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Jonah Takagi. (Photo: Erik Benjamins. Courtesy Marta)
Jonah Takagi. (Photo: Erik Benjamins. Courtesy Marta)

Jonah Takagi on Media as the Place Where the Practical Meets the Personal

March 10, 2023
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Jonah Takagi comes across as laid-back and casual, but the truth is, he keeps pretty busy. The bulk of his time is split between New York City, where he runs his namesake design studio, and Providence, Rhode Island, where he teaches a Herman Miller–inspired furniture design course at the Rhode Island School of Design. When he’s not designing or teaching, he’s up in the foothills of Vermont’s Green Mountains, developing a newly acquired plot of land, or back at home in Brooklyn, engineering his own tube amplifiers and other hi-fi audio equipment.

Brimming as his schedule is, none of what he does truly feels like work to him. In fact, Takagi has never really bought into the work/play dichotomy; instead, by his very nature, he has always spent his time oscillating between the realms of music and design. Born in Tokyo and raised in the suburbs of Hartford, Connecticut, Takagi grew up playing bass guitar in a local third wave ska band before going on to earn his B.F.A. in furniture design at RISD in 2002. Hearing the music scene calling his name again, he began playing with indie rock bands upon graduating and devoted himself to the touring life for the following seven years. In a joint stroke of practicality and renewed passion, Takagi returned to furniture design in 2009, establishing his own brand, and has since gained international recognition for his furniture pieces and homewares. This Saturday, March 11, in his first-ever gallery exhibition, “Brut Vessels,” Takagi will debut Brutalist-inspired glass objects, along with other work he designed during a recent residency in the south of France, at Los Angeles’s Marta Gallery.

Takagi’s media habits don’t stray far from this work-as-play M.O. He largely consumes content that informs his smorgasbord of life pursuits and interests, whether it be residential architecture books that inspire the house he’s designing on his land or Japanese tube amplifier magazines that teach him new configurations for the equipment he’s tinkering with. Like the work he does, none of this material is dry or tedious to him. “It’s all very practical, but it’s also immensely personal,” he says. “The [things I consume] are all things that I’m very passionate about, and they take a lot of energy and reflection.”

Here, we speak with Takagi about what this outlook means for the content he reads, watches, and listens to.

Pieces from Takagi’s “Brut Vessels” exhibition at Marta Gallery in Los Angeles. (Photo: Erik Benjamins. Courtesy Marta)
Pieces from Takagi’s “Brut Vessels” exhibition at Marta Gallery in Los Angeles. (Photo: Erik Benjamins. Courtesy Marta)

How do you start your mornings?

Well, I wake up, and typically, I’ll look at my phone. I dive into The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal apps. I’ve always read the Times, especially T magazine. The Wall Street Journal’s been pretty interesting to me lately, although I tend to avoid the whole opinion section.

Then, usually, it’s coffee. I recently got into the AeroPress. I’ve struggled in my adult life trying to find the best way to make coffee in the most effective way. I’ve tried everything—French press and Moka pots and pour-overs—and I’m now into the Aeropress. There’s a bit of a ritual aspect to it, the grinding and the filter and waiting and plunging and the whole thing.

Then, I just get right to work. Sometimes I’ll turn the radio on. I listen to NPR in the morning. It helps to fill the space and get my brain moving. I work from home, and it’s been that way for most of my career as an independent designer, punctuated by moments when I have a studio. But more often than not, I’m just here.

Where do you get your news?

I don’t know if this is embarrassing, but I used to love Gawker—rest in peace. It’s this thing that I read that was sort of irreverent and snarky, and even though it’s been years since I was relevant, I feel like I’m constantly looking for something to scratch that itch. I also was a rabid reader of The New Yorker, but I moved around a lot in the pandemic, and I don’t have a subscription anymore. I read it religiously for years.

I’ve never gotten on board with Twitter or any of those other platforms. I do engage in social media, but at this point, it seems like more of a professional tool.

