Sloft Edition 08

Capturing space

In this eighth bilingual French-English issue:

• 8 Exclusive Home Tours
  

Whether in Tokyo, Madrid, or Paris, our latest crop of interiors defies the growing uniformity of urban landscapes by affirming their uniqueness. Indeed, a new kind of financialized architecture is “smoothing out” buildings to make them “exchangeable,” like assets in a portfolio. This sweeping trend further anonymizes territories by pushing out what is specific. It dilutes our points of reference—something that the sporadic creation of a few large-scale “landmark” projects cannot fully offset.
What if the antidote to our external disorientation lies in the creation of singular interior worlds? Like the bold combination of materials, colors, and patterns in designer Pia Chevallier’s apartment? Or the radical functionality of Eduardo Mediero’s flat in Madrid?

• Our First “Fashion Feature,” combining a literary reflection with a fashion series

Another remedy for the vanishing feeling of the urban landscape may lie in the notion of scale. In a time that values ever-larger dimensions, it seems illusory to grasp an entire city, palace, village - or even a holiday home - in one go. Places must be revisited endlessly to recall their features, their unique geography. At best, we retain sensations, fleeting impressions. Dwellings that are too large slip away, living their own still, indifferent lives the moment their inhabitants turn their backs. This is the experience Ulysse Josselin recounts in "The Haunting”.

• An Interview with the artistic duo Xolo Cuintle
  

And yet, in the end, it is the settings that remain when we are gone. Concrete settings that might have expelled us for good? That’s the universe Romy Texier and Valentin Vie Binet develop as the duo Xolo Cuintle. They see concrete—their material of choice—as a kind of barrier between nature and humanity, sanitizing and controlling the environment. To them, it is a material that stifles the surface and blocks dialogue. At a time when architecture is shifting toward more natural building methods, they seek to restore its roots, to inject the organic—as if to conjure it, to re-anchor it in connection with the human. Fascinating.

Eclecticism, poetry, art, escapism, beauty and good ideas are definitely not a function of square metres!