Author: Iris
Bjarke Ingels 4 Bjarke Ingels is one of the most widely recognized architects today. Founder of BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), he champions a design philosophy called “hedonistic sustainability.” Instead of thinking of green architecture as a sacrifice, Ingels frames it as a chance to make things more enjoyable and useful. His work includes buildings like VM Houses in Denmark, innovative mixed-use complexes, and bold infrastructure projects like Amager Bakke—a waste-to-energy plant with a public ski slope on its roof. Ingels’ influence comes from blending environmental performance with playful public engagement, making sustainability exciting for clients and cities alike. Francis Kéré 4 Francis Kéré brings…
1) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, 1959) The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum broke museum conventions. Instead of separate floors, visitors walk a continuous spiral ramp. Wright wanted people to experience art in a smooth, uninterrupted flow. The building itself became an icon of modern design. 3) Robie House (Chicago, 1910) Robie House is a key Prairie Style home. Long horizontal lines, deep roof overhangs, and bands of windows create a strong link to the flat Midwest landscape. Many features of modern homes — open plans and integrated spaces — trace back to houses like this. 4) Taliesin West (Arizona, 1937) Taliesin West served…
Alexandra Jicol’s practice grows out of a dialogue between inner experience and the outside world, between what is remembered and what is happening now. She spent her early life in Bucharest in a period marked by social constraint and pressure. Her surroundings offered sharp contrasts: the quiet freedom of natural landscapes alongside the structure and watchfulness of city life. Those differences left a quiet imprint. They appear in paintings where calm and tension live side by side. Open, breathable areas meet compact, denser forms. Soft hues exist next to subtle disquiet. For Jicol, art begins with attention. She treats painting…
Julian Jollon is an American artist whose creative path has moved through detours, pauses, and returns. His background includes formal study in Fine Arts, Photography, and Painting, and early on he imagined a life centered on the studio. That plan shifted. For fifteen years he stepped away from art and worked in Hospital Epidemiology, a field grounded in science, systems, and the care of human life. During that period, he also experienced a liver transplant, an event that changed how he understands time and survival. When Jollon came back to art, he did so with steadiness and purpose. His practice…
Vicky Tsalamata works out of Athens, Greece, with a practice that keeps one foot in history and the other in the present day. Her prints echo the scope of Honoré de Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine—not as homage, but as a framework for looking at what people do to each other, what systems reward, and what gets lost along the way. There’s humor in her approach, but it isn’t comforting. It’s sharp, sometimes sarcastic, and aimed at the gaps between what we say we value and how we actually live. Her imagery pulls from moral storytelling traditions—Balzac’s social panorama, Dante’s vision of…
Born in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1953, Vandorn Hinnant has spent decades shaping a practice where craft and inquiry move side by side. For him, art is never only about technique—it’s a way to test ideas about identity, values, and the forces that shape a life. He earned a B.A. in Art Design from North Carolina A&T State University, then strengthened his understanding of volume and scale through sculpture studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. That dual foundation—design training with sculptural rigor—runs through everything he builds. His forms feel deliberate and resolved, yet they stay open to…
Sonja Kalb arrives at painting from a place most artists don’t start: engineering. Born in Stuttgart, Germany, she trained in textile and design engineering—work that depends on accuracy, systems thinking, and an intimate understanding of how materials behave. That early education doesn’t show up in her paintings as rigidity. It shows up as steadiness. She knows how to build a surface, how to hold a composition together, how to use restraint without draining the work of feeling. What keeps her practice alive is the way she treats that discipline as a launchpad, not a limit. Her abstractions live in the…
Haeley Kyong doesn’t make art that asks to be decoded. She makes art that asks to be noticed. A lot of contemporary work is built to be explained—its first move is intellectual. Kyong’s work takes a different route. It arrives through sensation first, then thought follows. You feel something shift—your breathing, your focus, your mood—before you can name what caused it. Her practice rests on a steady belief that art can reach us ahead of language, before we start labeling, organizing, and deciding what we’re supposed to think. Kyong was raised in South Korea and later spent key years in…
Sylvia Nagy makes work where touch and theory meet—where something built by hand can still speak to technology, process, and the way the world keeps shifting. Her training moves between industrial design and fine art, and that blend shows up in her materials: she respects structure, but she also leaves space for instinct. She studied at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest, earning an MFA in Silicet Industrial Technology and Art, an experience that sharpened how she thinks about making—how a concept becomes a finished object through planning, fabrication, and material behavior. Over time, that foundation expanded, with…
Nicola Mastroserio isn’t working on the clock of popularity. The studio isn’t a place where he reacts to demand or adjusts his direction to fit what buyers might want. He moves at a different pace—drawn to questions that don’t age out. For him, art is a way of digging beneath appearances, a method for getting closer to what things are, not just what they look like. Again and again, he returns to essence: how reality takes shape, how it’s felt in the body and mind, and how it can be approached beyond the constant distraction of the everyday. That commitment…