Issue 1
ISSUE
STORY TYPE
AUTHOR
13
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
November 4, 2024
How a Storied Printmaker Advances the Practice of Architecture
by Diana Budds
12
PEOPLE
October 21, 2024
Sounding Out a Better Way to Build
by Jesse Dorris
12
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
October 7, 2024
What It Means—and What It’s Worth—to Be “Light”
by Julie Lasky
12
PERSPECTIVE
September 23, 2024
Redefining “Iconic” Architecture and Ideals
by Sophie Lovell
12
PERSPECTIVE
September 9, 2024
Surrendering to What Is
by Marianne Krogh
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
August 26, 2024
Sometimes, Democratic Design Doesn’t “Look” Like Anything
by Zach Mortice
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
August 19, 2024
What Does Your Home Say About You?
by Shane Reiner-Roth
11
BOOK REVIEW
August 12, 2024
Is Building Better Cities a Dream Within Reach?
by Michael Webb
11
PEOPLE
August 5, 2024
The Value of Unbuilt Buildings
by George Kafka
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
July 29, 2024
Future-Proofing a Home Where Water Is a Focus and a Thread
by Alexandra Lange
11
BOOK REVIEW
July 22, 2024
Modernist Town, U.S.A.
by Ian Volner
11
PEOPLE
July 15, 2024
Buildings That Grow from a Place
by Anthony Paletta
10
URBANISM
June 24, 2024
What We Lose When a Historic Building Is Demolished
by Owen Hatherley
10
PERSPECTIVE
June 17, 2024
We Need More Than Fewer, Better Things
by Deb Chachra
10
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
June 3, 2024
An Ode to Garages
by Charlie Weak
10
PERSPECTIVE
May 28, 2024
In Search of Domestic Kintsugi
by Edwin Heathcote
10
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
May 13, 2024
The Perils of the Landscapes We Make
by Karrie Jacobs
10
PERSPECTIVE
May 6, 2024
Using Simple Tools as a Radical Act of Independence
by Jarrett Fuller
9
PERSPECTIVE
April 29, 2024
Why Can’t I Just Go Home?
by Eva Hagberg
9
PEOPLE
April 22, 2024
Why Did Our Homes Stop Evolving?
by George Kafka
9
ROUNDTABLE
April 8, 2024
Spaces Where the Body Is a Vital Force
by Tiffany Jow
9
BOOK REVIEW
April 1, 2024
Tracing the Agency of Women as Users and Experts of Architecture
by Mimi Zeiger
9
PERSPECTIVE
March 25, 2024
Are You Sitting in a Non-Place?
by Mzwakhe Ndlovu
9
ROUNDTABLE
March 11, 2024
At Home, Connecting in Place
by Marianela D’Aprile
9
PEOPLE
March 4, 2024
VALIE EXPORT’s Tactical Urbanism
by Alissa Walker
8
PERSPECTIVE
February 26, 2024
What the “Whole Earth Catalog” Taught Me About Building Utopias
by Anjulie Rao
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
February 19, 2024
How a Run-Down District in London Became a Model for Neighborhood Revitalization
by Ellen Peirson
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
February 12, 2024
In Brooklyn, Housing That Defies the Status Quo
by Gideon Fink Shapiro
8
PERSPECTIVE
February 5, 2024
That “Net-Zero” Home Is Probably Living a Lie
by Fred A. Bernstein
8
PERSPECTIVE
January 22, 2024
The Virtue of Corporate Architecture Firms
by Kate Wagner
8
PERSPECTIVE
January 16, 2024
How Infrastructure Shapes Us
by Deb Chachra
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
January 8, 2024
The Defiance of Desire Lines
by Jim Stephenson
7
PEOPLE
December 18, 2023
This House Is Related to You and to Your Nonhuman Relatives
by Sebastián López Cardozo
7
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
December 11, 2023
What’s the Point of the Plus Pool?
by Ian Volner
7
BOOK REVIEW
December 4, 2023
The Extraordinary Link Between Aerobics and Architecture
by Jarrett Fuller
7
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
November 27, 2023
Architecture That Promotes Healing and Fortifies Us for Action
by Kathryn O’Rourke
7
PEOPLE
November 6, 2023
How to Design for Experience
by Diana Budds
7
PEOPLE
October 30, 2023
The Meaty Objects at Marta
by Jonathan Griffin
6
OBJECTS
October 23, 2023
How Oliver Grabes Led Braun Back to Its Roots
by Marianela D’Aprile
6
URBANISM
October 16, 2023
Can Adaptive Reuse Fuel Equitable Revitalization?
by Clayton Page Aldern
6
PERSPECTIVE
October 9, 2023
What’s the Point of a Tiny Home?
by Mimi Zeiger
6
OBJECTS
October 2, 2023
A Book Where Torn-Paper Blobs Convey Big Ideas
by Julie Lasky
6
