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CONTENTS

The Porter Words John Pawson, Cillian Murphy, Thomas Bolger, Reiss Smith, Billie Muraben, Hannah Williams, Dan Crowe, Thea Hawlin, Megan Logue, Alex Doak, George Upton, Martine Assouline, Francesco Panella

43 Maya Hawke The free-spirited rising star of screen and airwaves strides out in Manhattan Words Claire Marie Healy Photography Clément Pascal 36 38 40

Contributors Out-Take Editor’s Letter

The lovely people who helped make the issue Introducing Maya Hawke

Life Must Be Lived as Play – Plato Photography Yiorgos Kaplanidis Styling Alex Petsetakis

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Edward Norton Words Matthew Specktor Photography Tom Craig Styling Dan May

Photography Name Surname

P H OTO G R A P H Y BY ZO Ã‹ G H E RT N E R

N O C TA M B U L E BY KO N STA N T I N G R C I C

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Photography Name Surname

CONTENTS CONTENTS

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43 138

Land of Giants Photography Frédéric Lagrange Styling Dan May

Italo Lupi At home with the irreverent icon of Italian graphic design Words Francesca Picchi Photography Alessandro Furchino Capria

90 116 122 150 172

Against the Grain Words George Kafka Footprints Photography and set design Anaïck Lejart The Autumn/Winter Collections Photography Frankiewicz & Rozniata Maya Hawke Blue Pearl Photography Josh Hight The free-spirited rising star of Leaves to a Tree Words George Upton screen and airwaves strides out in Manhattan Words Claire Marie Healy Formafantasma Photography Clément Pascal Exploring the possibilities

36 38 40

and limitations of design with the Amsterdam-based duo Contributors Words Deyan Sudjic Out-Take Photography Editor’s Letter Renée de Groot

Styling Rose Forde Creative direction and styling Dan May Photography Paul McLean

The lovely people who helped make the issue Introducing Maya Hawke

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Edward Norton Words Matthew Specktor Photography Tom Craig Photography Name Surname Styling Dan May

Photography Ilyes Griyeb

McCarren Park A portrait of a park Words and photography Ramak Fazel

Life Must Be Lived as Play – Plato Photography Yiorgos Kaplanidis Styling Alex Petsetakis

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PORTER 01

A PLACE TO HANG YOUR HAT By John Pawson. Remembering the writer Bruce Chatwin

I was studying at the Architectural Association in London when I first met Hester [van Royen], an art dealer who would become my first wife. She lived in the flat next to mine, and one day, when I was locked out, I had to climb across her balcony. I ended up doing her flat, knocking through the walls myself. She was renting the place and so of course the landlord kicked us out, but it was my first proper foray into architecture. Bruce Chatwin – who was friends with Hester – saw it and asked me to do his own tiny flat at the top of an old apartment block in Belgravia. Bruce was quite specific. He wanted somewhere light and airy that he could lock up and leave, somewhere he could ‘hang his hat’, as he said. It was to be spacious and minimally appointed but the few possessions he brought with him were exquisite: a sofa made for the empress Marie-Louise; a birchwood table and stool, designed by Alvar Aalto; a hanging of parrot feathers from the back wall of a Peruvian sun temple – every object had a story. Whether it was exaggerated or even made up was irrelevant to me. He was a storyteller, and you treasured every moment you had with him. Looking back, I’ve realised I’ve learned more from my clients than I’ve been able to give, and it’s especially true with Bruce. He was a great writer, of course, but he was also approachable and generous. He gave me a leg up when I was just starting out, and when he came to write about the flat I had designed for him, he articulated what it was I was trying to do. It gave me confidence. When I did the minimum, a lot of my ideas came from Bruce. I miss him. When he fell ill he told everyone that he had an incredibly rare disease, caught from a dead whale on a beach in China. The reality of that disease, which took away so many people so quickly and suddenly, was too awful. You wanted to go along with his version… As told to George Upton John Pawson is an architect and designer 43

THE ViEW FROM THE HiLL By Hannah Williams. Considering the city from one of London’s few successful housing estates

