met at the Tom Sawyer Fest, a grassroots festival of historic building restoration that originated in Samara in 2015 and has since spread to over sixty Russian cities.

Their methodology is forensic. When a discarded door is retrieved – often from a skip outside a building undergoing 'renovation' by developers who consider plastic replacements an upgrade – it is first photographed in situ, then transported to the workshop for assessment. The species is identified: Karelian birch (Betula pendula var. carelica) with its distinctive flame figuring, Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) from the Archangelsk forests, or Siberian larch (Larix sibirica), the same timber used in Venetian pilings and prized for its extraordinary resistance to moisture. Paint stratigraphy is performed on a micro-core sample: each layer is catalogued against known periods of building maintenance, cross-referenced with the building's archival records when available. The restorers have documented doors with hand-painted floral cartouches – executed in casein-bound distemper over a gesso ground – that survived beneath layers of Soviet khaki enamel, the delicate petals still discernible despite decades of chemical and mechanical insult.

Mann notes a grim irony: 'The best-preserved doors are often the ones the Soviets painted over most aggressively. The very enamel that obliterated their beauty also sealed them from oxygen and UV, preserving the original pigments in a state that borders on anaerobic conservation. When we peel back the PF-115, we find colours that a museum conservator would envy.' The collective's restoration of linden-wood doors from the Kamienny Ostrov area required eleven months of patient work: chemical paint removal using NMP (N-Methyl-2-pyrrolidone) – chosen over methylene chloride for its lower toxicity and slower evaporation rate, which allows for more controlled stripping – followed by consolidation of worm-damaged areas with Paraloid B-72 in acetone at 5% concentration, and final finishing with cold-pressed linseed oil, applied in four thin coats and allowed to cure for seventy-two hours between applications.

At Durham Cathedral in northern England, the North Door presents a conservation challenge of an entirely different order: how to preserve a structure that has been in continuous functional use for nearly nine centuries. Dendrochronological analysis of the oak (Quercus robur) places the felling date of the timber between 1109 and 1144, making it contemporary with the cathedral's original Romanesque construction. The door is not a museum piece behind glass – it is opened and closed daily by tourists, choristers, and clergy, its iron ring handle worn to a mirror finish by 900 years of human touch.

The 2019 conservation by Skillingtons Workshop exemplified the minimalist philosophy that defines contemporary best practice. Phase one: dry-brushing with natural-bristle brushes and low-suction vacuuming to remove trapped particulate matter from the open grain – medieval oak, unlike modern kiln-dried timber, retains a pronounced tangential grain pattern that acts as a trap for atmospheric soot and mineral dust. Phase two: aqueous cleaning with de-ionised water and a non-ionic surfactant (Synperonic A7) at 1% concentration, tested first on a concealed section of the rebate to verify that no dimensional change or surface blanching occurred. Phase three: re-saturation with cold-pressed Tung oil (Vernicia fordii), applied in four successive coats over sixteen days, each coat absorbed before the next was brushed on. Tung oil was chosen over linseed for its superior resistance to hydrolysis and its lower tendency to yellow with age. Phase four: the corroded wrought-iron fittings were stabilised with Renaissance Wax – a microcrystalline blend developed by the British Museum in the 1950s – rather than varnish, which would have created a non-breathing barrier antithetical to the iron's long-term preservation.

In Havana, the challenge is not preservation of the ancient but resurrection of the abandoned. The crumbling pastel facades of Centro Habana conceal portals of Cuban mahogany (Swietenia mahagoni) and Spanish cedar (Cedrela odorata) – aromatic, naturally insect-resistant hardwoods that once welcomed sugar barons and revolutionary poets alike. The tropical climate imposes unique stresses: relative humidity regularly exceeds 85%, driving cycles of expansion and contraction that no temperate-climate joinery was designed to withstand. Cuban restorers – many trained at the Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad, the heritage office established by Eusebio Leal Spengler – work with tools inherited from their grandfathers: wooden moulding planes with hand-forged blades, bow saws strung with tempered wire, and scratch stocks for reproducing ogee and cyma recta profiles. They re-carve rosettes and acanthus leaves not from measured drawings, which dissolved long ago in the tropical humidity, but from plaster casts taken from surviving examples in neighbouring buildings – a technique that preserves the local 'dialect' of ornamental carving, the subtle variations that distinguish Havana Baroque from its Andalusian ancestors.

Prague's doors speak in the dialect of Central European Baroque: a language of carved limewood (Tilia europaea) featuring saints, griffins, and garlands of impossible fruit rendered with a virtuosity that rivals the altarpiece carvings of Tilman Riemenschneider. In Malá Strana, beneath the shadow of Prague Castle, the portals of aristocratic palaces bear the heraldic devices of families who have been extinct for three centuries, their carved escutcheons the last material evidence that these lineages ever existed. The Palazzo Negri in Istrian Vodnjan – restored by the Ars et Labor Foundation during the European Year of Cultural Heritage in 2018 – demonstrated how a single Didactic Workshop, staffed by volunteer conservators and funded entirely by private donors, can preserve a region's identity one door at a time. The project's ten-month timeline included complete dismantling of the Baroque door, treatment of each component, and reassembly using traditional hide-glue joinery. Their motto, borrowed from the Gospel of Matthew, is quietly magnificent: 'Knock, and the door will be opened to you.'

The economics of door conservation are rarely discussed, yet they are decisive. A custom-fabricated fiberglass replacement door for a historic building costs between €800 and €2,000; a sympathetic conservation of the original, including paint analysis, timber repair, and hardware stabilisation, typically runs €3,000 to €8,000, depending on condition and complexity. The difference is not trivial, and developers routinely invoke it to justify replacement. But the calculus is incomplete. The original door embodies what economists call 'embedded energy' – the sum of human labour, material cultivation, transportation, and craft that produced it. A linden door from 1890s Saint Petersburg required a tree that germinated during the reign of Catherine the Great; its timber was air-dried for two to five years before a master joiner shaped it. No budget line captures this temporal investment. No replacement, however skilful, replicates it.

There is a Japanese concept – kintsugi – that repairs broken ceramics with lacquer mixed with powdered gold, treating the fracture not as a flaw to be concealed but as a chapter in the object's biography. The best door conservation operates on a parallel philosophy. The 'dutchman' insert is not hidden; it is grain-matched but left legible, a frank acknowledgment that repair has occurred. The tannic-acid-blackened hinge does not pretend to be unworn; it wears its patina as evidence of nine centuries of openings and closings. The conservation report, archived alongside the door, ensures that the next conservator – in fifty years, in a hundred – will know exactly what was done, and why, and by whom. This is the opposite of vanity renovation. This is humility encoded in wood and iron.

What makes a door worth saving? Not merely the age of the timber or the elegance of the carving – though both matter. It is the accumulated weight of passage: the thousands of arrivals and departures, the lovers who lingered in the frame, the children who scratched their heights into the jamb, the mourners who paused before crossing back into sunlight. Every threshold is a palimpsest of human experience, layered as densely as the paint stratigraphy on a Pombaline panel. When we permit a developer to rip out a nineteenth-century entrance and replace it with a pressed steel door from a catalogue, we do not merely lose an object. We erase a sentence from the city's autobiography – and unlike a book, a city cannot be reprinted.

In the end, the conservator's craft is an act of radical empathy extended across time. To sand a piece of oak that a Romanesque carpenter shaped nine centuries ago is to shake hands with the dead. To mix pigments that match a Baroque painter's palette is to complete a conversation interrupted by centuries. Every door that survives is a small victory over entropy, a proof that beauty can outlast the indifference of progress. The threshold of time stands open. Our choice – the only choice that matters – is whether we walk through it with the reverence it deserves, or seal it shut with the concrete of forgetfulness.

Choosing a place to stay in a new destination means entrusting it with the significant moments of your life. Falling into bed after a long walk through unfamiliar streets, late-night talks filled with the thoughts and emotions of the day, planning the next breakfast at your newly favorite nearby boulangerie, sharing genuine smiles and the pure excitement of exploration.

A pied-à-terre always catches the irreplaceable light in your eyes, but it can also spark them. A flat in the city naturally blends you with those who live nearby. You are no longer a tourist, but someone who acts as if it were the most natural thing to buy lactose-free milk for your morning coffee it the shop downstairs. And it is not a one-sided longing when we speak about pied-à-terre residences in Paris - the collection of architectural apartments in the prime location of The Moveable Feast.

Each of the apartments is a small journey within a larger one. When a space is carefully designed, you are respectfully offered so much to discover.

