This story was originally published in HYPEBEAST Magazine Issue 17: The Connection Issue as
"The Architecture of Hype." Find out more here.
Off-White™ Tokyo Store (2016)
Off-White™ Tokyo Store Concept
Off-White™ Hong Kong Store (2014)
Off-White™ Hong Kong Store Concept and mock-up
Yeezus Tour Stage (2013)
Yeezus Tour Stage Concept
Family tries to evoke the simplest of emotions through their designs, akin to the thrill of catching the crest of a wave.
"It’s an extremely intimate process — when you sit at the table, you need to be in an environment where you can be stupid, where you can say things that sound absurd."
Since the opening of OFF-WHITE’s Hong Kong flagship in 2014, Family has designed two more stores for OFF-WHITE in Singapore and Tokyo, both of which are intended as reactions to their immediate context. OFF-WHITE Singapore is a monasterial chamber with a bamboo grove – a reprieve from the cosmetic glamor surrounding it on the high-end shopping street of Orchard Road. Conversely, the Tokyo branch, otherwise known as “SOMETHING & ASSOCIATES,” is a hypernormal depiction of a corporate Wall Street environment, inspired simply by the business-like character of the building it is housed in.
While seemingly disparate in their designs, the three stores fall into a logical framework when considered as part of Virgil’s personality cult – after all, Stanescu observes “the people that go to OFF-WHITE in the first place, their constant element is Virgil, his Instagram or the recent campaigns that he’s putting out there. What they don’t require is a vanilla formula that’s been replicated endlessly all throughout the stores.” The stores thus transcends their original purpose as distribution points for product, and instead become the means through which the brand interprets each city; or funhouse mirrors where devotees can see the identities of their hometowns reflected back at them in a new light.
For this maverick design, Family found a more-than-willing patron in close Kanye associate and OFF-WHITE founder, Virgil Abloh, whom the duo had met while working on the Yeezus Tour. His background in architecture (he has a Masters in Architecture from the Illinois Institute of Technology) and conceptual art as the creative director for Kanye’s DONDA creative agency made Abloh naturally receptive to Family’s proposal to sacrifice a not-insignificant portion of the already cramped lot to a permanent installation of horticulture.
“We didn’t want to compete with another shop window in that area, nor can you as a brand when you’re not that established,” says Stanescu. “So we said, fuck it, might as well do our own thing.” In working with Abloh, she continues, they were uniquely placed to “dedicate a third of the floor space to the bigger picture, something that makes a stronger statement than a traditional shop window.” Underpinning the project was a desire for the store to give back to the city and its inhabitants. “It’s obviously essential that the store can sell clothes, but if it just did that, it wouldn’t have the kind of impact on its surroundings that a store like this has to have,” Wong adds. “It’s serving a purpose beyond simply selling clothes that’s as, if not more, important.”
To that end, Family tries to evoke the simplest emotions through their designs, akin to the thrill of catching the crest of a wave. And for all their skill in drumming up emotions, the work of Family has been welcomed at large by pop culture, which depends largely on these same off-the-cuff sentiments. “[Design] can be performative but ultimately, you have to react on a visceral level,” says Stanescu. “Just that millisecond of awareness for a user is something that’s super important and exciting to me.”
That all-important millisecond comes into play on the other side of the Pacific Ocean in Hong Kong, where, nestled in an overwhelmingly artificial environment between the glitzy window displays of Alexander McQueen and Tsumori Chisato, a burst of lush, green foliage erupts from an otherwise austere, whitewashed storefront in the Causeway Bay shopping district. So goes an initial glimpse of the first brick-and-mortar store for streetwear label du jour, OFF-WHITE.
This quietly rebellious design, with its tongue-in-cheek transplant of a real jungle into the midst of Hong Kong’s concrete equivalent, bears all the hallmarks of Family’s ethos with its focus on a purely sensory experience. Shoppers who cross the store’s threshold find themselves immersed in a dense rainforest that extends for over one-third of the narrow floor space, replete with mist sprays and a soundtrack of wild fauna to engage the other senses. Past a sliding glass door, the actual interior of the store is a spartan, geometric abstraction of a cave, with distinct visual ties to Mount Yeezus.
