A Better-Built Magazine
A conversation with Untapped Journal editor-in-chief Tiffany Jow. Interview by Arjun Basu
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THIS EPISODE IS MADE POSSIBLE BY OUR FRIENDS AT FREEPORT PRESS.
When a company publishes a magazine, or at least an “editorial” product, for whatever reason, it is called custom publishing. I have a long editorial background in custom. And custom has a surprisingly long history itself.
How long?
John Deere started publishing The Furrow in 1895. The Michelin Star started as a form of custom content: what better way to sell tires to monied Parisians than by enticing them to take a drive to the countryside to try a great restaurant?
Amex Publishing famously published Travel + Leisure among other titles for decades. That in-flight magazine you once enjoyed on your flight overseas? That, too, is custom publishing.
Now, after some down years, custom publishing is leaning waaaaay into print again. Henrybuilt is an industry leader in designing and constructing well-built products and furnishings for the home. Henrybuilt is not, however, a company that you would think is screaming for a magazine.
But the qualities that make a great magazine—attention to detail and craft, the curation of ideas, hard work—are the very qualities that have made Untapped, a “design journal that looks back to look forward.”
Led by editor-in-chief Tiffany Jow, Untapped is a smart, well-designed magazine that avoids the pitfalls of most design journals in being free of jargon and thus accessible.
With an enviable level of editorial freedom, Jow has created an editorial product that richly explores livable spaces and champions “ideas-driven work.” The result is a growing media entity across platforms independent of Henrybuilt while hewing closely to its brand. It’s good stuff.
The premiere issue of Untapped Journal
Arjun Basu:Tiffany Jow thank you for being on the show.
Tiffany Jow: Thanks so much for having me here. There’s not that many opportunities to talk about this kind of stuff, especially in public, and I think these are really important conversations to have.
Arjun Basu: Yes. Magazines should be spoken of in public and not in the shadows. How did you get here? What were you doing? Let’s just talk about yourself now.
Tiffany Jow: I moved to New York in January, 2006, and I was 21 years old and I had just finished my undergraduate degree in rural Oregon. And I’d never been to New York before. Different.
Arjun Basu: Where were you from?
Tiffany Jow: Seattle.
Arjun Basu: Okay.
Tiffany Jow: Yeah. I’d never been to New York before. I didn’t know anyone that lived here, but I knew I wanted to write for magazines and I arrived with $3,000 and a full-time unpaid editorial internship at a fashion magazine called Nylon. Which was really cool at the time. My college roommate’s sister was an art director at Scholastic in town. And she had dated the editor of Nylon and so he gave me the internship.
Arjun Basu: Got to work those connections.
Tiffany Jow: You got to find the way in somehow. That was my key because I worked for the ex-boyfriend and then I lived in a spare bedroom with the sister until I got myself sorted. Day one, it was very clear to me that my vision of New York was very romantic and very naive, and I was going to be in for a ride.
Six months in, I applied for a paid position at a design publication called Surface. And for whatever reason, they hired me as an editorial assistant. And this was another world that I knew nothing about, like furniture, architecture, looking at things as designed objects and seeing how they impact the world and respond to the world.
But it really resonated with me and I liked looking at the world through that lens, and I really liked talking to people about the world in that way. And I decided that this was the industry that I was going to focus on getting into. The recession happened a few years later, and I really struggled with being a writer at that time.
It just felt financially impossible, there were no jobs and it was super competitive. Ironically, it feels even worse today. I spent the next 10 years trying to figure out: How can I use my writing skills in the design industry that’s not publishing? So I worked for a designer.
I worked for museums. I worked for an architecture firm and a startup. But it never really quite scratched the itch because it wasn’t journalism. And in 2017 Surface had a new editor-in-chief, who hired me as its design editor. And this really marked my return to publishing and also really solidified for me that this is what I want to be doing.
