Through her firm Reddymade Architecture & Design, architect and artist Suchi Reddy has spent the last two decades on the borders between the body politic and the built environment. The author of the book Form Follows Feeling (2019), Reddy’s longtime research into neuroaesthetics informs not only state-of-the-art AI experiments like her 2021 installation Me+You in the rotunda of the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building, but also Google’s earthy entry into New York City’s retail environment.

This spring, she won the Lexus Design Award during Milan Design Week; this summer, her installation Look Here opens in the Great Hall of the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. On the morning of the opening, Reddy sat down for a Zoom with Surface to talk it all over, in a conversation that has been edited and condensed for clarity below.

Describe what you mean by “form follows feeling.”

I’ve had my practice for 21 years, and I’ve now been a New Yorker longer than I’d lived in India. So I’ve gained a perspective on the value of what we do as architects in the world. I have a skill and can use that skill to make people feel good. Feel better. It’s crystallized for me probably in the last decade, in terms of really thinking about how to orient design towards human experience—that’s where things should come from, and I really see it coming with an understanding that empathy, equity, agency, all of these things are important to use as tools.

How has that translated into your practice?

What Reddymade gives you is different every time because I’m not interested in questions of style, particularly. Style is a fine thing to address, but it’s something that comes out of substance. I want each client to feel like the space was made for them, and so the work was about how these sets of people, families, individual people, or companies feel in their space. How do they function and how does their function affect it?

As I started having more perspective on my body of work, it became clear that I needed to be more strident in addressing this with my clients. You’ve got to ask people: Does this actually work for you? That led me to neuroaesthetics. I’m always reading, like, 18 physics books because physics and spirituality have a lot in common—between consciousness, vibration, and quantum entanglement. I’m trying to bring science and data into this idea of feeling and emotion. How does that direct us? My job is to figure it out in the real world.

How did that figure into Look Here?

The [National Building Museum] space is so giant that somebody might feel really small in it, no matter what. As an architect, that’s a challenge. The brief was to explicate architecture and create this kind of wondrous discovery. I love both of those things, but how do you do this?

I started thinking about fractals. In neuroscience there’s a theory that the brain is wired to recognize symmetry—that’s why, when you look at leaves, it’s soothing even if it doesn’t have a symmetrical layout, but because it can be broken down. And the building’s facets could reflect, which meant I could use perspective to understand both the building and life itself. When I did Me+You, I asked people to give me a word for your future; the second they stopped to think, for me, was the piece.

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Pop Up Home, with its treasure trove of antique and contemporary art, vintage furniture, and home accessories, has journeyed around Los Angeles since 2005, cultivating a following of avid aesthetes but lacking a permanent home base. Until now. This summer, the vintage destination founded by Tricia Benitez Beanum has settled into a home of its own, a three-story, 7,800-square-foot showroom in central Los Angeles.

“From a warehouse with no sign, no real store hours, and traveling from place to place hosting activations and pop-ups,” Beanum says, “we’re finally at home.” With a custom cash wrap by local artisan Jason Koharik, and a kitchen and design shop conceived by Faith Blakeney Studio, Pop Up Home is an ideal staging ground for the kinds of vintage finds that have won fans including Tessa Thompson and Zendaya—and new work, curated by UNREPD, a joint venture of Beanum and gallerist Sarah Mantilla Griffin. “We have a place that we created and crafted exactly for our needs, our style, and our community,” Beanum says. And it looks like it’s here to stay.

This week, Brazilian gallery Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel is celebrating its third annual show at Portugal’s Casa da Cultura da Comporta by teaming up with Mexican gallery kurimanzutto. Housed in a converted rice barn planted between fields and water and operated by the nonprofit Fundação da Herdade da Comporta, the exhibition unfolds in two parts. July’s show offers work that weaves natural phenomena with man-made practice, including a limestone Gabriel Orozco sculpture that abstracts the luscious riot of fruit into cool architecture, and a woven planter by Haegue Yang that blurs the boundaries between harvest and harvested.

A second crop of artists arrives on Aug. 5 to explore bodily territories: a piece from Nairy Baghramian’s Beliebte Stellen/Privileged Points series, for example, drips with formal and sensual provocation as it points and curves through space; while a canvas by Márcia Falcão threatens, or promises, to swell into full 3D as it wrestles a characteristically female body into pictorial form. “Fortes D’Aloia x kurimanzutto” runs from July 8–Aug. 31.

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Camille Becerra is joining Ace Hotel Brooklyn as chef-partner, spearheading culinary programming and overseeing menus for As You Are, The Lobby bar, in-room dining, and private events. The former De Maria and Navy chef will collaborate with executive chef Michael King and pastry chef Danny Alvarez, who run the hotel’s daily kitchen operations.

In August, Yasufumi Nakamori will become director of the Asia Society. Most recently a curator of international art at Tate Modern, he succeeds Michelle Yun Mapplethorpe, who departed the New York institution for another role this past June.

Rome’s Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI (MAXXI) has named author Francesco Stocchi as artistic director. He succeeds Hou Hanrou, who oversaw the institution since 2013.

The housing market is facing rising mortgage rates and low inventory—likely due to the profusion of short-term rentals, which outnumber homes for sale in the U.S. by 380,000. A Twitter thread by Nick Gerli, CEO of Reventure Consulting, highlights a potential collapse of the short-term rental market, citing data that shows steep drops in revenue per listing.

Opportunistic landlords would gobble up long-term rentals and convert them into short-term Airbnbs, where a two-night stay may cover its entire monthly rent. But as the market became oversaturated and travelers soured on Airbnb’s exorbitant fees and unpredictability, what once was an absentee landlord’s low-effort cash grab suddenly seems like a riskier proposition.

Last week, the Surf Lodge hosted the inaugural dinner of the Mexican Sobremesa Series, a monthly event with gastronomic concierge consultancy Masediba to show off premier chefs from Mexico. Guests gathered at the buzzy Montauk hotel to enjoy a curated four-course meal of seafood delights and fresh vegetables by chef Guillermo J Goméz, the culinary expert behind Baja California’s sought-after Sage. Each course was paired with ultra-premium Casa Dragones tequila—an ideal pairing to showcase Mexican craftsmanship.

When was it? June 24

Where was it? The Surf Lodge, Montauk

Who was there? Jayma Cardoso, Jordan Carlyle, Tynan Sinks, Alexa Rudolfo, Sedi Sithebe, Todd Touron.

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