In the second part of our Driving Force series from the AW 2022/23 issue, LUX’s car reviewer gets behind the wheel of the Audi R8 V10 Spyder.

We at LUX are not engineers. We leave analysis of the technical side of motoring to our specialist colleagues in the automotive media. What we do know, though, as motoring enthusiasts, is that a mid-engined car should be fun to drive.

With only an elementary knowledge of physics, we know that placing an engine – a car’s heaviest part – behind the driver instead of in front, should make a car easier to pivot through a turn. And while LUX readers may not often do their own grocery shopping, anyone who has tried to steer a shopping trolley full of bottles of, say, Dom Pérignon, will know how much harder it is to turn corners than when the trolley is empty. The same principle should theoretically apply to a mid-engined car, where the space under the bonnet is air, not engine.

Driving through a series of sharp corners in the latest Audi R8, we were delighted to feel this theory being put into practice. The R8 is a fine-looking car, making the most of the engine placement. It has a short, aggressive-looking front end and a fat, squat rear, suggesting speed and intent. Then there is its handling. Steer into a corner and the reactions are instantaneous: there is no mass, no trolley full of Dom Pérignon to turn ahead of you. In fact, it turns so quickly you need your wits about you or you will overdo it, steering too much and aiming onto the wrong side of the road. You feel the car’s four-wheel drive getting its claws into the road as the engine shoots out of the curve, ready for the next one. It may be an Audi, but this is one hyper-responsive car, as sharp as a Ferrari or a McLaren. 

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You also have no doubt that the engine is just a few centimetres behind your head. It is a special engine. As you accelerate out of a corner, its howl grows, like the sound of a Formula One track getting closer. The revs continue to rise and the F1 track continues to increase in volume, the engine getting more and more urgent, until you hit the rev limiter at 8,700rpm. It is an exciting experience, and, combined with the concentration required to keep the hyper-responsive steering pointing in the right direction, makes for real fun and engagement.

Most sports cars today that have not turned electric or into part-electric hybrids are powered by turbocharged V8 engines. They are, by and large, very fast, and the engine response in many cases is even swifter than in this car. However, they lack the character and drama of the now old-fashioned V10 engine, as it gains revs and power mid-howl – something to treasure.

This all makes the R a brilliant car to drive. Unsurprisingly, over the years that its similar-looking predecessor was made, it was highly successful and remains highly desirable. If you feel a caveat coming, you are correct – it involves a mystery. This is an unquestionably rapid and exciting car to drive, even more thrilling on a twisty road than some of its acclaimed rivals. However, there is a slight snobbery towards it from some. Both rivals we mentioned have, we think, slightly higher status in the car-collector world, whereas the R8 V10, for all its brilliance, is considered a little more nouveau.

We can’t give a definitive answer as to why that might be. The R8 isn’t perfect, of course – a two-seater sports car rarely is. Even by the standards of this car type, though, there is very little storage space, either in the front boot or the cabin. If two of you were off for a weekend away, let’s just say that even if there were enough room for your bags, there would be none for souvenirs.

It is also true that the cabin suffers from the excellence of Audi’s corporate design. The shape of the interior is as you might expect from a low mid-engined, two-seater sports car. It is beautifully put together and clear in a Bauhaus-for-the-21st-century way, but the materials and interior design don’t feel special. It feels exactly what it is, a premium two-seater sports car from the people who bring you premium saloons and estate cars. However, the exterior shape, which we think looks better than anything else in its class, makes up for the lack of interior flair. 

If you did need further storage space, the Porsche is more practical and spacious, with small back seats that are suitable for humans over short distances. But these are not supposed to be practical cars and, as a racy weekend machine, the R8 is superb. It manages what some much more expensive supercars don’t: it is reactive and lively at low speeds, and you don’t have the feeling – common in some over-capable supercars – that the car is taking everything in its stride and not giving much fun or feedback. 

Read more: Ionic cars are transforming classic cars for an electric future

In the R8 you have the best engine in its class, combined with handling that lets you know you are in a supercar, while keeping you hyper-alert. The steering could have more feel, although that is a common complaint in this era of electrically assisted steering and giant tyres. Importantly, the R8 is the last of its kind. With emissions regulations, Audi will not make another V10. We recommend it, and, for extra fun, opt for the Spyder over the coupé, so you can open the roof and hear the engine even more.

LUX rating: 19/20

Find out more: audi.co.uk

This article first appeared in the Autumn/Winter 2022/23 issue of LUX

Lost at the Beach. Image courtesy of the artist

New York-based architect-turned-artist Erin O’Keefe plays tricks with our perceptions with her photographs that look like graphic paintings. The Deutsche Bank Lounge Artist for Frieze New York 2022 speaks to LUX about the transition from being an architecture professor to an artist, how the disciplines are interconnected, and her inspirations from the original Bauhaus art school in Weimar Germany. Interview by Darius Sanai

LUX: Was your dream when you were younger to be an architect or an artist?
Erin O’Keefe: I always wanted to be an artist. Although I guess what that actually means is an open question. Architecture provided a way of supporting myself that felt super interesting, and teaching meant I could explore theoretical issues that have turned out to be relevant to my art practice.

