Bistrotheque’s Flash at the Royal Academy for Wallpaper: It’s 11 a.m. in an unused corner of 6 Burlington Gardens at the back of the the Royal Academy of Art in London’s Mayfair, and restaurateur Pablo Flack is endeavoring to explain how this vast, austere room will soon be transformed into perhaps the most rigorously conceived museum restaurant in history: specifically, Flash, a new pop-up eatery from Flack and his partner David Waddington—famous as the creators of Bistrotheque and last year’s pioneering and somewhat over-ambitous pop-restaurant The Reindeer and now invited by the Royal Academy to temporarily inhabit this space.

Their 80-day stay here will coincide with GSK Contemporary, the Royal Academy’s inaugural season of work by new and emerging artists including René Pollesch, Olaf Nicolai, and Catherine Sullivan; the show debuts October 31, Flash the following day.

Even staring into it, it’s hard to see how Flack’s vision will materialize in this cavernous space, which is lit by a row of windows and currently overrun by Waddington and Flack’s collaborators, who are awaiting an afternoon photo shoot.

Though Flack has been laid relatively low by food poisoning by, he believes, a suspect hamburger, he’s thoroughly animated while recalling the epiphany behind Flash: “It was the last night of the Reindeer, and I remember walking up the main aisle—I just saw a room in a room, with a big chandelier, and the room-in-a-room was almost like a film set, so you’d walk onto the set, and that was it,” Flack says. “I sort of went around to everybody like, ‘It’s going to be called Flash.’ They just thought I was totally mad.”

Indeed, there’s an unmistakably Alice in Wonderland feel to this morning’s proceedings, at least if the children’s story were transported to one of the most exclusive addresses in Mayfair—and infiltrated by some of the East End’s best-known talents. There’s Giles Deacon, in a sweatshirt and jeans, eating a sandwich he brought in himself; he’s designing the restaurant’s chandelier, which will be made of peridot-green Swarovski crystals and 158 aluminum spikes. It emerges that Deacon has a history in DIY chandelier fabrication.

“I’ve made them at home with bits of wire,” he says. “I quite like doing them as a nice gift for friends.” Chef Tom Collins has been sent off to change into his working clothes; illustrator Will Broome, whose drawings now adorn the several servings of the signature Wedgwood White collection that are laid out for use in the photo shoot, sits quietly in the hallway, headphones on his ears. The illustrator Rory Crichton explains how his own contribution to the space will involve depictions of cutlery-wielding octopi and cabbage rabbits. What’s a cabbage rabbit? “A rabbit with a cabbage for a dress,” he says plainly. “Something daft—some daft surreal images, like I normally do with Giles.” When I tell him I can’t wait to see it, Crichton grimaces, mindful of an impending deadline. “Neither can I.”

The partnership with the Royal Academy is a huge move up and out of east London for Flack and Waddington, whose greatest successes have come on home turf—with Bistrotheque in Bethnal Green and with the Reindeer, which lived its brief life within the confines of the Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane.

Today’s assortment of artists, illustrators, and designers come chiefly, but not entirely, from east London. (Fulham resident Broome is an exception: “People always think I live in a wigwam in Hoxton, but I don’t,” he says. “I do go to east London, but just to sort of laugh at people and point at them.”

Flash’s infiltration of the Royal Academy—perhaps the most venerable arts organization in the world—is the latest creative encroachment on this historically reserved neighborhood: Mayfair galleries have long shown the work of east Londoners, but the arrival four years ago of Commes des Garçons founder Rei Kawakubo’s Dover Street Market, the six-storey celebration of the new and the next, heralded a fresh start for the enclave—or at least a reason for creative cognoscenti to visit Dover Street or nearby Mount Street, where Marc Jacobs would set up shop at number 23-25 the following year. After decamping to Hoxton in 2000, White Cube returned to the area six years later, with Jay Jopling opening a new space in Mason’s Yard.

This art-minded advance on the city’s most rarefied spaces is at the heart of Flash as well. “We all—whatever our businesses and livelihoods and talents and skills—of course everyone wants to do it in Mayfair,” Flack says. “I don’t know anyone from the East End who wants to be stuck there. My whole thing about the contemporary art season, and Will drawing on the Wedgwood, is this idea of heritage subverted by youth. It’s not that we want to do away with the heritage—you want to keep the bits that are quite cool and just add some other bits.”

