By: Jack Stanley
studio visits
studio visits
You’ve seen PLAYLAB, INC.’s work before — you simply haven’t realized it. Louis Vuitton’s viral red moon bounce, Nike’s Stranger Things campaign, hand-painted backdrops among the towering skyscrapers in Midtown and Virgil Abloh’s retrospective book, Figures of Speech, are just a few of the multidisciplinary studio’s projects you may have encountered.
Archie Lee Coates IV and Jeff Franklin started PLAYLAB, INC. around a decade ago with a simple contradiction that now encompasses the studio’s entire identity. “The goal was no goal,” Coates bluntly tells HYPEBEAST. “We wanted to be able to see how far we could take our jokes and conversations as a way to explore what we were interested in doing.” This inherent openness to explore ideas from the get-go has led the art and design studio to spearhead monumental projects with collaborators ranging from the City of New York to Louis Vuitton — and its list keeps growing.
As PLAYLAB’s roster of ideas and clients began to multiply, its studio size followed suit. Enter Dillon Kogle, Phil Gibson and Ana Cecilia Thompson Motta, three multifaceted creatives who each joined PLAYLAB’s team within the past two years. Kogle, Gibson and Motta bring their own individual skill sets to the table (including Kogle’s notable footwear experiments), but Coates clarifies that the main factors connecting the three are “the ability to not have ego, to want to learn, and to want to try things that aren’t comfortable.”
Regardless of its growth, PLAYLAB’s team continues to attack all projects with the same refreshing vigor its co-founders fostered from the very beginning. This energizing, imaginative attitude naturally reflects itself in the studio’s impressive outcomes — with painstaking scanning, sorting and sourcing processes manifesting into a manual for the creative youth and hours of back-and-forth with city officials culminating into a water-safety detecting LED light, just to name a couple.
We sat down with all five PLAYLAB members at their sunny one-room studio on Canal Street to learn more about their signature design process and wildly diverse projects.
Exploration is at the Heart of PLAYLAB, INC.’s Design Process
Exploring the otherworldly artworks of the Brooklyn-based painter and sculptor.
New York, New York
www.playlab.org
What is your favorite project you have worked on during your time at PLAYLAB?
Yok & Sheryo
Jeff: This year has been great for projects like the Louis Vuitton show and Fantasy Landscapes because we have started to take projects from the idea phase into actual reality. We've worked on a lot of projects that were amazing on paper, but they would just die there. Through hard work, we have been able to start figuring out how to translate our sketches into reality. Fantasy Landscapes was a great example of this because we were able to work with fabricators, find an amazing group of scenic painters, install everything and see people's reactions during its duration.
Ana: In addition to Fantasy Landscapes, the other project that comes to mind was working on the strategy for Nike's Stranger Things collaboration. We got to do a lot of research on the ‘80s, and all the ideas Nike loved were the most humor-focused. It's so surreal when you see projects like this in real life. Nike even made the upside-down receipt.
Dillon: We were part of a group exhibition at Black Cube in Denver where we essentially created a shoe store environment called Size Run. The show had an overarching theme of warehouses and distribution in relation to contemporary art, and the installation was an extension of our experimentation with shoes as a medium for our studio art practice.
We wanted it to be about sneakers as a medium while simultaneously being an art installation and performance. We made six pairs of one shoe model using knock-off Balenciagas as a base. We deconstructed and re-built them with a square foam body and bungee cord system. We made a whole store set-up, with a try-on bench experience (big thanks to Ryan Gendron for fabrication help), backstock, etc.
Did you have similar styles before you met?
Sheryo: My style is really wonky and really imperfect because I like imperfection. My lines were super wavy when I drew and his was kind of straighter. He would draw a straight line. Try to get really straight on the wall and spray can and I'll be like, "Yo. I'm just going to do it wonky." Because it's easier. It's done by hand.