Which social media platforms do you use?

I’m on Instagram [@jonahtakagi], and I do interact with it. It’s a really great source of inspiration for me, just consuming visual culture. And of course, as a promotional tool for my own work, I think it’s really great. For whatever reason, the algorithm really gets me. It’s a mix of bikes and stereo stuff and small houses, and the occasional furniture or hardware moment.

Do you listen to any podcasts?

On occasion, but I tend to listen to more music. Podcasts are difficult for me, because I have a hard time figuring out how they fit into my life. When I’m working, I really need to focus. I even have a hard time listening to music with words. I have to listen to something ambient, or jazz. Even just hearing people sing is a little bit distracting, let alone an engrossing story.

But my parents live up in Vermont, and I also have some land up there that I’m slowly working on developing. So my drives back and forth are moments when I dabble in podcasts. There’s this podcast Bandsplain, where the host, Yasi Salek, talks about these bands that are kind of culty or maybe mainstream, and just explains why they are the way they are. It’s everything from Phish to Dave Matthews Band, and I find that pretty entertaining, coming from a musical background. There’s also How I Built This, that NPR show. I find it a little redundant or repetitive—I always feel like it’s the same version of the same story over and over again—but it’s really fascinating for me to look at this broad context.

Any favorite TV shows?

I feel like everyone’s watching The Last of Us, and that’s been sort of indulging all of my prepper tendencies. At the root of it, it’s about a fungus that spreads throughout the world and turns people into things that resemble zombies. And it’s a story of a man who’s a father and in law school, and—no spoiler alert—this girl, and their trek across the United States. I’m only three or four episodes in, and they’re currently in Wyoming. I like it because the zombies are just backdrop to all of this other stuff going on.

I heard Party Down is coming back, which is one of my favorite shows, on Starz. I will watch that religiously. It’s about a catering company, and each episode is a discrete event that they’re catering. One will be somebody’s sweet sixteen birthday party. The next will be a funeral. And the next one will be the Adult Video News Awards. It’s pretty entertaining.

What books are you currently reading?

I think there are three versions of me reading, and they’re all very different. It’s all kind of goal-oriented reading. Certainly, my first area of interest at this moment is getting readings together for my course at RISD. The one book that I keep on going back to is a newish book about Herman Miller, called Herman Miller: A Way of Living. It’s hard to believe, once you open it and look at it, that something like this hasn’t existed, because it’s just this amazing document that talks about the pre–Herman Miller days when it was Michigan Star, all the way up through their merger with Knoll last year. It’s a coffee table book—it’s hundreds of pages long. It’s the type of thing where you can open up to a given page and have your mind blown, and you can close it and come back to it two weeks later.

The second version of me reading—which, I don’t even know if it’s considered reading—but I have some winter hobbies, like I make tube amplifiers for myself for listening to music. Some of them are behind me over here. So I have all of these Japanese magazines [about tube amplifiers]. I’m half Japanese, but I don’t read Japanese. So, again, I don’t know if you’d call it reading. This one, which is called something like Enchanting Vacuum Tube Amplifier—History, Design and Production: Volume 1—that’s probably a bad translation, but close enough—is from the nineties I think, or maybe from the mid-seventies. The author’s name is Isamu Asano, and he’s sort of the godfather of Japanese D.I.Y. hi-fi. He contributed all of these articles to the magazine MJ Audio Technology. It’s not quite reading, but I look at this, and point my phone at it, and Google Translate does its best to describe what it’s saying. It’s not the most pleasant experience of reading, but it’s interesting. I’m learning a lot and working on some new projects based on what I find.