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
September 24, 2023
The Architecture of Doing Nothing
by Edwin Heathcote
6
BOOK REVIEW
September 18, 2023
What the “Liebes Look” Says About Dorothy Liebes
by Debika Ray
6
PEOPLE
September 11, 2023
Roy McMakin’s Overpowering Simplicity
by Eva Hagberg
6
OBJECTS
September 5, 2023
Minimalism’s Specific Objecthood, Interpreted by Designers of Today
by Glenn Adamson
5
ROUNDTABLE
August 28, 2023
How Joan Jonas and Eiko Otake Navigate Transition
by Siobhan Burke
5
OBJECTS
August 21, 2023
The Future-Proofing Work of Design-Brand Archivists
by Adrian Madlener
5
URBANISM
August 14, 2023
Can a Church Solve Canada’s Housing Crisis?
by Alex Bozikovic
5
PEOPLE
August 7, 2023
In Search of Healing, Helen Cammock Confronts the Past
by Jesse Dorris
5
URBANISM
July 31, 2023
What Dead Malls, Office Parks, and Big-Box Stores Can Do for Housing
by Ian Volner
5
PERSPECTIVE
July 24, 2023
A Righteous Way to Solve “Wicked” Problems
by Susan Yelavich
5
OBJECTS
July 17, 2023
Making a Mess, with a Higher Purpose
by Andrew Russeth
5
ROUNDTABLE
July 10, 2023
How to Emerge from a Starchitect’s Shadow
by Cynthia Rosenfeld
4
PEOPLE
June 26, 2023
There Is No One-Size-Fits-All in Architecture
by Marianela D’Aprile
4
PEOPLE
June 19, 2023
How Time Shapes Amin Taha’s Unconventionally Handsome Buildings
by George Kafka
4
PEOPLE
June 12, 2023
Seeing and Being Seen in JEB’s Radical Archive of Lesbian Photography
by Svetlana Kitto
4
PERSPECTIVE
June 5, 2023
In Built Environments, Planting Where It Matters Most
by Karrie Jacobs
3
PERSPECTIVE
May 30, 2023
On the Home Front, a Latine Aesthetic’s Ordinary Exuberance
by Anjulie Rao
3
PERSPECTIVE
May 21, 2023
For a Selfie (and Enlightenment), Make a Pilgrimage to Bridge No. 3
by Alexandra Lange
3
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
May 8, 2023
The Building Materials of the Future Might Be Growing in Your Backyard
by Marianna Janowicz
3
BOOK REVIEW
May 1, 2023
Moving Beyond the “Fetishisation of the Forest”
by Edwin Heathcote
2
ROUNDTABLE
April 24, 2023
Is Craft Still Synonymous with the Hand?
by Tiffany Jow
2
PEOPLE
April 17, 2023
A Historian Debunks Myths About Lacemaking, On LaceTok and IRL
by Julie Lasky
2
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
April 10, 2023
How AI Helps Architects Design, and Refine, Their Buildings
by Ian Volner
2
PEOPLE
April 3, 2023
Merging Computer and Loom, a Septuagenarian Artist Weaves Her View of the World
by Francesca Perry
1
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
March 27, 2023
Words That Impede Architecture, According to Reinier de Graaf
by Osman Can Yerebakan
1
PEOPLE
March 20, 2023
Painting With Plaster, Monica Curiel Finds a Release
by Andrew Russeth
1
PERSPECTIVE
March 13, 2023
Rules and Roles in Life, Love, and Architecture
by Eva Hagberg
1
Roundtable
March 6, 2023
A Design Movement That Pushes Beyond Architecture’s Limitations
by Tiffany Jow
0
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
February 7, 2023
To Improve the Future of Public Housing, This Architecture Firm Looks to the Past
by Ian Volner
0
OBJECTS
February 7, 2023
The Radical Potential of “Prime Objects”
by Glenn Adamson
0
PEOPLE
February 20, 2023
Xiyadie’s Queer Cosmos
by Xin Wang
0
PEOPLE
February 13, 2023
How Michael J. Love’s Subversive Tap Dancing Steps Forward
by Jesse Dorris
0
SHOW AND TELL
February 7, 2023
Finding Healing and Transformation Through Good Black Art
by Folasade Ologundudu
0
BOOK REVIEW
February 13, 2023
How Stephen Burks “Future-Proofs” Craft
by Francesca Perry
0
ROUNDTABLE
February 27, 2023
Making Use of End Users’ Indispensable Wisdom
by Tiffany Jow
0
PEOPLE
February 7, 2023
The New Lessons Architect Steven Harris Learns from Driving Old Porsches
by Jonathan Schultz
0
PERSPECTIVE
February 7, 2023
The Day Architecture Stopped
by Kate Wagner
0
OBJECTS
February 7, 2023
The Overlooked Potential of Everyday Objects
by Adrian Madlener
0
ROUNDTABLE
February 7, 2023
A Conversation About Generalists, Velocity, and the Source of Innovation
by Tiffany Jow
0
OBJECTS
February 7, 2023
Using a Fungi-Infused Paste, Blast Studio Turns Trash Into Treasure
by Natalia Rachlin
Untapped is published by the design company Henrybuilt.
BOOK REVIEW
02.13.2023
How Stephen Burks “Future-Proofs” Craft

