architecture | the apartment broadcast

November 7, 2011

as it so subtly says on the left there, sometimes we also work… and today i just wanted to give you a quick look into what we are working on right now because it is, if i may say so myself, SUPERCOOL!

i am sadly not able to divulge the nature or name of the client, yet, but let me say that this industry is ripe for new vision. that which we are lucky to have been asked to provide. what you are looking at in the picture above is going to be the piece de resistance of an amazing project we were hired to design a few months ago and the round structure is an incredible piece of engineered art that we are designing with the visionary marc fornes of theverymany. fitting within a space that is part showroom, part womb, we will be unveiling this beauty early next year and we could not be more excited!

but what i really want to talk about this morning is criteria by which we are lucky to choose our clients. as with most projects that we take on, this one has involved us in a field that we never plowed before, which is exactly the point. when the phone rings and the person on the other side asks if we can show them examples of things we have done before in their industry, my response is always this:

do not hire us because of what we may have done, hire us because of what we can do.

now, 3 times out of 5, the new business prospect hangs up on me… but it guarantees that the other 2 that keep talking will have a built-in tolerance for the unconventional solutions we are bound to come up with. that is why i rarely show our portfolio any more. the reason i created the apartment creative agency was to have the ability to touch, unrestrained by the increasingly reductive industry of design, all aspects of the consumer experience. whether tasked to build an individual a home that feels as if they could have dreamt it themselves or launch a new car in a way theretofore unseen, the apartment staff and i believe that, ultimately, good design lays not in the individual instrument but the symphony, the way all the parts come together. our goal, in life as much as in business, has always been and always will be to do interesting things. and as such, we live to be hired to do that which we haven’t done before, not what is easily pointed to in a portfolio. we work with dozens of designers across the world who join us on teams specifically assembled for goals yet to be defined. that is how the unexpected happens. that is what we strive for.

my focus, is never simply to give our clients what they ask for but to define their mission on their behalf using the tools of branding, graphics, product design, architecture, strategy, marketing and publicity, yes, but also those of memory, experience, imagination, fantasy and emotion in order to give meaning to the adventure, not just success. i believe we are one of the very few agencies in the world today offering such comprehensive understanding of our craft beyond its tools. as alan kay famously said, “if you want to predict the future, you have to invent it…” we are inventors.

and that is what we hope to achieve with this and other projects in the pipeline. after 12 years of doing this, it truly feels like we’re just getting started…

sorry for the seemingly complacent post this monday morning but i felt compelled to explain ~~what we do~~ who we are to some who may not know. thank you for listening and have a splendid weekend!

October 24, 2011

IF YOU COME, SHE’LL BUILD IT

in winter 2002, while probably taking a break from nothing, the phone rang on my oversized desk and on the line was the politely determined voice of a young woman, just graduated from interior design school in germany, who had heard of our little dog and pony show in manhattan and wanted in for a summer internship. the apartment, having just been invented out of thin air a couple of years at that point, it never dawned on me that we could teach anyone anything, let alone offer “internships,” those were for “real” companies i thought, but my interlocutor that day reassured me that she would pay her way from germany and do whatever we asked, for free, as long as she could learn our trade… our what?! i didn’t know we had a trade, i thought until then that what i had been doing was pushing back the date when i would have to put my film degree to good use and be a waiter at dojo’s. i tried to tell this young woman that i would not want to take advantage of her and could not have her waste her time so i said that there wasn’t a position available at this time but to please stay in touch because, you know, yeah… and stay in touch she did, by email, voicemail and, about a week later, getting me on the line again and now saying that she was going to book a flight to come meet me for an interview because, obviously, the telephone was too poor a means of communication to convey her intention to never be told no to anything she wished. i was dumbfounded by her persistence to fill a non-existent position that i felt would be of no use to anyone but i couldn’t let her spend her money for a transatlantic flight just for an interview, that was crazy! so, defeated, i said ok. after all, it would just be a summer internship and by september, she’d go back home, disappointed, and i would put on my apron, filled with guilt, as things should be…

but i had underestimated ms. pia richter…
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June 3, 2011

GIGANTIC BALLS

if you need something to widen your sphere of consciousness as you attempt to put in perspective the death of your grandmother, there is no better place to go than at le grand palais in paris right now to see anish kapoor’s leviathan… there are few words that can be used to adequately describe what you see invading one of the world’s most beautiful industrial buildings, a beach ball, a whale, a blown-up nave, all inconsistent with the feeling you have either walking around or within the thing. best to let pictures do the talking…

May 23, 2011

GOOD MORNING ENGLAND

last week, i was lucky to have been invited to london by my beneficent mother to attend the premiere of a ballet scored by a friend of ours. yeah, that’s how we roll, apparently. so, a few kisses to my wife and children later, i found myself in the entitled cocoon of jfk’s virgin lounge, about to sleep my way across the ocean. that’s when i realized that, even though regaled by mommy dearest who has evidently been better with her money than i could ever dream to be with mine, it would be a shame not to take advantage of such a jaunt to pay my long-overdue respects to friends i hadn’t seen in a long time.
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May 9, 2011

THE STUFF WE DO

for those of you may have just joined us and are wondering what it is the hell we do, it is always my goal to show if i don’t have to tell. hence, here is a portrait of one of our projects, new york’s own yelo spa, a wellness center in midtown manhattan, which was a 360degree project for us as we were responsible for all aspect of it, from naming to branding to architecture to marketing. and the synergies between them. filmed by the incomparable gary nadeau for dwell magazine. enjoy!

April 25, 2011

HOMERUN

so much time was spent understandably celebrating the rebirth of zombie jesus through the over-consumption of bible-mandated high fructose corn syrup that i hardly had time to think about anything else but myself this weekend. specifically, the impact felt from here to milan of my first column written for fast company’s authoritative design blog titled what telephone unbeatable functionality teaches us about innovation. now i might be exaggerating my influence by a smidgeon but my point, that of the need for design not to be merely beautiful but singularly useful is well-taken, mostly by myself and reminded me that it didn’t always used to be that way… which is why, in lieu of saying good morning to a new, probably fatalist topic this morning, as has become our weekly habit, i wanted to hark back to a simpler time by headlining this hebdomadal feature with a demonstration of such consideration in design from an architect who rarely forfeited his functional gift for aesthetic pleasure: mr. marcel breuer.
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