Yok: I had a cleaner style. A bit more, I don't know, it was a bit more work and trouble to make the cleaner style and then I met Sheryo and she had this loose, wobbly, wonky style and I was envious of it and kind of adapted into that. It’s kind of like that new airbrush work that we've been doing. I kind of just embrace the looseness and the wonkiness of it in the conception.
Erchen: It’s very important that each restaurant does different things. We’re inspired by many different eateries in Asia. So Soho is quite minimal, it’s very food focused. It’s in Soho so loads of people are coming in and out and they only want to spend maybe 30 minutes. With Borough we were inspired by the late night grill places and drinking places in Tokyo. We have a highball machine here. Everything revolves around the late night eating style. I think the inspiration comes from a different area but they’re all kinds of Asian eateries and it filters through different restaurants.
Wai Ting: It’s just trying to bring different elements of Asian culture to London. At Borough we did the KTV room downstairs, and we’ve got the hatch there, almost back to our street food days.
A project like +Pool coming out of thin air was actually very naïve because there are all of these firsts that have to be accomplished in order for the project to be built. You can build an image or rendering really fast, and it feels like the thing you want to build is possible, but really it’s 10 years of work. We reference Jean-Claude and Christo often because he would do self-initiated projects that would take 10 to 20 years. But the real magic of the project wasn't the two weeks that it existed and was beautiful — it was the drudgery of the work to get there.
HYPEBEAST: How would you describe PLAYLAB to those who may not be familiar with it?
Archie: An extremely multidisciplinary creative practice with no particular focus.
Phil: A school.
Dillon: A rocket ship on its way to nowhere and everywhere.
I was doing reverse painted acrylic polymer peel paintings for a long time, and those were hyper-detailed and all super hard-edged and super meticulous. It got to a point with that where I guess around like 2012, I wanted to start doing something more visceral and more painterly and less sort of slick.
What is the process of creating a menu?
Good advice is work a lot, experiment a lot, and see a lot of art. Find out who the artist is who you really admire and what do you like about their work, what can you bring into the work, but also how can you experiment with materials and make paint do something that's your own language. At least for me, that's always been really important to my practice.
“We want to be the studio that wraps its arms and collaborates with an infinite amount of people to learn — not to take full responsibility.”
cj hendry
“We don't get ridiculous requests, we give them.”
Sheryo: Not as much as we like to. Now, we’re very busy with studio work and traveling to different locations in Southeast Asia.
Yok: Yeah, we’re busy finding places to do installations. It’s our new thing. We also travel often to learn niche handicrafts. We get stoked about going to places like Indonesia and spend months learning how to do Batik and making other local artisan works.
“There are elements of creativity in what I do but it's very process-focused work.”
Cj Hendry
Shoes are a cool visual language to speak in and re-contextualize. Putting that kind of experience in a museum as an artful interaction was impactful to me. It was an exciting opportunity to show the engine of PlayLab’s thought process and how we take our interests and manifest them into actual projects.
Archie: We had been working with Virgil since 2013, but only in a limited capacity. Then he asked us to work on the Louis Vuitton show, which We viewed this ask as an honor and a gift. The shared energy in the studio was, "Us?" That's the vibe, and that's where we want to be until we get to the point where we’re like, "Of course it should be us."
We want to be the studio that wraps its arms and collaborates with an infinite amount of people to learn — not to take full responsibility. For the Figures of Speech book especially, everybody from the publisher to the museum to Virgil had equal footing in the conversation about what this thing should be. There was a lot of mapping and drawing and divulging of information — and there were no guesses. Virgil was essentially like, "This is how I operate, and this is how I've been thinking for 10 years. I want everyone to know that through seeing all the evidence in a fun way." So for us, it was both an honor and an education.
What was the process for designing the Borough location?
Archie: +Pool started as abstract conversations in the studio with no intention of the idea going anywhere. Then, we put it on the internet and received a waterfall of responses, which is something that we didn't anticipate. But that is the nutshell of the office of PLAYLAB — we don't really have a goal, we really don't know exactly how we're going to get there, but we are really treating it very seriously. So we worked very hard out of the gate and haven't taken our foot off the gas in 10 years.