It also introduced me to aspects of magazines that weren’t there a decade ago. So there was social media, there was a custom content studio, there was digital first content, there were newsletters, and there was video. And Surface, it didn’t have individual digital and print teams—all of us did everything, and we also all did advertorials and editorial.
And it was the first time that I really started to understand firsthand the business side of publishing. And I saw how advertisers were dictating what publications were putting out. But I really loved that job and I really felt honored to have it later. I served as the executive editor for a media company that the Surface editor-in-chief co-founded.
And together with a small team, we launched a website. We had a weekly newsletter. And we did two podcasts, which were really successful and really highly produced. That was really educational too. A few years into that, I was approached with the opportunity to conceptualize and run a design journal of my own, which is what I’m doing now.
Arjun Basu: What’s the story behind Untapped?
Tiffany Jow: Untapped would not exist if it wasn’t for our publisher, which is the design company Henrybuilt. So I think I’ll start with them. Henrybuilt was founded in Seattle in 2001 to create a new standard of quality in areas of the home that are central to everyday living.
So that’s places like the kitchen, which is usually where it starts, but also the wardrobe and the bathroom. So really high traffic areas that you use. Henrybuilt is also one of a handful of companies in the world that’s focused on developing a system approach to these spaces. And by system I mean looking at specific tasks like serving or cooking or cleaning, and making sure that the design gives those specific tasks a place.
And that place is one that makes sense for the person using it. So the idea is if you have the right tool in the right place, then you can use the space without thinking, there’s a kind of flow and ease with it. Like it feels good to use it because the materials are so high quality. And then that frees you up to focus on more important stuff like hosting the people who are there for dinner or enjoying the act of getting dressed.
Why am I telling you all this? Because of that focus, Henrybuilt is very interested in all the nuances of how people live in a home. So what makes a home special? What gives it meaning, what does good design feel like and how can it really impact people’s lives? And that’s a really big topic. It reaches into psychology and history and physicality and aesthetics and neuroaesthetics and craft, and a typical ad, or a story about a house that has a Henrybuilt kitchen in it could never capture that, which is a shame because it’s such a core part of Henrybuilt’s DNA. And so a few years ago, Henrybuilt decided to start its own publication to try and convey this interest in how people live in their homes. It was called the Turn and it was digital only. And a team was hired to create this first issue. And the general idea was to feature Henrybuilt clients, some of whom are very influential and not well known in the art and design world, and how they use their Henrybuilt space and interview.
Arjun Basu: So very marketing.
Tiffany Jow: Very marketing editorial, yes. And the moment you start reading it, you’re like, “Okay, this is an ad.”
Arjun Basu: Exactly.
Tiffany Jow: It immediately discredits the entire thing.
Arjun Basu: It loses its authority.
Tiffany Jow: Totally. And so right before it was meant to go live, Scott Hudson, Henrybuilt’s founder, and CEO, killed it. It was never public.
Arjun Basu: Because he realized that they were basically creating a very expensive ad?
Tiffany Jow: And that it had no credibility because people are smart enough to recognize that. Yeah.
Arjun Basu: I want to say something because I’ve been poking around Henrybuilt’s website. And I have to say that the storytelling on that website is really well done. When you look at the magazine now it makes sense from a storytelling point of view because of the way they present themselves on the website. So I’m surprised that they went down this road, but I’m not surprised that they killed it.
Tiffany Jow: Yes. I think that’s a very good observation. Scott comes from a publishing background and he’s interested in all the things that we spoke about earlier, about history and psychology and all that stuff. It’s very much part of his DNA and the quality of the product, it’s reflected in the quality of the website and the quality of the customer service.
That whole experience is there, and I think it really speaks to Scott too, because it takes a certain kind of CEO to invest in this kind of thing. I guess the second part of the story is after the Turn was killed. He was in New York—he lives in Seattle, but he was here—and he and I had developed a rapport over the years because Henrybuilt used to be a Surface advertiser and I had to service them, and he told me the story and eventually asked if I’d be interested in conceptualizing a new kind of publication for them.
