Issue 8
ISSUE
STORY TYPE
AUTHOR
13
BOOK REVIEW
November 25, 2024
A Mind-Body Experience of Architecture, Delivered in a Photo
by Marianela D’Aprile
13
PERSPECTIVE
November 18, 2024
Seeing Chinatown as a Readymade
by Philip Poon
13
PEOPLE
November 11, 2024
The Place of the Handmade Artifact in a Tech-Obsessed Era
by Anne Quito
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.
PEOPLE
10.30.2023
The Meaty Objects at Marta

The Los Angeles gallery is concerned with much more than commerce.

Portrait of Heidi Korsavong and Benjamin Critton surrounded by furniture objects
Heidi Korsavong and Benjamin Critton. (Photo: Brian Guido. Courtesy Marta)


When Benjamin Critton and Heidi Korsavong mounted their first exhibition at Marta, the Los Angeles gallery they co-founded in 2019, it was with a mission statement of sorts. A model by ceramicist and designer Alex Reed proposed a utopian city for craftspeople, complete with amenities such as a communal kiln, cooperative housing, and a “Potters’ Pension & Trust Tower.” Reed’s project, the “International Ceramics Friendship Park,” announced Critton and Korsavong’s commitment not just to objects, but to the multifaceted lives and processes of their makers.

Marta has since become known, both within the L.A. community and farther afield, for a program that prioritizes craft, design, and functional objects—what Critton and Korsavong sometimes call, with tongues only partly in cheek, “applied arts.” The artists they tend to work with are united not by a particular aesthetic or medium, but by an approach to their work that might best be understood as conceptual. Critton and Korsavong seek out objects that are shaped by ideas which, often as not, come from their makers looking to the past: to their biographies, to tradition, to the history of art and design—then evolving their set of references into an outcome that’s relevant for today.

This is why Marta mounts focused, mainly solo presentations, as opposed to the showroom-style approach of many traditional design galleries: There’s a lot to unpack, to sit with. “It’s important for us to do really deep dives into the work and the narrative of a specific artist at a specific time,” Critton says. All art and craft, he insists, is at some level driven by ideas; it’s Marta’s job to create an appropriate platform for this work—to raise it up along with the concepts around it. “We hope to carve out a niche that feels programmatically unique,” he says. “We feel that galleries can be spaces for gathering, communion, dialogue, safety, discourse. They function as much more than a place for commerce.”

Critton and Korsavong believe that history is of paramount importance to contemporary design. “There’s a feedback loop between past and present,” Critton says. “What came before [...] inevitably informs how pieces are conceived and constructed today. Or we believe it ought to, anyway!”

Their approach to the history of design was particularly evident in 2021 when, with writer Erik Benjamins, they invited 32 makers to respond to aspects of the VDL House, architect Richard Neutra’s onetime Silver Lake home, first built in 1932 and now a National Historic Landmark. “The artists and designers we work with have a clear grounding in historical reference,” Critton says, “whether they are working in harmony with it or against it.”

pieces of brown, block-like painted furniture at Marta's “No Life” exhibition
Installation view of Kristen Wentrcek and Andrew Zebulon’s “No Life” exhibition at Marta. (Courtesy Marta)


One of Marta’s latest projects, opening early next year in Chicago, marks the first presentation of furniture by Michael Bennett, a Black Lives Matter activist and former Super Bowl–winning NFL player who left the sport in 2020 to pursue architecture and design. Installed in a residence that’s part of artist Theaster Gates’s Rebuild Foundation, a cultural and community platform in the city’s  South Side, the show, provisionally titled “We Gotta Get Back to the Crib,” surveys the history of objects from the African diaspora in America. Each piece is intended to spur thought and dialogue: an elegant fiberglass chair based on the white plastic Monobloc chair ubiquitous at backyard barbecues, for example, or a circular dining table, inspired by a recently discovered frieze in a Washington, D.C. church that depicts a Black Last Supper at a democratically round table.

At Marta’s gallery in L.A., Kristen Wentrcek and Andrew Zebulon’s exhibition “No Life” (through November 11) continues the New York–based designers’ experimental manipulation of industrial materials and manufacturing processes. Inspired by a plethora of unsettling fictional and historical references—from the science-fiction of director Andrei Tarkovsky to Metabolic architecture to Soviet sanatoriums, prison cells, and psychiatric institutes—the pair’s brown vinyl-coated foam monoliths, variously scaled as tables or benches or daybeds, are as austere as minimalist sculptures while also being functionally accommodating.

Critton’s background is in book design, typography, and art direction; he oversees Marta’s robust book and catalog publishing operation which, alongside his eloquent exhibition texts (typeset in Marta’s own font), elucidates the works’ all-important backstories. Zebulon says he appreciates how Marta “provides the context for why things look the way they do. Because if these pieces were in a store, people would be like, ‘What’s wrong with all this furniture?’”

brown couch, bench, chairs, and dressing area spaced out across concrete floor in Marta gallery from Sarah Burns’s “Prairie’s Edge” exhibition
Installation view of Sarah Burns’s “Prairie’s Edge” exhibition at Marta this past spring. (Photo: Erik Benjamins. Courtesy Marta)


Many artists in Marta’s program draw directly on their personal histories—from New York–based Sarah Burns, whose parents ran a Midwest furniture store and whose grandpa repaired tractors, to Lagos, Nigeria-based Nifemi Marcus-Bello, whose exhibition of benches at Marta was accompanied by a recording of his mother reciting his oríkì, a Yoruba praise poem specific to the bearer’s name. The round impressions covering Marcus-Bello’s cast-bronze seats nod toward the practice among the Surma people of Ethiopia of painting one another with repetitive fingerprints as a means of self-expression and communal bonding. Burns, meanwhile, incorporated surplus tractor mirrors for a wall-mounted vanity, and made a tilt-top chair-table, partly based on a Midwestern roadside restaurant table, with colorful, cast-plastic chewing gum speckling its underside. Each body of work is as distinctive as its maker.

