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But, whilst talking of modernity and contemporaneity, Grcic is ready to admit that he is not at home with the latest technological developments. We’re talking via Skype (he is in his studio in Munich, while I am at my kitchen table in London), a medium that neither one of us forty-somethings is entirely comfortable with. Having taken his computer out onto his terrace, Konstantin causes our conversation to come to an abrupt halt when his battery runs down. Returning a few minutes later he says sheepishly, “I am still quite analogue in my life and the way I work. I am never the fastest to adapt to the next big thing; I am not the first one to have the newest gadget. I think, in order to be more radical I need to remain quite analogue. And I still prefer meeting people in person.”

I am with Konstantin on the need for non-digital encounters, yet I find that he proves a match for the small rectangle of my laptop screen in terms of his ability to enthuse eloquently about the materials, techniques and attitudes of design. Wearing a black suit jacket over a T-shirt, his hair slicked back above black-framed spectacles and neat facial hair, he leans into the camera as he explains the inspiration behind and development of his recent projects. “I am going through a little bit of a phase of projects that go back to very simple materials,” he tells me, “with pieces that refer to the things that I studied at the very beginning, to my own roots in design.”

The son of a Yugoslav father and a German mother, Grcic was born in Germany in 1965. He attended secondary school in Wuppertal, the small town later made famous by the dancer Pina Bausch. His first point of design reference was the Bauhaus. “It is part of German history and culture, so that’s not unusual,” he explains. “I was drawn to it and especially to Marcel Breuer. I liked the way he always claimed that he started everything from scratch and that for him there was no history. I liked that self-confidence, and of course I liked his designs. I really like the word modernism and I find it extremely precious. Modernism was a movement that had such a clear goal: to change society on all the different levels. It was a different time than today. I’m not saying it was easy; it was pioneering, but now our world has become so much more complex: there is no longer one direction in which to push.”

Grcic has rediscovered certain modernist materials, in particular the Breuer favourite, tubular steel, in several of his recent projects. The first of these was a joint commission from the Japanese company Muji and the German furniture manufacturer Thonet, the firm that first produced Breuer’s celebrated cantilever chair in the 1930s. “The project was an amazing rediscovery for me of the material and the language of these modernists,” says Grcic. “It seemed so simple and contemporary to be making something from a bent piece of tube. For so many years I had completely forgotten about it because I’d been working in plastics and using injection moulding. Everything had become so complicated, so this project was a revelation.” Creating a series of beautifully minimal desks and chairs that were launched by Muji in 2009, Grcic was sufficiently enthused by the process to continue working with the same material for a next project, an outdoor chair for the Swiss furniture company Vitra.

“Vitra is an amazing company, one that is all about very sophisticated technology, and it was my plan to force them into something really simple, which they found very irritating!” laughs Grcic. “Everyone, including the founder of the company, Rolf Fehlbaum, kept asking me: ‘Is this it?’ I really had to push for staying so simple with the basic structure.” Made from a tubular steel frame, with a cloth hammock inside, the chair, which goes by the name Waver, represented ‘a combination of two worlds’. While the frame casts back to the Breuer furniture of the 1930s, the seat has more in common with the very latest sports equipment. “Stuff you would find in sailing or mountaineering. I love the new materials they use in those sports,” enthuses Grcic, “the amazing little hardware fittings and so on.”

Grcic’s current interest in working “very economically” and achieving “a lot with simple means” harks back in part to the earliest days of his formal design education at Parnham College, in Dorset, UK – a college that began life as the School for Craftsmanship in Wood. Spending two years there training to be a cabinetmaker before going on to study industrial design at the Royal College of Art, London, Grcic learnt various elementary construction techniques that he continues to use to this day. Most recently, while making a small wallhanging table named Bebek for the Italian marble manufacturer Marsotto, he employed “a very traditional cabinetmaking principle of two wedge-shaped rails: one attached to the wall, one attached to what you hang from the wall.” It was shown in Milan during the design fair in 2011, Grcic’s second year of working with the company, and his aim was to find a way of making marble furniture at minimal cost. “Marble itself is an abundant material, and it is so beautiful and appropriate for certain things, but it tends to be expensive because of the labour involved in crafting it,” explains Grcic. The key to the design of Bebek was the discovery that sheet marble could be produced relatively cheaply. It’s constructed from two thin slabs: a wall-hanging square and a round protruding surface. “I’ve always enjoyed designing small tables,” Grcic adds. “It is always useful to have a small surface to put things down on.”

Continuing in the same demystifying vein, Grcic says: “Furniture itself is actually quite primitive. A piece of furniture is not a car or a rocket. It is something to sit on or to put something down on.” This is undeniably true, but among Grcic’s most recent projects is a set of limited-edition, hand-lacquered tables that suggests he sometimes fantasises about things being otherwise. Called Champions and decorated in a style that brings to mind the latest models of skis, racing bikes or Formula One cars, the series consists of four large and four small tables, each made from a graphically enhanced aluminium trestle with a floating glass top. Grcic admits to finding decoration “something quite strange”, and says of this project: “It was a first for me to work with graphics or any kind of pattern on a piece of furniture.” He explains: “Even though I don’t necessarily like the graphics on sports equipment, I like the meaning they have. They make me believe that the ski, or whatever it is, has all these special technical features. They are very powerful in that they make us project qualities onto the equipment, so I thought it was worth an experiment to see if that would work on furniture.”