What feelings these walls evoke in you, how warm the textures are, how fluid the spatial organization seems, how gentle the rays of sun are in this flat, how loudly the floors creak, or perhaps the renovation has made them completely quiet. All these questions will never consciously arise in your mind, yet they will be answered silently within your body.

What I love about Pied-à-terre apartments is their complexity. The interiors are rich and confident.There is no attempt to reduce the experience of space to a minimum within your cognitive and emotional perception. Rather, the space helps you understand that sometimes valuable rest is not an introduction to emptiness, but a pleasant process of exploration That is exactly what we seek when booking flight tickets and anticipating the moment of landing in a distant place.

Being exposed to new memories with spiritual and material richness is nourishing for both soul and heart. I emphasize this duality because design is constructed from physical elements, yet everything within it contributes to the mental experience The perception of interconnections is more important than the mere existence of things. In other words, we appreciate how the lily makes us feel inside, rather than the fact of its tangible existence.

Each apartment is exclusive, giving you the opportunity to choose what you want to experience.

The two-storey townhouse on the Tuileries by Necchi Architecture is a dichromatic sanctuary, gently enriched with details in a way that makes you feel calm. The elaborate visual density is created through the overlay and juxtaposition of forms. Shadows playing across the monochromatic volumes create a textured canvas for exquisite black and steel elements.

Chairs 212 by Petite Furniture recreate René Herbst's Sandows collection of 1929, standing beside the 1980s Cello lamp by Jan Wickelgren for IKEA. The integrated desk in front of the windows is accompanied by the Memmi lamp by Modenature.

The townhouse is not the only project designed by Charlotte Albert and Alexis Lamesta of Necchi Architecture. The Superior Loft on Oberkampf catches the eye from the very first second.

Provocative patterns, red colour, chrome, and mirrors immediately transport us to a joyful evening in a 1970s Parisian apartment. The interior is composed of accents that support each other's flamboyance, grounded by touches of black. You can almost see how the sunlight diffuses, moving from one corner of the room to another, hitting the lacquered surfaces and slipping past the sharp corners.

One of the most compelling qualities here is its unpredictability. You slightly turn your gaze and see a completely different scene, untouched by the perspective you just left.

I have an association between a pied-a-terre and a box of exquisite chocolates.One carries orange zest, another lemon cream; the next reveals rosemary, while another holds delicate notes of jasmine.

The list continues, but once you know all the flavours, the spark of discovery is partly faded.

Explore it by yourself.

At night, every glass building changes allegiance. By day it borrows the sky and returns a clean image of the city. After dark the reflection collapses. Desks, lifts, kitchens and bodies appear in stacked rectangles, each room lit like evidence. A person working late becomes part of the elevation. Someone washing a glass becomes a moving detail in an architect’s drawing. The promise was openness. The sensation is exposure.

There is a particular unease in spaces that refuse to keep a secret. You feel it in the lobby where the receptionist can see the lift before the lift can see the receptionist; in the meeting room whose glazed wall has been decorated with a polite stripe of frosting at eye level; in the apartment where the curtain is treated as an aesthetic failure. These interiors are beautiful, controlled and faintly accusatory. They suggest that privacy is something one requests after behaving suspiciously.

The promise of seeing everything

Modern glass arrived carrying a moral argument. Weightless walls would replace the defensive opacity of the old institution. Sunlight would enter the factory, the school and the office. Structure would become legible. Work would be visible, therefore honest. The Bauhaus Building in Dessau gave this faith an unforgettable body in 1926: a workshop wing wrapped in steel and crystal plate glass, its corners apparently dissolved, its rooms offered to the outside world as a continuous field of activity.

The façade was not merely a technical demonstration. It proposed a new social character. Transparency looked hygienic, collective, forward-moving. The wall no longer had to announce authority through stone; it could perform authority through apparent absence. This is the first trick of transparent architecture: the less material the boundary appears to contain, the easier it is to forget that the boundary still decides who may enter, who may look and who must remain visible.

A transparent wall does not abolish power. It edits the direction in which power can look.

A house with nowhere to hide

Philip Johnson’s Glass House of 1949 is usually photographed as pure release: a dark steel frame, a brick cylinder and a glass perimeter placed with unnerving precision in the Connecticut landscape. The countryside seems to pass through the room. Furniture floats. Weather becomes wallpaper. Yet the house is less innocent than its photographs. To inhabit it is to accept that every domestic gesture has acquired an audience, even if that audience is only imagined.

The crucial object is not the glass pavilion alone but its companion across the lawn: the Brick House. Opaque, heavy and private, it held bedrooms, services and the mechanical systems that supported the transparent icon. The two buildings operate like a split psyche. One performs clarity; the other absorbs sleep, plumbing, disorder and retreat. The Glass House can look effortless because the Brick House keeps the evidence offstage.

The body in the perfect frame

Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House sharpens the same question. Designed in 1945 and completed in 1951 for the physician Edith Farnsworth, the weekend house is raised above the Fox River floodplain as two white horizontal planes with a single transparent room suspended between them. The image is almost impossibly calm. In winter, bare branches continue through the glazing until the house seems less built than temporarily outlined.

The plan appears universal, but living is specific. Morning arrives from one direction. Clothing has to go somewhere. A person becomes ill, angry, tired or simply unwilling to perform the landscape. Shortly after moving in, Farnsworth added screens around the west porch. Later restoration removed them to recover the canonical 1951 image. The sequence is revealing: the occupant modified the masterpiece to make life more tolerable; preservation modified it again to make the masterpiece more legible.

This is not an argument against the house. It is an argument for reading its beauty without erasing the negotiation required to inhabit it. Architectural photography rewards the uninterrupted plane. Daily life produces interruptions: a curtain half drawn, a chair turned away from the view, condensation at the edge of a pane. Those marks are not visual noise. They are the resident writing back.

This arrangement reveals a truth that contemporary interiors often conceal: transparency is never complete. It is curated. The cable is hidden, the storage wall is closed, the back office has no window, the camera is black and small. What looks like openness is usually a redistribution of opacity. Someone gets the glass view; someone else manages what must not appear in it.

The corporation discovers a face

By the middle of the twentieth century, glass had become corporate grammar. Lever House in New York, completed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in 1952, replaced the masonry weight of the commercial block with a blue-green curtain wall and a raised slab hovering above a public plaza. The building looked precise, clean and almost frictionless. It made administration photogenic. The company could be understood as a cool surface rather than a room full of decisions.

The institution as immaculate image

The United Nations Secretariat Building made the symbolism explicit. When its blue-green glazed slab rose beside the East River in 1950, transparency could stand for an institution willing to expose its workings to the world. The façade offered a moral picture before it offered information: international order as a luminous grid, bureaucracy transformed into light.

From the street, however, the grid performs equality by making every bay appear equivalent. Inside, rooms differ in access, security and influence. The curtain wall flattens those distinctions into one consistent skin. That is the political seduction of the glass tower: it can represent openness without surrendering hierarchy. You see the organisation everywhere and its decisions nowhere.

This is where transparency becomes branding. A glazed headquarters says: nothing is hidden here. But the statement is visual, not procedural. You can see people walking behind the façade without seeing how authority moves between them. The transparent building offers access to bodies and withholds access to systems. It is possible to watch an entire floor at work and learn nothing about what the work is doing.

When the building starts taking notes

The smart office completes the transition from window to interface. At The Edge in Amsterdam, employees use an app to locate colleagues, find desks and adjust local lighting or temperature, while sensors monitor occupancy, movement, humidity, carbon dioxide, light and climate. The design is genuinely useful. Rooms can respond to demand; energy is not spent pretending that an empty floor is occupied. Comfort becomes precise.

But precision has a shadow. Once a building knows where a person sits, how long a room is used and which route fills after lunch, space becomes behavioural data. The employee no longer moves through a neutral container. The container records movement, predicts demand and quietly defines what counts as normal. No villain needs to sit behind a wall of monitors. The unease comes from the fact that the system can be efficient, pleasant and invasive at the same time.

The most persuasive surveillance architecture does not look punitive. It looks convenient. It remembers your preferred light level, opens the correct door and suggests the nearest desk. Control arrives dressed as service.

Designing the right to disappear

The answer is not a sentimental return to thick walls and tiny windows. Opacity can protect, but it can also isolate and intimidate. The more interesting task is to design adjustable visibility: spaces that allow a person to decide when to appear, when to blur and when to vanish. Privacy should behave less like a bunker and more like a dimmer.