And my answer was hard “no,” because I know so many people who’ve gone down that road with brands and like you were saying it usually doesn’t work out. A lot of brands in the design space actually have done publications, which people may or may not know like Flos, the lighting company, Herman Miller, Schumacher, Lasvit, and they’re often really well designed. But in general, as you were saying, it’s usually the brand’s product and the brand’s client, and it’s a glorified catalog and they usually are a one-off type thing.
“Wouldn’t it be great if there was a publication that sifted through all that for you and identified and unpacked those ideas and that knowledge in a way that’s current and critical, but also explains in a really clear way why this is relevant now? That became our mission”
Arjun Basu: They confuse pretty with quality in a weird way, which they don’t do with their product. So it’s just someone who’s not actually in touch with their brand overall. Reading Untapped and looking at it, it feels to me like it’s the ultimate custom publication. This is what all custom publications should be. When I was in custom publishing, the first question I always used to ask is, who’s the client? Is it the client in marketing or is the client in brand? And if it was brand, then you had a better chance of creating something that was meaningful. So this feels like a brand custom publication because it just aligns with Henrybuilt’s brand as opposed to selling it. It would take some work for the average reader to even know about their involvement.
Tiffany Jow: I would say that we were very cognizant of that in the beginning. It’s a very fine line to walk. There’s not really a case study for that in the architecture and design scene anyway. Like how do you walk that line of being a brand-funded publication? And getting people to take it seriously? Transparency was super important to us from the beginning.
We have—what does it say, “Untapped is an independent editorial publication of the design company Henrybuilt” on the footer of our website. It’s on the print edition and it’s one of the first things I talk about whenever I speak about the journal. And we can get into why Henrybuilt publishes this thing and how it benefits from it later.
Arjun Basu: That’s my next question.
Tiffany Jow: Okay. I guess I’ll end the previous story by saying the reason I ended up taking the job was, my offer was, I will figure out what this new publication is only if it’s editorially independent from Henrybuilt. Only if there’s no Henrybuilt products and no Henrybuilt projects in there.
And Scott said, “Okay.” He said if I can figure out how to do that and have every story be a reflection of the brand’s values, then I could do it. And that was my prompt for conceptualizing what eventually became Untapped.
Arjun Basu: Okay. So before we dig into that too much, explain the concept of ideas-driven work.
Tiffany Jow: Ooh. Okay. I think I’d have to talk about Henrybuilt again, because that’s really where that stemmed from. I did a lot of interviews with people in the company to understand how it thinks and works, to figure out how to make that connection of how this journal would reflect its values and what really stood out to me was its approach to innovation.
So if you look at its product, it hasn’t really changed very much in 25 years, at least aesthetically. Instead, it’s making these kinds of incremental refinements to them that are based on experience. So, like, lessons it’s learned from clients and in the workshop and stuff like that.
So it’s never starting from scratch every time. It’s really building on what it already knows. And I thought, that’s a really great premise for a lot of things in architecture and design. What ideas have we had in the past? What can we learn from the past and how can we take the best of those ideas and apply them to the way we live now and to make it better?
People are already working on that there. There are a lot of ideas out there already. But I think in a time where we’re flooded with information, where things have the potential to get buried or where stuff is presented in a very academic or convoluted way it’s easy to overlook all those great ideas.
And wouldn’t it be great if there was a publication that sifted through all that for you and identified and unpacked those ideas and that knowledge in a way that’s current and critical, but also explains in a really clear way why this is relevant now? And that became our mission. So Untapped is a design journal that looks back to look forward.
We tell stories about ideas, not news or home tours. All of our stories identify important information from the past for improving the built environment and contextualize it for now and the future. Taken together, our stories create this kind of catalog of ideas, this encyclopedia of knowledge, which is a tool that can be used over time by the industry and folks outside of it.