Particularly inspired by the American mechanic who “put a big yellow stripe down the centre of the racing car: the first go-faster stripe,” Grcic spent two years formulating the appropriate graphic idiom. “It’s like learning a language,” he says. “We studied it carefully and we learnt by trying things out.” Grcic’s designs for the graphic forms look remarkably authentic, as ugly as anything on the Formula One track, but once transferred onto the furniture by ex-racing-car-driver-turned-lacquer-craftsman Walter Maurer, they become surprisingly lovely. In Maurer’s expert hands, harsh colour contrasts become exquisite fades, and awkward graphic forms spring to life. “It’s not that from now on I will go overboard and spray-paint everything,” says Grcic. “But, somehow, doing these tables now, I don’t think I’m working against the ideas of modernism. It’s almost the opposite. I feel that there are so many things in furniture that we never question and we never provoke any change.”

His recent projects have spanned from absolute simplicity to decorative complexity – an indication of his restlessness and his desire to challenge conventions. Grcic acknowledges history, but like Breuer, he wants his designs to be truly contemporary when he says: “They are products of today.”

Emily King is a freelance curator from London who also writes about design. Swedish photographer Andreas Larsson, who lives in London, traveled to Paris to capture Grcic on the opening day of the designer’s exhibition at Galerie Kreo.

Munich, Germany, 2011
Text Emily King
Portrait Andreas Larsson

The process in development at Xeros makes use of research done by noted chemist Dr Stephen Burkinshaw of the University of Leeds. Burkinshaw discovered that tiny nylon beads become highly stain-absorbent in an environment with 100% humidity. Thus, a washing machine filled with such 3mm-long, oblong beads would be able to clean one’s garments using just enough water to create 100% humidity, a tiny fraction of the amount currently required. The beads can be re-used hundreds of times and, amazingly, tests prove that they don’t all end up in jeans pockets and socks. The beads are properly drained away at the end of the cleaning process.

Bill Westwater, CEO of Xeros, affirms that the technology would reduce the carbon footprint of domestic laundry by up to 40%. A recent article in the Guardian states that if every household in the UK converted to the Xeros system, the emissions savings would be the equivalent of taking 1.4 million cars off the road.

For the moment, the product is still in development, with a commercial debut anticipated sometime later this year. In order to test out its invention, Xeros has paired with the US firm GreenEarth Cleaning, ‘the world’s largest brand of green dry cleaning’. GreenEarth already promotes the use of liquid silicone instead of chemical solvents in commercial dry-cleaning (an ironic name, by the way, as dry-cleaning was never dry to begin with).

Can washing ever truly be waterless? Probably, yes. Advances in polymer chemistry will inevitably lead to increasingly absorbent nylons or completely new synthetics for the beads, which might one day cancel out the need for water altogether.

What remains is the problem of waste. What to do with all those nylon beads full of sweat, red wine and coffee after hundreds of washes? Plans are that they will initially be recycled into useful objects such as car dashboards, with the possibility of closed-loop recycling on the distant horizon. And perhaps most importantly, someone will need to come up with a way to make one’s laundry smell nice and fresh after a good tumble in a drum full of nylon.

Text Matthew Lowe

Even the choice of materials was a matter of intuition and desire for Fehn, and he believed that light itself was one of them. Here he has filtered it through the concrete fins that make up the roof, turning it from a bright, Italian yellow to a pale, Nordic grey. Just a few seconds inside the pavilion, and you’ve left Venice behind.

Venice, Italy, 1962
Text Caroline Roux
Photography Åke E:son Lindman

The most interesting recent prospect comes from the Croatian engineer Dr Marin Soljacic of the company WiTricity. In 2007, Soljacic suspended two unconnected copper coils in the air. One was attached to an AC power source (the generator) and the other to a 60W light bulb (the receiver). With both finely tuned to resonate electro-magnetically with each other – think of how plucking an A string on a piano causes other A strings nearby to vibrate – it worked, at distances of up to two meters. While efficiency has increased significantly (by 90% according to WiTricity), the technique remains strictly in the development phase.

Other applications of wireless power are either limited to a distance of several centimetres or require continuous contact, such as the Powermat wireless charging system. Similar to the way most electric toothbrushes charge, simply by contact, devices such as telephones need to be placed directly on the Powermat in order to recharge. Ultimately it’s not what we would really hope to find in terms of truly wireless power: a living room without cables, the ability to place lamps, flat screens and toasters wherever we want.

But as we consider adding another energy source to the air around us, there is the major issue of safety. ‘Wireless power’ makes one think of giant clouds of electricity – a physiological no-go. Luckily, WiTricity makes use of magnetic fields, which, according to the World Health Organisation and other government bodies, have little or no effect on the human body.

All things considered, will we ever be able to cut the cord? The liberation would be glorious. Cardiac arrhythmia patients would no longer have to undergo surgery to replace the batteries in their pacemakers. Certain long-haul enthusiasts, spending their time jet-setting from London to the Middle East by way of Tokyo, would be tickled pink at the prospect that they could conduct their electronic lives seamlessly across continents. Others, like Dr Soljacic himself, would simply be thrilled to find their mobile phone in the morning, fully charged, on the kitchen counter where they left it. Despite all these advancements, electrical devices will continue to require a reliable source of energy. And as anyone who possesses a wireless network can attest, nothing is more aggravating than having to hard-reset the router. Imagine having to reset the wireless electricity generator for one’s home.

