Editor’s Letter: Places to Unplug

It’s rough out there. If things going on around the world have you feeling a sense of ambient dread, I’m right there with you. But for our annual issue dedicated to outdoor spaces, please indulge us in a little escapism. Without going into clichés about nature and mental health, each of the stories in this issue shows a different type of design connected to the outdoors: places to pause, free yourself from your feeds, and take a deep breath.

In our cover story, a concrete house on the beach in Oaxaca was commissioned by a group of friends looking to share a coastal escape. Architect Ludwig Godefroy designed a series of concrete pavilions that connect private suites with shared spaces using a dramatic combination of stripped down shapes and raw materiality. Yes. I also recommend that they install handrails and a pool fence, but I’m a big fan of how they built something that feels both formidable and at ease. On the other end of the material spectrum, architect Max Núñez gave his family’s greenhouse-inspired home on a lot in Santiago a sense of lightness, but also practical privacy, with twin vaults over translucent glass-block walls.

To help you unplug, we also put together a roundup of newly available furniture, lighting, and home accessories that will turn your backyard—or a patch of the nearest public park—into a phone-free retreat. Everything we selected is adamantly analog, or at least mercifully free from the internet.

In other stories, we celebrate the delightfully unnecessary. First, with a profile of Mark Cline, the artist preserving the production of monumental fiberglass figures that dot Route 66. The famed American highway turns 100 this year, and while I’m not a fan of car culture more broadly, making an itinerary of spotting the giants in the wild could plot the course for a great road trip. They are joyful pieces of Americana, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to hold them up as defiantly fun foils to a more dangerous kind of American kitsch. (The proposed National Garden of American Heroes is just one example.) We also highlight a few contemporary architectural follies, garden structures designed for diversion rather than function.