Since its founding in Milan in 1975, Armani has become a global benchmark of Italian taste, rooted in disciplined elegance, understated luxury, and a deep understanding of proportion and atmosphere. Clothing, as it turned out, was just one mode of expression. At the dawn of this century, Armani established Armani/Casa, bringing the fashion house’s sharp sensibility into the environments that people inhabit daily. By 2004, the Armani/Casa Interior Design Studio was fashioning a litany of interiors for private clients and major developments under the artistic direction of the brand’s founder, Giorgio Armani. Today, Armani/Casa spans 40 outlets across 29 countries.

Before he died last September at the age of 91, Giorgio was closely involved in one of the team’s most ambitious American projects to date: the Armani/Casa Residences Pompano Beach, set to open in 2028. The boutique oceanfront development is taking shape in a growing residential hub between Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach at a moment when new waterfront property in the region is particularly hard to come by. But Armani’s project boasts collaborations with a number of South Florida’s most prominent developers (Vertical Developments, WellDuo, GCF Development, and SP Developments), G3 Architecture, and the landscape architecture firm West 8.

“We’re excited to partner with Armani as they expand their brand of luxury condos,” says Tomas Sinisterra of SP Developments. “Armani/Casa Residences Pompano Beach introduces a new standard of elegance to Pompano Beach, making it a premier destination for those seeking refined condominium living and exceptional design.”

The building—one of only a few projects in the U.S. with input from Giorgio himself—features 28 residences offering 360-degree views, finishings imported direct from Italy, and the privacy of one home per floor. On Ocean Boulevard, the enclave will exude the sophistication that has become emblematic of Giorgio Armani and, with wellness features and a sanctuary-like atmosphere, daily life will feel like an escape to the late founder’s own immaculate Italian home.

In 1954, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held its first and only competition for creative playground equipment designs. The top submissions, culled from 360 entries from around the world, were presented in the exhibition “Playground Sculpture.” Three of them went on to be commercially produced. 

“Play and art have a lot more in common than we might think,” the historian Emmy Watts points out in her 2024 book The Art of Play. Both “derive from the same root—that of humanity’s endless creativity.”

Perhaps that’s why artists have created some of the most inspiring playgrounds. The first-place winner of MoMA’s competition was Fantastic Village by painter Virginia Dortch Dorazio, a series of concrete-paneled cubicles with organic-shaped openings to crawl through. The mini huts were fitted with climbing pegs, ladders, ropes, and sliding poles, providing ample opportunity for self-directed play. 

Sculptor and landscape architect Isamu Noguchi proposed numerous unbuilt Playscapes and completed his first playground outside Tokyo in 1965. While he attempted for decades to build a playground in New York, his only U.S. Playscape is in Piedmont Park, Atlanta, commissioned by the High Museum of Art in 1975 and completed the following year. The remit was a children’s playground that was also a work of art: Noguchi’s abstract sculptural forms often evoked ancient civilizations, an open-ended invitation to explore and make your own rules. To coincide with the project’s 50th anniversary, the High Museum is opening an exhibition of Noguchi’s work, including his innovative playscape designs, on April 10. 

Here are my four favorite playgrounds—one for each season—that double as works of art.

Winter
Pink Mirror Carousel, Kulm Hotel, St. Moritz, Switzerland
Created by Carsten Höller
Opened 2025

St. Moritz is known as a playground for the rich and famous, and at the Kulm Hotel, the city delivers on that promise—literally. Founded in 1856, the grand property is considered the birthplace of winter tourism. The candy-colored carousel is situated on the hotel’s ice rink. It’s an apt and ironic location for the work by conceptual artist Carsten Höller, who often re-conceives playground equipment as contemplative art installations that bore children and amuse adults. Here, he replaces painted horses with suspended single seats that face outward. This mirrored ride rotates very, very slowly (it takes 12 minutes to complete one revolution), enabling viewers to take in the wonder that surrounds them.

Spring
Woods of Net, Kanagawa, Japan
Designed by Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam and Tezuka Architects
Opened 2009

The Japanese architecture firm Tezuka Architects teamed up with artist Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam to create a timber-beamed pavilion in the middle of a Japanese forest. Part of the Hakone Open-Air Museum, Woods of Net employs traditional temple engineering: The trusses are fastened without metal and provide a monumental nesting structure for the showy climbing net, hand-knitted by Horiuchi MacAdam. The spirited dreamcatcher captures the youthful energy of hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. Kids (and adults) crawl into the primary-colored knitted, crocheted, and knotted nylon cocoon while upside-down lollipops provide maximum interaction: push, pull, and ride. Horiuchi MacAdam began making work expressly for children in the early ’70s, and over the next 30 years, her interactive spaces flourished. In 1990, she and her husband established Interplay Design and Manufacturing to develop play sculptures specially engineered to entertain children.

Summer
Il Giardino dei Tarocchi (The Tarot Garden), Grosseto, Italy
Conceived and overseen by Niki de Saint Phalle
Opened 1998

Ninety minutes from Rome, nestled in the hills of Tuscany, is Franco-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle’s monumental artwork, The Tarot Garden. This five-acre fantasy village is filled with 22 sculptures celebrating the life lessons also known as Major Arcana in Tarot. Funded with her own money and that of the Agnelli family, who founded Fiat, with engineering expertise by her husband Jean Tinguely, Saint Phalle spent nearly 20 years creating a wonderland of architecture, craft, and art. Her elaborate structures—named after symbols including the High Priestess, the Fool, and the Lovers—are formed in steel and iron, plastered with concrete, and then painted or inlaid with mosaics of glass, ceramic, mirror and stone. When the project finally opened in 1998, Saint Phalle decreed there would be no tours. The Tarot Garden was strictly to be a place of discovery—and, perhaps, a place to discover oneself.

