What’s Happening: In a new book, the rule-breaking British designer scorns drab architecture and pleads for buildings that make people happy. The reality is much thornier.

The Download: Thomas Heatherwick’s latest book is less a shiny monograph and more a passionate screed. Humanise, published last week through Penguin, argues that humdrum architecture starves the soul. “We’re living through a quiet, global catastrophe of boring buildings that make us sick, stressed, and depressed, while simultaneously destroying our planet,” the book’s website reads. Blaming the profusion of stolid structures on a cult of architects brainwashed by modernist orthodoxy, Heatherwick simply argues for a return to joy. For reference, see his firm’s work on Google’s tented Bay View campus, Manhattan’s Instagrammable Little Island park, and Tokyo’s sloping Azabudai Hills development.

Where did architecture’s dance with joylessness come from? The book blames Le Corbusier for convincing a generation of designers to see “beauty in the mind-numbingly boring” and giving birth to a clean-lined, flat-surfaced aesthetic that promised streamlined, sanitary spaces for a world cratered by World War II. Though it was hardly perfect, the movement delivered and continues to inspire swaths of buildings that, Heatherwick argues, are too flat, plain, and anonymous. He has a point, though perhaps it has already been hammered down by Robert Venturi, Antoni Gaudí, and Tom Wolfe. Most new builds in Manhattan are glass-skinned luxury condos and soulless office towers adorned with just enough half-hearted ornamentation and reflective surfacing to ensure they don’t massacre birds. But rarely do they captivate like the Chrysler Building or Grand Central Terminal.

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but money makes the world go ‘round. The beauty championed by Heatherwick often gets jettisoned by developers late in the design process to shave costs and boost profits. It’s not like most architects have room to experiment in the first place—they’re often beholden to strict safety codes and zoning regulations that make any aberrations cost-prohibitive, save for the scant one-offs that garner the most media attention. What remains can feel dull and uninspiring, but as Justin Davidson writes in Curbed, “not every home in 17th-century Agra was the Taj Mahal.” The ideal way forward, Heatherwick argues, is for architects to embrace emotion. His firm developed a “boringometer,” a software tool measuring the visual complexity of architecture based on human responses: frowns, muscles flinching, eyes dilating. Whether it can save him from himself remains to be seen.

In Their Own Words: “Humans are roughly the same size as we were half a million years ago, but buildings have got bigger,” he tells The Guardian. “Modern procurement means bigger pieces of glass, bigger pieces of aluminum. Buildings no longer have a human scale.”

Surface Says: Architects out of touch with human emotion? Sounds familiar.

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As New York’s premier organization for arts education across all ages, the Art Students League has hosted prodigious talents in its atelier throughout its nearly 150-year history. Louise Bourgeois, Ai Weiwei, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Pacita Abad are just a few of the League’s alumni who have gone on to radically influence American Art as we know it. The organization continues to support creative education through scholarships and its Seeds of the League program, which brings arts programming to underserved students in New York.

Surface readers are invited to support these endeavors with their attendance at the Art Students League fall gala on November 6. This year’s benefit honors the organization’s own instructor and painter Larry Poons (work pictured above) and philanthropist Beth Rudin DeWoody with a night of cocktails, dinner, and dancing at MoMA.

“Each of our bungalows has its own spirit,” Robert McKinley says of his design firm’s lavish yet laid-back homes that have come to define the aesthetic of far East End interiors. Whether in traditional New England Cedar Shake Houses or Ranch Style homes close to popular beaches in Montauk, each of McKinley’s bungalows are shoppable destinations enmeshed in their natural surroundings and imbued with laid-back coastal cool. That’s because he packs them with his studio’s favorite products—from linens and housewares and even furniture from Monea, his furniture and lighting collection—that intermingle with carefully selected vintage furnishings and blue-chip artworks emblematic of his own rigorous yet relaxed approach.