The last version of the books I’ve been consuming is that I have some land in southern Vermont that I’m working on. My dad is an architect, and it’s something that I always aspired to be, but I didn’t have the bandwidth or the focus to be an architect specifically. Now I have this land, and I’m going to try to design a house. So I’ve been buying a lot of used books and some new books on architects that I admire. One of my pastimes is low-grade trespassing to see architecturally significant buildings. One time, I was out near the beach with some friends, and we saw a bunch of the work of this architect Charles Gwathmey, who is just really amazing. This book, Charles Gwathmey & Robert Siegel: Residential Works 1966–1977, is his best, or at least it’s my favorite Gwathmey book. I also have this book Houses and Drawings by the Japanese architect Kazuo Shinohara, who’s probably my favorite Japanese architect. So I have a pile of these books, and I keep them around for inspiration as I imagine this future home for myself in the woods.

What artists or albums do you listen to most?

I’ve been pretty busy lately, so, as I was saying, I have to listen to instrumental music. For the most part, that’s been a lot of jazz, like the German label ECM, which is pretty jazz-centric. You can’t really go wrong with an ECM release, whether it’s a classic Eberhard Weber or something more contemporary. Bill Evans’s Explorations, I was listening to that the other day. When I’m outside of that work environment, it’s a little bit of everything, often contemporary music. I have a pretty big record collection. I like having people over and cooking dinner while we listen to records.

Music is just a huge part of my life. I play drums and guitar and bass. If I’m not listening to music, I’m wiring an amplifier, and if I’m not doing that, I’m maybe playing guitar. I have a friend, Jill Singer, who also did a Media Diet with you, and she mentioned in it that every night, for about a year of the pandemic, we spent ninety minutes a night doing this group-listening thing. It was four of us, from 7:30 until 9:00, every single night. We had this master playlist with tens of thousands of songs.

Any guilty pleasures?

I don’t know if it’s a guilty pleasure—I don’t really feel that bad about it—but a while back, I started paying for YouTube Premium, which has changed my life. I feel like I was wasting years of my life looking at targeted ads. I found these Japanese cooking channels, and you don’t even know who’s hosting it. One’s called Japanese Noodles [Udon Soba Osaka Nara] and the other is Mogu Mogu. There’s not that much information, but they just go to some restaurant—and these aren’t restaurants I’ve heard of—just some noodle place in a suburb outside of Osaka, and they go there and follow the owner as they roll up the metal grate. I enjoy cooking, so it’s entertaining to learn something, but it’s also coupled with A.S.M.R. vibes. I mean, there’s no music playing. It’s just the sound of kitchenware clinking and things bubbling, and it’s real work in kitchens. It’s not produced. The lighting is always a little strange. I’ve been watching those when I’m stressed out, or if I just need to relax.

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Courtesy Aedes de Venustas

A New Perfume Translates the Greek Island of Corfu Through Kumquat

Growing up in the Midwest, I wasn’t exposed to the widest range of foods. True to the Scandinavian heritage and harsh winters of the region, I remember a hearty, meat-and-starch focused cuisine, one meant to warm and sustain through the cold and dark. As I got older, I started expanding my palate, and I can remember many firsts: my first pho, my first dosa, my first doro wat. But out of all these first experiences of more far-flung tastes and flavors, none stands out in my memory as sharply as my first kumquat.

An array of Baudar’s wildcrafted vinegars. (Courtesy Chelsea Green Publishing)

“Culinary Alchemist” Pascal Baudar on the Art of Foraging and the Craft of Vinegar

Pinning a single job title on the award-winning food expert and forager Pascal Baudar is no easy task. A self-described “culinary alchemist” who cans, dries, smokes, ferments, steams, and pickles cactus buds, harvester ants, and other obscure flora and fauna, Baudar is the go-to source for Los Angeles–based chefs Curtis Stone, Josiah Citrin, and Ludovic Lefebvre, as well as cocktail maestros, including Matt Biancaniello, seeking these delicacies. “The majority of chefs use 30 wild ingredients, maximum,” Baudar says. “We deal with four hundred and fifty-six.”