Fall
Superkilen, Copenhagen, Denmark
Designed by BIG, Topotek1, and Superflex
Opened 2012

Superkilen is an endurance playscape—a color-coded, half-mile-long trail in the Copenhagen neighborhood of Nørrebro. In 2005, the city partnered with the Realdania Foundation to commission an urban playground celebrating local immigrant communities. It offers periodic stops along the way: The Red Square hosts cultural activities and sports; the Black Square is an outdoor living room for games, including chess; and the Green Park is a set of artificial rolling hills for picnics. The art collective Superflex also asked locals to nominate their favorite benches, bins, playground equipment, trees, and utility holes from their homelands, which the artists imported or recreated for the park site. The result is an international showcase of 100 playground objects from 50 different countries—a participatory work of art in more ways than one. 

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The hotel is also a source of inspiration for architects. Consider husband-and-wife creative team Elia and Zoe Zenghelis’s Hotel Sphinx, a never-built tower conceived in 1975 for the intersection of 7th Avenue and Broadway in Times Square. Immortalized in architect Rem Koolhaas’s book Delirious New York, it was an urban hotel that doubled as a model for mass housing. 

Each part of the Hotel Sphinx had a different function: the legs held escalators, the two towers of the tail held studio apartments, the neck housed social clubs, and the spine housed hotel rooms. The ground floor straddled 48th Street, literally bringing the city life into the hotel and the hotel out into Times Square. Today, Hotel Sphinx is the blueprint for the mega-hotels we see in Las Vegas, Singapore, and, notably, the Abraj Kudai in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. 

I canvassed architects who have been featured in my Spatial Awareness column about their favorite getaways, and the flurry of responses suggests that the hotel remains a rich typology of possibilities. The best of them, sphinx-like, provide various kinds of comfort.

​Heritance Kandalama

Where: Dambulla, Sri Lanka 

Chosen by: Minsuk Cho, founder of the firm Mass Studies

What to Know: Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa, known as the father of the Tropical Modernist movement, designed and completed Heritance Kandalama in 1994. The 152-room compound is built into a mountainside in a protected forest, and its nearby neighbor is the Ancient City of Sigiriya. It is the world’s first LEED-certified green hotel.

In His Own Words: “It was not an accommodation; it was the destination itself.” 

Miyamasou

Where: Near Kyoto, Japan 

Chosen by: Kulapat Yantrasast, founding partner and creative director of WHY Architecture

What to Know: Originally a hostel for pilgrims visiting the nearby Bujo-ji Temple, the ryokan (traditional Japanese inn) has been run by the Nakahigashi family for four generations. The dwelling’s architecture is based on tea house aesthetics known as sukiya-zukuri, and the inn is renowned for its Tsumikusa cuisine, foraged from surrounding streams and forests.

In His Own Words: “Because time stops / But the creek flows / into your tummy”

Hotel Hércules

Where: Queretaro, Mexico 

Chosen by: Charles Renfro, a partner at Diller Scofidio + Renfro 

In His Own Words: “There’s always a magical property that captures the spirit of a place, and if it’s my first time and if I’ve fallen in love with the place, then I fall in love with the hotel. My most recent hotel crush is in Queretaro, Mexico. It’s the Hotel Hercules.

It started as a fabric factory built in palatial style and was later converted into a brewery, a spa built into the factory’s ruins, several farm-to-table restaurants, and a collection of artisanal fabricators with shops and artists’ workshops. It’s a city within a city.

There are no TVs in the rooms. No minibars. Only old squeaky parquet floors, oversized doors, hand-made tiles, and of course artisanal linens.”

​Nima Local House

Location: Mexico City, Mexico 

Chosen by: Miriam Peterson, co-founder of Peterson Rich Office

What to Know: The owner, Regina Montes, converted a historic early-20th-century mansion in a hip neighborhood that boasts art and design galleries, trendy restaurants, and street food.

In Her Own Words: “Nima Local House in Mexico City is the best hotel I’ve ever stayed in. The four-room hotel is in an old mansion in Roma Norte, and the quality of staff, food, and services is incredible and feels very personal. It’s low-key, but luxurious.”

Albergo Hotel

Location: Beirut, Lebanon

Chosen by: Amale Andraos, co-founder of WORKac

What to Know: Originally a 1930s mansion, the Albergo Hotel is located in the historic Achrafieh district. It is designed by Atelier des Architectes Associés and the majority of the interiors are by Lebanese designer Maria Ousseimi.

In Her Own Words: “An adaptive reuse of an old Lebanese house in one of Beirut’s most picturesque streets, the hotel feels like a wonderful mix of epochs. From Ottoman grandeur to Parisian chic, it layers atmospheres and objects collected from around the world to bring you back to a dream-like Orient that inspires you to imagine what Beirut could be again. The rooftop terrace bar is particularly charming, offering an intimate panoramic view of the city.”

Maritim Hotel Plaza

Location: Tirana, Albania 

Chosen by: Florian Idenburg, co-founder of SO – IL

What to Know: The 24-floor hotel is located in the center of town. The Belgian architecture firm 51N4E designed a structure on the ground floor that is elliptical; as it rises to the top, it gradually becomes rectangular. A companion structure hollows out a dome recess to accommodate the tomb of Süleyman Pasha, an Ottoman prince.

In His Own Words: “The 51N4E-designed tower is a calm, stoic tower offering expansive views over a city that [Albanian Prime Minister] Edi Rama and his team are rapidly recasting into an unexpected laboratory for architectural ambition.”

Le Cloître

Location: Arles, France

Chosen by: Annabelle Selldorf, founder, Selldorf Architects

What to Know: Sited over the remains of a 12th-century Roman basilica, the townhouse is home to visiting artists and architects to the nearby art campus Luma, created by the Swiss philanthropist and art collector Maja Hoffmann.​

In Her Own Words: “Hotel Le Cloitre in Arles is one of Maja Hoffmann’s hotels, cleverly and innovatively designed by [French architect] India Mahdavi in the heart of the old town. Every room is different yet comfortable, and the individual qualities are held together by the same materiality and the range of furnishings, all designed by Mahdavi. The service is generous and unpretentious. Writing about it makes me miss spending time in Arles.”

