Felix Burrichter

I’m a German-born, New York-based architecture and design editor and curator. I’m also the founder of the magazine PIN–UP, a magazine for architectural entertainment. I’m one hundred and ninety-four cm tall, I have blondish hair (slightly balding), I’m forty years old, I’m a trained architect, and speak three languages. My shoe size is forty six (European).

Even though I studied architecture and I also run a business, I mostly consider myself an editor simply because that’s what I like doing most. By editor I (not only) mean the process of editing texts, but perhaps more importantly, editing content, creating unexpected juxtapositions and adjacencies of stories, images, narratives, and thoughts. To be able to provide a platform for that, whether it’s digitally, through video, or in good old print, is what I enjoy most.

The challenge for the book’s conceptual conceit was to celebrate a legacy by looking into the future. To reconcile the two seems anachronistic at first, but when you look at a company with such a rich design heritage like Cassina, you find the entire avant-garde from the 20th century combined in its back catalogue. Most of the pieces we today consider classics were considered radical when they first came out, whether they were by Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Frank Lloyd Wright, Gerrit T. Rietveld, etc. And even more recently, Cassina was among the first to introduce designs by Zaha Hadid, Konstantin Grcic, and of course, Mario Bellini, who created some of the company’s most iconic pieces. This Will Be The Place reminds us that to understand the future, to understand the future of living in this case, we have to also look at the radical solutions of the past. In that sense, the book is also a reminder to Cassina itself, to always be at the forefront of innovation when it comes to design, and to not rest on its laurels.

Cassina produces to this day some of the most iconic and radical design classics created during the 20th century and continues to do so in 2018. My role as a design editor is to pay respect to that, to encourage this attitude of continued formal, material, intellectual innovation. The worst thing would be for the company to content itself with the status quo. I think with Patricia Urquiola as the art director it has a very energetic, new direction.

Unlike other design companies, Cassina does not try to prescribe a ‘total look’ to its customer. The Cassina client is educated and knows how to experiment – or at least is willing to learn how to combine periods, styles, designers, etc. At first it’s more challenging but it’s a huge benefit because it prevents it from ever being out of style, or looking dated – innovation never looks dated, no matter when.

It was important to us to also interview architects rather than only designers, because they sometimes have a better overall, 360˚ vision of the built environment, from the micro to the macro. Arno Brandlhuber, Martti Kalliala, and Zhao Yang are very interesting practitioners because they challenge the status quo in their respective cultural contexts: what does it mean to be comfortable? How do we redefine the concept of luxury in the 21st century? What makes a perfect dwelling? They have very different answers to these questions that touch on all aspects, from the urban scale down to the furniture.
Beatriz Colomina, as a historian, was key to put everything we accept in a historical perspective. It is fascinating to follow her trace the historical arch between Sigmund Freud’s daybed to the working realties in the digital economy where the bed becomes a social platform. Konstantin Grcic is one of the most successful and perhaps more importantly, most influential industrial designers working today. In his interview he discusses the challenges of projecting the future in a formal way, reconciling the ‘slow’ nature of furniture design with the speed of development in a digital age.

Colomina’s thoughts on the contemporary generations of the bed were first laid out in her essay The Century of the Bed, which led us to approach her for this project. In it she describes how paradoxically our lives have expanded digitally, but physically our living spaces are getting smaller and smaller – at least for most people in the world. As a result, we are increasingly confined to the one room in the house that cannot be rationalized away: the bedroom. It is from there that we go out into the world, via various social media platforms, video-telephony apps, or even through virtual reality. As a result, the time we actually spend outside diminishes.
However, it probably doesn’t mean that we’ll never go outside again. There is also a counter-trend of people moving to rural areas to live a different life, away from claustrophobic urban confines. And then there still are many people in the world who don’t even have the privilege of owning their own home, who might share a room with an entire family, or even with strangers. So it’s a fine line where being able to stay in bed is both an incredible privilege and a debilitating factor for social and societal community.

These five themes were derived from things we talked about with Konstantin, Arno, Zhao, Beatriz, and Martti – different thoughts that manifest themselves in one way or another in these beautiful environment that the Cassina team created around the furniture. Again, the Cassina customer is intelligent, educated, so these are not prescribed aesthetics of a certain taste, but rather idealized interpretations, suggestions, speculations of what our lives can or will be – I say idealized because having a house exclusively furnished with beautiful Cassina pieces is, of course, a privilege not everyone can afford.

My personal taste has very much been formed by having studied architecture and so my apartment in New York is almost the cliché of an architect’s home: very sparse, mostly black and white, a few key pieces by designers I admire, such as Gae Aulenti, Gino Sarfatti, Mario Bellini, Ward Bennett, Ilmari Tapiovaara, etc. And a lot of books, too many books than I have room for. It’s not the cosiest place on earth, but I also don’t feel like I am in a position in my life where should be getting too comfortable anytime soon.

The one I probably most aspire to – although not in the near future — is Back to the Roots. I love the presence of water in this house on the Sicilian coast, which is very minimalist, designed by Arno Brandlhuber. After having lived for more than half of my life in big cities like Paris or New York, I can very well imagine to retreat one day to a place very rural, away from the hustle and bustle that fills my life now.

My bed – closely followed by a dishwasher.