And I’m not sure when this is going to air, but that concept, this encyclopedia of ideas, was the impetus for us doing the website redesign that we talked about earlier. Just to make that super clear and that much more of a tool for our readers.
Arjun Basu: So I’m happy to talk about the way it’s written because I’m struck by the language. Because it’s sort of a smart magazine that doesn’t talk in design- or architecture-speak. Which I’ve always found amazingly off-putting and keeps that sort of circle of readership and understanding small. Your editorial issue number two says, “Untapped approaches architecture as a subject for everyone.” Honestly, that to me is fabulous. I wish everyone talked about architecture and design in an accessible manner because it’s so important. Design’s one of those words where people either recoil or jump to it, but very pretentiously. And architecture is, it’s the built environment. It’s all around us. We’re impacted by it every day, even when we’re not thinking about it. And that, I think, goes back to the brand. So it’s not just an editorial decision, but it is this sort of simple storytelling in a way. Because you’re not looking at things in an inaccessible manner. I think about the Chinatown as an object and you bring in Duchamp’s urinal and stuff, but at the end of the day you’re just saying Chinatown is like this thing and we should just look at it this way.
Tiffany Jow: Yeah.
Arjun Basu: In very simple language.
Tiffany Jow: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that’s a really great example, and thank you for saying that. I think that’s one of my favorite pieces in the print edition. It’s about looking, it was written by an architect who’s Chinese and whose father built a lot of buildings in New York’s Chinatown, and he introduces this concept of looking at buildings in Chinatown as a Readymade.
And that can be such a pretentious topic, but the way that it was written, I think that every story needs to pass the mom test, which is that I can send it to my mom who doesn’t know anything about design and have her understand it. And I think that’s the goal.
And it is just interesting to me that, as you were saying, a part of our world, architecture and design, that touches everyone, is such a closed-off, up-and-away-from-you thing. And I say that as someone that spent so much of my time in that world and still exists in that world. We’re getting ready to do a big project in Milan next month, which is the biggest global moment, Milan Design Week centered around the Salone del Mobile furniture fair. Even in New York, you go to things and people don’t say, “hi.” There’s little cliques and there’s a lot of different personalities and worlds within worlds just like in the art world or in the fashion world or whatever.
But I think you’re right. It speaks to the Henrybuilt brand very much. But I also feel like it makes it true for me because I don’t want to deal with that anymore. Like I’ve been the person, snubbed, I’ve been the person trying to like, get in there. And I think, Why? There shouldn’t be any gatekeeping with this stuff.
It’s so important that people understand and recognize how influential, and impactful, the things that they use every day are the things that surround them are. And I think that even extends into, if you come to an Untapped party, an Untapped lecture, an Untapped event, the vibe is distinctly different from other design events because of the voice that we have. That begins with the writing, people can see that right away. And it does welcome a different audience. If I give a talk, new people will be there all the time. Our latest issue launched in October, students from a class I gave a talk to, they all came and they were so excited to be there because they never were invited before to come to something like that. And it was just so cool to have them there and have their perspective on everything.
Arjun Basu: The ecosystem of Untapped is actually quite large. The print is just like the tip of the iceberg, really. So let’s go through what Untapped is as a media brand.
Tiffany Jow: So we have an annual print edition that comes out in the fall, and then we do biannual digital issues. We publish a new story generally every Monday. We also run a book club, the New York Architecture and Design Book Club with the wonderful bookstore Head Hi here in Brooklyn. We’re starting our third year and we do programs, which wasn’t part of the initial ask. The initial vision was like, Just make this magazine. It wasn’t even, Make a print magazine. It was just, Make a publication that can reflect Henrybuilt’s values.
But I think when we launched, which was February 2023, with no proof of concept, with nothing, we had the book club, we had an invitation from Vitra to run its design salon, and we were like talking to Rockwell Group about curating a program series for its installation during design week in New York.
