Ark Journal / 14

Ark Journal Volume XIV spotlights a quiet yet powerful shift occurring in contemporary architecture and design – a new wave of architects and creatives that seeks not to erase the past, but to build on it. With deep respect for the histories embedded in buildings and honouring local crafts and traditions, they work with, rather than against, existing structures while valuing complexity over uniformity, continuity over rupture.  

In rural France, Pollet Pinet Architectes breathes new life into forgotten buildings, reviving vernacular traditions through local craft and subtle innovation. Step into Nata Janberidze’s apartment in Tbilisi, a powerful blend of history, culture and personal expression. In New York, experience how gallerist Suzanne Demisch and collector Jeffrey Graetsch live in spaces where time is not concealed, but embraced. We visit Bosco Sodi’s house and studios in Mexico that embody the raw synergy between architecture and art, and artist and food visionary Laila Gohar in her New York loft, an interior where creativity, design and storytelling merge. All these spaces exemplify another theme of this edition: home as a place of convergence, where old and new – material and metaphorical, personal and collective – shape who we are.  

Volume XIV, like all issues, travels the world to amplify creative voices: a jeweller in Tokyo who plays with scale and form; a Singaporean artist in Bali who assembles ancient stones into monumental furniture; the daughter of Tapio Wirkkala reminiscences about summers in remote Lapland; a Japanese architect whose works tell unique stories based on location and materials; Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House in Los Angeles, a mythopoetic mashup that became a defining force of regional modernism. 

Our Case Study, shot in the the exposed concrete new headquarters of BIG in Copenhagen, assembles objects fashioned from raw and uncompromising natural materials in sync with the tectonics and aesthetics of their surroundings.  

 

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At Ark Journal we explore the spaces around us, the objects we put in them and the people who make them. Bridging architecture, design and art, we show them as interplay rather than in silos, and with a sense of enduring Scandinavian values and aesthetics. Each issue we visit extraordinary homes around the world that are more than the sum of their parts and that express the personal narratives of the people who live in them, their philosophies and influences.