Transparency without the interrogation

SANAA’s Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art offers a more ambiguous model. Its transparent walls do not simply divide interior from exterior. More than 360 large panels, many of them curved, form rooms inside rooms. Reflections overlap with silhouettes; a person appears, disappears behind a bend and returns as a pale double in another surface. Visibility is continuous but never stable.

The difference is subtle but important. A straight glazed partition behaves like a diagram: here, there, observed, observer. Curved glass introduces delay and error. It gives the eye too much information to master at once. The architecture remains open, yet the body is not pinned to a single field of vision. Openness becomes atmospheric rather than disciplinary.

This suggests a richer brief for contemporary design. Do not ask only how much daylight or visual connection a partition can deliver. Ask what kind of relationship the pane produces. Who receives the first view? Can the person inside anticipate an approach? Does reflection protect or expose after dark? Can the surface change state without summoning facilities management? The ethical quality of transparency lives in these small asymmetries.

This changes the status of ordinary elements. A curtain is no longer decoration but a user-controlled façade. Ribbed glass transmits light while refusing a complete image. A deep reveal lets someone stand near a window without becoming a display. A turn in a corridor delays the view by one second, enough to replace surprise with consent. Acoustic absorption prevents transparency of sound even where visual connection is useful. A warm pool of local light can make a desk feel inhabited without illuminating the entire room.

Good spatial privacy is not the absence of contact. It is the ability to modulate contact without asking permission from the building. The best rooms offer several states between exposed and sealed: visible, silhouetted, reflected, screened, withdrawn. They recognise that human attention is not an unlimited public resource.

The radical luxury of the next interior may be simple: a room that notices you without reporting you.

The last lit window

Glass remains irresistible because it turns architecture into weather. It catches clouds, dissolves corners and lets a room borrow a horizon. None of that beauty is false. The mistake is to confuse visual openness with ethical openness, or technical intelligence with care. A building can reveal its structure and still conceal its politics. It can know exactly where you are and understand nothing about what you need.

The city after midnight makes this contradiction visible. Towers become grids of private scenes; transparent homes become lanterns; the office continues to glow for nobody. Somewhere behind one pane, a person reaches for a switch. The room goes dark. For a moment the façade loses a piece of information. That small disappearance feels less like retreat than control.

References

Creating your own project in a new country is always a bold step, where creative exploration intertwines closely with personal transformation. Elena Kuzmina and Xenia Bunina – founders of decor studio Chora Practice , based in Lisbon, Portugal – talk about how to turn any crisis into a point of growth, why there are no “uncreative” people in the world, and how to allow yourself to do what you genuinely love.

Chora is a creative practice. Could you tell us about your background?

Xenia: Most people who move to Portugal eventually start doing what they truly love – things they wanted to pursue in their ‘past life’ but were afraid to because of social expectations. The same happened to me.

After moving here, I started my own production company, working on photo and video advertising. That’s how Alena and I met. Later, I discovered Arco, a contemporary art school where we were taught not so much how to draw as how to look at the world through an artistic lens. I graduated this year, it were three years of intense study.

Elena, could you tell us about your experience?

Elena : I’m from a small town in Chuvashia and trained as an English and French teacher. But I was always drawn to art – cinema, architecture, painting, crafts - everything. Before moving, I took filmmaking courses because I dreamed of making films. When I found out that Ksenia had her own production company here, I wanted to join her.

I was so nervous about reaching out that my husband Mark contacted Ksenia for me, asking if I could come by, observe, and help out. In the end, Ksenia and I became very close. She’s an incredible person – always encouraging others and giving them space to express themselves. It was Ksenia who told me, ‘You should go to the art school.’ I was surprised: ‘Me? Are you serious?’ But I eventually enrolled too. It turned out to be an amazing experience: we learned to observe, create, and go through a complex, profound, almost philosophical process of discovery.

You mentioned that after moving to Portugal, you felt a sense of freedom. What exactly contributes to that?

Xenia: The environment is completely different. I love my city and my country, but St. Petersburg is huge, while Lisbon has only around 600,000 people. Because there are fewer people and the overall atmosphere is more relaxed, everything feels calmer. If you’re not bothering anyone, people tend to support you. In an environment like this, it’s much easier to express yourself.

Does it also have to do with the relaxed atmosphere around you, as well as the fact that no one knows you and you’re free to try something new?

Xenia: I don’t know if Alena feels the same, but I had this thought. Immigration can be a very intense experience, no matter how prepared you are. For many immigrants, life feels divided into two periods – the life before and the new one. If you’re starting over, why repeat what you’ve just lived through when you have the chance to begin doing what you genuinely want?

That’s a powerful thought. We often arrive at positive change by overcoming difficult experiences.

Let’s talk about your decoration studio. What exactly do you do, and what are your main areas of focus?

Xenia : Our main focus is textile decor for premium weddings. Initially, we decorated restaurants, creating temporary seasonal installations for Christmas or summer. Then we did our first wedding project and thought, ‘Oh, this is actually such a great field!’

Why did you decide to focus on textile design?

Elena : I think we simply aren’t afraid of challenges. We dive headfirst into every project and figure things out along the way. As artists, we see fabric simply as the medium that feels right for this particular stage. We’re not attached to the idea of always creating textile arches.

Xenia : I think it was more Alena’s initiative. She knows how to sew, genuinely loves fabrics, and has a deep understanding of the material.

At some point, we started receiving requests for fabric installations and realized we had found an open niche. It was a combination of a rational business approach and genuine personal interest. And although installing huge arches is physically demanding, fabric turned out to be the easiest material for us to work with because we understand it so well.

How did you choose the name Chora? Is it connected to philosophy?

Xenia: It was a beautiful sunny day – I think it was August – and we were sitting in the stunning Estrela Garden brainstorming. There were three of us at the time, and we had already been trying to come up with a name for about a month.

Then we came across Plato’s concept of Chora. In his philosophy, it refers to a primordial space – ‘space before everything’ – where matter comes into being. We found that idea very inspiring, especially because our initial concept was multisensory decor.

Then we had to decide on the format. Words like ‘studio’ or ‘bureau’ were already taken, and that’s when we came up with ‘practice’. We thought, ‘Wait, this sounds like an art practice! That’s perfect.’ And that’s how Chora Practice was born.

Six months later, we finally decided to find out what Chora meant in Portuguese – we hadn’t actually checked. It turned out to be the imperative form of the verb chorar, meaning ‘cry'.

Let’s talk a little about the technical side. What does the installation process look like? Do you do everything yourselves or mainly oversee the process?

Elena : We mostly do everything ourselves.

Xenia : It depends on the project. When we created a tent for Tales [Wedding Planner], we had a team from Back UP Rentals. After a short briefing, they created an incredible draping installation very quickly. Our decorations aren’t that large-scale yet, so the two of us can handle quite a lot ourselves.

The events industry is full of unexpected situations. How do you deal with crises on site?

Elena : Something always goes wrong at weddings. The main thing is to stay calm and be prepared.

Xenia : We always bring extra fabric. We try to anticipate potential problems in advance – what obstacles can occur for florists, organizers, and transportation. We think through as many possible scenarios as we can, come up with solutions, and prepare for them.

How do you deal with crises and creative burnout? What helps you recover and move forward when things get difficult?

Elena : Crises definitely happen. When I’m exhausted, I go for a walk in the forest. Nature inspires, relaxes, and recharges me enormously. I see problems as a completely normal part of the process. In fact, I’m even grateful for them because they mean we’re actively searching, facing challenges, and growing.”

Xenia : “I believe every business is essentially a journey from one crisis to the next. It’s not a burden – it’s simply part of reality. You need to be prepared for it and understand that every crisis is an opportunity. Things are going incredibly well for us now, and we’re very happy, but we know another difficult period will eventually come. And when it does, we’ll get through it and come out stronger.

Yes, it’s difficult and frustrating. But if something frustrates you so much that you want to cry, that probably means you’re just one step away from a breakthrough. Art school taught me that if you don’t move toward that resistance, you lose the opportunity. So: breathe in, breathe out, and solve the problem.

How would you explain a life filled with creativity to someone who isn’t connected to the creative world? How you experience and perceive the world?

Xenia : “Honestly, I don’t know – I’ve never been on the other side. I don’t believe people are divided into ‘creative’ and ‘non-creative’.

When someone says, ‘You’re creative people, but I’m more down-to-earth,’ I’m convinced that they’re suppressing something in themselves. For whatever reason – shame, fear, or social conditioning – they don’t allow themselves to recognize the artist within.

I truly believe we’re all creators to some degree. And if someone reading this thinks, ‘No, that definitely isn’t me,’ I’d suggest simply opening yourself up to the world a little more. There is definitely something inside you.

