Sloft #8

In this eighth bilingual French-English issue:

• 8 Exclusive Guided Tours

Whether in Tokyo, Madrid, or Paris, our new harvest of interiors tends to defy the ongoing homogenization of urban landscapes by asserting their singularities. Indeed, a new financialized architecture "smoothes" constructions to make them "exchangeable," like products in a portfolio. This vast movement further anonymizes territories by chasing away the specific. It creates a dilution of landmarks that the scattered creation of a few major projects conceived as "signals" is not enough to counteract. What if the antidote to our external disorientation was the creation of unique interior worlds? Like the daring combination of materials, colors, and patterns in designer Pia Chevallier's apartment? Or the radical functionality of Eduardo Mediero's apartment in Madrid?

• Our first "Fashion Essay," combining a literary reflection with a fashion series

Another remedy to the feeling of evanescence in the urban landscape could lie in the notion of scale. Indeed, in an era that aims for ever-greater size, it seems illusory to hope to grasp a city, a palace, or a village in one go. Or even a holiday home. One must tirelessly revisit places to remember their features, their particular geography. At best, we retain sensations, impressions. Habitats that are too large elude us, living their immobile and indifferent lives as soon as their occupants turn their backs. This is the experience that Ulysse Josselin recounts in "L'appartement Fantôme" (The Phantom Apartment).

• An interview with the artist duo Xolo Cuintle

Yet, in the end, it is the decors that remain when we are gone. Concrete decors that would have definitively expelled us? This is the universe that Romy Texier and Valentin Vie Binet develop within the duo Xolo Cuintle. They consider concrete – their material of choice – as a kind of barrier between nature and human beings, allowing for sterilization, for control over the environment. For them, it is a material that suffocates the surface and prevents dialogue. In an era where architecture is turning to new, more natural construction methods, they give it roots, inject it with the organic, as if they wanted to conjure it, to re-anchor it in a connection with humanity. Fascinating.