La Colombe d’Or

Location: Saint Paul de Vence, France

Chosen by: Dominic Leong, founding partner, Leong Leong

What to Know: In 1920, Paul Roux opened the café-bar Chez Robinson, which evolved into a legendary hotel where artists (Léger, Matisse, Braque, Chagall) bartered their work in exchange for rooms and meals. The Roux family continues to operate this beloved inn and lovingly maintains its traditional Provençal architecture.

In His Own Words: “Although it was a hotel, it offered all the essential elements of an ideal artist residency—history, seclusion, intimacy, and community—a restorative sanctuary in a stunning setting.”

​Unité d’Habitation

​Location: Marseille, France

Chosen by: Zeina Koreitem, co-founder, MILLIØNS

What to Know: Unité D’habitation by Le Corbusier is a modernist concept of a housing development consisting of 330 units and collective spaces. Although not officially a hotel, a lucky few may have the chance to stay as guests. 

In Her Own Words: “I’ve stayed at the Unité d’Habitation several times, and it was remarkable to get to know local residents who have been living there since the project was completed in 1952. I spoke with retired public school teachers, an electrician, and an épicier in their 80s. Listening to their stories was heart-warming. They spoke of their communal experience: raising their children with their neighbors; hosting cultural events like plays, concerts and collective meals. They spoke openly of their experience as working-class citizens with a good quality of life and a community that cared for their families.”

Johnston Marklee’s Canal House sits on one of Kyoto’s centuries-old cherry-tree-lined canals. Completed in 2021, it embodies the fluid convergence of American and Japanese architectural traditions: where neighboring homes are made with a reverence for wood, the Canal House is built from concrete. Single Yoshino-style windows float below its terraced eaves like moons, each tier buttressed by concrete struts instead of traditional bamboo ones.

Inside, the house revels in itself: each level looks onto a glass-enclosed inner courtyard studded with mossy rocks, while cantilever staircases offer a glimpse at above from below. The house’s street level holds both a two-car garage and a Sukiya-style, wood-panelled tea room.

The phrase “exit through the gift shop” has come to signify the growing commercialization of our museum spaces. Retail pop-ups now cluster near the exits of major exhibitions. Museums face pressure to compete with other forms of entertainment and to find additional income streams beyond donors and admissions. Meanwhile, some galleries are working to turn themselves into leisure or community destinations, complete with restaurants, listening rooms, and libraries. 

Amid these increasingly blurry goals to be omnichannel (something for everyone), the architectural studio Peterson Rich Office (PRO) has emerged as a key force in determining what the spaces where art and commerce collide actually look and feel like. 

PRO was founded by husband-and-wife team Miriam Peterson and Nathan Rich in 2014. (They discussed what starting a studio practice together would look like on their very first date as students at the Yale School of Architecture.) Since then, they have designed Perrotin’s 25,000-square-foot Lower East Side gallery and numerous artist studios. Three recent and ongoing projects—one in Detroit and two in New York—showcase their welcoming and expansive approach to designing cultural spaces. 

In East Detroit, gallery owners JJ and Anthony Curis’s Library Street Collective is transforming several buildings into a cultural campus for a neighborhood lacking in investment and attention to infrastructure. PRO took on a core role in converting a Romanesque church into the Shepherd, a space for public exhibitions, a community library, and performances. 

Peterson says the firm loves working in Detroit because it’s a “community that is willing to take risks, and the city provides an accessible feedback loop for helping to make things happen.” While PRO’s interior interventions are rightly praised, their exterior improvements equally stand out. In collaboration with the landscape architect OSD, the firm removed the Shepherd’s black iron fencing, installed new lighting, and landscaped the grounds into a sculpture garden—announcing the area as a creative oasis to passersby.

PRO faced a different challenge in the SoHo neighborhood of New York, where foot traffic often bypassed the MoMA Design Store at Spring and Crosby Streets. The 19th-century cast-iron building is part of a retail empire with a staff team rivaling any mid-size museum. PRO’s task: draw in more visitors and serve as a satellite gateway to MoMA, the Midtown institution welcoming three million annually. 

PRO stripped away old decals, window displays, and drop ceilings, bringing in more light and creating a loft-like space. They reconfigured two corner entrances into one on Spring Street, aligned with the main axis. Peterson aimed to enliven the space and more explicitly link the store to contemporary artists. 

“Foundational to the store’s concept was an idea for a mural at the back wall that would tie the store inextricably to the museum and be visible as a focal point from the street,” Peterson says. MoMA’s decision to commission the artist Nina Chanel Abney for the inaugural mural “was a special coincidence because we’ve been working with her on a few projects and she has become a friend,” she continues.

The fluid co-mingling of galleries, retail, and dining, is what drives PRO’s most ambitious and high-profile commission yet for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The scope of the forthcoming project includes a special exhibition gallery, dining and retail spaces, and a new entrance at 83rd Street. “The project forges new connections across eight different eras of Met construction and engages just about every stakeholder group in the museum,” Peterson explains. “We are juggling multiple stakeholders and agendas, weaving it all together into a new museum experience that will hopefully feel effortless and timeless.” 

To develop its plan, PRO envisioned the Met as a city in miniature, composed of 21 interlocking buildings that house 800 galleries, and mapped out the visitor circulation—which can surge to more than 30,000 a day during holidays—as streets with storefronts. Their new 83rd Street entrance will accommodate the extensive crowds that currently gather on the Met’s front steps and offer a bold, fully accessible gateway to the museum.

With increasingly large-stakes projects, a significant ground-up cultural or civic commission likely isn’t too far off. For her part, Peterson doesn’t mind being called “buzzy”—just “as long as it also means our work will stand the test of time.” 

IN HER OWN WORDS: Miriam Peterson

What was your favorite toy growing up?

To be honest, I have no memory of playing with toys. But I had somewhat of an unusual childhood because I was a very serious ballet dancer. I was cast in my first professional production at 6 years old. And then I was a student at the School of American Ballet here in New York. At that time, it was the 10-year anniversary of George Balanchine’s death and they were reviving several of his ballets, many of which involved children’s roles and Peter Martins was choreographing new ballets that also involved children. So I spent a lot of time at Lincoln Center. Now that I think about it, we played a lot of jacks backstage when we weren’t performing. I wonder if the kids at SAB still play with jacks today—it was pretty old school and analog even back then.