The best view in London belongs to the benches next to the bandstand in the Horniman Museum Gardens, where the concrete folds into the sloping grass. Look northwest and you will see the usual sights – the ice-blue steeple of the Shard rending the clouds; the Walkie Talkie, with its wheezing, asthmatic stoop; the phallic helter-skelter of the Gherkin, all Motorola Razr and hair gel and New Labour. They speak to a kind of noughties excess; a vision of London’s overwhelming desire for power and commerce. Owned by autocratic governments and property conglomerates, occupied by bankers, law firms and luxury restaurants, they are strange and foreboding, boasting of their domination to the skies of the City. It’s easy to feel angry when you see those skyscrapers. They make you think of other towers that burned black into the dawn; of people lying on beds of damp cardboard outside the champagne bars and hotels; of the people scraping and slaving to afford rat-infested flats. There has been a 50 per cent increase in homelessness in London since 2010, but there is no regular accommodation available in the Shard or the Walkie Talkie or the Gherkin, and their lights shine throughout the night regardless. The reason the Horniman Gardens offers the best view in London is not due to its panorama of the City and its glass sarcophagi of skyscrapers, but instead the sight that dominates the horizon to the west: Dawson’s Heights. The postwar housing block sits, tumbling, jagged as a loose tooth, on a hill, its sandy exterior a constant against the seasonal affectations of the trees that surround it – blending with the orange-brown foliage of autumn, standing stark against the black ribbons 50

The Porter

of winter, a backdrop to the lush greens of spring and summer. Dawson’s Heights looks modern, space age – more so than any glass and chrome building, blinking wanly in the sun – and yet it is unknowably, incredibly old. Unmistakably human – there is a clear seam of inspiration running from the smooth, ancient rocks of Göreme, through the pitted tuff of medieval Sorano, to the clay of SE22 – it is also oddly organic, as if formed by the snow and water of a distant ice age. Unlike the skyscrapers to the northwest, Dawson’s Heights is entirely residential, built solely to house people: “those in most urgent need of homes”, its architect, Kate Macintosh, told the Guardian. It was designed when she was 27, fresh from working on the National Theatre with its architect Denys Lasdun. The National’s influence is clear – the lines of concrete that should be harsh, discordant, instead arranged into something harmonious. There’s a humanity in the touches that give the National Theatre its warmth – the feathered grain in the walls that comes from the wooden beams used to hold the concrete, the sunlight that reflects off the Thames and spreads through the atrium; never self-conscious, but constantly aware of the reasons for its use, of why and how people need to interact with the space – Dawson’s Heights shares this spirit of generosity towards its inhabitants. It embodies a holistic attitude to architecture; by placing the requirements of its users above other demands, structure and aesthetics are not placed at odds, but as inextricable: flowing and melding, transforming each other. The split levels, growing stalagmite-like out of the trees and the grass and the rock, not only allow it

Photography Sadie Catt

The Porter

to settle into the hill it’s built on, but ensure its acoustics are well balanced; that sound disperses rather than accumulates in one area. It also means that light enters all apartments equally, meaning that even in December the strange grey-yellow glow of the winter sun seeps through the rooms. No one is overshadowed, no one overlooked. Everybody has an outside space, a balcony for plants or bikes or deck chairs. There is a playground, where people from across the local community bring their children. The decline of Britain’s social housing in the wake of Right to Buy is well documented: Estates that once represented a gleaming future, that offered low rents and spacious flats, were suddenly left without funding, pockets sold off as councils scrabbled for money. Even now, with the reappraisal of brutalist buildings and the fight to save social housing, modernist estates are being torn down.

The Heygate Estate in Elephant and Castle, its gargantuan facade the slate grey of London skies, was sold to developers, with existing residents forcibly evicted from their homes. Their compensation was 40 per cent of the market value. All of the new flats built on the site have been sold to foreign investors before they even went on sale to the UK market. Even the ‘success stories’ of social housing have downsides; an average flat in the Barbican estate – vertebrae that reach into the sky, flowers dripping from balconies – now sells for around £1 million. Rejected for listed status, Dawson’s Heights balances precariously in the middle, threatened by, both developers, circling, hungry, and by gentrification that displaces the very people it was built to house. And yet it continues to thrive, still a vision of a better city, a city built for its people. The London we want to look out on. 53