Text Matthew Lowe

This is the destination of Novotny’s current work commute. She is in the process of filming the second series of a highly acclaimed drama called Dog, in which she plays a woman who has returned from a long spell in Goa and is facing relationship issues –?Novotny seems to be drawn to more soulful characters. She will later describe the show as “a hybrid between Mad Men and Californication,” but for the moment she’s running late, even though her flight landed at the same as mine.

It turns out that while I jumped into a taxi, Novotny was being far less glamorous and took the airport train. In fact, she’s quite shocked by my extravagance. “Really? Taxis cost a fortune! Also, the train is really the fastest way,” she says, “except today there were hoards of people and delays.”

It’s yet more evidence that Novotny is a very un-starry kind of a star. There’s a striking lack of information on her to be found anywhere online or on paper. “I like to keep it that way,” she says. In fact she dislikes the term ‘star’, as she’s doing a job that deserves no more attention than any other. Her gentle face is the kind you’d seek out in a crowd of strangers if you need to ask for help: quietly, staunchly independent in everything.

Novotny is rarely seen walking on the red carpet “unless it’s my project and I need to be there to promote it.” And while magazine covers, make-up contracts and fragrance creations are snapped up by actresses big and small around the world, you won’t find Novotny among their number. The truth is that you’ll barely find her at all, except on screen.

Novotny likes indie films, the untetheredness of it all. “Independent productions are not always more challenging performance-wise, but obviously they give you a bit more freedom, as you don’t have to have the input of four producers, three executive producers, four big studios and 15 distributors who are all supposed to have their say,” she says. She also likes the cosiness of the set in smaller productions. “From my experience, with the kind of mentality on set when you’re working with a 20-person crew, rather than a 250-person crew, you get a bit more intimacy, more personal relations. As an actor, that’s really necessary to make something. It really gives you more focus sometimes. Because walking onto a set with 250 people around you and then peeling everything down to ‘Oh, I’m just a normal person,’ it’s really difficult to make a natural appearance, I think. Of course, if you’ve come from that school and you’re one of those Hollywood actors who’s only ever worked like that, then I can understand how you could just walk in and...” She clicks her fingers to suggest an instant rapport. “But for me, working in setups like that can be quite intimidating.”

Novotny definitely has done the big-crew, big-budget thing, most notably in Eat, Pray, Love – last year’s Hollywood blockbuster based on Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling memoir about a journey of self-discovery set in three different countries. “It was great,” she says of the experience, which saw her in a big supporting role to Julia Roberts during the Italian part of the adventure. “I certainly enjoyed eating ice cream with Julia.”

Weirdly, despite the big budget, she got no help in mastering the Italian she needed for her scenes. “There was no dialogue coach. I was back in Copenhagen where I live and there was this Italian guy who works in a shop and I said, ‘Listen, I really need help. I’m supposed to deliver this in two weeks and I’m getting no help from anywhere.’ So I sat in this café across the street speaking Italian – or what I thought was Italian. I’m not sure, but I think it went okay.”

Could she do more Hollywood productions if she wanted to? “You’d have to ask someone else about that. It would be a bit too cocky for me to answer that,” she says. But then Novotny really isn’t so interested in pursuing Hollywood for the sake of it. It’s just not how she defines success. “I guess after Eat, Pray, Love I could have taken a swing at it, but I don’t really work that way. I think in the movie industry the world is your playground. It’s become more and more possible, also because of co-productions, to work locally and still be seen worldwide. I just stay open to everything, which then obviously doubles your opportunities for work.”

But Novotny is a strong champion of the importance of the domestic market. She’s particularly proud of Dog, which centres around a couples’ therapist who believes that people are better on their own and consequently encourages his clients to split up. “It is really dark and very intellectual; it’s great,” she says. When the director interrupts our interview to come and say hello, she tells me afterwards: “Every day there’s some kind of absurd scene we’re shooting, and the saying of the day is always something completely absurd. So now he just said we’re going to fuck a cake.” Literally or metaphorically? “Probably literally, I think!”

It won’t be her character fucking a cake, however, even though she wouldn’t object. “Oh I’d be completely alright with it. I can be naked. We don’t have a lot of ‘I don’t do that,’” she says cheerily of the Scandinavian approach to acting. In part that’s all to do with the darker side that seems to permeate a lot of the domestic creative output: Wallander, the Stieg Larsson film adaptations, the novel The Leopard by Norwegian writer Jo Nesbø. “Overall, Scandinavian drama is quite dark,” ponders Novotny. “It is pretty dark here for ten months of the year, so it might have something to do with that,” she laughs. “Also, our film censorship is quite mild, so maybe that has something to do with it as well.”

Novotny used to blog about the dominance of the brooding crime genre in the Scandinavian film industry. (She took her blog down when someone started stalking her. Now she has no online presence; not even her own page on Facebook. The dot-com website under her name is run by a fan and is not an official site.) “What we’re looking at is a successful concept that you know is going to work for a big audience,” she says of the popularity of crime movies. “And yes, it’s a great opportunity work-wise for the business and has created a lot of job opportunities. But on the other hand it becomes a kind of a factory production. And the problem with that, I think, is that it might make it more difficult for any indie production to get through.”