One of your major projects, +Pool, hopes to build a self-filtering swimming pool in the East River. Recently, you reached a milestone with the unveiling of +Pool Light, a floating LED plus sign that glows various colors based on water safety levels. Can you discuss some of the challenges you’ve faced while working on +Pool as a whole?
Jeff: Back in the beginning when it was just Archie and I, we would get fired from projects because we would throw back ideas that they didn't ask for. But we just kept persisting throughout every year, we just kept making sure that people understood what we think. Now we've gotten to the point where people expect these ideas from us — everyone from big corporations to smaller clients.
Archie: We've tried to craft an environment where people come to us for us — not for a specific type of project. But at the same time I think that our job is to be honest about who we are and what we're doing and what we're interested in. We never present something to the client that we don't think is sick. As a result, sometimes the client isn’t the right fit. But most often, the client is like, “Holy sh*t.” And that's what we look for. The feeling in the studio when that hits is like a drug.
When you work on projects with large corporate organizations, how do you manage to strike a balance between what the client wants and PLAYLAB’s creative identity?
Dillon: We don't get ridiculous requests, we give them. We tell people to do some pretty outrageous sh*t, and a lot of what we hear back is, "This is f*cking amazing. Wait, rewind. How do we make this?" The more nuanced part is then making our ideas real, in tandem with other people, with a budget, in the real world.
Archie: It’s also just about ridiculous situations, which are the byproducts of working on projects with human beings. With the Louis Vuitton show, the moment nobody sees is Virgil texting all of the designers in the group thread saying he wanted to bring a DJ and throw a huge party in the center of the show right when it ended. Situations like that and learning the different ways people you work with think are the evidence of a project. Those little moments are like symbols, and every project has them.
What is the most ridiculous request you've ever gotten from a client?
Are you both still doing that now?
Jeff: We have so many things going at once, so there's no typical day. On any given morning everyone knows they can walk in and we'll be like, "What you thought you're going to do today is not going to be anywhere close to what's going to happen, so let's shift gears." It's changing all the time, which is how we like it.
Dillon: Day to day is not a real thing in this studio. There's a rough energy level and thought level that we have to keep consistent, but in terms of projects we are always pivoting. When I come into the studio with a rough idea of what the timeline of my day looks like, it generally gets moved around because we're working on projects simultaneously that are all so different in nature and are always changing.
What is the typical workflow of a studio that has “no particular focus” but also has many projects to focus on at once like?
Phil: Yeah, sometimes your work for a project will have to be put on hold, but then you interweave it with some of the learnings you have from encountering another project in that time gap. Now you can bring some of those teachings back into that first project that you had to put on pause, and sometimes that can really work to the project's benefit, even if it's really subconscious.
Ana: It's really helpful that we're not working on all branding projects or all experiential projects. I can get inspired by something that we reference for a branding project at 9 a.m. EST, and at 1:00 p.m. EST it's one of the main ideas for a separate experiential project.
Do you find that working on multiple projects simultaneously makes each separate process stronger?
Yok: We would look at our drawings and imagine how it would be great if they were worlds that you could go inside, touch and move around. That's where the installation inspiration came from, I guess.
Sheryo: It was kind of natural, really, a progression from 2D to 3D. Yeah.
What about installations are you both most fascinated by?
Yok: We’re working on an immersive installation at the Paddle 8 auction house at the Lower East Side of New York City. We’re creating this nine-foot wooden sculpture of a middle finger with Donald Trump’s tombstone on top.
Sheryo: It’s this pretty big basement spot. We are making sculptures as well as creating the upholstery and benches. It has a really dingy and dark vibe. It’s kind of a lounge room setting. It’s going to launch this coming fall season.
What are you both working on right now?
By: Emily Engle
Archie: We aim to hire people that are extremely multidisciplinary. But at the same time they don't have to have done everything, because in this studio, Jeff and I have not done everything and the principle of this studio is that we won't.