How would you suggest people reconnect with that creative part of themselves?

Xenia : There’s a practice called "Impulse". For instance, you’re walking down the street and suddenly feel like picking up a leaf or photographing a particular building. Your inner critic immediately says, ‘Why? Nobody needs this. We’re late. Please stop doing something pointless.

But that little impulse is exactly what your mind is telling you to ignore. If you listen to this impulse once, then again and again, the world gradually becomes richer – and you learn more about yourself, what you genuinely like, and what you really want to do.

The important thing is to hear that voice saying, ‘This is pointless,’ and answer: ‘Great. I’m going to do something pointless.’ That helped me enormously. It’s actually what led me to art school, because at first, studying art felt completely pointless.

Elena, do you have your own way of unlocking that creative part of yourself?

Elena: I’m a very slow person, so observation helps me a lot. I love immersing myself in the process – looking at a tree, feeling the wind. Simply observing yourself and the world around you can reveal a lot.

What is your favorite place in Lisbon, somewhere you always want to return to?

Elena : Probably the Gulbenkian Garden. It’s an incredible park and museum. It’s right in the city, but once you enter, it feels like you’re somewhere completely different. It’s a beautiful combination of nature, architecture, and art. You walk in and suddenly find yourself in your own little world. You can breathe out.

Xenia : For me, besides Gulbenkian, it’s probably Cabo Espichel. It has this incredible lighthouse and is considered by the Portuguese to be one of the westernmost points of Europe. I also love the café at Museu Albuquerque, and MACAM – Museu de Arte Contemporânea Armando Martins – has a wonderful café too. They’re all affordable but incredibly stylish. Museums often have amazing cafés.

What has been your most inspiring trip?

Xenia : I’ve just come back from New York, where my husband and I got married, so that’s definitely my strongest impression at the moment. But I think every journey is inspiring in its own way.

Elena : Recently, it was my solo trip to Porto. I visited the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, explored Álvaro Siza’s architecture, and absolutely loved it. The fact that I went alone also made it a special experience.

Finally, what is the one piece of advice you would give every reader?

Elena : Keep doing what you genuinely love. Despite your inner limitations, look deeply within yourself, listen to your true desires, and simply give yourself permission to pursue them.

Xenia : The main lesson I took from art school is: ‘Experience resistance.’ If you feel resistance toward something, you should move toward it. It means there’s a huge amount of energy hidden there. Don’t ignore or suppress it – look at it more closely.

Born in Japan, trained in London, and now based in Lithuania, Keisuke Azuma builds his canvases by taking away rather than adding – washing pigment back, dissolving the body until only a hand, a foot, or a fragment of gesture survives against raw, unfinished canvas. His recent series, currently on show in KIAF Seoul, and exhibited recently in solo shows in New York and Paris, strips the human figure down to its most universal parts, leaving the rest as an invitation: a blank the viewer fills with their own reflection.

Epris met Azuma over a video call from his studio in Vilnius, where he lives with his wife and their dog and cat. Below you can find our conversation on the Japanese aesthetics of deduction that shaped his method and why he thinks art has no right to be exclusive.

01 · Becoming a painter

Maria Ivanova [MA]: What was the starting point for you to become an artist – were you immersed in art from childhood, or did the desire come later?

Keisuke Azuma [KA]: It's always a funny story, because I never actually wanted to be an artist. I loved art, obviously – I read a lot about artists from the Baroque period, and it always said they were poor. There were exceptions, but in general it looked like such a difficult profession. Still, I loved it, even though I was pretty much alone in that in my community. No one else in my family cared about art.

I was doing marketing work in a shop, and someone asked if I could do an illustration. I saw how customers reacted, and I was fascinated by that power art has to deliver a concept. I was into film too, so for a while I thought I'd combine the two through illustration. That's why I chose art school in the first place. During my studies I found this other love – expressing my own words, my own sense of identity. So it was a gradual thing. I kept trying to make excuses not to be a painter, and I kept coming back to it anyway.

Eventually I started showing in London while I was still studying, and having a gallery or two consign my work convinced me it might actually be possible. My wife's support mattered enormously too – she married me knowing I wanted to be an artist. That's how I built myself into one.

I kept trying to make excuses not to be a painter, and I kept coming back to it anyway.

MI: Do you think that pull toward art is something innate, or something your surroundings gave you?

KA: It feels a bit cheeky to just say “I was born this way,” but – my mother is an architect. My sister collages, just for her own journaling. My father doesn't do anything art-related, and neither does anyone else in the family, really. So I'd say it's more innate than not, with maybe a small hint of it in the bloodline. I actually tried hard not to go this way. In high school an art teacher personally called me to join his club, and I told him I wanted to do music instead. There was always a little sign pointing at it, even when I wasn't looking for one.

02 · Method

MI: You were born and raised in Japan, then moved to London to study. You've said your work is rooted in Japanese culture – how does that show up in your practice?

KA: There's a book, In Praise of Shadows – about how traditional Japanese houses use light and shadow, with a strong emphasis on negative space. A single shelf holding flowers becomes the whole focal point of a room precisely because everything around it is empty. Even a living space gets treated like a complete art expression. I was already interested in the contrast of light and shadow – I used to take a lot of photographs – and at some point that merged with my painting.

I take classical paintings as a reference, most of the time, and I manipulate them. In the process I try to eliminate elements so I can focus on what actually matters, what I want to deliver. All of my paintings have white space – that's the raw canvas itself. I wash the paint off. It's not perfectly clean; you can still see lines underneath. I do it because I love the physical act of taking the colour back out. In Japanese Zen culture, what matters is minimalist expression, and I wanted an immersive, physical process for myself.

All of my paintings have white space – that's the raw canvas itself. I wash the paint off.

MI: When I first saw your paintings I immediately felt that Japanese influence – that emphasis on essence over material, on how a space makes you feel rather than what's placed in it.

KA: You're right. I once visited a Tadao Ando church – a concrete box with two thin lines of glass standing in for a cross. Walking in, I felt completely safe, precisely because there was nothing there. That kind of minimalist emptiness matters because it's one of the few places left to actually see who we are – we spend so much of our lives on our phones, immersed in content instead. I keep a monotone background in most of my paintings for the same reason: when you wash off paint there are traces everywhere, and every one of them matters. And I still love how Baroque paintings use darkness – not as absence, but as a presence in the frame.

03 · Metamorphosis

MI: Your recent body of work, Human Metaphors , showed in Paris – it deals with vulnerability, identity, and change. Is it a response to the pressure of constant self-presentation we live under now?

KA: I think so. This series is a statement against that kind of validation-chasing. In London I felt I had to fit a certain format – what's trendy, what's popular, what's seemingly correct. Living in Lithuania changed that. I barely see anyone – my wife, our dog, our cat. Lithuanians, and Slavic people generally in my experience, are very true to themselves. They don't even say hello to me half the time, which I actually find refreshing – there's no pretending. People chase influence and money, and it matters, but at the end of the day you're the most important person in your own life, and it's easy to forget that. That's the question I'm trying to leave in the painting – which is also why I leave so much empty space. It has to become the viewer's own experience.

MI: Through the abstraction, but with hands and feet still present, are you gesturing at something like consciousness or soul – a self that can be detached from the body?

KA: Exactly. The title Human Metaphors was for the New York show; the Paris one was called Metamorphosis , which I love just as much. I erase the body because I think we've stopped paying attention to it as a physical scale – we live in our heads, on our phones, and the body becomes almost incidental next to the face, which carries the first impression. Hands and feet, though, are strangely universal. Bodies vary enormously, but a hand stays a hand. So I keep them as a kind of anchor – something everyone can recognise – and erase the rest so people can enter the painting without needing permission first.

Contemporary art has become elite-focused in places. Art should be accessible. When I see people say “I hate this painting,” it makes me a little sad, because it's still a human creation, even the ones I personally don't like. So the hands and feet are also an invitation – I don't want anyone standing in front of my work feeling like they don't belong there.

I don't want anyone standing in front of my work feeling like they don't belong there.

04 · On Eggs Series and A Journey to Abstraction

MI: You have an earlier series titled Eggs , more centre-oriented – something about transformation, maybe rebirth?

KA: Exactly that. After graduating in London I moved straight to Lithuania, into a basement studio, in winter, with nobody around – it felt like an art prison, just me and my art. That's was the moment when I made the Eggs series. Before that I was doing abstract landscape painting, which I loved, but I was following what people said was good without fully expressing myself.

I initially started making art through figurative compositions, working in realism. I wanted to combine this with my abstract expression, Japanese aesthetic, deduction. To do this, Eggs series was very important. In this work I tried to create something out of my landscapes - by folding them or experimenting with their physical form.