LUX: Were you always fascinated by the crossover between architecture and art?
EOK: Thinking about how architecture is represented in painting and photography has always been a source of fascination. I particularly love the wrongness of space in early Renaissance paintings – it actually feels pretty liberating. And I’m interested in the fact that most of what I know about architecture has come through images rather than visiting the actual buildings – that seems perverse, but it’s true. So you need to become a good translator to make a bridge between a picture of the thing and the thing itself, but I think it’s actually impossible to get the two things to align.

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LUX: Are we right in seeing influences of the Bauhaus – the physical school itself and its teachers – in your career and your works?
EOK: Yes, absolutely – it’s a kind of touchstone for me, and the development of my practice. The sense of interconnectedness among the disciplines, and the primacy of making, were both things that feel relevant. I did the Albers colour exercises with my architecture students, which was really the beginning of thinking about the spatial impact of colour in my work.

Fever. Image courtesy of the artist

LUX: How do you set out to create your works: what is the process of conception and execution? Are you looking for a particular effect on the perception of the viewer?
EOK: I am always looking for a condition of uncertainty in the images. Something that operates in multiple ways and is a bit destabilising for the viewer. I’m interested in the friction between the ordinary tactile objects and the unreality of the image.

My studio process is quite open-ended, lots of trial and error. Small shifts or alignments in the still life can transform the reading of the image, and that moment feels like magic to me.

Colour and light play a huge part in how the objects are perceived, and what they are capable of spatially. The objects themselves are made with the awareness of how they will operate in the photograph – although it’s always a very rough guess, and most of the time I discover possibilities that I couldn’t have anticipated.

One Day Soon. Image courtesy of the artist

LUX: Please tell us a little about some of the works at Frieze NY.
EOK: The consistent focus of my work is the gap between the real condition and its representation in the photograph. For the work at Frieze, I became interested in perspective correction – meaning I can paint shapes on the ground and back wall of my still-life set-up that appear very differently in the image – a trompe-l’oeil situation in reverse. I’m also using paint in these photographs as a kind of camouflage to confuse or amplify a spatial condition.

LUX: What kind of a visual artist do you describe yourself as?
EOK: At this point, a photographer, as a way of underlining what these images are. People often mistake them for paintings, but the fact that they are photographs that utilise the language of painting feels like an important distinction.

Read more: Uplifting New Paintings by Sassan Behnam- Bakhtiar 

LUX: Do you still teach and if not, will you ever teach again?
EOK: I really loved teaching, but I’m glad to have the time and attention to devote to my practice. I do miss the studio interaction – architectural education is pretty unique. I have no plans to teach in the future, but who knows?

Find out more: erinokeefe.com

This article appears in the Summer 2022 issue of LUX

The Gaggenau stand at the EuroCucina 2018 exhibition

Stephen Bayley

Of all rooms in the house, kitchens demand the best design for function as well as looks. Cultural critic Stephen Bayley reveals their modernist origins and meets kitchen appliance-maker Gaggenau’s head of design Sven Baacke to talk about his design thinking, what luxury means and the poetry of fridges

No-one is ever going to want a virtual dinner. The one thing electrons, sensors, code, AI, VR and haptics will never provide is a perfectly executed, steaming hot perdiz estofada Casa Paco, a Madrileño classic with fumes of wine, garlic, onions and bacon, garnished by an improbably big handful of parsley. Not to forget its ideal companion, a perfectly chilled 2016 Finca Allende white from Rioja.

For this reason, the domestic kitchen with its hob, oven and fridge will always remain a part of civilised life. App-driven delivery services may flourish on their wobbly bicycles, but they have more effect on the precarious margins of the traditional restaurant trade than the home cook with his gastronomic library, bleu de travail pinafore and wooden spoon.

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Despite changing behaviour – going out, staying in, hot yoga, crazy exercise regimes, fasting and peculiar diets – the kitchen is a remarkably resilient feature of building design. Although some experts estimate that New Yorkers spend 130 per cent more on eating out than other Americans, the fact remains that every new apartment in Manhattan is still equipped with an impressive new kitchen.

Gaggenau’s head of design Sven Baacke

And that probably means a new German kitchen. Like the German car, the German kitchen has reached a global archetypal status that Carl Gustav Jung would have appreciated and understood. Never mind that the same new German kitchen in that vertiginously tall apartment building on East 57th street is rarely used and never contaminated with actual hot food, it is a powerful and universally understood status symbol. Why? Because the design and manufacture of a kitchen and its equipment combine the disciplines of architecture and industrial design at which, at least in the modern era, Germans have so excelled.

It was in 1926 that Grete Schütte-Lihotzky unveiled her Frankfurt Kitchen, a functionalist masterpiece designed for that city’s ambitious socialist housing programme. Exploiting industrial processes and materials, it was tiny, ergonomic, modular, intelligent. It was everything the Bauhaus claimed but often failed to achieve.

