INFLUENCES
Inspiration
INFLUENCES
Photographed by Irving Penn, Vogue, 1993.
REI KAWAKUBO
Avant garde designer
Rei Kawakubo and I share birthdays! She and her creations have been integral to my love and appreciation of design and Japanese culture as concepts, for example, Boro, the sustainable no-waste patchwork of 19th-century peasants. Seeing Kawakubo’s ability to transform the familiar anew, both visually and as an antagonist of established norms, with a remarkable measure of elegant chaos, arrived early in my naiveté and has continued to inform and inspire me for many years.
At the launch of her SS21 Homme Plus collection, Kawakubo explained that the she was inspired by the metallic materials she uses in interior design, and expressed, “It is my wish that the strength of metal, the strength that wouldn’t yield to any pressure or force, and the strength that will give birth to hope…to overcome the various hardships that we now face, will overlap in this collection.”
- Tiffinee
RICHARD NEUTRA
Architect
Photo, Neutra House interior, captured April 2022, T. Harmon.
Fascinating information has been researched and distilled on the subject of the psychological implications and advancement of architectural design. Can architecture influence well-being? Yes, it can! There is renowned physical evidence that embodies and supports the research and the notion of the biological power of architecture. The purpose of architecture goes well beyond logistics, ornamentation and protection from the elements. There is a responsibility as an architect to stimulate the end-user, hopefully to an enriching end; to what degree they advance this ideal in the design is up to the architect/designer. An exemplary contribution to this theory is the home built by Viennese-American Modernist architect Richard Neutra (1892 - 1970) and Neutra’s holistic purpose.
In 1932, Neutra designed and built a home for his family as a living laboratory to study the biology of how humans respond to architecture with the intention to show that a restriction of space doesn’t have to equate to a restriction of well-being. Neutra’s focus for an enhanced well-being within a small footprint was to establish a sense of expansiveness by bringing the outdoors to the interior while simultaneously providing total privacy. Neutra named the project “The Van der Leuw Research House” in homage of Dutch theologian and historian, Gerard Van der Leuw, who helped fund the project. The home, now known as the “Neutra VDL House”, sits in the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles in perfect preserved antiquity of Neutra’s life (Neutra and Neutra).
Neutra’s hallmark of bringing the nature of the outdoors inside while maintaining privacy sounds simple, but it is quite exceptional in the way he did it. His use of mirror and glass and planar ingenuity is a mindbender! - Tiffinee
READ MORE of Tiffinee’s academic Art Review of the Neutra VDL House published in May 2022.