Whose house would you live in (real or fictional) and why?

My own house, but renovated, and it would probably have to be designed by someone else because Nathan [Rich] and I are terrible at making design decisions when we are the architect and the client.  

What is your go-to uniform when you’re powering through a project?

Black Gap jeans, a James Perse T-shirt, Bensimon sneaks, and, if it’s cold, a blazer. I wear that most days. 

Are there any analog materials you return to in spite of the prevalence of new technologies?

Daylight. The oldest, best, and most enduring material! 

Who chooses the playlist in your studio?

Nathan [Rich]! 

What’s a trend in architecture you wish would die out?

Biomimetic design. 

What is one detail of a structure that most people wouldn’t notice, but that you always look to for insight?

Seams in materials—where the limit of a material’s size, its manageable scale or practical weight, requires a seam, and how that’s articulated or subverted, which is not the same thing as a transition between materials. We were in Versailles last spring. I’d never been there before. There is this incredible stone stair, the Escalier des Princes, built in 1672. At the seams in the balustrade, there are metal butterfly-shaped inlays that hold the two pieces of stone together. I’d never seen anything like it before. I think the technical term is an agrafe.

What is the most progressive architectural city you’ve visited?

Detroit. Compared to New York, where there is so much red tape and the cost of doing something out of the box is prohibitively high to most people, Detroiters welcome progressive architectural ideas and it doesn’t need to cost more to achieve them. I love Detroit. 

What is your last source of inspiration that surprised you?

The Escalier des Princes, in Versailles.

In name, the Municipal Arts Society of New York City sounds like it’s from another era. And it is. It was founded in 1893 to beautify New York with public art and, over the past century, has evolved into a juggernaut of advocacy for a more beautiful and livable city. MASNYC helped to create the Landmarks Commission and saved Radio City Hall, Lever House, and Grand Central Station from demolition. 

It was the threat against Grand Central Station that led Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to telephone MAS’s director Kent Barwick in 1975 and ask how she could help. She became the face of the campaign, working in front of the cameras and as a shrewd strategist behind the scenes. She spent two decades as a passionate board member and in 1994, when she died, MASNYC renamed its highest honor, the President’s Medal, to the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (JKO) Medal, recognizing an outstanding citizen who has made an extraordinary contribution to New York.

The Occasion: On Oct. 6, MASNYC celebrated the 2025 JKO Medal Winners, architects Elizabeth Diller and Annabelle Selldorf. These women, who have made their mark in New York and around the world (hello Pritzker Prize!), join an esteemed group of winners including Agnes Gund (2004), Diane von Furstenberg (2011), Candice Bergen (2019), and Yoko Ono (2024).

Diller is a founding partner of Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) and has made an outsize imprint on the city’s cultural landscape with projects like Lincoln Center, the Shed, and the High Line. 

If the High Line is the spine of Chelsea’s reinvention, then the galleries designed by Selldorf Architects—Barbara Gladstone, David Zwirner, and Hauser & Wirth among them—are its ribcage. Selldorf is currently basking in the glow of the celebrated update of the Frick Collection, which reopened to great fanfare this spring. 

The Scene: While the Pool and the Grill at the Seagram Building is a gala hotspot for New York’s glitterati, the location holds an extra special place for this year’s JKO Medal Dinner. The tower designed by Mies van der Rohe and the restaurant interiors by Phillip Johnson both gained landmark status in 1989. DS+R made the tower’s basement the coolest place to be seen a decade later, when they turned the Brasserie into a movie set, complete with video monitors surveilling guests, projections, and lots of structural glass. Then, when the landlord, Aby Rosen, needed to update the Four Seasons Restaurant in 2016, he called upon Selldorf Architects to oversee the meticulous renovation.

The Crowd: A who’s who of the architecture and design worlds. Guests included Bloomberg administration power brokers Dan Doctoroff and Amanda Burden; curators Roselee Goldberg and Paola Antonelli; Beatrice Galilee, founder of the World Around; Tina Vaz, newly appointed director of MTA Art and Design; and architects Charles Renfro, Vishaan Chakrabarti, and Hashim Sarkis.

Soundbites: “If I told you how long I have lived in New York, I’d have to kill you! This city matters, it’s my home… a kinship that was born from my first renovation projects for individuals to larger projects that connect all of us.” – Annabelle Selldorf

“Culture is in perpetual flux….change has never been faster, architecture has never felt slower to respond. The discipline itself needs a redesign and we are hoping to do that with my colleagues. The preservation of New York’s identity and its civic values is a shared responsibility amongst us all.” – Elizabeth Diller

Wilson W. Smith III is Nike’s best-kept secret no more. Those in the know have often described him as the Jackie Robinson of the athletic footwear industry: the company’s first Black designer, who created shoes for the likes of Michael Jordan, Andre Agassi, Roger Federer, and Serena Williams.

The athletic footwear industry is notoriously tightlipped, fiercely guarding trade secrets and top talent. But after a 41-year run at Nike, Smith retired this winter and is seizing the moment to reflect on his career, giving one of his first interviews to CULTURED. 

Born and bred in Oregon, Smith graduated with a degree in architecture from the University of Oregon and began his career at the Portland office of the architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. After being laid off in 1983, he interviewed with U of O alumnus and Nike corporate architect Tinker Hatfield. After spending two years designing showrooms, stores, and offices for the company, he followed Hatfield into shoe design in 1985. 

There were no wrong moves in the ’80s and ’90s for Nike—Jordan was signed in 1984, ad agency Wieden and Kennedy coined the phrase “Just do it” in 1988, and, in 1990, Nike moved into their World Headquarters and launched their first immersive retail environment, NikeTown, in downtown Portland. In the ensuing decades, Nike has dominated the categories of running, basketball, and American football. And Smith made his name designing shoes for some of the biggest tennis stars in the world. 

During the inaugural Sneaker Week in August, the Portland Art Museum hosted a celebration honoring Smith. We were introduced and later sat down for a conversation exploring the intersection of architecture and sneakers.