After Eggs series it tooks roughly eight months to reintroduce realistic elements - hand and feets. Eggs series was a transformation for myself.

MI: Do you think abstraction is the purest form of painting – more powerful because it forces self-reflection rather than reading a figure?

KA: I mostly agree. I remember a Monet retrospective in Kyoto – he's technically figurative, very pictorial, but there was one unfinished canvas from the Water Lilies series on show, barely any colour, just a few strokes. It affected me more than his finished work. That's one of the paintings that broke my resistance to abstraction.

Abstraction also has this democratic quality – it makes people feel like they could do it too, and I think that's valuable, even if it sounds naive. I still believe in the power of high realism, Caravaggio and that kind of work – we still go to the cinema for scale and craft – but abstraction fills a gap between the public and elite realism. It has its own contradictions – some abstract work is just as exclusionary – but at its best, it opens things up.

It has its own contradictions – some abstract work is just as exclusionary – but at its best, it opens things up.

05 · Why art should be for everyone

MI: You've said art should have a function. What function, in your view?

KA: Art has always had one, I think. Probably the earliest paintings – the Lascaux cave paintings in France, drawings of cattle – already had a narrative function: “this is what I saw today, this is where the hunting spot is”. We still use illustration that way, in guides and encyclopedias. I love Baroque painting particularly because it moved away from portraits of the powerful and started introducing ordinary civic life. It always have a function to talk about something beyond words. For example, Picasso's Guernica is the extreme version of that – painfully, brutally honest, and it makes me sad every time, it has a function to be against the world.

Art can deliver emotions beyond the skills to understand - books can be more efficient, but maybe some people don't know how to read - and painting can be more universal – it's even older than language itself.

MI: Do you think everyone has an innate capacity to understand art, or is it something learned?

KA: Both, I think, but I lean toward “learned.” I hated abstraction as a kid – I loved realism, and when I first saw work by a well-known abstract painter I genuinely didn't get it. Now I did cried in front of a Rothko.

I do believe everyone has a capacity to understand aesthetic and beauty in general - everyone can learn to recognise beauty in a face or in clothing – it doesn't have to be about painting specifically.

My own family still doesn't really understand my abstraction, but they're supportive. My wife's father, who has no art background, once looked at a painting and said, “Oh, he can draw hands and feet – he must be good.” [ laughs ] That was very important reaction as well - this connection with a work - even if it only lasts a second.

MI: What was your own first major encounter with a work of art – the moment you thought, this is it?

KA: Probably Rothko, in Tate Britain. I already knew his work, but seeing it in person, in a room that was much darker than the rest of the museum, was different. I felt something beyond humanity – like the painting had taken something out of me. One of the black-and-red canvases, almost like a gate to somewhere else. That's probably the painting that made me want to paint.

06 · In Artist’s Studio

MI: Do you paint daily, or wait for inspiration?

KA: Daily now – I have a lot of shows this year, so I don't have the luxury of waiting anymore. I work on an iPad first, manipulating a classical painting, then come to the studio around lunchtime to paint. I keep notes constantly, mostly title ideas – whenever something occurs to me, I write it down so it's there when I need it.

MI: So the starting point now is memory or emotion, recalled, rather than something you're seeing in the moment?

KA: Largely, yes. I still use classical paintings as inspiration when they can help carry a concept, but recently I've been trying to step slightly away from purely personal memory, toward something more generic – I've started making more explicitly political work lately, thinking about what's happening more broadly rather than only in my own life.

MI: Do you plan meticulously, or let the canvas decide in the moment?

KA: I'd say about half and half. Nothing ever repeats exactly – temperature, texture, everything shifts between the iPad sketch and the actual canvas. The painting I showed you earlier was originally dark blue; I didn't like it, went back to the iPad, mocked up something lighter, and ended up loving the mistake – you can still see the blue underneath. On the iPad everything looks matte and controlled; in reality it gets dirtier, more human. I like that.

MI: What's your biggest non-visual source of inspiration?

KA: Honestly, everything, but music and film especially. Even our dog – she has no capacity for overthinking, she's just happy, and there's something inspiring about that raw, unfiltered expression. In film I love things that confuse me – David Lynch, work that leaves a question instead of answering it. In music I listen mostly to instrumental or classical pieces, and to a Japanese band whose lyrics are deliberately mysterious – the mystery does more work than an explanation would .

07 · Favourite Places

MI: Do you have any hidden gems in London that you can share with us. Doesn't need to be art-related. A bar, a bench, a street.

KA: Not exactly hidden, but there's a bar in London, called Nickel Bar, inside a former bank building near Bank station, that they gutted and rebuilt – it looks a bit like Hogwarts inside. Very dark, very spacious, more like a grand hotel lounge than a typical bar, and dark enough that you can actually have a private conversation. I only found out about it near the end of my time in London, and I'd go back for that alone.

In Japan, I'd point people toward Nara – everyone goes for the deer and the giant Buddha, but if you climb further up the mountain behind the main temple, maybe twenty minutes past where most tourists stop, there's a much quieter temple with a view over the whole city. It feels like stepping back a few centuries. More generally: any small, minor temple you find on a map rather than a “best of” list – somewhere you're actually allowed to walk inside. Kyoto has thousands of them. If you can get matcha there afterward, even better.

08 · On life

MI: You mentioned earlier how much the move from Japan, through London, to Lithuania shaped you – can you say more about that?

KA: As Japanese, we're raised not to express ourselves too openly. Lithuanians, like a lot of Slavic people in my experience, hold onto their independence fiercely, and value both family and a very solid sense of self at the same time. London never really got under my skin that way – it's too much of a melting pot to leave a single mark. Lithuania taught me how to listen to myself. When I go back to Japan now, once a year, I notice how much self-suppression is baked into daily life there, and it feels strange in a way it didn't used to. I still love the culture deeply, but I needed the distance.

MI: And for someone young who wants to be an artist but is afraid to start?

KA: I believe anyone can be an artist, in principle – sustaining yourself entirely on it is a different, harder question. But it takes real guts and commitment, especially now, when the economics of it are unstable and art isn't something society treats as essential. Nobody hands you the opportunity – you make your own . From my first year at university I was applying to every open call I could find, because I was terrified of graduating with no show history. That network, built early, is what let me keep practicing once I moved abroad.

If art feels optional to you, it might not be the right path – it has to be closer to the centre of things than that. It doesn't matter if you're rich or poor going in. You just have to keep the spirit.

If art feels optional to you, it might not be the right path – it has to be closer to the centre of things than that. It doesn't matter if you're rich or poor going in. You just have to keep the spirit.

MI: If you had to give one piece of life advice, what would it be?

KA: Quit being a people-pleaser. I think a lot of people struggle with that, at different levels. It matters, because we only get one life, and I've heard the same thing from a lot of older people in interviews: just do what you actually want. Knowing your own voice, even in small daily decisions, is the whole thing.

…just do what you actually want. Knowing your own voice, even in small daily decisions, is the whole thing.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Orani is a village in the Barbagia, the mountainous heart of Sardinia. A road climbs up from the valley, the houses gather along the slope, and just above them, on the hillside, a low white building sits among olive trees and looks back down at the roofs. It is one of the most quietly beautiful small museums in Italy, and it belongs, in the fullest sense of the word, to the place it stands in.

Costantino Nivola was born here in 1911, the son of a mason, and learned the trade on his father’s building sites before the ISIA in Monza and a job as a graphic designer for Olivetti in Milan. In 1939 he left for New York. He met Le Corbusier in 1946, wrapped the wall of the Olivetti showroom on Fifth Avenue in a sand-cast relief in 1954, taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design at the invitation of Josep Lluís Sert, and spent three years filling Eero Saarinen’s colleges at Yale with carved concrete. And he kept coming home. In 1953 he drew a plan to link every house in Orani with vine pergolas; in 1958 he covered the facade of the village church with a graffito and carried his sculptures out into the streets for three days, with the whole village taking part.

The museum that carries his name has inherited that generosity. It keeps its door open to the village, to contemporary artists, to schoolchildren and to researchers, and it does all of this with rare care and warmth. We are grateful to the team of the Museo Nivola for the time and thought they gave to our four questions: where the museum ends and Orani begins, what is still alive in Nivola’s belief in the union of art and architecture, what a museum in an artist’s birthplace can know, and what they hope the museum will become.

Where, in your view, does the Museo Nivola end and Orani begin? Can the village, its landscape and its inhabitants be considered a continuation of the museum space?