Perhaps she’s taken her penchant for independence personally. Novotny isn’t married. Her partner is “a great, normal guy” who works in IT. “I don’t really believe in marriage,” she says. “I really don’t think it’s necessary, but legally it’s important with the kids, so I’m going to have to.” She doesn’t specify when she might get married. The couple is known to have a four-year-old daughter. Novotny is so intensely private that it’s only when she happens to mention having “hormone pimples from breastfeeding” that I realise a second child, a one-year-old daughter, is even on the scene. “Yes, nobody knows about her,” she confirms.

Perhaps the key to really understanding Novotny lies in the small tattoo that encircles the top of her left arm. She had it done at 16. “There were two things I wasn’t allowed to do: get a tattoo and drive a motorcycle. I did both, of course.” So is she a rebel? “A rebel without a cause. Definitely without a cause, as I don’t need to rebel against anything, but sometimes for the sake of exploration it’s good to be a rebel, just to see what happens, you know? And also to be yourself.” So does she regret the tattoo at all? “I don’t. I mean, it would have been easier without it sometimes, but I don’t regret it. I don’t believe in regret.”

In part, her independent and liberal spirit is the result of “growing up in Sweden, a country which has been so open to immigration but that also became quite integrated earlier than a lot of other countries,” she says. But things are even freer in her adoptive hometown, Copenhagen. If you want to see real liberation, she says, try Denmark. “It’s even more fantastic. The women there are amazons.”

Edwina Ings-Chambers from London is the beauty director of Sunday Times Style. Photographer Marius W Hansen is originally from Norway, the country where Tuva’s portraits were taken. He currently resides in London.

Oslo, Norway, 2011
Text Edwina Ings-Chambers
Photography Marius W Hansen

Noma, the restaurant Meyer co-founded in 2004, has two Michelin stars and in April this year was named the world’s number one restaurant for the second year in a row in the San Pellegrino Awards, considered to be the most significant of their kind. Housed in a beautifully restored 18th-century warehouse overlooking Copenhagen Harbour, Noma is the food critics’ favourite. It is lusted after by gastronomes willing to wait months for a reservation (tables for November 2011 can be booked from 4 August, when the telephone lines open at 10am), patronised by people who fly in on private planes just for dinner, and revered by fellow chefs. Even my mother knows all about Noma, and she’s an 85-year-old living in the depths of the English countryside who’s never set foot in Denmark. Meyer says that he was never interested in being number one, only in opening a really good restaurant serving Nordic cuisine (with local products such as grains, berries and Greenland musk ox and never so much as a drop of olive oil). I, however, have seen him play tennis in his front garden with a 12-year-old, and I’m not so sure. A knockabout it might have been, but he seemed pretty set on winning.

Meyer is 48 now. In his early twenties, he was a top-ranking badminton player. After studying at Copenhagen Business School, Meyer successfully took over and ran the school canteen. “I wanted to start a restaurant but didn’t have the money for it,” says Meyer. “So I started running the canteen instead.” By the time he was in his late twenties he was presenting a cookery programme – Meyer’s Kitchen – on DK1, Denmark’s primary TV station. It ran from 1991 to 1998. His current projects include an initiative to bring better food to Bolivia and another to get Copenhagen residents to grow their own crops. There are Meyer cafes and bakeries and ranges of flour and vinegars. There’s a new food festival called Mad 11 happening this autumn (mad means food in Danish), a food lab and a cooking school and something in the order of 550 employees. His services to improve the country’s food culture have garnered him the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Danneborg – the second highest honour a Dane can receive. Right after our meeting he’s seeing Queen Margrethe again.

The Meyer family lives in a villa in Copenhagen’s ultra smart Frederiksberg district, where lilac trees drip with purple flowers and expensive family saloons cruise the wide residential streets. The house dates from the mid-19th century and has fabulous neo-rococo detailing. The floors are laid with intricate parquet. The modern kitchen has plenty of pans and cookery books, including a few Jamie Olivers in Danish and Meyers’ own weighty Almanak, a vast compendium of Nordic food and cooking. Six months since its publication, it’s a bestseller in the Danish market. The book was designed by his wife, Christina, a slender, black-clad graphic designer who also creates the packaging for his various products. Their family is composed of three daughters: Elvira, Viola and Augusta, and Christina’s 21-year-old son, Valdemar.

Out in the garden, Meyer cultivates fruit and vegetables in perfectly manicured beds. There are different kinds of beans, asparagus and potatoes, red and black currants, hazelnut bushes and walnut trees. In an outbuilding, in an upper loft reached by tortuously tiny wooden stairs, are barrels and barrels of balsamic vinegar that he distils from plums and apples grown at his orchard. We open one barrel and poke in our fingers. The liquid is thick and dark, sticky and fruity. It is the exact opposite of the industrial beet vinegar that’s popular in Denmark, so it’s the perfect example of the refined complexity of New Nordic Cuisine. Meyer opened his micro vinegar brewery in hopes of providing some stiff Danish competition for the famed Modena balsamic vinegars he sought to emulate.