The crucial “bit” added here is a thorough reimagining of the restaurant space. After the photo shoot is completed, architect David Kohn walks the perimeter of Flack’s room-within-a-room, which is demarcated by six slender white columns, Victorian additions to what was once a two-storey library. Flack’s room will be bordered by five-metre-high stacks of art crates, opened to reveal, among other things, work by Crichton, Simon Popper, and Alexis Teplin. Each artist was asked to design a separate layer, from Crichton’s bottom-dwelling octopi to Teplin’s birds, at top. (The natural elements reference the fact that 6 Burlington Gardens, was, indeed, once a garden—when Burlington House was first constructed as a stately home in the 17^th century.

Flack’s idea is an intriguing exploration of the theatre of restaurants and, as Kohn suggests, an irreverent play on the room’s classical architecture—but perhaps not an art installation, as it’s described in materials promoting the restaurant. “I call it a set, but other people have called it an installation, and there are some similarities. We’re creating quite a controlled little world, and in that way it’s very similar to an artist creating an installation in a gallery—they do their best to control that world in the space that they’ve got,” says Flack.

Kohn uses theatrical metaphors to explain the use of art crates to define the central eating space. “I was keen that [the walls] not be made of set material—from the stage side it looks like something, but from the back-of-house it looks like nothing,” Kohn says, gesturing to the crates that were brought into the room this morning for the photo shoot.

When the restaurant is fully constructed, the art crates will outline an interior dining space; outside them will be a makeshift back-of-house, including a prep kitchen. Guests will essentially walk through busy preparation areas on their way to tables. “We don’t want to stifle people’s experiences by concept, but the concept is that we’ve turned a restaurant inside-out, so you kind of see the guts when you walk in,” Flack says. “People will walk into the back-of-house, where people are making drinks, and there’s a prep kitchen—you’ll think, ‘I’ve obviously walked through the wrong door,’” Flack says. “But then you’ll walk onto the set, where the atmosphere is totally controlled. People won’t notice it, but they’ll feel a sense of calm.”

“Calm” was not the operative byword at the Reindeer, the 23-day winter wonderland of snow-covered fir trees and illuminated log cabins, with Deacon-designed plates and Christmas crackers created by Katie Grand. Its 310 seats were some of the most desirable in town, even if, Flack now concedes, the overwhelming hype finally did the restaurants few favors. “We ended up doing a lot of Christmas parties, and to be honest, they’re not very pleasant,” he says. “There’s so many people, and they’re usually drunk and most people usually don’t even want to be there. To be honest, hosting lots of them is like….” Flack concludes his thought with an utterance that is midway between a groan and a shudder. “The whole thing was my Christmas fantasy—I used to spend Christmas with my auntie in Bournemouth, and I kind of based the Reindeer on that style of Christmas—this kind of wintery Narnia, rather than tinsel baubles. But at the Reindeer, we’d literally be there with 75 real trees covered in snow, and there’s log cabins and everything’s aglow, and you’d get people going, ‘It’s just not very Christmasy,” Flack says. “You’d just want to kill them.”

Lessons learned, Flack and Waddington have refined the pop-up formula for Flash, which will offer only around 100 places, down from the Reindeer’s 310; the great majority of tables will seat four or fewer, and many will be held back for last-minute guests. “We realized that if we did it again, we wanted to do it much more for our natural crowd, which is the art and fashion world,” Flack says. “With the Reindeer, everybody had booked months in advance—but our regulars aren’t the sort of people who’ll do that. The people you really want to be there, because they make the restaurant fun—they make decisions at six o’clock. We want more of that spontaneity, so when people who are in the exhibitions come by and ask if we have a table, we can say yes.”

There seems to be an unusual synergy between Flash and the GSK exhibitions that will appear above and around the restaurant—in galleries open for viewing, their curator David Thorp says, for the first time since the USA Today exhibition in 2006. GSK and Flash together represent a rather forceful step into new ground for the Royal Academy. “The launch party [for Flash] was unbelievable,” says Kohn. “There’s the director of the Royal Academy, there’s the head academician, the great and the good—and then the lights went out and in burst four trannies singing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ carrying torches. The only thing illuminated is this big bearded face with painted lips and a bra falling off, and I can’t quite believe this is happening, and I certainly can’t believe this is happening in the Royal Academy—and that they’re brave enough to take what is clearly a risk.”

