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“If the work is personal and has a narrative, it’s so much more interesting.”
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| Unpacking the Art Inside Meta’s New Manhattan Office
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Tech companies can be notoriously tight-lipped about the goings-on in their headquarters, but Meta is eager to keep all eyes on the art adorning its forthcoming office in New York City’s James A. Farley Building. The landmark Beaux-Arts structure, which leased space to the Facebook parent company in 2020, is also home to the city’s main United States Postal Service branch and the gleaming new Moynihan Train Hall, a light-filled transit hub home to public artworks by luminaries like Kehinde Wiley and Elmgreen & Dragset.
Meta’s new office picks up right where Moynihan left off, infusing three lobbies and a central atrium across 700,000 square feet with ambitious site-specific artworks by such emerging and established artists as Baseera Khan, Liz Collins, and Matthew Kirk. Each piece responds to the site’s history, paying tribute to the Indigenous communities and natural landscapes that inhabited the space long before a building ever stood there. “The commissions for the Farley Building are some of our most ambitious to date,” says Tina Vaz, head of arts activation arm Meta Open Arts, noting how several of the artworks will be on view to the public.
Since rebranding from Facebook Open Arts this year, Meta Open Arts has been busy securing high-profile partnerships in the cultural realm with ICA San Francisco, the New Museum’s New Inc. incubator, and Rashaad Newsome’s Assembly installation at the Park Avenue Armory. The program was initially founded as a residency that tapped artists to create work for Meta’s headquarters, but soon evolved into a collaborative effort between artists and product teams to infuse the company’s suite of social media apps—Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp—with experiential artworks.
Below, all the art in Meta’s new office:
| |  | Branching throughout a four-story skylit atrium is Timur Si-Qin’s monumental Sacred Footprint, an arboreal suspended sculpture based on the Tree of Life. To create the piece, the German and Chinese-Mongolian artist 3D-scanned vulnerable tree species in the Catskills and Adirondacks and composed them into digital models. He translated them into a physical sculpture through 3D printing, mold-making, metal casting, and painting, shedding light on nature’s majestic details and calling for responsibility toward technology and the environment.
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| |  | Another monumental piece comes courtesy of Baseera Khan, who reimagines the Corinthian column as a symbol of imperialist power. (The columns, originating from the Roman Empire, adorn the facades of government buildings, banks, and museums throughout the Western world.) The hollowed-out structure is wrapped in handmade silk rugs created by artisans in Kashmir, a Muslim-majority disputed territory between India and Pakistan that once fell under the rule of British colonizers. Honoring the traditions of Kashmiri craft, Khan enlarged the patterns onto a hand-painted mural nearby.
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| |  | Despite growing up on opposite sides of the country, artist couple Esteban Cabeza de Baca and Heidi Howard both share a deeply rooted respect for the natural world. It’s evident in the duo’s series of plein air–inspired paintings, Nature Remembers Love, that help bring the main lobby to life. Across multiple canvases, they depict the natural terrain of New York State, rendering mountain vistas, snow-covered trees, fields of flowers, and native wildlife across four seasons and throughout time.
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| |  | Visible to passersby in the Moynihan Train Hall’s waiting area is Liz Collins’ vibrant ode to New York roadways and street signage. The Brooklyn fiber artist mined patterns from the chaotic cityscape to create zigzag-striped textiles created on a Jacquard loom, a 19th-century weaving apparatus considered a predecessor to modern computing. Each pattern adorns padded panels affixed to aqua- and eggplant-colored walls, allowing the Ring Lobby (one of many in the building) to buzz with the city’s undying energy.
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| |  | Matthew Kirk’s “weaving” paintings, two of which adorn the Farley South Lobby, mimic the grid structures of the Navajo rugs of his heritage, but use materials woven through a steel rebar grid as the ground for their hundreds of small paintings. Referencing everything from the Navajo language to superheroes and post-industrial landscapes, the constellation of imagery nods to the Farley Building’s newfound identity as a communication hub.
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| Meet the Founder of the World’s First Decentralized Art Fund
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| Jordan Huelskamp was well-versed in Web3 and its traditional art-world applications before she founded Salon, a pioneering decentralized art fund. The Stanford alumna cut her teeth at Apple and Artsy before going on to launch the fund, which is the first decentralized autonomous organization to use the blockchain to govern its collection of real-world artwork—not NFTs.
“Across the art market, I’m seeing a growing appetite for alternative investment models—companies offering fractionalized ownership of works and a rising demand for digital art, for example,” Huelskamp says. “Salon delivers a new model to grow and diversify an art portfolio while staying grounded in the magic of the traditional art world: personal connection, community, and the joys of living with the works in your collection.”
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| Deux Chats Brings Art Nouveau Elegance to Williamsburg
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When Jon Neidich first laid eyes on an empty Williamsburg storefront’s dramatic arched ceilings, the self-described Francophile was immediately transported to the City of Lights. “I was taken with the original design details and set out to add to, rather than overhaul the space,” the head of Golden Age Hospitality explains, “looking to Paris’s Art Nouveau brasseries, whose interiors have been lovingly layered with new design elements over the years.” So enter Deux Chats, an ornate 60-seat raw bar replete with an easygoing old-world elegance befitting its romantic waterfront location.