In a place like Orani, given its history and its nature, the border between museum and village is difficult to draw. The museum itself is born in a particular position: on the hill, immersed in the landscape and at the same time facing the slope up which the village climbs. Its architecture does not build a rupture with its context, but continually establishes relations with what surrounds it: the vegetation, the shape of the valley, the spring of Su Càntaru and, above all, the community.

This relation is deeper still if we think of Nivola’s own work, because Orani is a presence that runs through all of his research and is evident in the materials, in his childhood memories, in the experience of his father the mason, in his conception of public space and of the relationship with the social life of a place. In the 1953 project Pergola Village , Nivola imagined connecting the houses of the village, ideally and physically, through vine pergolas, turning the streets into shared social space. In 1958, returning to Orani, he made the graffito on the facade of the church of Nostra Signora d’Itria and brought his sculptures directly into the streets, involving the inhabitants in an experience that goes entirely beyond the traditional model of the exhibition.

This is why we like to think that the Museo Nivola does not end at the threshold of the building: the village is not an extension of the museum in the sense of a musealisation of the territory, but rather a living interlocutor.

The challenge is precisely to prevent Orani from becoming a backdrop, or a kind of diffuse museum crystallised in the past. We are interested in continuing to build a relationship in which the museum is part of the life of the village and the village keeps entering the museum, through people, through memory, through educational activities, projects in public space and new forms of cultural production.

Nivola called himself a sculptor for architecture, and the phrase was not a modest one. It meant that the sculpture would not arrive after the building, like a piece of furniture.

Nivola believed deeply in the integration of art and architecture. How current is that idea today, and what can it teach new generations of artists, architects and designers?

That is the great topicality of his thought. Today, perhaps, even more than when Nivola began working in this direction. For him, the integration of art and architecture did not simply mean placing a work inside a building or on its facade. It meant conceiving space, matter, function and the experience of whoever would inhabit that space all together. The famous total project.

Nivola worked with some of the great protagonists of modern architecture, trying to overcome the disciplinary separation between artist, architect and designer. His interest was directed at space as an overall experience. Sculpture could become wall, relief could become part of architecture, the courtyard a place of encounter. Even the urban plan was to be an instrument for strengthening social relations.

Behind the idea of integration between the arts there is something wider still: a conception of art as an instrument capable of affecting the quality of collective life.

Nivola invites us to step out of categories that are too rigid. He invites us to ask for whom a space is designed, who will use it, what relations it will produce. At a moment when architecture, art and design are called to confront environmental and social questions and new ways of inhabiting, his interdisciplinary approach appears surprisingly contemporary.

It is not, of course, a matter of merely reproducing his forms and languages, but of inheriting his method: working through dialogue between disciplines, keeping attention on materials and on context, and considering space as something that can orient behaviours, encounters and forms of community; not as a neutral container.

The collection in Orani is the largest anywhere, but the case for a museum in a village of a few thousand people was never an argument about inventory.

What can a museum located in his place of origin tell us about Costantino Nivola that a major international institution could not tell in the same way?

An international institution can tell Nivola within the dimension of global art history and twentieth-century architecture, reconstruct his relationships with New York, with the Harvard Graduate School of Design, with architects such as Le Corbusier, Josep Lluís Sert or Eero Saarinen, and give back the extraordinary cultural network in which he moved.

Orani can tell something different, showing the genesis of that gaze, its anthropological reasons.

Here some of the central questions in his work stop being merely art-historical themes and acquire a concrete dimension. His relationship with matter refers back to the geology of his land, as well as to family experience and his father’s trade. The attention to community, the theme of participation, take on a crucial meaning. A museum in the place of origin has access to a memory that is not only documentary. There is an oral, vernacular, everyday memory, made of people who remember him or who have gathered the memory of previous generations. There are the light, the silences, the movement of the landscape: elements difficult to restore inside an exhibition, and they require a language, a narration, a rooted and conscious approach.

This does not mean reading Nivola exclusively through Sardinia: that would be equally reductive, because his artistic identity is born precisely from the encounter between Orani and the world. The strength of the Museo Nivola lies, if anything, in the possibility of holding these two dimensions together. On one side, an artist fully part of the international culture of the twentieth century; on the other, a biography and an imaginary profoundly rooted in the island.

Perhaps what the Museo Nivola can offer in a unique way is exactly the possibility of understanding that these two dimensions are not in contradiction.

The last question is about what comes next, and the answer describes something closer to a workshop than to a shrine.

Could you tell us, as far as possible, about your plans for the future and for the development of the Museo Nivola? We were particularly struck by the way the museum goes beyond the traditional exhibition space, creating a dialogue between art, architecture, landscape and the village of Orani. How do you imagine the next phase of its evolution?

The direction we are following is to deepen precisely this hybrid identity of the Museo Nivola: a monographic museum as a research centre, as a place dedicated to the contemporary, to architecture, to landscape, to education and, once again, to community.

The new programme Nivola vis-à-vis arises from that need. After a series of exhibitions dedicated to contemporary artists, our vision returns to questioning Nivola directly, placing him in relation with the figures, experiences and questions of his time. It is not a matter of simply constructing formal comparisons, but of analysing Nivola’s work as a point of departure for themes that are still vital and necessary: space and the body, architecture and design, the interpenetration of art and environment. The exhibition Nivola, Colombo e lo spazio intorno , currently on view, reflects for example on space as physical and relational cognition. Around it orbit important reflections on what Nivola’s research continues to suggest to the present. Which aspects of his work still appear open, urgent and productive? Within international debate, it is fundamental to reactivate their design potential, bringing back to the centre of current discourse the questions Nivola posed more than seventy years ago about the relationship between art and society, between education and imagination, between the project and everyday life.

In the coming months, this work will continue through a rereading of the permanent collection. The temporary departure of some works for the exhibition dedicated to Nivola at the Triennale di Milano will become an occasion to rethink the display, to return to studying the storerooms, to present lesser-known works and to create other connections. We want scientific research to be able to speak with educational activity, every exhibition to be able to generate an experience within public space, the heritage to be continuously reread through the “sentiment of the present”, and the museum to continue to be perceived by the community as a belonging.

It is a dynamic that, in the end, already belonged to Nivola: crossing the world without losing the bond with the place one set out from. And this is perhaps the model of museum we are interested in continuing to build: not a closed place that preserves a legacy, but an organism capable of putting it back into circulation, continuously.

The exhibition Nivola, Colombo e lo spazio intorno is on view at the Museo Nivola in Orani, Sardinia. Works from the permanent collection will travel to the exhibition dedicated to Nivola at the Triennale di Milano, and the display in Orani will be rebuilt around their absence.

Every souvenir shop sells the same promise: a small object that will remind you, years later, that you were somewhere. A magnet does this job better than almost anything else, which is exactly the problem. It remembers the fact of the trip and forgets everything that made the trip worth remembering – who you were laughing with on the ferry, what the light looked like on the last night, the wrong turn that became the best hour of the week. That richer material does not disappear. It is on your phone, buried a few thousand photographs deep, in the part of the camera roll nobody scrolls back to.

Souv , a startup out of Zagreb, was built to close exactly that gap. Tap a physical card or magnet with your phone – no app to install – and it opens a personal space tied to that specific place and trip: your own photographs, a short recap video, a note for later. The object stays on the fridge, doing what a souvenir has always done. The memory it points to stays reachable, which is the part that used to get lost.

The company started with two friends at university. Since a first pilot at a cycling event on the island of Brač, Souv has spread along the Croatian coast, into museum shops and chain retail, and has been named a finalist in the Digital Communication Design category of Zagreb Design Week 2026, where it will show at the Academy of Fine Arts this September.

We spoke with co-founders Matej Petrić and Antonio Šeparović about the third coffee in Zagreb that started it, the version of the idea they were sure would work and had to throw out anyway, and what it actually took to put colour-engraved stainless steel into production.

Take us back to the very beginning – was there a specific trip, a specific place, or a specific frustration that actually sparked the idea for Souv? Describe that moment in detail – where you were, what you were trying to do, and what wasn't working.

The funny thing is that Souv was not born on a beach, in an airport, or during some particularly dramatic trip. It started over coffee in Zagreb.

Antonio and I were sitting in WESPA, already on what he remembers as our third coffee, talking about how many photographs we take when we travel and how rarely we actually return to them afterwards. At the same time, our homes were full of physical reminders of places we had visited, especially magnets. The strange thing was that the physical object survived, while the actual experience was buried somewhere among thousands of photographs on a phone.

That disconnect became the starting point. We asked a very simple question: what if the physical souvenir could somehow carry the digital memories with it?