Meyer was born near the German border, the only child of a tool salesman and a doctor’s receptionist. When he was 13 his parents divorced, and when he was 14, his beloved grandmother – an excellent cook – died. His less-than-happy adolescent memories are wrapped around negative memories of food. “It was what I call one of darkest periods of Danish food history,” he says. “It was the era when women left the kitchen, and they opted for industrial solutions: pre-cooked, tinned food. In my childhood, every meal was a nightmare.”

Claus was a super sportsman. He played tennis, football, badminton, table tennis, and chess, and organised a number of badminton competitions. Aged 20, he wrote a letter to the French national Badminton Federation saying, “My name is Claus Meyer. I’ve being training people in badminton for the last four years of my life. I would like to train a great team.” He landed a job in Paris, at the Racing Club de France. He found a room with a dentist and his teenage son in the chic 17th arrondissement. The dentist, a bit of a bon vivant, also asked him to cook. “I didn’t know how to cook and told him he’d have to teach me,” says Meyer. “And I just fell in love with the French way of living, the quality of the food, the markets and all these wonderful flavours. I loved it when the dentist said, ‘Claus, this is great.’”

The next stage in his epicurean odyssey was brought about by a brush with hepatitis. Meyer went to recuperate in a small town in Gascony, staying with a pastry chef called Guy. “He became a spiritual father to me, and he taught me everything about his pastry shop,” says Meyer, who recovered in just five weeks (rather than the usual five months) on a diet of buttery croissants and strong coffee. “I had been working at a boulangerie in Denmark before I’d left, and it was two different worlds. The one in Denmark was a hi-tech, lousy, bullshit bakery, and this was a paradise of copper moulds, butter and berries. I just ate my way out of liver disease.”

To say Meyer believes in the redemptive quality of good food is putting it mildly. He thinks food can save the individual and the nation. “Great food is the foundation for happiness,” he says. He rails against what he sees as the Lutheran dictates that were behind the traditional Danish diet. “For centuries, doctors and priests have preached the idea that in order to have a long and healthy life and a chance to get into heaven, you have to eat something that doesn’t taste like much.” He pauses. “Until the 1980s in Denmark, cooking for your loved ones was considered a mortal sin, in line with exotic dancing, theft, masturbation and incest.”

In 1985, he returned to Copenhagen on a mission. “I was obsessed with the idea that I should change Danish food culture.” Several restaurants, 300 episodes of Meyer’s Kitchen and 14 cookery books later, Meyer has certainly done what he set out to achieve. With all the evangelical zeal of a Danish Jamie Oliver, he has reintroduced Denmark to its local delights. The result has been the New Nordic Cuisine movement. “We had to create a food culture where there was none,” Meyer says. There are clear parallels with the Italian Slow Food movement, such as the promotion of local products. “It’s like eating out of God’s hand,” he says. Also one cannot help but think of Dogme 95, the Danish film movement initiated by Lars von Trier, where a set of restrictions took the films they made to new heights.

Noma – the name is a conflation of the words ‘nordic’ and ‘mad’ – has changed the reputation of Danish food and Nordic cuisine all over the world. Meyer was offered the space in 2003 (it had once been a store-house for Nordic produce from whale blubber to salt) and brought in René Redzepi as his head chef. The pair travelled through the north, picking up seaweed and birch sap, Icelandic skyr, horse mussels, large black truffles from the Swedish island of Gotland, and berries so rare and regional they don’t even have names. Redzepi has continued the foraging tradition, taking his kitchen brigade out on frequent food-finding missions in and around Copenhagen. His creations are incredibly refined and artful, but suitably simple and light at the same time.

If Meyer is Noma’s major shareholder, Redzepi is its figurehead, its master chef, the one the press talks about in reverent tones. “I let him run the restaurant, and I run the movement,” says Meyer. “My mission has been to change food, not to run a Michelin-star restaurant.” Indeed, he’d probably get very bored. Among his recent adventures is the land he acquired 20 minutes outside of Copenhagen, where people pay €400 a year for a plot and – with seeds and guidance from the Meyer team – grow their own food. “They come for the whole season and go home with 100 kilos of vegetables if everything goes well,” says Meyer. He goes off to his kitchen and comes back with a loaf of bread made with rye from his own flourmill – another new enterprise. The bread is dark brown, dense and delicious, naturally sweet and perfectly moist.

And if Meyer has made a difference, he’s not stopping here. He’s soon to launch his culinary assault on the capital city of La Paz, Bolivia.“Bolivia has got rainforests with ancient cocoa varieties, coffee beans, mangos and bananas,” he says. “They have 350 potato varieties. But what they eat is like Danish food 30 years ago. Our idea is to create a school and to train people, like Fifteen in London. We might come up with a cafeteria, a bakery, a top restaurant and a small hotel.” He chose Bolivia because he says he’s never had a decent meal there.

One would think that the success of Noma could easily be rolled out for commercial success. Noma Dubai, perhaps? In fact, this year’s biggest April Fool’s joke involved such a rumour, and Denmark was up in arms. Luckily, Meyer and Redzepi are deeply committed to the New Nordic Cuisine manifesto. Both refuse to sacrifice Noma’s beautiful beginnings for some easy money; choosing instead to invest in the local community through endeavours like the Mad 11 festival and the Nordic Food Lab. “I don’t need more money. I’ve got my house, I’ve got my salary,” says Meyer. “So I want to teach people to become culinary entrepreneurs and the sense that great food can be at the root of prosperity in different ways.”