Courtesy Strange Attractor Press

A New Book Explores How, Via X-Rays, Banned Albums Made It Into the Cold War–Era U.S.S.R.

The bad news is that this particular set of X-rays won’t be covered by your health insurance. The good news? Discarded hospital film of broken bones can defy a communist regime, deliver banned music to the masses, and endure as art.

Photo: John Cairns. Courtesy the Bodleian Libraries.

An Exhibition at Oxford Highlights the Sensorial Splendor of Books

In 1940, Dorothy Kunhardt published a book that would forever change the way young children read. Pat the Bunny, an interactive book full of activities such as touching the sandpaper of “Daddy’s scratchy face,” playing peekaboo with a piece of cloth, or gazing in a mirror, imbued the act of reading with a new form of sensory engagement. Today, “touch and feel” books for babies and children are almost required reading—their cellophane stuffing produces a satisfying, A.S.M.R.-level crunching sound, while the use of faux rabbit fur or horse hair offers an exhilarating tactile experience. As we age and our reading comprehension sharpens, the books we pick up prioritize a single sense—sight—their stories seemingly locked away in lines of text.

The Sculpture Gallery at The Glass House. (Photo: Michael Biondo)

Robert Stadler Has a “Playdate” With Philip Johnson at His Glass House

It’s a serene, bluebird-sky day, a slight chill in the air, and I’m walking with the Paris-based, Austrian-born designer-artist-provocateur Robert Stadler along a central pathway on Philip Johnson’s 49-acre Glass House estate in New Canaan, Connecticut. We’ve just exited the property’s whitewashed, brick-floored, glass-ceilinged Sculpture Gallery, a transfixing space of light and shadow built in 1970 that’s home to works by artists including Michael Heizer, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella. Now, for one of the first times ever, a temporary installation by a contemporary artist—Stadler—is being shown among the sculptures of these art-world giants.

Photo: Marco Galloway

Willo Perron’s Debut Furniture Show Makes the Case for a “No Coasters” Design Movement

With everything he does, the Los Angeles–based designer and creative director Willo Perron always considers the macro and the micro. From the L.A. headquarters of Roc Nation, to Stüssy stores around the world (including in Kyoto, Milan, and Shanghai), to the set build-outs for Rihanna’s and Drake’s latest tours, to album art for those same artists, to the branding and art direction for the non-alcoholic aperitif company Ghia, Perron has an adroit ability to work across many scales.

The “shite” (primary performer) in “Makura Jido” (“Chrysanthemum Boy”). (Photo: Yutaka Ishida. Courtesy Japan Society)

Ever Heard of Noh Theater? Our Primer to Three Major Productions Arriving in New York City This Fall

Two winters ago, I picked up a copy of Penguin Classics’ Japanese Nō Dramas, a volume of two dozen translations by Royall Tyler I’d been meaning to read since tearing through Yukio Mishima’s Five Modern Noh Plays a decade previous. I had moved into a New York City gem (an apartment with a fireplace), and with Covid cases skyrocketing and temperatures dropping, I decided that a winter fireside with a handful of centennia-old ghost stories (cat in my lap, or reading aloud to a friend) might carry me away from the pandemic—from Brooklyn, 2020—to somewhere entirely distinct.

Cover of “The Seed Detective” (left). Adam Alexander (right). (Courtesy Chelsea Green Publishing)

“Seed Detective” Adam Alexander Imagines a Better World—Through Rare, Endangered, and Unusual Vegetable Varieties

For British author, TV gardening producer, and “seed detective” Adam Alexander, the supermarket serves as perhaps the finest symbol of our modern food systems and their discontents. Of course, there’s undeniable quantitative material abundance, with aisles upon aisles of vegetable varieties—chopped, pickled, canned, and fresh—all that one could imagine within the confines of some idea of a generic palette. But it arrives at a qualitative price, and not just in terms of flavor, but also in context, in our ability to see this food as a part of our own story—as a connection to the land we live on or a cornerstone of the traditions we uphold. Vegetables are more than just so many anonymous pounds on a scale. “This strong connection with the land and what we grow and what we put in our own mouths has been lost, especially in the U.K.,” Alexander says. “To me, it’s really important that we try to reconnect and recognize that these vegetables are part of our human story and, in that way, we can do a lot to serve rare and endangered varieties.”

