ISSUE NO. 60

An October Issue

A reckoning, is the moment the mirror stops lying. It’s when the mind—or society, or history—has to reconcile what is with what it’s been pretending to be.

It’s inventory. A moral audit. Think of it as truth (an energy) collecting it’s receipts. Whether personal (facing contradictions), cultural (reckoning with injustice), or existential, it’s the point where illusion runs out of runway.

ARCHITECTURALLY CURIOUS

unApproachable

The architecture begins with a descent—a curved concrete path that follows the land’s slope rather than fighting it. Light filters through vertical steel fins, casting rhythmic shadows that shift with the day.

These narrow lines aren’t decorative; they regulate privacy, airflow, and light, creating a façade that breathes with the environment. The material palette—weathered steel, concrete, and glass—sets the tone early: built to age.

The Interior Plane

Inside, the structure trades grand gestures for spatial precision. Board-formed concrete walls hold a quiet texture, interrupted by a sculpted red alcove—a built-in reading nook folded into the architecture like an afterthought turned art form. The living area opens outward through floor-to-ceiling glazing, aligning views to the hillside and grounding the teal-toned upholstery against the warmth of the wood. Every surface seems to negotiate between weight and ease, permanence and softness.

Horizon Lines

From the exterior, the home reads as a single horizontal volume hovering above the landscape. The curved retaining walls guide the eye toward a controlled horizon, while the planted terraces below steady the structure against erosion and time.

The materials—Corten, concrete, and native vegetation—form a conversation between permanence and decay. As light shifts from morning to dusk, the home seems to change allegiance—from object to landscape, from architecture to terrain.

GLOBAL GLIMPSE

‘Purple Rain’

Stepping inside feels like entering a chamber of suspended light. Every surface—walls, ceiling, even the air—seems to hum with quiet precision. The polished panels don’t just reflect; they multiply light, softening the edges of space until everything begins to feel weightless. A single violet armchair anchors the calm, grounding the radiance that ripples through the air. There’s a serenity here, a balance between stillness and spectacle that feels almost cinematic.

Geometry

Here, design speaks in contrasts. The stark grid of shoji screens filters daylight into a silken glow, while a single red circle commands the wall like a rising sun—an emblem of balance and boldness. The furniture reads almost ceremonial: low-slung, sculptural, and deliberate. Deep purple sweeps across the rug and seating, offering depth to an otherwise weightless palette; a space that measures it in restraint.

Taking Shape

This room begins to glow from within. Warm light moves across mirrored planes, merging with the violet tones in a subtle play of shadow and saturation—a moment that feels almost cinematic, like Purple Rain reimagined through architecture. The reflections tint from silver to mauve, dissolving the line between object and atmosphere. The precision remains, but now it hums with something gentler—an emotional rhythm embedded in the geometry. It’s a rare moment where design and mood share the same wavelength.

VISUAL COMFORT

Language of Stone

Soojin Kang’s work collapses the boundary between art and artifact. Her surfaces feel excavated rather than made—woven from jute and wood that behave more like earth strata than composition. Each thread records time through repetition, revealing how labor itself becomes language. The circular and linear gestures evoke natural formations—sun, horizon, driftwood—yet what’s striking is their restraint. The work resists immediacy, inviting slow observation until material becomes narrative.

In her sculptural forms, Kang extends weaving into a kind of architecture—one where softness and structure coexist without hierarchy. The coiled fiber appears to grow from the plaster body, merging the handmade with the elemental. There’s an intelligence in her control of tension: the interplay of density and fragility, concealment and revelation.

MUSICAL INTERLUDE

What I'm Listening to in October

In more poetic terms: a reckoning is the collision between perception and reality—where self-awareness finally gets loud enough to drown out denial.—I’ll see you next week, my friend.

Warmly,
/shane