At first it sounded almost obvious. Tap a souvenir, open your photographs, add something about the place. Then we started asking the harder questions: what should the physical object actually be, why would someone buy it, how do you make the technology invisible, and how do you make something digital feel like a real keepsake rather than another app?

Who was on the founding team, and how did you split the early work between you? Looking back, whose idea ended up shaping the product the most, and did that person's role change once the company grew?

Souv was founded by the two of us, Matej Petrić and Antonio Šeparović. We were friends and university colleagues before becoming business partners, and both of us came from software and digital product backgrounds. That meant the early division of work was much less clean than “one technical founder and one business founder.” In the beginning, both of us were doing whatever the product needed.

I also would not honestly attribute Souv to one person's idea. The initial question came out of a conversation between us, and the product was shaped by iteration afterwards. If one principle influenced the product more than anything else, it was something we learned during testing: people are not interested in buying NFC technology.

They are interested in preserving an experience. Once we understood that, the technology became quieter and the memory became the centre of the product.

What did the very first version of Souv actually look like – the card, the app, the whole experience? Which parts of that first version survived into what's sold in stores today, and which parts got thrown out entirely, maybe even something you were sure would work?

The first versions were much closer to proofs of concept than to the Souv you can buy today. The basic idea was already there: a physical card or magnet with an NFC or QR connection that opened a digital space associated with that particular object. We needed to prove that the connection between an object on your desk or refrigerator and a personal digital memory could feel natural.

What survived is actually the most fundamental part of the idea. You still tap a physical object, nothing needs to be downloaded, and that object becomes the entrance to your own photographs, videos, notes and journey.

Almost everything around that core became more refined. The onboarding became simpler, the digital experience became much less technology-led, and the physical product developed into two very different expressions: an accessible printed Eco version and a Premium object made from brushed stainless steel with colour laser engraving.

One thing we initially overestimated was the “wow” of the technology itself. We assumed tapping an object with a phone would be the part people found most interesting. It is useful, but it is not the reason they care. The important moment is when they understand what is on the other side of the tap. That changed the way we designed and explained the entire product.

Walk us through the milestones that mattered most along the way – the first store, the first city outside your home base, Zagreb Design Week. For each one, what actually changed afterward – and was there a moment that felt bigger from the outside than it actually was on the inside, or the reverse?

There were several milestones, but they mattered for very different reasons.

The first time Souv was used in a real environment was particularly important. At the Uvati Vitar cycling event on Brač, participants received a personalised Souv as part of the event experience. Around 70% of the distributed Souvs were activated and filled with personal memories, and almost one in five participants shared the experience. The numbers were based on a small pilot, but internally that moment was much bigger than a press article or presentation because strangers were finally using the product without us standing next to them explaining it.

The first retail location in Zagreb was another psychological shift. Until then Souv was something we had designed, tested and presented. Putting it into an actual shop meant a person who had never met us could see it on a shelf, understand it and decide whether it deserved their money.

There was not really one neat “second city” afterwards. The rollout moved quite quickly from Zagreb towards the coast, with Souv appearing across places including Split, Zadar, Dubrovnik, Šibenik, Pula, Poreč, Korčula and Brač. By August, the retail network included independent stores, museum locations and chain retail locations.

And now there is Zagreb Design Week. Souv has been selected as a finalist in the 2026 Digital Communication Design and Interaction Design category and will be exhibited at the Academy of Fine Arts from 15 to 20 September. That exhibition is still ahead of us, so we cannot pretend to know what it will change yet. But the selection itself means a lot because it recognises Souv not only as a tourism startup, but as a piece of interaction and communication design.

Interestingly, some of the moments that looked small from the outside, like watching people use Souv at the first event, felt enormous internally. Media exposure sometimes works the other way around: it looks like a major milestone publicly, while inside the company you are still thinking about the next production batch, a software bug or whether the display in a store is positioned correctly.

You call it 'not your typical souvenir.' Was there a particular souvenir – one you personally owned, bought, or were given – that you found genuinely disappointing, and did that specific object shape what Souv became?

There was not one terrible souvenir that made us say, “we have to fix this industry.”

It was almost the opposite. We actually like souvenirs, and particularly magnets, which is why the magnet became our first format. They work remarkably well as physical triggers. You see one on the refrigerator and immediately remember Dubrovnik, Paris or the island you visited five years ago.

The disappointment was that the object could only take you so far. It could tell you, “I was there,” but not what happened there, who you were travelling with, what made you laugh, or what the place actually felt like.

Meanwhile, all of that richer material existed. It was simply sitting somewhere on the 23,000-photo timeline of a phone.

So the object that influenced Souv was not one particularly bad souvenir. It was probably the very ordinary magnet that does its job quite well, placed next to a phone that contains the much better story but almost never tells it again. We wanted to connect those two things.

Each city – Zagreb, Dubrovnik, Split, Zadar, Brač, Korčula – has its own visual identity. Walk through how you actually decide what a new city's card should look and feel like, and has a local ever told you that you got their city wrong?

We try not to start with the question, “Which landmark should we put on this card?”

We start with what makes the place recognisable to the people who actually know it. That includes architecture and landmarks, of course, but also colour, local visual codes, landscape, small details, stories and the way the destination presents itself. Then we reduce that material into something that can work as an object rather than trying to fit an entire tourist brochure onto a magnet.

The design also has to survive the material. Something that looks beautiful on a screen may behave completely differently when UV printed on the Eco version or colour engraved into stainless steel, so the process moves continuously between visual design and physical testing.

Our art director Antonija has been central to developing that visual language, while destination partners give us local feedback before editions go into production.

And yes, locals have challenged details. Usually it is not a dramatic “you completely misunderstood our city” moment, but smaller corrections are extremely valuable. A motif can be technically recognisable and still feel wrong to someone who sees that place every day.

We would much rather have that conversation during development than produce a beautifully designed object that locals themselves do not believe represents them.

Tap. Save. Relive your trip. Describe, step by step, what actually happens in the seconds right after someone taps a card for the first time – and then what typically happens weeks or months later, once they're back home. Do you know of a moment when it genuinely surprised or moved someone?

The first tap is deliberately simple.

You touch the Souv with an NFC-enabled phone, or scan the QR code on the back. The experience opens directly in the browser, so there is no app to install. On the first visit, you sign in, choose whether you are keeping the Souv for yourself or preparing it as a gift, and claim that particular Souv. From there you can add your first photographs, videos or message.

Once it has been claimed, it becomes your personal memory space. You can organise the journey through a timeline, continue adding material, create a recap video and explore selected content connected to the destination.

The more interesting part happens later. Weeks, months or even years after the trip, the physical object is still there. You see it on your desk or refrigerator and tap it again. Instead of opening a generic destination page, you return to your own photographs and your own version of that place.

The next question is about the one part of the product that could not be solved by iterating on the app: a physical object, made in batches, that has to look the same the five-hundredth time as it did the first.

What's been the hardest part of building Souv so far? Pick one concrete example – a specific technical problem, a specific design decision, or a specific logistical headache – and walk through how you actually solved it, including anything you tried first that failed.

One very concrete example is the Premium stainless-steel Souv.

On paper, the idea sounded simple: take stainless steel and engrave the destination artwork in colour. In reality, producing that object consistently became one of the hardest parts of the project.

We tested different materials, engraving parameters, finishes, production speeds and ways of preparing the artwork. The difficulty was not producing one beautiful sample. You can spend an unreasonable amount of time making one piece look good. The real problem is creating the fiftieth or the five-hundredth piece with the same quality, within a production time and cost that makes sense for a retail product.

We repeatedly ran into trade-offs between visual quality, durability, repeatability and speed. Eventually we realised that we would not get the level of control we wanted if we treated production as a completely external black box.

So we brought a significant part of the process in-house and built our own small production setup in Zagreb. That was not part of the original startup plan. We came from software. Suddenly we were learning about stainless steel, lasers, material tolerances, finishing and production workflows.

In retrospect, that difficulty improved Souv. We now understand the physical object at a much deeper level because we were forced to learn how to make it ourselves.

The last question is about scale, and the answer turns out to be less about new cities than about what Souv actually is: an object, or a layer that any object could carry.

Where do you see Souv a few years from now? Is it mainly more cities and countries, a specific new feature you're already working on, or something about the product itself you'd genuinely want to change if you could start over?

A few years from now, we would like Souv to be much bigger than a collection of Croatian city magnets.

Croatia is the right place for us to prove the model because tourism is such an important part of everyday life here, but the underlying behaviour is universal. People travel, take hundreds of photographs, buy something to remember the trip and then rarely return to most of the digital material they created.