Caroline Roux is a London-based freelance writer. Norwegian photographer Benjamin Alexander Huseby lives in Berlin. He photographed Claus Meyer at home in Frederiksberg, Denmark.

Copenhagen, Denmark, 2011
Text Caroline Roux
Photography Benjamin Alexander Huseby

Well, energy-saving models such as halogen, fluorescent or LED are hardly the perfect alternative. Hybrid halogen bulbs, while closely resembling their incandescent counterparts, are only slightly more energy efficient. Compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) are essentially a corkscrewed version of the long tubes that have been used to light office buildings and libraries since the 1960s. They use electricity to excite mercury vapour contained within their glass tubes to produce ultra-violet light, which in turn excites phosphor molecules, creating the diffuse ‘white’ light many of us have spent hours working under. These bulbs use 80% less energy and last at least eight times as long, but the light they emit often appears cold and unflattering.

Research has suggested that the light we are exposed to has significant physiological and psychological effects. Hyper-photosensitive individuals, such as Lupus patients and migraine sufferers, find fluorescent light difficult to endure. There’s also the problem of disposal. Regardless of their energy-saving abilities, the mercury contained in CFLs makes them difficult to dispose of.

So what will ultimately succeed the current favourite? The answer may be found in light-emitting diodes (LEDs). LEDs have been used for decades as part of microwave displays and car dashboards. It is only recently that their potential for diffuse lighting has been investigated. The Royal Philips Electronics conglomerate, and their subsidiary Lumileds, are currently exploring a prototype that could just be the holy grail: an energy-efficient bulb that precisely mimics the cosy luminescence of the old light bulb. The prototype contains twenty-four red and blue LEDs within a yellow phosphor-containing glass shell. When these LEDs are illuminated, the wavelengths stream through the casing, mixing to create a white light that is the closest we’ve come to traditional bulbs. The LEDs are said to last for 22 years and function on just 10 watts of electricity. Unfortunately, the technology is not yet ready for industrial use – the creation of the diodes is highly sensitive, making an exact replication of colour and brightness difficult. Nevertheless, Philips recently introduced a more primitive commercial model, the AmbientLED, which makes use of much of the same technology. It is advertised to last 17 years, is slightly less efficient, but similarly bright.

In a recent New York Times article, a Lumileds scientist stated that transitioning to LED would cut “the amount of electricity used for lighting by more than 50% worldwide, eliminating some 200 million tons of carbon emissions a year.” The key will be getting consumers to embrace the change, a challenge similar to the one Swan and Edison encountered when electric lighting was debuted – people really loved their candlelight.

Text Matthew Lowe

We’re in Camden to mark the conclusion of a residency by one of the artists she represents, Anne Hardy, whose activity in the previous three months has produced a vivacious installation, on view in the gallery upstairs. Before Maureen gracefully rises to welcome the various curators, collectors, friends and artists who’ve gathered to dine on the delicious beetroot salad and monkfish stew she selected for the occasion, she discreetly arranges that each of us receive a generous flute of prosecco, with which we exuberantly toast the artist. Though Maureen raises her glass as enthusiastically as the rest of us, never in the course of the ensuing evening does the fizzy aperitif actually pass her lips. It just sits there, going flat, long past the point where chocolate and raspberry tart is served.

Sitting in the office on the ground floor of her immaculately white East End gallery the following day, Maureen cracks open a bottle of Hildon mineral water and I ask her if she makes it a rule not to drink while on duty. “Oh, no,” she says in a soft, even purr that betrays her East Coast American origins. “I was forced to stop drinking through illness some years ago. I had German measles, Rubella, which you’re really not supposed to get as an adult, so I now have to be very careful. And I really didn’t wish to stop. I really, really liked my vodka.”

As with most things Maureen commits to, she is something of a connoisseur. “I started off on Stolichnaya when I was younger – I was drawn to its very modernist label – then Ketel One, Grey Goose; Moscow Mules or Bloody Marys at the St. John. Or neat. A little shot, very chilled. It’s a very pure spirit, or so I believed, so I would stick to it throughout my meal, as the one thing I would drink all night. Afterwards, I would feel weakened but never hungover. I mean,” she continues, “it wasn’t as if I had some out-of-control relationship with alcohol, but I was completely despondent about having to stop. Still am.” Is that why she still has a glass poured even though she never intends to drink it? “No. You see, a large part of my work is hosting and attending social occasions, and I really want people to enjoy themselves, without feeling observed or judged. I see that it makes them far more comfortable if the drink is poured, and since people are drinking, they don’t notice when I don’t. I like it when everything looks seamlessly connected; if I can lift a drink to my lips, not touch it and then put it down again, at least I can be participating in the occasion.”

Providing a seamless context in which other people can enjoy themselves and be enjoyed might sound like a curiously post-industrial kind of work, but over the last two decades it has come to be the most coveted of all occupations. Curators are the new pop stars of our time. As the film critic Mark Kermode has observed, any attractive, remotely intelligent female character featured in a movie released over the past five years inevitably turns out to work in an art gallery. And as we know, we’re all curators now. Fashion bloggers ‘curate’ their shoe collections and the US high-street fashion brand J.Crew introduced the ‘curator pant’ earlier this year – a three-quarter-length pair of trousers fashioned from matte jersey. The popular job title has been democratised out of all meaning.