The book Shelter in Place considers the possibilities, and the precedents, of the designer’s inclusive approach to creating objects for the home.

Study models for Stephen Burks’s Shelter in Place collection
Study models for Stephen Burks’s Shelter in Place collection. (Courtesy Stephen Burks)


In the spring of 2020, the American industrial designer Stephen Burks was, like many of us, confined to his home amid the Covid-19 lockdowns. But while some people’s productivity amounted to a sourdough starter, Burks was inspired to draw, design, and make. With his partner, the cultural strategist Malika Leiper, the Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based designer experimented with hands-on creating, unbounded by practical concerns. Soon, this creativity morphed to respond to the evolving needs and experiences of domestic life. For our homes were in the process of transforming—as places, and as containers of suddenly a lot more life—and these new uses of interior realms called for new kinds of objects.

The body of work that emerged, called Shelter in Place, includes Supports, supersize stands for smartphones and tablets, and Private Seat, a cocoon-like, screened-off chair. The creative process prompted conversations with Monica Obniski, curator of decorative art and design at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, and resulted in the exhibition “Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place” (through March 5), as well as a book of the same title (Yale University Press), out last November. The book speaks to a particular moment in time. But while we might feel a long way from those early experiences of pandemic life, the ramifications are still being felt, and a key site of change has been the home. Can Burks’s work point to ways of reshaping our domestic lives and landscapes for the better?

As an accompaniment to the exhibition—which surveys the last decade of the designer’s work, as well as his Shelter in Place project—the book is in part a catalog, but goes beyond this scope to critically and comprehensively dig into the context within which Burks’s practice is situated and the propositions his work puts forward. It features seven texts, including an in-depth introduction by Obniski, a personal piece from Burks focusing on the creation of Shelter in Place, a short but sweet text from friend and fellow designer Patricia Urquiola, and essays by critics and curators Glenn Adamson and Beatrice Galilee. Immersive images of Burks’s work, captured by photographers Caroline Tompkins and Justin Skeens, bring his creations powerfully into focus. 

Of arguably greatest interest, though, are the book’s dialogues, presented as Q&As, which in their free-flowing format reflect the creative multiplicity of Burks’s work itself. One is between Burks and Michelle Joan Wilkinson, a curator at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, who interviews him about his career. The other is between Burks and the late legendary critic bell hooks, who discusses the designer’s work in its broader cultural context. (It’s one of hooks’s last published conversations before her passing.)

