OPENHOUSE EDITOR’S LETTER
THE ACT OF SHARING
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Editor’s letter of Openhouse magazine Nº20.
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Openhouse magazine Nº20
Since Openhouse launched its first issue almost ten years ago, the world has reconceptualized the term sharing. Today, it has many more meanings, more nuances, more scenarios and more platforms. However, in many of its current meanings, sharing is linked to the idea of an individual who unilaterally emits ideas or emotions from a physically closed space, in many cases through social networks. It is a way of breaking down borders that allows us to connect in real time with people from all over the world, but only, and here is the catch, while holding tight to the small physical world of an individual device such as a smartphone. In solitude but at the same time in company.
For Openhouse as a project, even before becoming a publication, the idea of sharing refers to its social meaning, linked to the physical and communal encounter. In the same way as in the eternal enigma: “if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”; If we have a talent or gift that no one knows about, can we really defend that it is a real ability?
Published in 2014, Openhouse magazine's No. 1 was born with a slogan: The Life we Share. A phrase that describes, almost literally, what Andrew Trotter and Mari Luz Vidal, founders of the magazine, were doing at that time in their own home. An apartment in the center of Barcelona that they not only shared as roommates, but also turned into a project in itself when they decided to open its doors to anyone who wanted to enjoy the different cultural activities that they both began to program. This 'act of sharing' is still latent under the skin that Openhouse magazine inhabits. Twenty issues later, the emotion we feel when we look back is indescribable. There are many people who began as names of professionals whom we admire, and today we can consider friends. Architects, artists, curators and creators who opened the doors of their homes to us so that we felt as if we were in our own home. John Pawson, The Gomis family, Jan and Lin Utzon, Héctor Barroso, César Cervantes, Christian Bourdais and Eva Albarrán… The list is overwhelmingly long.
But we are not only filled with emotion when reviewing what we experienced. We also do it when we look up to foresee what is to come. In this issue, we surround ourselves with already known faces such as Vincenzo and Claudia Rose de Cotiis, who are kind enough to show us their new project in Venice. An ode to Italian art that is a work of art in itself.
We visited Casa Soleto, the personal project of Andrew Trotter and Marcelo Martínez. It is a home away from home, whose renovation we have witnessed through their hard work and enthusiastic joys over the last two years that welcomes anyone who wants to live an almost spiritual experience in Puglia, Italy.
Across the ocean, in Mexico City, Graciela Iturbide and Mauricio Rocha sit at the table in the Estudio Iturbide with their friend, the artist, Claudia Fernández. Around a delicious cake and a bottle of tequila, mother and son tell us about their respective creative processes, as a photographer and as an architect, about their first professional steps, and share their family history through anecdotes, memories and laughter.
Not far from there, in San Francisco, Ira Kurlander opens the doors of his house to us; a home designed by the architect himself where the mid-century style coexists with creative dreaminess and a certain surreal touch. Holding that sense of creative play in our minds, we return to Barcelona to visit the studio of the artist Marcos Palazzi, whose paintings of intimate and family scenes invite us to recognize the universal themes we share.
If there is one thing I have learned since I started working at Openhouse magazine in 2015, it is that sharing and capturing moments of our lives, through any type of discipline or platform, is an intimate act that remains within our physical and emotional memory.
At Openhouse we like to think that we continue to be a meeting place. We continue to strengthen ties with creative people around the world and we like to do it as we always have: inviting them to come in, sit down and chat.