If he’s at all anxious about that risk, Thorp—well regarded for his pioneering work with PS1 in New York and Platform China in Beijing—is hiding it well. “I quite like the idea of the Royal Academy being squatted by all these artists—I think it’s actually a very convenient way to think of the structure of this building,” says Thorp, who gestures into a two-storey stairwell, beautifully sunlit, where Rémy Markowitsch’s “Onion Options” will hang in just over two months’ time. “We’ve got all these different people inhabiting all these different spaces; that’s what Bistrotheque is doing, taking control of the situation. It’s sweet, this idea of the East End taking over the West End. I like it.”

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Lang\Baumann for ID: There should be little doubt as to whether the slightly menacing panels of slick, black molded polystyrene and electric bulbs constructed by the Swiss duo Lang\Baumann qualify as art or design: They have a title (“Perfect #2”), a curator (Marc-Olivier Wahler at Paris’s Palais de Tokyo), and a privileged role as the functional gatekeepers to a bona-fide art exhibition (“Five Billion Years,” a group show which closed at the end of 2006). 

Still, visitors should be forgiven for wondering how much it would cost to have the dazzling wall treatments installed at home. “We like that very much, it looking like design,” says Daniel Baumann, half of the Burgdorf, Switzerland-based studio, with Sabina Lang. “But there’s a difference between making design, and making something like design. No one actually orders pieces from us. If people are asking themselves, ‘Where is the art in this piece?’ then they’re also thinking about what the function of art is. Can art be something that is used? Can it be a hotel?”

Indeed, one of the duo’s highest-profile projects is their Hotel Everland, a mobile, one-room pod that functions as artistic experimentation and a rentable hotel property, with €220-a-night reservations handled by a local Marriott. Currently installed on the roof of the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst in Leipzig, Hotel Everland offers concierge service, a stocked mini-bar, and embroidered towels that occupants are invited to “steal”; overnight guests will also enjoy the room’s double windows, though perhaps not the look inside they offer GFZK visitors who venture up to the building’s roof. (After the GFZK show ends in August, the pod will be installed above the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and the windows will offer a view of the Eiffel Tower.) 

The pod’s sleek design expertly mimics a boutique hotel—a blue mosaic-tile bathroom looks swiped from a Bisazza catalogue—but its creators seem to view the visual aesthetics, however accomplished they are, as a means for asking questions unrelated to interiors. “Normally we don’t make stuff in this real-world context,” says Lang, who mentions a similar project in a Cape Town bar as a fellow exception. “But the theme is still to explore what can art be, both in galleries and in public spaces.”

Invited to contribute to an exhibition, the pair met in 1990 and haven’t worked separately since; their professional entwinement eventually turned personal, and produced a three-year-old daughter. 

It’s easy to imagine the Lang\Baumann household as an always-open laboratory for artistic investigation. “It’s not really a question, where private life starts and the work stops,” Lang says. Baumann continues: “Our daughter’s another point in the system, because she’s not coming out of art,” he says, before modifying his statement. “Of course, her godfather is a curator and her godmother is an artist.” Private or public, it seems that Lang and Baumann couldn’t escape art if they tried.

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Case Simmons for NYLON Guys: Midway through my interview with the artist Case Simmons, my bikini top, which I’m wearing beneath a spare, loose-fitting shirt, falls off. I am sitting two feet away from him, bewildered, the bikini strings in one hand and my tape recorder in the other, and Simmons doesn’t even look up. He’s not being subtle, or discreet, or respectful, though he is all of those things: He just hasn’t noticed. He’s so intent on what he’s saying that his gaze, focused on his hands, never deviates. He won’t look up until his thought is completed, and my bikini’s refastened, and our interview marches on.