What was your favorite toy growing up?

I drew a lot of pictures and played with building blocks. When I was 5, my mom said I should be an architect because architects make a lot of money. [Laughs] She didn’t want me to be a starving artist nor squelch my love of design and curious nature, so architecture from grade school to college became my North Star.

What is one of your earliest architectural projects for Nike?

Tinker [Hatfield, Nike’s corporate architect] designed the Nike 1984 Olympics Store in Westwood, Los Angeles. One of the main elements was a huge swoosh crashing through the front facade. On the odd day that it would rain in LA, water would trickle down the swoosh and into the store. I developed a gutter for the swoosh, a clear plastic sheath that captured the run-off. I got a couple of trips to LA for that!

What Nike project was a game-changer for you personally?

In 1984, I designed a new retail concept that Nike named the “factory store.” The very first one was in North Portland, a vibrant Black neighborhood. No one had invested in this area, and Nike set its intentions on building community by hiring from the community and creating neighborhood initiatives. I detailed a lot of odd angles for the interior, and I recall founder Phil Knight attending the opening to cut the ribbon. At that time, the significance was lost on me, but today there are hundreds of Nike Factory Stores around the world, and I’m proud of my contribution.

Was it easy to pivot from architecture to shoe design?

In 1986, I was called into a back room, and thought I was going to be laid off. Instead, they said, “Do you want to design shoes?” and I said, “I’ve always wanted to design shoes!” I had never considered designing shoes. I was a snobbish architect, and architecture was considered the highest form of design expression. But sitting next to Tinker, an architect who was so adept and thorough, he saw it as a practice of designing homes for the feet, shoes were like little buildings. And it was a revelation that I was as fulfilled designing shoes as I was designing buildings.

Are athletic shoes overdesigned today?  

Your question reminds me of what a good friend, a pastor, said to me: “When I heard you and Tinker, two architects, were starting to design shoes, I thought shoes were going to get complicated.” When design prioritizes style over story and style over performance, we lose something. For me, the best architecture is one that is attached to function and context, and so it is with footwear design.

Our feet represent the place where our body meets the earth. And this is the point where you need to identify all the forces in your movements in the sport. It’s a sacred design opportunity, but also we have to get out of the way and let the foot be the foot.

You’ve had a long chapter designing shoes for the GOATs of tennis. How did that come about?

I grew up playing basketball and loved tennis in college. At one point, management offered me the opportunity to help lead tennis or basketball, and basketball was well established, arguably Nike’s second most important category after running. Running is the heart of Nike, and basketball is the soul. Basketball was a big deal with a lot of eyes on it. Tennis—there was less pressure. And honestly, a Black guy doing a basketball shoe felt expected. Moving into the tennis world was an opportunity to bring some diversity into a sport that lacked it.  

​My goal was to become Mr. Tennis, and I found a world of joy in building relationships with Andre Agassi, Pete Sampras, Mary Joe Fernández, Monica Seles, and Mary Pierce.

You had a deep design run with Agassi. What was that like?

From 1994 to 2001, I designed a shoe for Andre every six months, a collection of 15 or more shoes. It’s fun to develop a storyline from one shoe to the next, and we were always trying to bring to light something Andre was into, as well as a new performance insight. And we discussed beauty and the shoe; ultimately, beauty needs to perform.

If shoes are little buildings, you designed a skyscraper for Serena!

Serena is wonderful, and she helped build a new era, a new evolution for Nike. [The largest building at Nike HQ is named after her.] I met her in October 2003, and she signed with Nike in December of that year. We had 10 months to design a shoe for her to debut at the 2004 U.S. Open. I asked my boss, Mark Parker [who became CEO in 2012 and retired in 2020], what he would do differently when designing for Serena. He suggested letting her sense of fashion fuel the performance design—make that the innovation. 

Over the winter months, Serena was always wearing boots, and I said, “What about a tennis boot?” She signed up for the concept and then I took the sketches to the Nike Sports Research Lab. Sure enough, they were also interested in a tennis boot. We treated the boot as a long sock with a bottom stirrup, which warms up her calf muscles to prevent cramping, mimicking a compression sleeve that can be easily zipped off.

And the Serena boot becomes infamous. Why?

It’s a nighttime session, and Serena walks out in the Arthur Ashe Stadium in a Nike-designed denim tennis skirt—channeling Agassi—a studded tank top, and a pair of black boots. The cameras are flashing like she’s on a Paris runway. Tournament officials deemed them too dramatic to be worn during matches, so she warms up in them, zips them off, and goes on to crush her opponent. Later that evening on ESPN’s SportsCenter, Serena and the boots are featured, and the next day, on USA Today’s front cover, in the upper left-hand corner, there was a close-up of the boots. Our takeaway: Serena had the ability to tell stories and influence culture way beyond the sports world.

With the growing popularity of hip hop and basketball, collecting sneakers became a trend during the 1980s. Some say it was legendary DJ and basketball enthusiast Bobbito Garcia who coined the word “sneakerheads.” What’s your role in this cultural phenomenon?

I surfed the wave of Nike’s culture, starting as an architect, and became a storyteller. Later in my career, I was a key team member of the Department of Nike Archives (DNA) and at one point, my title included the word “sneaker” in it. I was initially taken aback; the word “sneaker” felt informal, but really, it’s a cultural concept. Sneakerheads are kids who grow up loving the stories around each release and how it connects to their own journeys. As an older person, they can actually afford sneakers, collect them, and it’s a nostalgic connection.

Do you collect anything?

Besides pounds? On a more serious note, I never had my own children, but I’ve taught hundreds of students over the past 15 years. Not so much a collection, but rather a collective where I can be an inspiration and share my experiences to help empower the next generation of visionary designers.

Few buildings are immortalized in literature quite like the barn. One beloved contribution to the genre is Charlotte’s Web. In the 1952 children’s book, E.B. White chronicled the unexpected friendship that blossoms between a spider and a pig as the arachnid’s life cycle comes to an end, forever epitomizing the barnyard’s function as a space of nostalgia. Off the page, the barn’s unpretentious aesthetic codes have been consistently co-opted in restaurants, retail spaces, and museums as a shortcut to making people feel at home.