It just snowballed from there. Almost all of our events are—I did a survey recently to see where they came from. Probably 80-90% of them are not self-initiated projects. They’re folks who have come to us wanting our voice or our approach for their audience. And whether that’s a university, whether it’s a brand, whether it’s a gallery, it runs the gamut. But it just is proof of concept in a way. This is relevant for everyone and the way that we’re trying to achieve that is succeeding just by seeing who comes to us.
Arjun Basu: Let’s talk about what Henrybuilt really gets out of it. Is it just that you “encompass” the brand? Is it an idea of “lifting all boats”—making the discussion about a certain kind of design, bigger, better? On your website, the link is there and on their website they have one thing called magazine, but there’s no direct link to Untapped.
Tiffany Jow: It’s buried in there. But it’s a great question and one that I get asked a lot, and I think there’s two points to make here. The first one is, like you were saying, Untapped is a way to signal to folks that Henrybuilt is interested in this stuff.
And beyond that, it’s a way for Henrybuilt to support critical thinking and knowledge gathering around improving the way that we live. So on the one hand, yes, it is marketing for Henrybuilt. My salary is paid by part of Henrybuilt’s marketing salary. Our marketing budget and every story speaks to a Henrybuilt core value and interest.
And some of them are sent to prospective Henrybuilt clients and existing clients because these stories are relevant to people who are interested in the concept of home. But because Henrybuilt is funding this kind of writing and has a seat at the table, so to speak, in these conversations and these topics that Untapped covers, Untapped elevates Henrybuilt from a vendor to a peer. And it says, “Hey, we’re thinking about the evolution of the domestic space too.” And not just like in terms of the “color of the year” or like how you should best organize your socks.
And then the second point is that Henrybuilt and I see that critical gap in design media that we were talking about earlier. Most of the attention is superficial and focused on other people in the industry who have the money to pay a PR firm to get them in front of editors who are overwhelmed with email.
And as publications struggle to figure out financially, How do we be viable in an increasingly digital world? Securing and maintaining advertisers is so important. That’s why we have the custom content divisions and the advertorials. And that it’s part of the job now for editors. There’s a lot of problems with that. It’s not journalism. It diminishes the amount of time that journalists have to be journalists, finding original stories, being out in the field, writing about stuff that they feel is important. There’s no editorial integrity.
And then people are not really encouraged to be critical because you might offend an existing advertiser and they might pull out, or you might scare off someone that maybe would give you money down the road and that lack of criticism of like deep, critical thinking, cheapens the whole thing because home is, as you were saying, a concept that touches everyone’s lives.
And it’s not about status, it’s not about cool things to fill it with. It’s really about our lives and about creating spaces and objects that can support our development as people, and as human beings and so by Henrybuilt funding the Journal, we don’t have any advertisers.
Henrybuilt is giving journalists the opportunity to write about this other side of design, how it plays out in our everyday lives. And I think it’s part of why we’ve been so readily embraced by the design community because they, too, want stories that matter. They don’t want another listicle about 10 things to do during New York Design Week, or, like, the newest product launch.
Like that stuff definitely has a place and a purpose. I’m not diminishing that, but I think there’s also a real appetite for stories that are real and honest and relatable and useful. And so the result of all of that, Untapped, is a publication that can stand on its own, even though it’s funded by a brand.
So we’re sold in about two dozen bookstores in the US and the UK. We’ve been invited to lead conversations and teach classes and curate programs throughout the country, and I can’t think of any other brand-funded publication in the architecture and design space that can say that.
Arjun Basu: Yeah, no it’s rare overall.
Tiffany Jow: Yeah.
“Securing and maintaining advertisers is so important. That’s why we have the custom content divisions and the advertorials. And that it’s part of the job now for editors. There’s a lot of problems with that. It’s not journalism.”