MAYA H

HAWKe THE FREE-SPiRiTED RiSING STAR OF SCREEN AND AiRWAVES

CLAiRE MARiE HEALY AS SHE STRiDES OUT MEETS

iN MANHATTAN

This spread and previous: Top, trousers and boots GIVENCHY

Opposite and next spread: Jumper and leather skirt SALVATORE FERRAGAMO

Maya Hawke likes to walk. Especially, it turns out, when being interviewed. “When I have an interview I have to be walking, otherwise I get too nervous,” she says. If, one afternoon in early September, you were somewhere between Second Avenue and 14th Street, you might have seen the actress walking while on the phone to me (several of her friends did). It reminds her of a ‘walk and talk’ in a movie, she says – a term which sounds best coming from her true-blue throaty New Yorker accent, a voice you would be happy to let wash over you for hours. She was walking, too, when she first heard she had been cast in Stranger Things, “…Through Los Angeles,” she recalls. “I didn't Uber there, because it was too expensive, and I don't know how to drive, so I would just walk everywhere, which takes a long time. I was on one of these two-hour journeys from one audition to another, and I got a call to say that I'd gotten the part.” No one walks in LA, it goes without saying, but, as Hawke quips, “19-year-old New Yorkers do.” The image of the actress commuting on foot to Hollywood auditions speaks to the chilled vibe she has projected since stepping into the public eye, an attitude that feels remarkably contrary to the crowded bunch of other actors on the crest of Generation Z. Though she had a lead role in the BBC’s 2017 adaptation of Little Women (a role she left the Juilliard drama school for), Hawke’s introduction to celluloid stardom proper came this year, via roles in indie disaster movie Lady74

world (think Lord of the Flies with eight teenage girls), and a small but pivotal role as a Linda Kasabian-inspired character, Flower Child, in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. But it’s her casting as Robin in Netflix’s much-loved sci-fi show that has rocket-launched Hawke into the public consciousness. What’s more, despite being new to television’s most obsessed-over ensemble cast, her performance really stuck, making a deeply felt impact among the show’s fandom that has sealed her place as one of her generation’s most exciting actresses. “You know, I wasn't totally sure if I was ready to step into this giant cultural thing, like Stranger Things,” she admits. “But after having met Joe Keery [Steve Harrington] and [show creators] the Duffer brothers… just the energies that they have, and the creativity, and the spontaneity, and the playfulness… I didn't feel like I was doing a giant Netflix behemoth; it felt intimate.” In season three, Robin is introduced as a server at Scoops Ahoy, the shopping-mall icecream joint, where Steve – former arrogant jock turned sensitive fan favourite – is also working for the summer. As the threat of the Mind Flayer returns, Robin, Steve and Dustin (played by Gaten Matarazzo) discover the Russian infiltration of the town and embark on a mission to save Hawkins, America and the world (duh). In a series in which established cast duos spend their time making up and breaking up, the odd-couple of Robin and Steve add much-needed hilar-

ity, and, in the end, tenderness. Hawke’s stubborn and gently self-deprecating Robin hits all the right marks, something that might be down to the work she put in to give the character a vivid off-screen life. “I wrote pages and pages of journal entries about her life,” she describes. “As the seasons progress, I'm sure the Duffer brothers’ vision of her will be different to what I’ve been imagining, but I don't think it matters. What matters is that she felt full. She felt like she had a life outside of monster bashing, and Russian bashing.” In a season of high-speed car chases, interrogation by torture and ambiguously corporeal CGI blobs fit to put you off your morning Eggos, the most moving moment was a conversation between unlikely BFFs Steve and Robin, which takes place in a bathroom stall. “It matters a lot in the long run,” says Hawke of the scene, in which Robin comes out to Steve. “Both to the integrity of a show and the impressions a show makes on its viewers, which are mostly young, and from all over the world and all different political backgrounds: Action is a real uniting force in the world. “It's funny because it doesn't feel that drastic or extreme to me,” she continues, of her rising fame among that fandom. “But I know that if any young person is prepared to handle it, probably it's me, just because of the way I grew up.” Hawke’s parents are actors Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman. They divorced when she was