How did we get there? The barn typology as we know it emerged during the Middle Ages, with a central passageway for wagons typically flanked by two aisles of bays. These purpose-built structures evolved to house livestock, farming equipment, and crops. Barns developed to include ingenious features like pitched gable roofs that mitigated snow and rain runoff while creating loft space for additional storage. Others were partially subterranean, allowing storage of potatoes and ice at a consistent temperature year-round.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, English- and Dutch-style barns were farmstead mainstays across the state of New York, from the wooded regions upstate down to the tip of Long Island. Before it was the summer destination it is today, the East End’s thousands of acres of farmland were dedicated to the cultivation of corn, potatoes, and cauliflower. That began to change in 1870, when the Long Island Railroad added a Sag Harbor station, ushering in a new wave of development that would transform the region. Over the last 150 years, farming has maintained a modest foothold in the Hamptons, alongside a burgeoning number of vineyards that have sprung up since the ’70s.

Given this rich agrarian history, it’s no surprise that the Hamptons have adopted the barn silhouette as the mascot of their architectural offerings. In many regional riffs on the humble structure, one recognizes a sense of reverence. The Parrish Art Museum, founded in 1898, was originally located in Southampton in a stately Italian Renaissance Revival–style building designed by Grosvenor Atterbury. In 2005, the institution purchased a 14-acre site in Water Mill, commissioning the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron to design a structure with a twin-gabled roof, extruding the barn-like facade to a length of 615 feet. The minimalist shed—with its airy ceilings and luminous gallery spaces—acknowledges the Hamptons’s pastoral beginnings as well as the vital role artists have played in shaping the region’s culture. (There’s also a sense of irony in the barn’s architectural legacy out East—last year, The New York Post ran a story with the headline “Historic Bridgehampton potato barn transformed into artists’ sanctuary lists for $4.45M.”)

As the barn typology is adapted to unexpected ends in the Hamptons, one question persists: To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, when is a barn is a barn is a barn? Here, CULTURED’s contributing architecture editor spotlights four local case studies that have withstood the test of time.

Sayre Barn, Southampton

This colonial barn was built in 1739 and purchased in 1826 by Isaac Sayre, a hotshot whaling captain whose family owned the farm for over a century. Situated at the intersection of ancient trade routes that remained active until the first half of the 1900s, the barn’s exterior was often covered in flyers for traveling circuses, missing criminals, trade store sales, and community events, earning it the nickname Billboard Barn. By the 1930s, ownership transferred to the Dimon family, who added two display windows and converted the barn into an antique store that they dubbed “the most attractive shop on the Atlantic Seaboard.”

In 1954, the family donated the Sayre Barn to the Southampton Historical Museum, located down the road on Meeting House Lane. The barn’s transfer was made possible by laborers who wedged rounded logs underneath the building and literally rolled the structure to its new address, where it took on a new name to reflect its new role: the Old Country Store. In 2008, the deteriorating barn was deemed a hazard and closed to the public. A fundraising campaign ensued, and in 2014, the Sayre Barn was meticulously restored using as many of its original materials as possible. Today, it holds a place of pride among the 14 restored historic buildings owned or leased by the museum.

Mulford Barn, East Hampton

The Mulford Farm remained in the family that gave it its name for 10 generations before finally changing hands in 1949. This 1721 building is a powerful example of an early English-plan barn. In 1990, it was recognized as the second most important 18th-century barn in New York State by the State Department of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.

The rectangular form, with its gable roof and lean-to addition, is clad in wooden shingles and was constructed using a typical post-and-beam oak frame with mortise and tenon joints (an ancient interlocking method in which a protrusion from one piece of the wood fits into the socket of another). The Mulford Barn hosted several seasons of performances from the Mulford Repertory Theatre in the early 2010s and is now open to the public as a museum.

Deep Hollow Ranch, Montauk

Established in 1658 and billed as the oldest cattle ranch in the United States—not to mention the birthplace of the American cowboy—Deep Hollow Ranch boasts a series of working barns that support a long-standing tradition of cattle and sheep grazing. The property is surrounded by 3,000 acres of coastal parkland that creates organic boundaries for roaming livestock. Deep Hollow Ranch is open to the public and offers a number of trail rides, including one along the ocean.

The Ranch, Montauk

Across the Montauk Highway is a private property simply dubbed “the Ranch.” Purchased by art dealer Max Levai in 2021, the property features two barns built in the late 1920s by industrialist Carl Fisher, who had grand plans to transform Montauk into the Miami of the North. Ultimately, Fisher’s vision was thwarted when he ran out of money, and the property fell into disrepair.

Levai currently maintains one barn as a stable to breed competitive quarter horses. He refurbished the second barn using only natural materials found on the property, leaving the exterior untouched. Levai has used the 2,500-square-foot galleries to exhibit work by contemporary artists, including Daniel Lind-Ramos, Donna Dennis, and Jamian Juliano-Villani.

Alesch also presents a 21st-century interpretation of a historic botanical drawing that diagrams two types of apples. The forbidden fruit, cultivated on Long Island since the 17th century, has long captivated the couple’s imaginations—in art and in food. The variation on tarte tatin on the menu of La Mercerie, the French restaurant they founded at the heart of SoHo’s RW Guild, is just one of their tributes to the fruit’s timeless tang.

“The layout [of our Hamptons orchard] was inspired by traditional labyrinth gardens; classical places like the Alhambra in Granada, Spain; and the culinary gardens of Versailles—albeit a rougher, wilder seaside interpretation.”

“The formal garden, for us, serves as a counterbalance to the rambling, mostly native meadows and thickets in the area.”

“Day after day, long into late August, we cruise along the ‘fruit loop,’ collecting armfuls of things to make into other things—completing the circle.”

Time stands still as you pass through the gates of La Pausa.

The idyllic villa dreamt up by Gabrielle Chanel is perched high on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. Built in 1928 by a young architect named Robert Streitz, it was Chanel’s base in the south of France until 1953. That year, she sold La Pausa to a pair of American collectors who would later donate it to the Dallas Museum of Art, until a special opportunity for the house of Chanel to acquire La Pausa arose in 2015.