Courtesy Assouline

Why Audemars Piguet’s Royal Oak Remains One of the Most Enduring Watches Ever

Designed in 1972, at a time when a luxury watch made of steel was still a radical concept, Audemars Piguet’s nautical-inspired Royal Oak captured the “stealth wealth” style of the moment, mirroring the cutting-edge ethos of the French fashion scene (think: Hubert de Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent, Emanuel Ungaro, Pierre Cardin), as well as the era’s groundbreaking architecture, such as Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano’s inside-out postmodernist Pompidou Centre in Paris, completed in 1977. “To me, the Royal Oak is a work of art that happens to be a watch,” says British GQ editor Bill Prince, author of the new book Royal Oak: From Iconoclast to Icon (Assouline), coming out October 12. “It’s one of those works of culture that has managed to cut through time, in the sense that it was born of an era, but it already had the criteria to be bigger than the era.”

Courtesy Olivia Sammons

A New Zine Highlights the Poetry and Beauty of Food

Each of us has our own individual way of following the changing of the seasons, a private choreography in relationship to the calendar. For interior designer and prop stylist Olivia Sammons, the produce available from the farms, orchards, and markets near her family’s Hudson Valley home marks time for her, leading her forward through the year. “I spend so much time thinking about food,” she says. “What I’m going to eat, where I’m going to find it, which orchard has the best blueberries.” This focus led her to create the new zine Is My Favorite Flavor, which just launched its first issue, appropriately titled Summer! Is My Favorite Flavor, at the design-focused Head Hi bookshop and café in Brooklyn.

Photo: John C. Hawthorne. Courtesy Alex Tatarsky.

Alex Tatarsky on Art as a Means to Live Out the Absurd

It’s late August, and I’m walking on Grand Street in Lower Manhattan. It’s one of those summer evenings that’s cooler than expected, a pleasant foreshadowing of fall. I’m on my way to discuss compost with the artist Alex Tatarsky, and as I head east from the subway, I pass through the dense, networked scents of the edge of Chinatown: the briny tang of fish markets, the sweet snatch of a fresh egg waffle from a rolled ice cream shop, the yeasty cloud that floats around the famous bialy shop. Approaching Abrons Art Center, where Tatarsky is doing pick-up rehearsals for an out-of-town run of their show Dirt Trip, this close-packed olfactory landscape opens up into something with more space: a faint vegetal whiff from a small vacant lot, the not unpleasant chemical tang from a passing truck, and beyond these, the smell of a certain rot rolling in from the East River.

Courtesy Blue Note Records

An Album of Cover Songs Honors the Legacy of Leonard Cohen

Though nearly six years have gone by since Leonard Cohen’s passing, the long shadow cast by his legacy as one of the 20th century’s most esteemed and idiosyncratic singer-songwriters shows no signs of lifting from the public’s imagination anytime soon. From the enveloping warmth of “Suzanne,” to the high drama of “Hallelujah,” to the chilling minimalist and gospel juxtaposition of his swansong “You Want it Darker,” Cohen managed to constantly reinvent himself, leaving behind the rare achievement of a musical body of work whose most impressive moments exist across eras.

Courtesy OMA

For a Tiffany & Co. Pop-Up in Paris, OMA Designs a Literal Jewelry Box

Hiring a world-class architecture firm to design a tiny temporary retail space may seem an extravagant choice, but given the high aspirations of Tiffany & Co.—especially now that it’s owned by the French luxury conglomerate LVMH—it makes sense for the American jewelry company’s Paris debut under its new French banner.