“Any bigger implications as to who that person is or what they do need to be left outside the door.” And far from his brazen, at times obnoxious public image, Kanye in private proved to be a fluent and adept communicator of ideas. “It’s undeserving to call him just another creative person in the room because he’s actually very, very good, but it’s not in his nature to exert his fame on the process,” adds Wong. “The conversation is much more natural than you would imagine.” The final result was a perfect reflection of the interplay between creative minds, with Kanye’s electrifying on-stage presence amplified all the more by the set design. “That was one of the most fascinating things to me, seeing how Kanye completely owned it and how people reacted to everything he did, how he took that as a tool and brought it to life,” Stanescu recalls.
The fantastical escapism and solemn monumentalism imbued by the Yeezus Tour stage is indicative of Family’s continued fascination with nature, hinting at a deeper awareness of the environment surrounding their projects. It is, as Wong explains, the result of many childhood summers spent straddling a surfboard in the serenity of the Pacific, staring out at the impossible flatness of the ocean’s horizon. “There’s something about its sublimeness that we’re always trying to capture in one way or another.” It’s a refreshing take on architecture, which often comes across as an impenetrable and esoteric craft to those outside of the industry – a strange state of affairs, given the ubiquity of buildings and the outsized effect they have on the lives of city dwellers.
The conversation naturally settles on the role of architecture in a post-Instagram, post-Amazon Prime world. In an era where you can meet all of your basic needs without leaving your couch, Wong says, “Buildings oftentimes don’t need to function like they did before, but they need to fulfill all these other needs that are cropping up that you can’t get online. Things as simple as a shop suddenly have to do a lot more, or a different set of things than simply sell your clothes.”
True to the visceral ethos of Family, Stanescu believes that “the underlying goal of architecture is to make people feel or understand design, not on a rational, cerebral level, but just to feel it.” Buildings, she says, become more like a portal to other places, moments, feelings. And whether architectural design transports you to the foot of a holy mountain, or places you on a surfboard gazing at the ocean’s horizon, it must do so without pomp nor circumstance. “At some point, the design has to feel right,” says Wong. “It has to be beyond any kind of explanation and just be an awesome place to be.”
“Unbeknownst to us, we moved around from project to project as a pair and we clicked right away,” recounts Wong, a 36-year-old San Diego native who has worked at the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, EHDD and Snøhetta, and founded Family in 2009 at the height of the recession. Meanwhile, the 34-year-old Stanescu – a transplant from Romania’s Polytechnic University of Timisoara – used architecture “as an excuse to live and work around the world” after her internship at REX, first heading to SANAA in Tokyo, then Architecture for Humanity in South Africa and Herzog & de Meuron in Switzerland. All the while the pair kept in touch, Stanescu occasionally working remotely for Wong’s budding firm before she returned to New York in 2013 to properly join Family’s office in the West Village.
Stanescu brought with her a valuable connection to Kanye West, whom she met at OMA while working as the project architect on his seven-screen “surround vision” cinematic experience at Cannes Film Festival for 2012’s Cruel Summer album. West approached Stanescu after she returned to Family, roping in the fledgling firm to design the striking 50-foot-high miniature mountain that would accompany West on his 38-city tour. The creative process proved to be fluid, honest and more importantly, a great leveler between client and architect. “It’s an extremely intimate process – when you sit at the table, you need to be in an environment where you can be stupid, where you can say things that sound absurd,” says Stanescu.
The rock slab, seemingly shorn from the earth under immense tectonic forces, began to arc upwards as a solitary figure, his face shrouded by an onyx-encrusted mask, strode into an ethereal column of light that illuminated the slab at its apex. Against the backdrop of a lone mountain, fractured perfectly down the middle, and framed by a flattened orb of light from above, the figure spoke in booming tones to a roiling human mass 30,000 strong. But far from being a biblical scene from the 5th century B.C., the year was 2013; the figure was clad not in ceremonial robes but in custom Margiela; and the verses resonating through the air were not of holy provenance but came from the platinum-certified studio album Yeezus. Similarly, the geologic formations that Kanye West stood on were not extricated over millions of years from within the planet’s bowels, but created in the course of several months by a small but close-knit architectural firm called Family New York.
That this five-person outfit and its innocuous-sounding name would be responsible for the set design of one of the most acclaimed concerts of the decade seems both improbable and entirely natural. The firm first garnered acclaim in 2010 for +POOL, an ambitious project which proposed floating a cross-shaped pool in New York City’s East River that would act “like a giant strainer,” cleaning the river water while providing a public leisure space for the city. It was four years prior, however, where the story of Family began with partners Dong-Ping Wong and Oana Stanescu, who met while working at New York architecture studio REX.