Over the ensuing decade, longtime Chanel co-conspirator Peter Marino worked under the cover of night to faithfully restore the home to its original state. After consulting a treasure trove of archival images, blueprints, receipts, letters, and other records, the architect worked with the maison’s team, including Head of Heritage Sites Hélène Fulgence to source many of the pieces Chanel had installed in the house at auction, and meticulously reproduced others to exacting detail. “When I am serious about historical restoration, I am deadly serious,” Marino shares. “We were very strict.”

“Peter really wanted it to feel like Gabrielle Chanel had just walked out of the room five minutes ago,” explains Chanel President of Arts, Culture, and Heritage Yana Peel. For her part, Peel is championing Gabrielle’s legacy by way of an impressive string of initiatives including the Next Prize, which awards contemporary artists with 100,000 euros in funding as well as mentorship; the Chanel Culture Fund, which engages in long-term partnerships with cultural institutions across the globe to create programs rooted in innovative thinking; and Chanel Connects, a podcast that brings together creatives across disciplines to connect in conversation (the fifth season, which was filmed at La Pausa, will be released later this fall).

Among these initiatives is also the restoration and stewardship of La Pausa, which will be used as a space for artists and writers to nurture and deepen their practice (later this year, the celebrated critic Merve Emre will lead a retreat). “This is very much a zone of experimentation, a laboratory of ideas, a space artists can use as a canvas they prime for their own endeavours,” adds Peel. “I hope that it will offer [them] the freedom to be audacious and to dare in a world that is full of constraints. We want to champion artists to be able to go further than they can go themselves.”

It is this cross pollination of creative minds, ones who would no doubt be friends of Chanel were she to be alive today, that will illuminate La Pausa in the years to come. To mark its grand reopening, CULTURED selects five meaningful design moments that distill the ethos of the villa—and its new chapter.

The Staircase of Chanel’s Monastic Youth

In constructing La Pausa, it’s clear that Chanel returned to the austere architecture of a youth spent in the Aubazine Abbey in Corrèze. High ceilings, sober furnishings, and cloister-inspired arches abound, and holding court in a corner of the monastic entry hall is a replica of the “monk’s staircase” found at Aubazine. (Mademoiselle Chanel sent Streitz off to Corrèze to study and photograph the original in order to reproduce it as authentically as possible.) The stairs’ beige stone, coupled with the walls’ smooth white plaster and the doorway’s sharp black lines, brings to mind Chanel’s own restrained color palette, design sensibilities, and opinions on how women should dress and be in the world.

Chanel liked to say that she ‘lived on the staircases’ while in the abbey, and it was no different at La Pausa. It was the perfect place to make an entrance and an ideal backdrop for portraits: Archival images show Salvador Dalí and Gala posing on the staircase between Mademoiselle’s cacti plants. The pair were invited by Chanel to take up residency at La Pausa between September and December of 1938 while Dalí produced work for his forthcoming show with Julien Levy in New York. The Spanish artist is one of many renowned creatives who were invited by Chanel over the years to use the home as a place to explore their practices. Others include Paul Morand, Jean Cocteau, Pierre Reverdy, Christian Bérard, and Luchino Visconti.

The Wood-Paneled Library 

English wood oak panels line the walls of La Pausa’s library in the tradition of great Scottish castles, the inspiration for which is said to have come from Chanel’s companion, the 2nd Duke of Westminster. During the restoration the panels were gingerly removed from the walls to be sent to a workshop not far from the villa, upon which the markings from the original fabricators, Maison Jansens, were found, confirming the panels’ originality. Maison Jansens fabricated not only the wood paneling for La Pausa but library furniture as well, designing stretches of horizontal shelves that could house some 2,000 books on either side.

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The Use of Symbolism 

By the time Chanel came across the olive groves of La Pausa, she had built her empire, but never a home of her own. She wanted to tailor it to her sensibilities and infuse it with a sense of self; the villa would be a place where, finally, she aligned with the landscapes, sights, smells, and surrounding environment. It is not surprising, then, that the designer imbued it with her favored symbols. Just above the entrance to the home are five black iron frame windows, lined neatly in a row. Five was of course a sacred number for Chanel, who also made sure there were five tiers to the golden chandelier that hangs a few feet away. Other motifs include the surrounding cloisters’ smooth paved square stones, which evoke the classic quilted pattern of the maison, and the golden star and feather Chanel affixed above her bed, symbols which featured heavily in her 1932 Bijoux de Diamants collection.

Pops of Color in the Salon

The drawing room is one of the only places at La Pausa where color crops up, with hues of violet and dusty rose found in the carpets and sofas and contrasting the otherwise dark woods of the Baroque furniture Chanel favored. In pouring over archival materials, Marino discovered a letter written by Visconti recounting the room’s colors and floral motifs, which proved instrumental in recreating its woven Spanish and Persian rugs and plush sofas as the black and white photographs of the time cast doubt as to Chanel’s chromatic choices.

It was here that Chanel and her guests would gather after dinner—served buffet-style, Chanel was an unfussy host. They would roll up the rugs, push the furniture aside, and dance well into the evening as Misia Sert, a talented pianist and a dear friend of Chanel, sat at the Steinway.

As a host, Chanel had one rule: You didn’t have to dress up, but you had to be interesting, and interested. “You’ll see that there are no pictures on the wall; she did not collect pictures, she did not collect art—she collected artists,” says Peel. Indeed, Chanel was far more invested in creating a space for artistic exchange and experimentation than a gallery of greats.

