nytimes.com/2021/09/20/t-magazine/valerio-olgiati-architecture.html

Last year, mid-lockdown, the musician Kanye West, whose passion for contemporary design is well documented, took his jet to Zurich for a day, then drove to Flims to dine with Olgiati in a local restaurant. The meeting landed the architect a commission for both a Los Angeles apartment for the recently separated West and a quixotic megaproject that would render literal the underground nature of the architect’s appeal: an artists’ colony built beneath West’s Wyoming ranch (which is reportedly 4,500 acres), as vast as the subterranean cities of Turkey’s Cappadocia, with up to 200 dwellings, as well as studio spaces and a performance venue.

These days, his hopes are buoyed by West, whose aesthetic ambitions are as limitless as his budget. Olgiati says West is the best client he’s ever had, unfailingly gracious and generous, and they speak on the phone, email or Zoom often — West calls at all hours from the bedroom, the studio, the bathroom. While he was working on his album “Donda,” he sent the architect one of its tracks, a mournful vocal at that point backed only by piano, seeking feedback. “He says I am Picasso, and his job is to buy land so that I can create,” Olgiati says. “I have never had anyone who appreciates so much what I do.” West’s underground village, which he hopes to finish within the next few years, will be accessible from the scraggly prairie by a ramp descending into the ground, leading to a third-of-a-mile-long arcade. The dozens of communal dwellings, which feed into the central spaces, will have circular bedrooms mostly taken up with mattresses, and walls of pink and blue marble to be illuminated by light shafts from vast windows onto the surface. “He doesn’t want to buy furniture, he wants me to make it all from concrete,” the architect says. (West declined to comment.)

If Olgiati harbors doubts that the subterranean utopia will ever be realized, he doesn’t let on. Instead, he relishes the precise planning. Like the design aficionados and architects who seem to live vicariously through him, you find yourself wanting to believe such a thing can happen, that as amenity-laden condo towers and giant faux-Modernist mansions pock the land, Olgiati will indeed build his Atlantis deep in the ground — and that it will be pure and strange and uncompromised. “Yes, it sounds a bit far-fetched, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they managed it,” says Chipperfield. “And wouldn’t it be amazing?”

hype to see how it turns out if it ever comes to fruition

He doesn’t want to buy furniture, he wants me to make it all from concrete

Awesome, real

why is sweatshop in title

change title

You're fired

Go home

Stop texting

Go find God

Come back after you found God

Architect Ye in full effect

Can I live there tho

We’re reclaiming the negative connotation of the word “sweatshop”

Can u let me know where u were going with this title because im confused

@YANDHI change the title please

I think this was covered in the gq interview

This man is nonstop

one good thing about appreciating kanye outside of his political s*** is, theres constant leaks, and constant new design s*** going off.

must be hella boring being a coI lerai fan or one of these rappers who never drops (sorry kendrick fans, hes still a GOAT)

Neverland

i mean its mad unfair to compare a billionare who made his money in fashion to entertainers

who do you think paid for all those museums aint no rappers like the gugenheims

Not Wakanda but Wakanda is kinda like what we 'bout to make
And who gon' make it? Kan', duh

the Donda design team run out of ideas
the best guys left