What most people don't have that Dillon, Phil and Ana all have is the rare layer on top of professionalism and the ability to design — the ability to not have ego, to want to learn, and to want to try things that aren’t comfortable. When you’re uncomfortable, good stuff happens because you’re able to fall back on and grow your basic skill set. Dillon didn't design shoes before he got here — he just wanted to. Now he's a shoe designer. To Phil's earlier point, that's why PLAYLAB is a school.
When you decided to grow your team, what qualities were you looking for in new members?
Dillon: Residency programs and other resources for artists — let’s make a school someday.
Jeff: I want to make a penny press called “Penny, Pressed.” The image that goes on the penny press is a penny. I'm not even sure if that’s legal, but it's in the works. I also want to make more art. I think we need more of it and that everybody thrives off of it.
Archie: I want to do it all. I want to see PLAYLAB continue to thrive and grow and morph and change, and I want to be surprised by it every year. I love the projects we work on, but I love the studio more than anything. The studio is the project because it's art.
What's next for PLAYLAB? Is there something that you've always wanted to design through PLAYLAB that you guys haven't touched yet?
When you work on projects with large corporate organizations, how do you manage to strike a balance between what the client wants and PLAYLAB’s creative identity?
Jeff: Back in the beginning when it was just Archie and I, we would get fired from projects because we would throw back ideas that they didn't ask for. But we just kept persisting throughout every year, we just kept making sure that people understood what we think. Now we've gotten to the point where people expect these ideas from us — everyone from big corporations to smaller clients.
Archie: We've tried to craft an environment where people come to us for us — not for a specific type of project. But at the same time I think that our job is to be honest about who we are and what we're doing and what we're interested in. We never present something to the client that we don't think is sick. As a result, sometimes the client isn’t the right fit. But most often, the client is like, “Holy sh*t.” And that's what we look for. The feeling in the studio when that hits is like a drug.
What is the most ridiculous request you've ever gotten from a client?
Dillon: We don't get ridiculous requests, we give them. We tell people to do some pretty outrageous sh*t, and a lot of what we hear back is, "This is f*cking amazing. Wait, rewind. How do we make this?" The more nuanced part is then making our ideas real, in tandem with other people, with a budget, in the real world.
Archie: It’s also just about ridiculous situations, which are the byproducts of working on projects with human beings. With the Louis Vuitton show, the moment nobody sees is Virgil texting all of the designers in the group thread saying he wanted to bring a DJ and throw a huge party in the center of the show right when it ended. Situations like that and learning the different ways people you work with think are the evidence of a project. Those little moments are like symbols, and every project has them.
“We want to be the studio that wraps its arms and collaborates with an infinite amount of people to learn — not to take full responsibility.”
What is the typical workflow of a studio that has “no particular focus” but also has many projects to focus on at once like?
Jeff: We have so many things going at once, so there's no typical day. On any given morning everyone knows they can walk in and we'll be like, "What you thought you're going to do today is not going to be anywhere close to what's going to happen, so let's shift gears." It's changing all the time, which is how we like it.
Dylan: Day to day is not a real thing in this studio. There's a rough energy level and thought level that we have to keep consistent, but in terms of projects we are always pivoting. When I come into the studio with a rough idea of what the timeline of my day looks like, it generally gets moved around because we're working on projects simultaneously that are all so different in nature and are always changing.
Do you find that working on multiple projects simultaneously makes each separate process stronger?
Phil: Yeah, sometimes your work for a project will have to be put on hold, but then you interweave it with some of the learnings you have from encountering another project in that time gap. Now you can bring some of those teachings back into that first project that you had to put on pause, and sometimes that can really work to the project's benefit, even if it's really subconscious.
Anna: It's really helpful that we're not working on all branding projects or all experiential projects. I can get inspired by something that we reference for a branding project at 9 a.m. EST, and at 1:00 p.m. EST it's one of the main ideas for a separate experiential project.
“The real magic of the project wasn't the two weeks that it existed and was beautiful - it was the drudgery of the work to get there.”