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“Rafael de Cardenas situates his practice between architecture and interior design, neither of which he subscribes to entirely. “I don’t care weather it’s considered architecture if you put tape on a wall,” he muses, referring to the dizzying black-and-white zigzagging applique he did for the Greasy Spoon pop-up shop (run by art collective O.H.W.O.W.)in Athens, Greece. De Cardenas studied architecture at Columbia and UCLA, but initially worked as a collection designer for Calvin Klein (and as a production designer for BMW car shows and the film Minority Report). Two architectural references particularly haunt him: the bondage room at the late, great ’90s nightclub USA, “where reference and effect turned self-aware,” and Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, “where High Modernism strips architecture of decoration… as too gay,” while still employing decorative I-beams. He now considers architecture, among others, a medium for provoking an emotional response: “You don’t design a mood, you design the instrumentation that produces a mood.” De Cardenas’s architectural moods tend toward disorienting, and slightly melancholic. In the New York home of model Jessica Stam, he channeled Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s tragically fashionable and famously claustrophobic The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) through gothic, feminine colors. And in his design for the Charles Restaurant in New York, smoked mirrors and fragments of Rorschach-like marble surround patrons in order to create, as de Cardenas puts it, “a dissected version of yourself, an exquisite corpse.”
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ALL IMAGES OF WORK BY RAFEL DE CÁRDENAS, VIA O.H.W.O.W. AND ARCHITECTURE AT LARGE: [1] O.H.W.O.W., MIAMI; [2] WRECK CENTER, NEW YORK; [3] CÁRDENAS RESIDENCE; [4] BRANCATI RESIDENCE, NEW YORK; [5] NY MINUTE, ROME; [6] GREASY SPOON POP-UP, ATHENS; TEXT BY ALEX GARTENFELD AS TAKEN FROM PIN-UP ISSUE 7, F/W 09/10](http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kxx7wcuIkW1qz93lzo1_500.png)
[1]
“Rafael de Cardenas situates his practice between architecture and interior design, neither of which he subscribes to entirely. “I don’t care weather it’s considered architecture if you put tape on a wall,” he muses, referring to the dizzying black-and-white zigzagging applique he did for the Greasy Spoon pop-up shop (run by art collective O.H.W.O.W.)in Athens, Greece. De Cardenas studied architecture at Columbia and UCLA, but initially worked as a collection designer for Calvin Klein (and as a production designer for BMW car shows and the film Minority Report). Two architectural references particularly haunt him: the bondage room at the late, great ’90s nightclub USA, “where reference and effect turned self-aware,” and Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, “where High Modernism strips architecture of decoration… as too gay,” while still employing decorative I-beams. He now considers architecture, among others, a medium for provoking an emotional response: “You don’t design a mood, you design the instrumentation that produces a mood.” De Cardenas’s architectural moods tend toward disorienting, and slightly melancholic. In the New York home of model Jessica Stam, he channeled Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s tragically fashionable and famously claustrophobic The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) through gothic, feminine colors. And in his design for the Charles Restaurant in New York, smoked mirrors and fragments of Rorschach-like marble surround patrons in order to create, as de Cardenas puts it, “a dissected version of yourself, an exquisite corpse.”
[2]
[2]
[3]
[4]
[1]
[5]
[6,1]
ALL IMAGES OF WORK BY RAFEL DE CÁRDENAS, VIA O.H.W.O.W. AND ARCHITECTURE AT LARGE: [1] O.H.W.O.W., MIAMI; [2] WRECK CENTER, NEW YORK; [3] CÁRDENAS RESIDENCE; [4] BRANCATI RESIDENCE, NEW YORK; [5] NY MINUTE, ROME; [6] GREASY SPOON POP-UP, ATHENS; TEXT BY ALEX GARTENFELD AS TAKEN FROM PIN-UP ISSUE 7, F/W 09/10