Arjun Basu: Some brand-funded media go on to bigger and better things. I think of Amex publishing all the time. They’re the perfect example. But it’s really rare because the tension that exists in all companies between marketing and brand is eternal and who gets the budgets and that fight. Marketing will always wonder why they’re spending resources and money on something that isn’t going to sell a couch tomorrow. They just work in such different worlds and timelines. Marketing is just worried about tomorrow, and brand is worried about next year and the year after that, and the year after that. And so it’s really rare. The proof to me, besides the fact that Henrybuilt is almost invisible from the magazine, it’s just the way that the magazine sees the world. It just sees it differently. It’s like looking at it anew in a way, just looking at what’s there. Everyday objects, buildings, normal buildings, not starchitecture or anything. And just seeing it for what it is and thinking about it in a very simple but smart way. If you do make the leap and you do go to Henrybuilt’s site and you go, “Wow, that’s a really nice kitchen.” There’s no bells and whistles to it. It’s just really nice.
Tiffany Jow: I think what you were saying about brand and marketing is very real and I’m not going to say I don’t fight those fights, I’m very clear about the separation between church and state and Scott respects it. I report directly to him and we’re very much aligned. But I have to remind others within and outside the company that this is so key. I have a friend who works in brand and she’s not a writer, but we talk, we get along really well because we realize that our jobs are essentially the same.
It’s to do that long-form building, community building, or idea building, or whatever you want to call it, and it’s interesting because so few companies even have a head of brand. They have marketing, but not brand. And I think if Untapped can be a model for like, why brand is important or how brand can be achieved over time, like that would be a huge success. But I think you make a really good point that a lot of folks experience.
Arjun Basu: So let’s talk about the design of the magazine.
Tiffany Jow: Great topic.
Arjun Basu: I love the format. It’s half a magazine in a weird way, in the way it’s cut. But what was the thinking behind it?
Tiffany Jow: Yeah, it wasn’t my thinking. Our graphic designer, her name’s Elli, we actually met many years ago when I was at Surface, she used to be a designer there. But she created our brand identity and she makes everything we do look super smart and incredible.
She found a lot of ways to make our mission, visually and physically apparent. Like you were saying, the print publication folds in half and it’s just one color. There’s no image on the front so that there’s no hierarchy of stories at all. And to figure out what’s in there, you have to actually flip it over, look back, read the table of contents and then flip it over again and start from the beginning to read everything.
There’s also very few images. They’re actually folded within the physical journal. So there’s intentionality there that you open this thing and you’re looking at the image and you fold it and you’re looking at the text.
And the point there is, it’s really about ideas. It’s not about pretty images. We want you to read this stuff. We’re investing in the written content, first and foremost. And what else do I want to say? Yeah, I think the website, looking at the digital side, looks like an encyclopedia. It’s like an index or a table of contents, which kind of brings that vibe there too.
Arjun Basu: Yeah. It just reminds me of the way, especially in Europe where they have oversized newspapers and people still read newspapers. The way if you’re in public transportation, like the subway in any city and the business people have just mastered the art of folding the paper into tiny, almost into column widths, and then just flipping something over and reading, and it looks like trying to fold a map at the end, and I got that call back when I saw this for the first time.
Tiffany Jow: I obviously use the internet and I read stuff on there, but any of my personal reading is in print. And my publications always end up in that size because you can stick it in your pocket. You can stick it in your bag. And it’s so fun to give people the journal for the first time in person because you watch them instinctively do that. And I keep meaning to make an Instagram series about that, but I haven’t done it yet.
Arjun Basu: So who is your readership? Where are they? Like how many of them are coming from the general public design community and how many are there coming from Henrybuilt?
Tiffany Jow: Yeah, it’s a great question. And it actually surprises me because I think initially I envisioned it just being read by Henrybuilt people, because they will repost all of our Instagram posts, for example.
But as we’ve gone on, that’s really not the case. There’s a fraction of them who are Henrybuilt folks. But by and large we’ve really built our own audience mostly in major cities. In the US, we have a lot of folks in London in particular. I think the concept just really resonates easily there.