But there are ‘curators’ and there are curators, and it was visionaries like Peggy Guggenheim, Denise René, Barbara Gladstone and Maureen Paley who wrote the original job description. When Maureen, the sparky young photography postgraduate from New York, set up her home gallery Interim Art in 1984, in a part of the borough of Hackney now famous for its burgeoning Broadway Market, the area was not the hipster Mecca it is today. And there was certainly no commercial East End art scene to speak of. Maureen’s project space was situated in a shabby 19th-century row of workers’ cottages owned by the ACME Art Collective, an organisation formed by artists to create affordable live/work spaces through buying and renovating low-cost property. Maureen launched a progressive curatorial programme and aesthetic on London that was as far from the conservative, Mayfair-centred world of commercial art as was possible to imagine.

In the 27 years since, she’s built a stable of star artists including Turner Prize winners Wolfgang Tillmans and Gillian Wearing, Rebecca Warren, Liam Gillick and James Welling, as well as a reputation for friendship and loyalty verging on the familial. “The people who come into my life tend to stay in my life,” she says. “So when I commit to an artist, an idea or a place, it’s with a notion of really staying with it, allowing it to grow, nurturing it. It’s not something I enter into lightly or trivially.” What unites the many diverse practitioners Maureen has exhibited in her gallery, now titled plainly ‘Maureen Paley’ and since 1999 located down the road in Bethnal Green, is her preference for ideology over fashionability. She has never chased the latest trends. It is her steadfast adherence to relationships and substance that has consistently kept Maureen at the forefront of the field she helped create. “A lot of the people I’m interested in have a sense of social commitment; they’re observationally engaged with how they believe the world appears. There’s that Gertrude Stein quote, you know, ‘It takes talent to recognise genius.’ Everyone is the sum total of what they’ve looked at and a large part of my work is in travelling to absorb interesting things from let’s say LA, New York, Berlin, Amsterdam, Torino, Rome. This ensures I build up a world view from which to create the possibilities.”

The dynamic is also intensely personal. “I think to spot someone truly modern with staying power, there has to be some kind of connection, which is probably greater than the sum of its parts. I had it with Wolfgang, I had it with Anne, and I had it with Rebecca and Gillian and the others. It just strikes a chord; it’s like: ‘Yes, that’s what I’m looking for, this is what I’m thinking about, that’s what I’m wanting.’ Rebecca showed me some Polaroids in the bar of the St. John and said, ‘I was going to do some things with this clay work, what do you think?’ And I saw in these pictures just what I was thinking of showing. I hadn’t seen anyone making work like that and it was a perfect combination of this charismatic person and their work. It was like: ‘Yeah, we should do something.’ It’s a kind of marriage, a kind of falling in love.”

Despite having built a thriving business on her ability to identify new talent and anticipate the more sustainable aspects of the art market, Maureen cautiously avoids making predictions. She says it’s only in the past five years she’s really seen the investment she made by remaining loyal to the area pay off – no less than 134 galleries participated in the latest ‘First Thursdays’ guided tour of the East End. These days, she says she prefers to think of herself as of her time, rather than ahead of it. “When you’re too far ahead, running out on your own, you just don’t have time to fully enjoy the moment you’re in. If I look at the roster I had in the mid-’80s-to-’90s, I was showing people like Christian Marclay, Fischli and Weiss, Charlie Ray, and I knew that they were going to be interesting and have longevity. They may not have been part of my full story, but they did inform how I was able to pick up people like Wolfgang, Gillian and Rebecca. Really growing with those artists in the last decade has allowed both me personally and the gallery space to flourish, to go to greater depths.”

It’s through these choices – whom and whom not to commit to, or what and what not to do together – that Maureen lives her life to the fullest. “What I call work, living this movable feast with the artists, enjoying their personalities, travelling with them, it comes with unique privilege. If the painter David Salle comes to London, one wants to make sure that he’ll enjoy hanging out at Shoreditch House, or that I know where he might like to go in the West End. Or taking him on the Eurostar to the Musée d’Orsay to view a Manet that he adores. It’s my job to ensure that my artists feel entertained or excited, that their comforts are met as much as their intellectual needs. I really pride myself on the little black book I’ve built up.”

I ask Maureen what it feels like for the revolutionary – the former punk who attended Sex Pistols gigs and set up a gallery in what most contemporary collectors probably regarded as a squat – to have finally become the paradigm? The experience has taught her the virtue of patience, she says. “Better to wait and find it’s not a hollow victory. This area, the East End, is now connected to many others, internationally; it’s fascinating the way that the geography is shrinking, joining, feeling closer than ever.” This success isn’t necessarily contrary to the early punk spirit, she adds; it’s more that the acts have changed. Last December, she took the office to London’s O2 Arena to see Lady Gaga for their Christmas night out.

And when will the Grande Dame who’s made it her life’s work to support and nourish other people finally give in to a bit of comfort herself? Maureen insists on a few necessary luxuries, she says. She takes taxis everywhere and she sees the renowned facialist Eve Lom personally. And recently she got a house by the sea in Hove. But she still uses it to entertain friends and provide her artists with a space for relaxation. “I do enjoy it, but it’s come gradually and correctly; only as a by-product of my other commitments. Now I see that the combination of the two ways of life has actually softened me and allowed a creativity to come out that has been useful – and very wonderful actually. But I had to come to it in my own time. If you’d asked me earlier ‘Would I do this?’ I’d have been really strident, ‘Absolutely not! What are you talking about, are you trying to retire me?’” Perish the thought.