First, the work: Simmons make large-scale digital photo collages, constructed on Photoshop and consisting of thousands of images of Paris Hilton, of the Statue of Liberty, of porn stars and rappers and white tigers, each taken from the Internet and then painstakingly arranged into compositions that are frequently described as Boschelian, a reference to Hieronymus Bosch, the 15th-century Dutch depicter of extremely detailed versions of heaven and hell. Each piece—and so far, four in a planned series of ten are finished—takes about two months to complete, or 150 hours. I ask Simmons at what point his head screams at him for some recreational time. “It screams at me all the time,” he says. “It says, ‘Case, where’s your girlfriend?’ I spent so much time in front of a computer that I became a hermit, but I don’t think that’s such a bad thing—I think in life you go back and forth between needing a lot of people, and needing yourself.”

These pieces clearly demand the latter, and whatever effort they demand from the artist, they feel like a vision of an end-of-history moment for their subjects±Hilton, Nicole Richie, and the other Us Weekly staples assembled into a superstructure that resembles nothing so much as a temple. Despite the pop-culture elements, there’s something subtly apocalyptic about Simmons’ prints—as if all this cultural refuse we inhale, from Entertainment Tonight to Perez Hilton to ex-Survivor Rudy Boesch’s book of aphorisms, which Simmons has on his bookshelf, must combine to form something else, something distinctly otherworldly. “I try to stand outside the art world a little bit, and look at popular media—I watch MTV all the time, and it makes me think about why people are so fascinated about all of this,” he says. “So I take it and recombine it with other imagery to make this world you can get lost in, and also maybe make sense of it. When I get them up on a wall, I feel like I’m finally giving some sort of justice to the amount of intake that I’m getting.”

Simmons is based in San Francisco but grew up in small-town Iowa, and though it’s painful to indulge in region-based stereotypes, there’s something distinctly Midwestern about him, something solid and assured—qualities not generally associated with a 23-year-old artist on the cusp on a major career. “In a way, you feel like you have more to prove, because you’re this little runt from Iowa,” Simmons says. “If you went anywhere, it was like, ‘Oh, you’re from Iowa? What do you grow, potatoes?’ And you’re like, ‘No, it’s corn.’ But Iowa was good to me.” However good it was, he left it young, at 16, to study at the North Carolina School of the Arts; a year later, he followed a girlfriend to Arkansas, where he stayed with her through a major illness. “As a kid, that was mind-blowing—I wasn’t going to be a 17-year-old anymore,” Simmons says. That seriousness accompanied him to art school in San Francisco, and he seems to be taking some refuge in it now, a few days after an Oakland gallery showed some of his newest pieces. “I love that people are reacting to the work, but I want to be removed enough from it, too?any attention I’ve been getting from the show has made me really anxious,” Simmons says. “I feel like I’m down to earth. I feel like I try to stay humble. I’m not going to forget I’m from Iowa.”

Simmons’ next home will be not Iowa but New York: “I want it to rain, I want it to snow,” he says. “San Francisco’s sunny, and it’s comfortable here, but I want to be rubbed the wrong way; I think I need a little big more struggle.” I want to tell him that Manhattan has a habit for devouring its young, and to be careful. As I leave, he hands me two pieces of paper, each filled with details he didn’t want to forget to discuss in our interview: the support from his family and his roommate Calvin (“that kid really has made it possible for me to live here”), a distillation of his philosophies (“finding beauty in opposites, not being skeptical or afraid of being stupid & profound”), even mention of the grandmother he loved. If it didn’t clearly mean so much to him, it’d register as adorable, but it does, and so it becomes something more solid and sizable: a bulwark, against becoming a different person, maybe. I want to tell him, again, to be careful in New York, but I manage to keep my mouth shut: He’ll be just fine on his own.

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Industrial Facility for ID: Upon entering the Clerkenwell studio of British husband-and-wife duo Industrial Facility , what you notice first is the space. Not the room, exactly, but the space. It’s very white. The couple’s wares are there, in various stages of production, but they’re completely unobtrusive, and in its minimalism, the room seems full of possibilities, the studio equivalent of a blank canvas. “I promise, at home I have a wildly baroque wardrobe,” says Kim Colin, who’s dressed entirely in black. “We are wildly expressive people,” she deadpans.

You might have guessed as much from the designers’ fondness for the word “evacuate,” an off-putting locution that describes the duo’s talent for stripping objects down to essentials without sacrificing necessary attributes—or adding superfluous ones. Their products for the Japanese retailer Muji, with whom Colin and Hecht have worked since Industrial Facility opened in 2002, offers plenty of examples: a fan whose remote control fits discreetly into the base when not in use, a collection of sofas and beds designed to accommodate transport through narrow doorways, and a set of playing cards reduced to their basics: no blond-haired jacks, no well-coiffed queens, just a numeral and a symbol denoting each of the four suits. 