By and large, they are folks from the architecture and design community. Whether they’re design enthusiasts, whether they’re an architect or a designer. Working in this space already we’ve got a lot of writers and critics and curators who read and also students.
It’s exciting to see new publications, which I think are having a resurgence now actually. But we do get college folks purchasing the publication too, more often than I would think, which I think is great.
Arjun Basu: It’s always great when college people or students read a magazine, I’ve seen them look at a magazine. It’s like they’re looking at a rotary phone and they’re like, “Oh yeah, these exist in, in print.” And then, yeah. Is Untapped where it is? Where does it go from here?
Tiffany Jow: Where does it go? I guess in the immediate future we are launching our new website, which is a big deal. Mostly because we felt probably like six months ago that we’ve outgrown the box that we created for ourselves. And so we’re going to be introducing that next month now, actually the end of next month.
But there’s a few features that we’ll roll out with that are important and also longer term. One is this thing that we’re calling the Knowledge Map. So we’re actually going to identify the key kind of ideas in every story and organize them according to themes. One view of Untapped will be the stories. The other will be this kind of tree of knowledge that it will look like, and you can click around and see where a given idea appears in Untapped, but you’ll also be able to see other resources, like an expanded bibliography of books, other podcasts, other, even, scholarly journal articles, manifestos. So to really enhance the ‘resource-ness’ of what we’re doing.
Untapped Journal’s newly-redesigned website.
Arjun Basu: That’s like that music website that musical tree that ties all the music? I wish I could tell you what the name was right now, but you basically hit a genre and then it explodes into all the other genres, and there’s always a song that is an example of that. But you can go from tribal music in New Guinea to like Latvian death metal, like in four clicks.
Tiffany Jow: I’m going to write that—I’m going to find that because we struggled to find an example of this because I think technically it’s very challenging to do.
Arjun Basu: It’s really quite an accomplishment. So I was thinking about that site the moment you started talking about this new thing on your website.
Tiffany Jow: I think I’m excited for you to see it. I wish I could share it with you now, but it’s, I think it’s going to be really great and very intuitive and we’ll show the connections between the things.
And just another way to really underscore what we’re all about. And that will continue to grow forever. Every new story will be, their key ideas will be added onto this map. And the other thing that will be introduced in this redesign is our very first column. We’ve never had a column before.
Arjun Basu: Oh, okay.
Tiffany Jow: And this is called Making Space, which is also the title of a symposium that we’re going to start running on an annual basis at least. So the symposium title, it’s Making Space: An Architecture Symposium for Everyone. And the idea is it will take place in a different city. And that each time we do it, it’ll be themed.
So the first theme is the house I grew up in. You know what? What was your childhood home like? And I don’t really care what it looked like aesthetically. I’m really interested in How did it impact you emotionally? What did it feel like? All the stuff that a picture can’t capture. We’ve interviewed, I think, about a dozen or so folks so far, not just architects and designers, also artists and musicians and other writers and scientists and stuff.
And we’ll be publishing these on our website in first person narratives along with pictures of a childhood home, I think, biweekly, and then at the end of the year, the in-real life Symposium will happen. The first one’s going to be happening in Los Angeles, and we’re partnering with the LA Forum to do this.
And we’ll probably have a handful of folks giving original presentations about the houses they grew up in there. So it’s been really fun doing these interviews so far, and I’m really excited for how it evolves.
Arjun Basu: That sounds really cool actually. My last novel came out last fall, and the cover is basically a large orange shag rug and the shag rug is a big element in it. And they said, why is shag? And I was like, I don’t know, but it is an important thing. It’s at an office that’s worn out, shag rug orange. It’s in a home. And the father in the story likes to just sit there on the rug, rub his hands on it and drink a scotch or something. It shows up over and over again. And I hadn’t really thought about, like, where it came from. But then I realized that there was a room that was the dining room when my brother was born. It became his room. There was a purple shag rug in there. And I’m trying to make that connection, but if anyone asks me about the house you grew up in, it might be the first thing I think about because it was a deep shag. We moved out of the house when my brother, I think, was 1-year-old. But I remember that rug.