So international expansion is definitely part of the ambition, but the more important expansion is from a single product into a platform.

That means continuing to develop our own collectible Souv objects, but also allowing the Souv experience to live on other physical products. One direction we are already developing is a small NFC/QR Souv layer that can be integrated into an existing souvenir or its packaging. A ceramic object, book, museum product or locally made gift would not have to become “a Souv product”; it could keep its existing identity while gaining the personal memory experience behind it.

The digital side will keep growing as well: richer ways of organising journeys, gifting, collections, recap experiences and destination content that can evolve after the trip.

If we could start again, the biggest thing we would change is that we would begin with the emotional proposition much earlier and test real-world retail behaviour sooner.

In the beginning we spent too much time thinking like technologists. Today we know that the NFC, QR code and software should almost disappear.

The product is not really about tapping something with your phone. It is about giving an experience a physical place to live.

Nick Dahlen is an artist and illustrator from Minneapolis whose work revives the spirit of modernism through a contemporary lens.

With a background in graffiti and a degree in Graphic Design, Dahlen has developed a visual language that combines the strength of modernist aesthetics with a sense of nostalgia – perhaps for a visual era we instinctively long for without even realizing it.

The foundation of Dahlen’s style is remarkably consistent, and that consistency only makes it more compelling. Once you encounter one of his images, you immediately want to move on to the next, drawn in by the pleasure of clean, simplified forms covering otherwise ordinary, everyday subjects.

Style & Influences

This visual accessibility – in the best possible sense of the word – is largely created through saturated, contrasting shadows that immediately establish the contours of each form. We can read the scene effortlessly, and that clarity makes it instinctively appealing.

The simplification of forms, combined with deliberate distortions and an authorial sense of proportion, recalls Cubism, particularly the work of Fernand Léger and Pablo Picasso. It is worth lingering on this idea of simplification because, in Dahlen’s work, it exists hand in hand with complexity. This dichotomy is rooted in the distortion of form and in a belief in its inherent plasticity.

The distortions – and particularly the enlarged proportions – make his figures feel monumental, almost sculptural. Here, one can trace an affinity with the work of Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral, whose figures similarly acquire a powerful, almost sculptural presence through their simplified and exaggerated forms.

Boldness is balanced by a certain fluidity, which keeps the work visually inviting. All of these elements come together through a palette of muted tones, transforming familiar subjects into instantly arresting compositions.

The visual impact happens almost immediately. Contrasting shadows and simplified figures allow us to read the image effortlessly, while simultaneously presenting a reimagined form of figurative painting.

Dahlen’s background in graphic design – particularly his attention to the visual language of twentieth-century posters – seems to have played an important role here. A strong awareness of hierarchy, direct communication, and the clear transmission of both image and meaning coexist with his distinctive treatment of form.

Subjects

Dahlen uses this visual language to depict ordinary objects and everyday scenes: preparing food, playing dominoes, cutting with scissors, assembling a puzzle. He has a particular fascination with food.

There is something striking about the way we can look at the same object every day, while an artist can present it to us in a way that feels completely unfamiliar – beyond the limits of our imagination.

Dahlen’s work ultimately seeks to communicate a sense of positive energy while subtly reflecting certain tensions and difficulties, leaving their interpretation to the symbolism of form and colour.

The story modernism tells about itself is a story of conversion: the young architect sees the new work, throws out the mouldings and never looks back. Fysikkbygningen at Blindern is that story with the receipts attached, because both halves of it survive on paper. Finn Bryn and Johan Ellefsen won the University of Oslo competition in 1926 with a Roman temple: a columned facade in the centre, a round vestibule ringed by galleries, a dome on top, all of it in red brick and granite. Then they went to Germany, France and the Netherlands to see what was being built, came back and took their own drawing apart.

What they kept was the symmetry and the materials. What went was everything that made the building an argument about Rome. The tall windows dropped, the dome and the temple front disappeared, and the facade was regrouped into the harder geometry that stands there now. The building was finished in 1935 and opened in 1936, ten years after they won it, which means the design that made their reputation was quietly demolished by its own authors somewhere between the competition and the scaffolding.

It helps to remember what Blindern was at the time. Not a campus: a farm. The university had bought agricultural land north-west of the city and was moving out of its neoclassical quarter downtown, and the first buildings stood in a meadow with a dirt track running past them. There was no context to answer to, only a field, a brief and a decade that believed a building should be honest about its purpose.

Even stripped, the building reads as civic architecture rather than as a laboratory. A central tower rises out of a long horizontal block, its top floor cut open by a continuous band of glazing, and the brick is laid dark and warm rather than rendered white. Norwegian functionalism arrived through Sweden and Denmark rather than direct from Dessau, and it arrived softened: less manifesto, more craft, willing to keep the material a country already knew how to build with. Bryn and Ellefsen had been in partnership since 1922 and would go on to design the Norwegian pavilion for the 1939 World's Fair in New York.

The plan is disciplined where discipline pays. A physics faculty in the 1930s needed vibration-free floors, long service runs, blackout rooms and a lecture hall that could seat a generation of students, and the building solves all of it with the efficiency the period demanded. It housed chemistry too, until that institute moved out in the 1960s and the name shortened to the one it carries now. Then, at the point where circulation happens, where people actually meet the building, the geometry loosens. Stairs sweep rather than turn. Handrails are brass. Ceilings lift. Colour appears where a purist would have left plaster.

The vestibule is the whole argument in miniature, and it is the one room where the demolished 1926 scheme still shows through. Bryn and Ellefsen had promised a domed rotunda; what they built instead is a double-height hall with a black and white zigzag floor, closer to a 1930s ocean liner than to a laboratory, opening on both sides so that the space worked as a public passage between Majorstuen and the campus rather than as a lobby.

Through the middle of it hangs a Foucault pendulum: a gilded ball bearing twenty centimetres across and weighing thirty-two kilograms, on a wire of 14.1 metres. Foucault's original in Paris in 1851 was a 28-kilogram weight on 67 metres of wire, the first demonstration in a room rather than a sky that the earth turns. At Oslo's latitude of sixty degrees north the plane of the swing takes 27 hours and 43 minutes to come back round. It is a working instrument and a piece of interior design at once, the one object here that explains the discipline housed in the building without a single word.

Above it, across three walls around the main entrance, Per Lasson Krohg painted 260 square metres of fresco with glass inlays and painted glass. He won that competition in 1935, the year the building was finished, and the work was completed in the autumn of 1938, paid for by the consul general Peter Krag. It is called Atomet i verdensrommet, the atom in space: the sun and the planets ringed by galaxies drawn as a woman and a man, with the aurora running through the composition. Krohg would later paint the mural in the United Nations Security Council chamber in New York.

Note what that means for the chronology. The classical scheme was abandoned in the late twenties as too decorative for the new century, and then, with the functionalist building standing finished, the university ran a competition to cover its entrance in painted cosmology and hung a brass weight in the middle of it. The glazing bars of the stair window cut straight through the picture. The grid and the painting hold each other rather than compete, and the conservators from NIKU who cleaned the work in 2015 were maintaining something no purist reading of the 1930s can quite account for.

That is the reason the building still teaches something. The heroic version of the decade asks a structure to be honest, and honesty gets understood as bareness. Fysikkbygningen accepts every functional demand of its brief, drops its own columns to do so, and then treats warmth, colour and curvature as functional demands too, on the grounds that the people inside are also part of the programme. Nearly a century on, with the creeper turning scarlet over the entrance each October and the pendulum still swinging, it looks less like a compromise with modernism than a correction to it.

Sources Museum for universitets- og vitenskapshistorie, UiO – the 1926 winning entry, the study trip and how the temple facade was removed – muv.uio.no Museum for universitets- og vitenskapshistorie, UiO – Bryn and Ellefsen at Nedre Blindern: the practice and the campus plan – muv.uio.no Store norske leksikon – Finn Bryn: the partnership from 1922 and the later work – snl.no Fysisk institutt, UiO – the pendulum in the vestibule: 32 kg gilded bob, 14.1 m wire, 27 h 43 min at 60 degrees north – mn.uio.no Paragone – Atomet i verdensrommet: the 1935 art competition, 260 square metres, completed autumn 1938, conserved by NIKU in 2015 – paragone.no Nasjonalmuseet – Bryn and Ellefsen, original competition drawings for the physics building – nasjonalmuseet.no Photographs: freely licensed via Wikimedia Commons, each credited in its caption. Archive views from the National Library of Norway and Oslo Museum.