“We’re often able to evacuate some things out of the product the client thought should be there,” says Hecht. (There’s that word again.) Consider their new coffeemaker, also for Muji: Hecht wanted the machine to be circular when viewed from above, so the designers rendered their first, experimental prototype in cardboard. “We don’t use computer modeling,” Hecht says. “If you were to create a circular coffeemaker like this on a computer, it would look dreadfully dull.” In other words, what reads as uninteresting on screen can in fact be quite calming and simple in the real world—a nuance that Hecht and Colin were, and are, eager to explore. Unfortunately, their coffeepot evacuation wasn’t limited to profile: Colin and Hecht originally did away with the heating element, which was eventually restored. “We were hoping the fact that the coffee pot is stainless steel would provide enough insulation for the coffee to stay warm, but it didn’t,” Hecht says. “That was an example of taking too much away, and then putting it back in.” 

This kind of procedural give-and-take seems natural for two designers who don’t finish each other’s sentences so much as continually refine each other’s thoughts. London-born Hecht, 37, is British, a product designer schooled at London’s Central St. Martins, while Colin, originally from Los Angeles, trained as an architect. Though settled, for now, in London with their two children, they seem tenuously connected to the city, and to a local design community they view as chiefly focused on corporate interests; in any case, most of their work comes from Japan and Europe. “Industrial Facility is not corporate, and we don’t want to be,” Colin says. “It’s too much follow-the-instructions,” Hecht adds, and he could well be talking about the firm’s dealings with Epson, for whom they recently designed a Picturemate portable printer. Hecht originally planned to make the machine off-white “to heighten its domesticity.” Epson didn’t agree, leaning instead toward a more high-tech silver and black—a color combination that has proved easily digestible for most consumers. 

Hecht and Colin couldn’t refute Epson, but they did question the validity of its sources: “Market research is conducted by companies to essentially eliminate risk,” says Hecht. “That’s not a bad thing, but if you eliminate as much risk as is conceivably possible, you either end up copying someone else, or following what you have done previously, even if it was not very successful.” That philosophical purity feels genuine; Hecht often sounds legitimately mystified as to how a company could lose its way, like in the case of British kitchenware company Taylor’s Eye Witness, which next spring will manufacture a set of stainless-steel cutlery that’s based on shapes familiar to anyone who’s ever eaten in a high-school cafeteria. “They had become market led,” Hecht says of the company’s departure from its roots. “When we started an alliance with them, we could see that their cherished idiosyncrasies and eccentricities needed to be reintroduced.” A perfect fit, then, for an elegant set of cutlery with down-market origins. “Kim and I feel strongly that low cost doesn’t have to mean the avoidance of good design,” Hecht says. 

Even among partners who share a home and a business, Hecht and Colin seem remarkably in sync, and Industrial Facility’s success may be in the way it marries its founders’ two fields—the way their products relate directly to their environments. “In architecture, you don’t think of the building as an object,” Colin says. “You also have to ask, ‘How does it interact with the city?’ Architecture’s all about the connections to the things around it, and we found that product design wasn’t really speaking that way.” An attempt to bridge that gap is palpable in their two phones for Muji: Second Phone can make and receive calls, but not much else. Relying on the assumption that houses have at least one other teched-out model, the phone is an outgrowth of the idea that a connection should exist between product and landscape, “to the point where the product is able to rely upon things in the landscape to fill in the gaps,” says Hecht. A new cordless phone, released this year, has its buttons on the rear, as inconspicuous as possible, which actually works to temper an emotionally charged environment. “Most phones present a product with a series of buttons on display that are totally pointless when you’re not using it,” Hecht says. “This one’s not calling at you to turn it on.” “It creates a space for you,” Colin adds. 

Space: That’s the altruism inherent in Industrial Facility’s wares. Few products seem to want—so seriously, so determinedly, so quietly—to give owners their space back. “We had someone to our house, which is very white,” Colin says, “and they asked, ‘Where’s the color?’ And we said, ‘In our lives.’ Our lives are full of color and full of expression. At the end of it, things are just things.” 

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