Tiffany Jow: I think it speaks to what this column is after, though. It’s proving that like, it doesn’t really matter what the house looked like, because a lot of folks too, they say I don’t even remember what the facade looked like. I don’t remember the layout at all, but I remember how it smelled in there. Or I remember like the velvet couch that my mom had. And I think it speaks to how fundamental living spaces are to people’s lives and their work and their personal lives. And it’s interesting to have a wide range of people from a wide range of professions come to that same conclusion in their own way.
Arjun Basu: Yeah, it’d be interesting to see how many people talk about their senses as opposed to the actual built environment. So we always end the show with this question. What are three magazines that you love right now?
Tiffany Jow: I listened to past episodes and I should have asked you this before because I noticed that some people took it as media.
Arjun Basu: Yeah. I sometimes say the word media and and you are allowed to say whatever you want here really. If it’s a TV show I don’t care.
Tiffany Jow: Okay, so I know a lot. One is, it is The New Yorker, which I know has been said before, but I wanted to.
Arjun Basu: It’ll be said again.
Tiffany Jow: It’ll be said again, too, but I wanted to offer color around why I’m saying this for me. I started subscribing as soon as I could afford it, which was like 2013. And I always read it cover to cover and I only read it in print.
And I read it because I don’t think I was a great writer or reporter or reader. Reading The New Yorker helps me expand my vocabulary. It helps me with reading comprehension skills. It shows me style and voice and some of my favorite writers are in there.
I love anything that Jackson Arn, the new-ish architecture critic, writes. I loved Joan Acocella, the late dance critic. And I love Anthony Lane who writes about movies and Jelani Cobb and Diane Fan. You know, I hope I can be as great as them one day.
Two is Obituaries. So I was working on a podcast several years ago with the artist and illustrator, Maira Kalman, and she said offhand you always have to read your obits because they’re celebrations of life and I thought she was joking, but then I started to do it and I realized that’s so true. So I get the print edition of The New York Times on the weekends and I always read it and like last weekend I read obit about, Georgia O’Keeffe’s caretaker, who I’ve never heard of him before, but he was several decades her junior, cared for her in the final years of her life very controversially. But then there’s the smaller kind of columns that are little paragraphs. And then at the very end there’s the in memoriams that are tributes to people who have passed a long time ago.
I think I like them because you have evidence of people that you may or may not know doing things that are not recognized maybe or were not recognized during their lifetimes, but they still did it because it was important to them. And I think as someone who’s always looking for external validation, so I know that what I’m doing is good enough or important. It’s really refreshing and it’s a good reminder to read that stuff.
Three is The Interview, which is The New York Times podcast and it’s in the New York Times Magazine. And this is something that’s hosted by Lulu Garcia-Navarro from NPR, and then other times it’s hosted by David Marchese. He’s the one that I read and listen for because he used to run the previous incarnation of this—you’re nodding so you know—it was called Talk and he just asked such good questions. Like he really listens and he pushes people for specifics and I feel like he asks what I always want to ask as a reader or a listener, and most people or a lot of interviewers just stick to their script and don’t go there because they weren’t planning for it, and so he gets these amazingly personal and original answers from really well-known people. So the format of it is you get a q and a version in the print The New York Times Magazine. And then the podcast is two interviews. They do one, and then they follow up with them later to reflect on what they said before.
And they had Lady Gaga on I think most recently, and I think they launched it with Anne Hathaway, who I’ve never thought about, but he got her to say amazing stuff about turning 40 and about being a former people pleaser. They don’t talk about their most recent projects.
They’re asked about their perspective on life and work and stuff like that. I find that when it’s done well, it really humanizes people. And I think that’s really refreshing in a time where everything seems so depressing, but also so homogenous and smooth.
Tiffany Jow: Three Things
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