Rizzoli
As a child, I was captivated by a painting that hung in my aunt’s house in Oxfordshire. I had never met my grandfather and was therefore particularly fascinated by this portrait of him as a young man in Cape Town, painted by his brother. It is extraordinarily atmospheric. Of course, I didn’t appreciate then that the chair he sat in was rattan, but now I wonder if those hours spent gazing at Grandpa might have subliminally instilled in me a love of wicker furniture. A little far-fetched maybe, but I am not sure how else I can explain why, in my late teens, I developed such a devotion to rattan.I first became aware of furniture made of plant fiber while in Egypt, and saw not only the extraordinary pieces with which Tutankhamen was buried but also the ubiquitous café chairs and tables made from the date palm. Around the same time, I started buying old pieces of rattan furniture, cluttering up my long-suffering parents’ house and stables with old daybeds, chairs, tables,
In the summer of 2014 a strange building began to take shape just outside MoMA PS1, a contemporary art centre in New York City. It looked like someone had started building an igloo and then got carried away, so that the ice-white bricks rose into huge towers. It was a captivating sight, but the truly impressive thing about this building was not so much its looks but the fact that it had been grown.
The installation, called Hy-Fi, was designed and created by The Living, an architectural design studio in New York. Each of the 10,000 bricks had been made by packing agricultural waste and mycelium, the fungus that makes mushrooms, into a mould and letting them grow into a solid mass.