Sometimes Marta combines historical pieces with contemporary objects, as with “Make–Do,” a collaboration with Avi Kovacevich of auction house Catalog Sale presented during this year’s NYCxDesign. The exhibition brought together 12 vernacular or improvised chairs (made from such inventive components as a stack of tires, wooden crates, a section of carpet, and part of a wheelbarrow) and 12 chairs commissioned by Marta from present-day makers, who were challenged to make a chair in three days from items lying around their studios. The exhibition showcased the vitality of unconventional, intuitive, and untrained design processes—outlining a bold spirit of experimentation that one sees throughout Marta’s program.

five chair artworks on display at Marta from its “Make–Do” exhibition
Installation view of Marta’s “Make–Do” exhibition in New York. (Photo: Jason Lê. Courtesy Marta)


Surveying Marta’s shows, you get a sense not of stuffy pretentiousness, but of wit and passion. In the dog days of September 2020, mid-pandemic, the gallery got a lot of press for an exhibition of toilet-paper holders. More than 50 pieces, from a length of bent rebar by Martino Gamper to Chen Chen and Kai Williams’s loop of heavy steel chain, were presented at Marta and on its website; it mounted a second iteration the following year, with guest curator Emmanuel Olunkwa, installing bespoke domestic accouterments in fashionable restrooms across New York City and in a Chinatown storefront. At a time when life felt fraught and constricted, these exhibitions offered delightful moments of surprise and humor—just what many people felt they needed.

Critton and Korsavong were introduced in New York City by a friend who noted they were both involved in design. (Korsavong was a student of art history before she moved on to production design and high-end residential interiors.) They discovered they shared a fascination with the built environment, particularly domestic spaces, and were also fans of similar artists and designers, such as Jean Prouvé and Donald Judd. After moving to Los Angeles in 2016, they pursued their own projects in a co-working space on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park; when they took on the building’s lease, they established a gallery in the building’s glass-fronted storefront. Marta began as a place for artists to make their first pieces of functional work, or for designers to make their first nonfunctional work.

This past summer, Marta expanded into spacious new premises: a former truck garage, three miles from its previous abode. A central space provides the conventional clean neutrality of a typical contemporary art gallery, while a shelving system on a mezzanine upstairs doubles as open storage for available works from previous shows—an inventory that many galleries are not keen to publicize, but that highlights the wide-ranging conversation between makers in Marta’s program. Further along, a plywood-clad bedroom offers out-of-town artists a place to stay while installing their exhibitions. Filled with furniture, textiles, and lighting by artists Marta has worked with, this bolt-hole serves as an immersive model of Marta’s vision.

exterior shot of Marta’s Silver Lake space
Marta’s Silver Lake space. (Photo: Brian Guido. Courtesy Marta)


Despite their handsome new digs, Critton and Korsavong are already looking to a future in which Marta spreads its program far and wide, and mounts exhibitions in unusual venues. The pair’s favorite galleries, Critton says, are often idiosyncratic house museums, “where assorted disciplines have been placed together and imposed upon one another under a single roof.” His and Korsavong’s “holistic” approach to collecting art and design follows a similarly inclusive ethos, he continues. “We want to invite others to join in this disciplinarily borderless way of looking and thinking and collecting.”

But transgressive, idea-driven work can be challenging. Burns’s gum-speckled table, or Wentrcek and Zebulon’s slablike daybed, for instance, introduce into their owners’ homes degrees of functional or aesthetic difficulty. Artist couple Antonia Pinter and Chase Biado work together as A History of Frogs, producing pieces such as gnarled bronze candelabras and spindly silver flatware, designed with fantastical elf or goblin users in mind; there are many other such examples in Marta’s presentations that verge on awkwardness or discomfort. In fact, Critton and Korsavong are planning an exhibition for 2024, guest-curated by Krista Mileva-Frank, on the theme of the grotto, or cave. The term is derived from the Italian word grotte, which also inspired the word grotesque, a style that extends to certain Marta works. “Objects that might easily be described as ‘grotesque’ are compelling because they prompt us to confront the absurd and the fantastical,” says Critton, “and often the bodily, which maybe in turn allows us to examine what it means to be human.”

The statement underscores the rare ambition of Marta’s programming. Both the contemporary commissions and the historical pieces it shows embody the loftiest aspirations of the applied arts: not just to make life more comfortable, but to make it more interesting. They capture not only existing ideas but generate new ones—sparked by their makers’ lives, the places, traditions, and times they came from, the ways they might be used now or in the future. Marta shows that a stool or a chair can be every bit as enlightening as any painting or sculpture, while remaining as humble and as useful as a spot to park one’s backside.