The Vario 400 refrigerator

True, the American dream kitchen, with its pastel-coloured and chrome-plated laboursaving appliances attended by a blonde model in a flared and pleated A-line skirt, presented consumers with an alternative in the 1950s and 1960s, but the Frankfurt Kitchen set the enduring design standard. So much so, that examples are in the permanent collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.

The Frankfurt Kitchen from the 1920s

In a nicely paradoxical way, this austere design language has become the ultimate luxury product. This is because luxury today is not about excess or vulgarity, but of having time to spare for, among other things, cooking.

Now, I want you to imagine Sven Baacke riding his adored 1962 Lambretta scooter, a machine he enjoys dismantling and reassembling, around Munich. Baacke is the Gaggenau designer. He was born in 1974 and attended the Staatlichen Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart.

This is an inspirational city for a design education. At the beginning of the last century, the local museologist Gustav Pazaurek organised an influential exhibition called ‘Geschmacksverirrungen im Kunstgewerbe’ (Errors of Taste in Design). Pazaurek hated fuss and admired logic. And in 1927, the great Mies van der Rohe participated in Stuttgart’s magnificent Weissenhofsiedlung, or Weissenhof Estate, a real-life demonstration of architectural possibilities embodied by the International style.

Today, Baacke says his favourite building is Mies’s pavilion built for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona. And, of course, Stuttgart is the city of Porsche and Mercedes-Benz, with all the industrial discipline and design prowess that suggests. And if Baacke’s new home is Munich, remember this is the territory of BMW, a company that made its reputation through design as much as through automatic self-levelling suspension.

All these architectural and design influences I think can be seen in Gaggenau, but I wanted to check this thought with Sven Baacke. So, I asked him.

Stephen Bayley: Is there such a thing as ‘German Design’?
Sven Baacke: Of course. We have the Bauhaus. And Gaggenau has been in the Black Forest for more than three hundred years. There’s nothing more German than the Black Forest! But at Gaggenau, while we certainly admire precision, we have soul as well. That’s not something you’d dare admit to a German engineer!

The Weissenhofsiedlung, designed by Mies van der Rohe, 1927

Stephen Bayley: What’s your approach ?
Sven Baacke: I reduce everything to the essentials, but do not remove the poetry. To me, a fridge is architecture. There are so many variables involved, so many different criteria. But everything comes together in a well-balanced kitchen. One thing is certain – I like open spaces, not closed doors.

Stephen Bayley: How do you define luxury?
Sven Baacke: Luxury is not so much about owning things. I don’t like to talk about Gaggenau as a luxury brand. In any case, luxury is culturally determined. If you live in a Chinese city, the ultimate luxury is fresh air. In Tokyo, it is space. For us Europeans, luxury is a personal thing. It is subtle. It is personal. It is about experience. And especially the experience of cooking, taking time to buy ingredients and spending time with friends.

Stephen Bayley: And are you a good cook?
Sven Baacke: Ah, but what is ‘good’? Certainly, I do not like baking because it is all about chemistry. I prefer to be intuitive. I love being in Sicily because the produce is so good that you hardly need to change it.

A Gaggenau wine cabinet at the EuroCucina exhibition

A Gaggenau kitchen design incorporating a Vario 400 series oven

Stephen Bayley: So, would you agree with [cookery writer] Marcella Hazan when she said, “I don’t
measure, I cook”?
Sven Baacke: Yes!

Stephen Bayley: Does good design last forever?
Sven Baacke: Yes. I admire Apple, but a first-generation iPhone is now obsolete. Our 90cm oven has been on the market since the eighties. It’s an investment, not an indulgence!

Stephen Bayley: Where do you find inspiration?
Sven Baacke: I like the oak cutting-board I recently bought at Margaret Howell in London. And I have just bought an electric Audi, but I also want to buy an old Porsche Targa or an original 1959 Mini. I am in love with combustion engines, but this is not a technology that’s going to get us to the next generation.

Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion

Stephen Bayley: What about the Frankfurt Kitchen?
Sven Baacke: My grandma had something like it. Very German. But its successor was Otl Aicher’s book Die Küche zum Kochen (The Kitchen is for Cooking) which inspired me at college. Aicher was the designer who gave BMW and Lufthansa graphics their amazing clarity.

Stephen Bayley: What new technologies will influence cooking in the future?
Sven Baacke: Revolutions are very rare. Cooking will always be an analogue activity. Look – we are not going to the moon, so I think future improvements will come from better manufacturing. And from a better understanding of how, for instance, we can make cleaning easier. Perhaps we will be able to make equipment disappear from view when not in-use.

Stephen Bayley: You have ten designers working at Gaggenau. What do you tell them?
Sven Baacke: Well, you have heard of forecasting. We have this intellectual game I call ‘back-casting’. I ask my designers to jump into the distant future and then jump back to the near future. And, with the jumping concluded, we both firmly agreed that the idea of wanting to save time in the kitchen was ridiculous, because wherever else would you ever want to be other than in a well-designed kitchen?

Find out more: gaggenau.com/gb

This article was originally published in the Spring 2020 Issue.