иконография

i know the world is small.

the reason i know this is because even a wee office such as we have thrown together is published in way too many languages.  I guess we always expected our work might be published in English magazines, and most of what we have written or been featured in, fits that category. But surprisingly a lot of it doesn’t.

It all started with the Russian version of Interni, and expanded to include Korean (Details and C3), and Dutch (Starchitects book) publications, and finally last year we also made into the Japanese press (this was not an easy thing to do, even though we are based in Japan).  Just this week we received our copy of a book on small houses that is written in Chinese and English featuring two of our projects.

Now, I am happily the first to admit it is incomprehensibly surreal to see our work in so many languages, especially since we are often set alongside such amazing people.  In this latest book for example we are there with UN Studio.  Absolutely makes us feel we need to work harder (at the very least).

The thing that I can’t help wondering is why we find ourselves so accidentally international, especially since we are so decidedly local in our practice, at least so far.   After all it isn’t like we sent our work to all of these publishers.  To the contrary they always come to us.  My theory is that we are picked up in so many languages because of the internet and the blogosphere. It’s kind of like word of mouth, but everyone has their eyes closed

The upshot is that somehow our projects end up relayed all over the place, from the UK to India, the USA and China, without any apparent awareness that national boundaries even exist.  It really does seem like the world is growing flatter and smaller.  Would be nice if that meant we could move into those markets more easily too, though I somehow doubt it works that way. иконииконописikoni