Penny Martin is the editor-in-chief of The Gentlewoman, the biannual fabulous women’s magazine. She is based in London, as is photographer Paul Wetherell, who also recently shot the June 2011 cover of Korean Vogue Girl.

London, United Kingdom, 2011
Text Penny Martin
Photography Paul Wetherell

Yet, the greatest hurdle for supersonic travel remains the sonic boom that occurs as the aircraft breaks the sound barrier. This loud ‘bang’ is the reason why a number of countries, including the United States, have banned supersonic air travel over land. If only the sound barrier could be broken without disrupting the land-bound public, fast flying may once again become a commercial option.

A number of companies are attempting to develop ‘boomless’ supersonic technology. NASA’s Supersonic Fundamental Aeronautics Program is currently working on ways that would muzzle the boom to the level of distant thunder. That would involve a 10% increase in fuel consumption, however. Other companies, such as Aerion and Supersonic Aerospace International (SAI) are investigating silent supersonic business jets. SAI’s Quiet Supersonic Transport jet would minimise the boom to one-hundredth of Concorde’s big bang. Unfortunately, both Aerion and SAI’s offerings remain in the design phase; the companies hope to make their first test flights within the next 15 to 20 years.

Some are ignoring the boom altogether. UK-based Reaction Engines has designed a hypersonic airliner called the A2 that would catapult 300 passengers across the globe at 6500 km/h, over five times the speed of sound. The aircraft would be twice the length of current jets and would run on liquid hydrogen, emitting only rather innocuous laughing gas and water. The flying time from Brussels to Sydney would be approximately four hours and 40 minutes, making day trips to Australasia a distinct possibility. But hypersonic travel is not without its own set of problems: to attain hypersonic speeds, jets would have to fly in the lower stratosphere, and concerns have been raised regarding possible damage to the ozone-inhabiting layer of the atmosphere. Then there’s the issue of passenger comfort. Concorde was notoriously claustrophobic due to its highly aerodynamic design. The A2 would take this one step further, as the high speeds do not allow for windows in the cabin. It’s quite literally a giant bullet, down to the giant ‘bang’ it would create as it shoots by.

Text Matthew Lowe

Given how fresh, or rather timeless, Horwitz’s work looks and feels today, it’s hard to believe that for the past 50 years it has gone mostly unnoticed. It certainly wasn’t a strategic decision on the part of the artist. “I always hoped that somebody would find my work, and even if not, I tried to keep it all together and organised so that after I died it could be discovered – or not,” she laughs over the phone from her studio in Santa Monica, where she still goes to work every day. But Horwitz is also the first to admit that the lack of distraction that comes from regularly showing in galleries or exhibitions might in the end have benefitted her work. “Exhibiting takes up a lot of time, and you produce things for a specific show. I’ve always had the freedom to explore in any direction I wanted to go, so it’s been a very linear progression for me, one step at a time.”

Indeed, Horwitz has built her prolific career on a complex and strict set of rules based on the numerical sequence of 1 to 8 (including eight colours she chose), which she imposed on herself early on and has adhered to since with a precision and a focus on minutiae more befitting a scientist than an artist. It all started sometime in the early 1960s, when Channa was alone in her room during a vacation with her first husband. “I took a pad of graph paper and a couple of pencils and I came up with my first three ‘compositions’. And I realised back then that simply by moving the little squares on the paper, I could show anything. I felt I had discovered a new language.” It was a language of pictorial systematics that still forms the basis for the majority of her work to this day, including the piece Flag #2 (1984) which is enclosed in poster format in this issue of COS Magazine.

Horwitz’s personal and professional life has never been quite as controlled as the system she created for herself. She endured an unhappy first marriage with a husband who discouraged her from making art, and lived through the trauma of losing one of her three daughters in the late 1960s. Horwitz also faced a decidedly macho Southern Californian art scene that at the time was wary of experimental art coming from a woman artist in her early forties. (“Pretty notations from a Valley housewife” is how a critic at the time described her work.)

Perhaps it was her quiet yet continuous revolt against such externally imposed limitations that led Horwitz to pursue her explorations within her own systems even more persistently. It ultimately provided her with the unparalleled freedom and joy that are so palpable in her work.

“At a time when anything seems possible in contemporary art and there’s an almost paralysing freedom for young artists, Channa’s work is fascinating,” says Alexander Hahn, the gallerist who is taking her work to Frieze Frame. “She created this regimented set of rules to achieve total freedom in her work.”

In interviews Horwitz often emphasises the fact that the idea for her octal system simply derived from the graph paper she first used, which was divided in a grid of eight. Whether that’s a genuine explanation or if Horwitz is just being coquettish doesn’t matter so much. The significance of the number eight lying on its side as the symbol for infinity, however, is key in understanding why her body of work, especially now, seems never specifically of its time, our time, or any time, for that matter. Horwitz has found a way to transcend the notion of time altogether, and infinitely so.

Frieze Art Fair and Frieze Frame in Regent’s Park, London, 13–16 October, 2011. Opening hours 12–7pm, Sunday until 6pm. Frieze Frame is sponsored by COS.

Text by Felix Burrichter
Photography Theron Humphrey