Designer Stephen Burks
Stephen Burks. (Photo: Caroline Tompkins)


Burks—along with his practice, Stephen Burks Man Made—is known for craft-centric furniture designs, and the most compelling aspect of both the book and Burks’s work is what this approach says about the past and future of design. His focus on participatory craft and the value of the hand speaks to an embrace of global diversity, design democracy, and cultural multiplicity, which implicitly and explicitly challenges the European canon of design and its traditional hierarchical division of labor, a subject carefully explored in Adamson’s chapter. 

Burks has worked with artisans all over the world, from Senegal to Colombia, seeking to champion these communities and their craft traditions. His core belief, he writes, is that “everyone is capable of design”—a powerful statement. He is careful to avoid the extractive or appropriating behaviors that working with craftspeople risks—behaviors that have historically sought to profit from community labor, fetishize otherness, or both. Obniski tells us that Burks aligns himself as a “collaborator instead of a colonizer,” and she positions craft—especially how Burks practices it—as “a way to connect to one another and, perhaps through collaborative endeavors, to create a more inclusive design system.”

Burks’s focus on collaborative craft emerged from an experience in 2005, when he was invited to South Africa by the nonprofit organization Aid To Artisans and the design brand Artecnica as part of a project pairing designers with artisan communities. Burks worked with local craftspeople to develop commercially viable pieces of contemporary design using their traditional skills in unexpected ways, including chairs wrapped with leftover plastic from parade floats and furniture surfaced with shredded magazines. 

After South Africa, Burks tells hooks, “my work quickly became about creating more space, opening doors, trying to take this kind of monoculture of European design and make it more pluralistic, more hybrid, which I think is the reality of the world.” He has since worked extensively across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as the United States, Europe, and Australia, on projects that center community craft traditions. His Dala (2012–14), Kida (2020), and The Others (2017) ranges for the German furniture brand Dedon, for example, involved working closely with master weavers in the Philippines. Through his work he hopes to embed this global cultural representation and diversification of design in our homes, creating functional objects as vehicles that propose a more inclusive future. 

Nevertheless, as Burks’s commissions come primarily from luxury brands, his furniture is often only affordable to those with wealth, so while inclusivity underpins his practice, it does not define his audience. These high-end consumers may be precisely the people that Burks wishes to influence—shifting perceptions of craft and elevating overlooked and diverse creativity—but it’s challenging to see just how much they would look beyond a beautiful product to learn about and be influenced by the way it was made.

Supports from the Shelter in Place collection
Supports from the Shelter in Place collection. (Photo: Caroline Tompkins)


Of course, not all Burks’s works are commercial pieces, and the very act of experimenting and prototyping is crucial for him. As part of his collaboration with the Student Craft initiative at Berea College in Kentucky, he produced Crafting Diversity (2020), a series of inventive home accessories, from throws to baskets and even a decorative broom. Although made in partnership with the furniture company MillerKnoll, the items were not made for a consumer market, and instead seek to explore new expressions of traditional crafts such as weaving and woodworking.

This approach is a typical one for Burks: supporting, championing, and sustaining historic craft techniques—what Galilee refers to as “future-proofing” crafts—and reinterpreting them for contemporary life, harnessing design to mediate between yesterday and tomorrow. This can be seen in Woven TV, part of Shelter in Place, which blends physical craft with digital technology for the phygital generation. Responding in part to the shrinking of the television’s domestic presence to a wafer-thin device, the prototype comprises a large industrial-metal mesh surround for a flat TV screen. Although the initial design was, according to Burks, “an exercise in the structural integrity of weaving a cabinet,” the piece’s lattice enclosure invites users to decorate it with materials of their choice to personalize the structure. 

The piece seems to respond to what Obniski outlines as the central question behind the Shelter in Place project—“How can we design our interiors to enable joyful living while empowering creativity?”—and reflects Burks’s desire for people to participate in designing their surroundings. But it reveals a tension between ambition and use: a designer can certainly set an intention for how an object could or should be used, but ultimately the life of that object will be dictated by the user, who may not share those ambitions, or participate in the way the designer intended. 