The Untamed Gardens

If wheat was 31 rue Cambon’s emblem, lavender is La Pausa’s. At the villa, Chanel kept the doors open to let the wind bring in the herb’s hypnotic scent. The designer is said to have been among the first to properly cultivate lavender, and was particular with her gardener about a gentle maintenance schedule—she never wanted the patches to look too coiffed. Marino echoes Chanel’s predilection for wildness: “She didn’t want something that was fussy,” he says. “What appealed to her, apparently, was the natural beauty of it, not the fake planted English gardens with purple, pink, and white.” Indeed, Chanel was so taken by the landscape’s “natural” state that she instructed Streitz’s team to build around the landscape so as not to disturb it. (It is said that during construction, Jean Cocteau would stay on the property and act as a sort of guardian, keeping Chanel up to date on the progress while she attended to business in Paris). Today the terrain’s unsubdued spirit lives on, eagerly awaiting the next generation of creative renegades to inspire.

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Despite their different media of choice, artist Sarah Meyohas and architect Ben Dobbin begin their projects from the same place: imagining what a person will behold when they first approach the work.

For Dobbin, lead of the Foster + Partners San Francisco office, that vista tends to feature a looming facade encountered from the sidewalk—among them, Silicon Valley’s Apple Park and Vivaldi Towers in Amsterdam. Lately, though, he’s engaging the built environment on a more modest scale, partnering with The Dalmore, a nearly 200-year-old distillery in the Scottish Highlands. The new collaboration introduces the third masterpiece in the Luminary series and yielded a sculptural display for the presentation of two rare bottles of 52-year-aged whisky, one of which was auctioned at Sotheby’s last month. Dobbin’s creation is complemented by a strictly limited 20,000-bottle run of a 17-year-aged single malt sold in a bespoke case inspired by his work.

This recent turn to the sculptural brought Dobbin into a dimension with which Meyohas—whose conceptual practice dissects the impact of new technologies across film, cryptocurrency, holograms, and more—is familiar. Recently, the artist, whose work has been shown at institutions including New York’s New Museum and London’s Barbican Centre, veered into the architectural realm herself, to remarkable effect. She installed a meandering wall at the Desert X biennial in the Coachella Valley this past spring and served as an executive producer on last year’s Oscar-winning drama, The Brutalist, about a fictional architect.

These experiences have only deepened Meyohas’s inquiries into the ways we perceive and give meaning to space—whether virtual or physical. Here, she joins Dobbin to compare notes on their complementary practices: the light it casts, the people who engage with it, and most importantly, how it feels to bring a heady concept to life.

Sarah Meyohas: I’m excited to talk to you. I may be an artist, but architecture is calling me in multiple ways.

Ben Dobbin: I was watching your film Cloud of Petals. What inspired you to choose the Bell Labs building as the environment for that?

Meyohas: Bell Labs still holds this mythic weight in the tech world. I created that piece because I was so inspired by the grandness of that space. I don’t often walk into office buildings that have such a large atrium—it lifts your gaze upwards like it’s a cathedral. I’m very curious how you think about designing spaces.

Dobbin: That [taste for a] big central space and corporate messaging has evolved. Now people want impact, but also softness. They want multidisciplinary spaces where many things happen at once. I’d love to reinvent that building.

“There’s a connection between making film and making architecture. Both involve experiential storyboarding: What do you first see? What’s the next revelation? And the next?” —Ben Dobbin

Meyohas: Are there spaces you’d love to design but haven’t found a client for?

Dobbin: There’s a perception we only do big things—and we do—but we also just finished two very intimate restaurants in Tuscany. We have to maintain the discipline of working at the human scale, and that comes down to thinking about experience. There’s a connection between making film and making architecture. Both involve experiential storyboarding: What do you see first? What’s the next revelation? And the next? What if you came by foot, or off the bus, or were the executive, or the chef? We imagine those people’s movements. Architecture is shaped through these little paths and perspectives.

Meyohas: That makes so much sense. I recently did a piece for Desert X—a sinuous, serpentine wall with large reflectors that cast light onto the surface. For me, both filmmaking and art-making begin with an obsession over light. When Desert X invited me, I asked, “What are our constraints? How big can we go?” From there, I leave room for experimentation. That’s the gift of being an artist.

Dobbin: That sounds familiar. We have more structure due to scale, but we also discover things as we go. Light, color, the way vegetation reflects or filters light—it all brings buildings alive. It’s never too late to adjust and refine. Your holograms are amazing. They have a kaleidoscopic effect—almost cubist. What links the holograms to the ribbon in the desert, to the petals in the A.I. generation? How would you describe the thread that connects them?

Meyohas: I am the thread. The link between the ribbon in the desert and the holograms is much clearer—it’s light reflecting off a surface. Light is a really good material for me because it combines the spirit—something metaphysical, transcendent—with a real, scientific entity that I can play with. These media help me turn light into something extraordinary. And they require physical presence. Now, I’m working on more film, more sculptures. I actually designed a bottle, too.

“Light is a really good material for me because it combines the spirit— something metaphysical, transcendent—with a real, scientific component that I can play with.” —Sarah Meyohas

Dobbin: Oh? What was ironic about The Dalmore project was that, at first, we thought it might be a bottle. In the end, it turned out to be everything but the bottle, which I quite liked, because the spirit itself was left pure. It’s celebrated by all that surrounds it. What kind of bottle did you design?

Meyohas: That’s the thing—no one called me up! So I designed a bottle for myself. It’s meant to be cast glass. The patterns on it aren’t bold—they’re very soft. I’ve been writing and thinking a lot about perfume, which was the connection. But similar to you, I’m not interested in creating a scent itself—I’m only interested in the vessel. If someone wants a bottle, I’ve got a great one.

Dobbin: Outside of your own discipline, where do you look for inspiration?

Meyohas: Right now, I look to neuroscience. I’ve been spending a lot of time in San Francisco and have become friends with some extraordinary scientists and founders. Neuroscience is so interesting because it’s focused on perception—the link between what we see and how we understand it—and consciousness.

Dobbin: One of the cool things about being an architect is that you’re constantly working across professions. If you work for a dentist, you have to think like a dentist. If you’re working for a tech company or an industrial design company, you start to understand what motivates them. When you work with scientists, you rub up against them. You’re always learning. Every time you’re exposed to something new, it’s a new set of fingerprints on your brain.

Ben Dobbin’s Luminary No.3 Rare Sculpture joins Luminary No.1 and No.2 in the galleries at V&A Dundee. See here for more information.

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