“Today we experience chaos. The waste of human and material resources and the canalization of almost all creative effort into blind alleys bear witness to the fact that our common life has lost its coherency.” This feels accurate, but surprise: These are the opening lines to György Kepes’s The Language of Vision, published in 1944. The book, written in a mystical, prophetic voice, is a fascinating primer of composition; it makes the case that “optical communication” is the most effective form of transmitting knowledge. The image has killed the text.
Eighty years later, in our overstimulated, doomscrolling, AI-saturated era, Kepes’s obvious observation has intensified into a pressurized state of hyperconsumption. We are beset by content. Knowing this, AN Interior attempts a certain edgyish tack through the maelstrom. The publication, founded in 2015 largely to showcase design work by architects that went underappreciated in The Architect’s Newspaper, gathers evocative contemporary interiors, furniture, and products from around the world for an audience of discerning and curious readers within the design community. We publish compelling projects, often by emerging talent, and look for striking photography, while keeping an eye out for the unexpected. Each issue aims to equip designers with ideas and images that will inspire them in their creative work.
We mark this milestone of ten years in print with a special section that responds to Kepes’s book: The Future of Vision gathers leading photographers and thinkers to show us and tell us, respectively, where we ought to be directing our attention.
Reading through the contributions, it is clear that sweeping changes are needed to respond to the climate crisis and other urgencies—and that the responsibility of design media is to shape the conversation around the topics that matter. (“Public taste today is formed mainly by publicity and the articles of daily use. By these it can be educated or corrupted,” the architecture historian Siegfried Giedion wrote in his introduction to The Language of Vision.) Similarly, the submissions from world-class architecture photographers give us a glimpse of how they see space, a collection that balances between lived-in, everyday casualness and a more epic sense of grandeur.
Beyond, the issue is stocked with goodies. With our features, visit four projects that center restorative retreat. See what caught our eyes at the recent Milan Design Week. And check out a fun focus on kitchen and bath products and case studies. Up front, there are still more projects to absorb, from a new nightclub in a Williamsburg basement to a spare rework of an architecture-school interior. (I knew its previous configuration all too well, as I went to graduate school there.)
Ten years in, AN Interior has some momentum as a design magazine for designers. My hope is that this issue is another step in the right direction. As with hiking, sometimes taking a pause and looking around is the best way to see how far you’ve come—and how far you have to go.