What’s Happening: Eight years after former President Barack Obama declared the Stonewall Inn a National Monument, the legendary West Village bar receives a visitor center that strives to capture the nuances and history of queer liberation.

The Download: Few sites carry more weight in the LGBTQ+ community than the Stonewall Inn, the New York City bar where a group of patrons took the unusual action of fighting back during a routine police raid in 1969, when being queer was against the law. A watershed moment in queer history, the rebellion catapulted the LGBTQ+ liberation movement to the global stage and permanently enshrined Stonewall as a queer landmark. Former President Barack Obama made things official when he designated Stonewall as a National Monument in 2016. This past weekend, as New York City was celebrating Pride, the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center opened after six years.

The center, conceived by LGBTQ+ advocacy organization Pride Live, sits in an adjacent storefront to Stonewall and will feature short- and long-term programming about the site’s significance. Encapsulating the nuances of queer history isn’t easily accomplished in a tight 2,100 square feet, so designers EDG Architecture and Engineering dutifully opted for a clean, white-box interior that allows visual displays to stand out. Among them is a wall mural of texts and images depicting milestones in LGBTQ+ history and a rotating collection of queer ephemera produced with students from the nearby Parsons School of Design. Honey Dijon curated a playlist that shuffles on a 1967 Rowe AMI jukebox, the same model playing on the night of the uprising. A silver floor outline marks where the actual bar stood; luminaires inset into the ceiling are 3D-printed with the same pattern as Stonewall’s original tin ceiling.

Several LGBTQ+ collaborators—interior designers Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent, lighting designer Nathan Orsman—lent their support. As did a medley of corporate and celebrity donors advertised on two full walls and a projection screen, which New York Times art critic Holland Cotter laid into as overpowering an otherwise bland gallery space with an impression of rainbow-washing. That’s perhaps not the best look at a time when “rightward politics is dragging us back, bill by legislative bill, to the pre-Stonewall 1950s,” he writes.

The $3.2 million center will evolve over time, though, and Pride Live chief executive Diana Rodriguez is taking that task seriously. One of the most powerful displays there honors her uncle, a Puerto Rican immigrant who served in Vietnam and died in 1989. When his army unit and co-workers learned he died of HIV/AIDS, none of them attended his funeral—a gripping reminder of how far the movement toward queer acceptance has come and, in today’s political climate, the work that remains.

In Their Own Words: “[The visitor center] is both civically important and nationally important, but also globally important,” Richard Unterthiner, the project’s design director at EDG, told the Architect’s Newspaper. “That’s not lost on us. It’s really a beacon of hope.”

Surface Says: Though we’d like to see more gallery space dedicated to queer stories than seven-figure sponsors, the visitor center still avoids the hollow trappings of Corporate Pride.

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Venice’s five-star Londra Palazzo hotel has an illustrious history: since it was built in 1853, it’s hosted creative talents ranging from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky to Jules Verne. The latest isn’t a guest, but local studio Ruberti Cutillo, which has transformed the fixture of Venetian hospitality into an Art Deco dream with a sweeping renovation of the hotel’s common areas. The studio blended influences ranging from Venetian modernism to the city’s architectural legacy of splendid palazzos in its refit of the hotel’s restaurant, bar, lounge, lobby, and tea room. Perhaps nowhere on the property is more exemplary of the firm’s approach than the L.P.V. Ristorante, which features touches like Murano chandeliers and Rubelli tapestries.

You know Venus Williams as one of the all-time greats of tennis, but the seven-time Grand Slam champion and founder of V Starr Interiors is also building her art-world credentials. Besides helping Pace Gallery buy Nina Simone’s childhood home for preservation and launching an AI design platform called Palazzo, she’s teamed up with Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art to host a podcast complementing their exhibition “Widening the Lens” that uncovers environmental history and change through the camera lens. In six episodes, Williams interviews historian Tyler Green, geologist Marcia Bjornerud, archaeologist Rachael Z. DeLue, and artists like Victoria Sambunaris and A.K. Burns. The conversations, Williams says, “prompt us to consider new and alternative ways of relating to our landscapes through photography.”

Majorie Waks is early in her career, but the Paris-based artist is already showing immense promise as a practitioner of expressive ceramics that summon the extraordinary. Drawing inspiration from medieval turrets to Mayan pyramids, her abstract lamps, mirror frames, and vessels appear at once archaic and straight out of a sci-fi movie, evoking imaginary worlds thanks to their mesmerizing engraved lines and futuristic forms.

Last week, a fleet of Maseratis greeted guests at an invite-only seated dinner at Bouchon, Thomas Keller’s Coral Gables bistro. As they eyed the lineup of supercars, including the MC20 Cielo and the GranCabrio Trofeo, attendees partook in Davidoff cigars and Cuervo Reserva De La Familia Tequila. In between overseeing the dinner courses, Keller mingled with attendees, capping off an unforgettable evening.

When was it? June 21

Where was it? Bouchon, Coral Gables, Florida

Who was there? Laura Cunningham, Seth Browarnik, Cindy Prado, Andres Fanjul, Mick Ainger, Daniel De La Vega, Marc Schwarzberg, and Jose Ortega.

The detail-driven minds behind F05 Studio seek to instill architecture with meaning, achieving harmony and functionality in the built environment. An ever-evolving practice, F05 works in the pursuit of creating timeless spaces that emphasize seamless interactions between people and their surroundings.

Surface Says: As a full-service interior and architecture studio, F05 approaches spaces with a nimble and fresh point of view, with the versatility of experience and perspective necessary to execute anything from modern minimalism to Brutalist-inflected futurism.

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