His latest bungalow, a 3,800-square-foot waterfront escape perched on a bluff overlooking the bay, is no different. “The location of the site is truly an oasis, tucked out of view of any other houses or structures,” he says. “The vista is unobstructed and the sunsets are front and center.” Those twilight hues saturate the house’s creamy and sandy neutrals, lending a sunny ambience to an interior replete with white-washed wood that complements pieces like vintage teak credenzas and armoires anchoring many rooms. Lending further coastal touches are rattan lighting fixtures and custom backsplashes from Heath Ceramics, whose seaweed green, warm white, and taupe tiles forge spa-like environs in the bathrooms. That’s not to mention the pool house and private beach.

In 2018, then-furniture designer Ian Collings took a hiatus from his day job, re-emerging three years later as a deft full-time sculptor. His work, which has been exhibited on both coasts, as well as NYCxDesign with The Future Perfect and Blum & Poe, has become a highlight in a market full of captivating collectible design objects and talented makers.

Collings’ practice explores the ways life force and momentum manifest in the unlikeliest of materials: stone. His latest exhibition, “Movements,” is currently on view at The Future Perfect in San Francisco. Instead of static objects arranged in a room, “Movements” comes alive. Objects in green and pink marble, black basalt, and red travertine seem to scuttle up walls, across display plinths, and draw the viewer’s eye every which way. At its core, “Movements” allows the viewer to see the allure of stone much as Collings does: “Not just a convenient metaphor for time and transformation, it can be seen as transformation itself.”

Over the weekend, luminaries across art, architecture, and philanthropy descended on Grace Farms to attend the foundation’s 8th annual benefit. Held in support of Grace Farms’ mission to end modern slavery and gender-based violence, the benefit was an evening of connection as guests indulged in delectable hors d’oeuvres and sipped creative cocktails as golden hour bathed the SANAA-designed River Building in a picturesque autumnal glow.

When was it? Oct. 21

Where was it? Grace Farms, New Canaan

Who was there? Nate Berkus, Abby Bangser, Hayes Slade, Athena Calderone, Jeremiah Brent, Jennifer Pastore, Anna Dyson, and more.

When: Oct. 27–Dec. 22

Where: New York Life Gallery

What: The photographer embraces his infinitely inspiring muse in his latest show, which runs in conjunction with the gallery’s first anniversary. In an apt reflection on the occasion, Arnold captivates with pedestrian scenes of life unfolding on sidewalks, subways, beaches, and bodegas: a tourist family prepares to cross a busy intersection; a woman wearing impossibly high heels pauses for a moment of respite.

Look closer, and the child preparing to cross the street is surreptitiously giving the camera a middle finger; the woman in heels doesn’t realize that a window display of a grim reaper leers at her from above. In this show, Arnold subverts cliché by highlighting just a few of the millions of moments of serendipity that color life in New York City with humor, oddity, and the sheer luck of capturing the perfect moment as it unfolds.

Even as the EU approved Farfetch’s acquisition of Yoox Net-a-Porter two days ago, share prices enjoyed a momentary upswing before trending back down to their pre-news price of around $1.60. In the past two years, the former fashion tech disruptor has lost 97 percent of its market capitalization, from an all-time high of $26 billion in 2021 to around $600 million today. The startup once had an exacting vision for how it could become the “Amazon of fashion,” leveraging a cutting-edge e-commerce platform powered by top-notch tech talent without the underlying liabilities of owning inventory. Combined with the company’s lacking history in turning a profit, an eight-year acquisition spree has muddled its clarity of vision in the eyes of both consumers and investors.

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Neal Aronowitz is a self-taught sculptor who finds inspiration in the natural world and the dynamic forms within it. After years of running Neal Aronowitz Stone & Tile, a successful stone and interiors business in New York City and Portland, he launched an art and design studio that focuses on hand-crafted bespoke furniture and lighting. The work of the studio continues with a passion for daring forms, material experimentation, and simple beauty.

Surface Says: Using an ultra-thin concrete fabric as his material of choice, Aronowitz sculpts statement furniture that evokes calligraphic brushstrokes—or perhaps a flying carpet. His pieces, especially the award-winning Whorl Console, appear to levitate gracefully and effortlessly, infusing airiness and emotion into a traditionally cold material.

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