Neidich and local designer Xavier Donnelly took cues from famed Art Nouveau mainstays Clown Bar and Julien for interior details, which pay homage to decorative art, Jazz Age illustrations, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novella The Little Prince. They sourced lamp shades from Saint Germain flea markets, outfitted the painted glass tables with classic Thonet bistro chairs, and backdropped the bar with the pièce de résistance—a fanciful hand-painted green-and-yellow tile mural of two cats playing underneath the Manhattan skyline set aglow by a large moon.
There’s no better place to enjoy executive chef Nicole Gajadhar’s grand multi-tiered seafood towers, stuffed with chilled lobster, tuna crudo, and East and West Coast oysters—all of which are available à la carte—or beverage director Ashley Santoro’s boozy concoctions, such as the spicy vodka Kinky Martini, served up in conical glassware by the official glassmaker of the Prince of Wales. “I envision Deux Chats as a place to escape and unwind,” Neidich says. “I hope it functions as both a neighborhood bar and a culinary destination, where you can celebrate with friends and family over a feast of oysters, small plates, seafood towers, and, of course, ice-cold martinis.”
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| | Our weekly roundup of the internet’s most preposterous headlines, from the outrageous to the outright bizarre.
More Than $100M Worth of NFTs Stolen Since July 2021, Data Shows [The Guardian]
Capitol Records Preemptively Cancels AI Rapper FN Meka Over Racist Lyrics [The AV Club]
Garth Brooks’s New Nashville Bar Will Have a Police Station Attached [Eater]
Internet-Famous Erotica Writer Pens New Book About Sentient Lesbian Em-Dash [Input]
The Metaverse Is As Dead As Zuckerberg’s Cartoon Eyes [Fast Company]
Netflix Spent $5 Million to Flawlessly Reproduce the Sistine Chapel. Soon After, the Replica Was Destroyed [Artnet News]
A Preacher Scolded His Flock for Not “Honoring” Him With Luxury Watch [Washington Post]
The Evergreen Tree That Outlasted the Dinosaurs Is Now Endangered [CNN]
Doctors Warn That Scrumptious Instagram Trend Is Giving You Colon Cancer [Futurism]
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| Carpenters Workshop Gallery Settles Into a West Hollywood Warehouse
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| Carpenters Workshop Gallery founders Loïc Le Gaillard and Julien Lombrail have a deep appreciation for adaptive reuse. The esteemed dealer of objets that blur preconceived notions of where design ends and art begins is so named for its first-ever gallery, housed in a former carpentry workshop in London’s tony Chelsea neighborhood. Since then, the gallery has established itself as an industry-leading stronghold of haute artisanry by launching London’s PAD fair and a network of galleries spanning Paris, London, New York, and now L.A.
With an inaugural exhibition by Spanish sculptor Nacho Carbonell, Carpenters Workshop’s long-awaited presence in L.A. is officially here. The gallery joins the likes of Lisson, Sean Kelly, Pace, The Hole, and Maccarone in bringing the blue-chip scene to West Coast–based collectors. Le Gaillard and Lombrail enlisted local firm Standard Architecture, which designed Pace and Maccarone’s L.A. outposts, to transform a former West Hollywood warehouse into a pristine environment befitting the gallery’s roster of collectible design objects—and the discerning sensibilities of the city’s burgeoning collector scene.
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| ICYMI: Architects Can Do More to Prevent Bird Deaths. Why Aren’t They?
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On a brisk fall morning this past September, Melissa Breyer was conducting routine collision monitoring at the World Trade Center for NYC Audubon, a grassroots nonprofit that works to protect wild birds across the five boroughs. What the Treehugger editorial director found shocked both her and her Twitter followers: nearly 300 bird carcasses littered the plaza surrounding the glassy buildings. Harrowing footage shows her picking up and bagging the birds’ lifeless bodies, strewn just feet away from each other. It’s not easy to look at—nor is an image of the carcasses neatly arranged in rows by species.
Glazed and mirrored buildings account for one billion deaths of birds in the U.S. each year. In the eyes of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), architects are largely to blame. Birds can easily mistake glassy reflections for open skies, or become disoriented and lured off their migratory paths by interior lighting that shines through them after dark. According to the National Audubon Society, these fatalities account for two to nine percent of all birds in North America in any given year. Building strikes are one of biggest threats to avian populations, second only to feral cats.
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Reach the design world every morning. Find out more about advertising in the Design Dispatch.
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| Member Spotlight:
Il Bisonte
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| Il Bisonte is a high-quality Florentine brand that has been crafting bags and accessories in leather and fabric for the past five decades exclusively in Tuscany. These products express a style immune to market-driven conventions and fleeting seasonal trends. The brand can be found on four continents and in the most important global cities (Tokyo, Florence, Rome, Milan, Paris, New York, Sydney, Taipei, and Seoul), and is distributed in more than 30 countries.
| Surface Says: With their impeccable craftsmanship and hyper-local artisan supply chain, Il Bisonte’s stylish wares are instant heirlooms.
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| Today’s Attractive Distractions
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Microsoft never imagined its insufferable paperclip assistant would live on.
The retired Nike Vapor shoe is storied among tennis stars—and won’t die.
Vending machines now sell everything from eggs and underwear to pizza.
This new video game will put the knowledge of art history buffs to the test.
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