Detail of Woven TV, from the Shelter in Place collection
Detail of Woven TV, from the Shelter in Place collection. (Courtesy Stephen Burks)


The idea of better living through design, with its origins in modernism, is a driving concern for Burks. In fact, the book positions the 20th-century design movement as underpinning his practice. One can understand why: Burks grew up in Chicago, a city shaped by modernism, and studied product design at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s (IIT) Institute of Design, which was originally founded as the New Bauhaus: Chicago School of Design by Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy, in 1937. Modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who had a significant impact on Chicago’s urban landscape, designed IIT’s campus. “I’ve always considered myself a modernist,” Burks tells Wilkinson, adding that modernism is a “critical rethinking of everything we knew.” He even likens the goals of modernism to those of the “recently freed people of the African diaspora” from that time—to reinvent, break free, find new expressions, and create their own roles.  

Obniski connects Burks’s practice to the way the Bauhaus school sought to elide divisions between different creative disciplines, and notes conceptual similarities between the work of Burks and Bauhaus textile artist Anni Albers, who saw craftspeople, industrial designers, and artists as one and the same. Obniski also quotes part of architect Walter Gropius’s 1919 Bauhaus Manifesto—“Today the arts exist in isolation, from which they can be rescued only through the conscious, cooperative effort of all craftsmen”—positing that Burks’s practice internalizes this belief. 

In part, she’s right. But Burks’s work seems to acknowledge that these ideals of inclusivity and pluralism were not comprehensively achieved through modernism. With Wilkinson, he talks about the “conflict” of learning from modernism while at the same time challenging its European dominance. His response is his work: an approach that combines modernism’s ideals with global cultural representation and references that were “not accepted or regarded as part of the modernist canon.” 

Study model for The Ancestors, from the Shelter in Place collection
Study model for The Ancestors, from the Shelter in Place collection. (Photo: Caroline Tompkins)


Discussions of diversifying the canon cannot be separated from the history of colonization and systemic racism, and indeed Burks’s challenge to the European (and mostly white and male) dominance of design history is also bound up with his identity as an African American. Of his experience, which includes being the first, and often the only, Black designer to work with many of his European clients, Burks tells hooks, “We, as African Americans, are seen first as Black and seen second as artists or architects or designers. There’s always that conversation with race that has to be overcome before people understand our work.” He recounts how he has been commissioned by companies that have “literally asked me to make [the product] look African.” 

Reflecting on his own career trajectory, Burks identifies a longer road, full of more obstacles, in comparison to his European peers. Change, he tells Wilkinson, relies on the acknowledgement, understanding, and interrogation of history. “As Americans, we cannot afford to leave our history behind,” Burks says. “As African Americans, we must continue to rely on our collective imagination to design new ways of being in community and society with each other as well as our past, present, and future.”

Above all, it is Burks’s process—not the products themselves—that’s truly propositional. In a world where “so few make design decisions for so many,” Burks writes, one solution is to “involve everyone in the conversation.” It is a noble ambition, and one that requires comprehensive change to achieve. Perhaps the biggest impact of Burks’s approach, beyond the support of international artisans, will be through films, exhibitions, or publications, such as Shelter in Place. Objects can tell stories, yes, but typically only if we, as their users or viewers, are willing to do our research to understand what they’re saying. It will be interesting to see what other avenues of communicating these stories Burks will embrace in future, in order to achieve his seemingly tireless ambition of ushering in a more inclusive, pluralistic future for design.

Burks positions home—the place most of his work is designed for—as the starting point for reshaping society. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, this is particularly apt; during lockdown, home was, if we were lucky, one of the few places where we could make change. These days, more people see home as a key arena for expressing our values and ambitions for the future—whether that’s democratic design, social equity, collaboration through craft, or unbounded creativity. The next step is to take this appetite for change beyond the domestic sphere.


The book Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place will be the focus of the February 18 meeting of the New York Architecture + Design Book Club, a quarterly event series co-organized by Untapped and the Brooklyn bookshop Head Hi. Burks, along with the artist and writer Christian Nyampeta, will lead the program’s interactive discussion. Find out more and R.S.V.P. to the event on the book club’s website.