Interview

His signature look is full-on biker: black leather pants, boots, and cap, with a tight black T-shirt over bulging biceps, and often a pair of black shades. Architect and designer Peter Marino is a big motorcycle fan and a big New York personality. He got his start in the mid-’70s, renovating the Upper East Side townhouse of Andy Warhol and the third “Factory.” Today, Marino is one of the biggest names in buildings. He’s designed more high-fashion boutiques in high-fashion capitals than any other architect in the business. The 59-year-old Marino won an AIA Institute Honor Award in 2007 for his semi-transparent Louis Vuitton boutique in Hong Kong, but he has received just as much attention for his Chanel Tower in the Ginza district of Tokyo, for which he introduced a new form of LED embedded glass. One of the secrets behind the man in black is his rare approach of treating design as an all-inclusive, one-stop shop: inside, outside, and everything in between gets the full Marino treatment. Lately he’s been working in the Middle East, where an influx of money and progressive aesthetics have allowed him to press his ideas into new shapes and heights.

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One of his artistic collaborators and good friends is Brazilian artist Vik Muniz. Muniz recently visited Marino in his midtown Manhattan office and, sitting high up over the city at sunset, the two got down to discussing the failures of art museums, why there isn’t enough talent to go around, and why Marino feels most at home on his motorcycle.

VIK MUNIZ: I had to do a bit of a crash course on you today because you’re so prolific. You collect my work and come to my studio and we talk about art, but we seldom talk about architecture.

PETER MARINO: You also made a portrait of my daughter out of chocolate.

MUNIZ: See. That has nothing to do with architecture . . . And you never hear people talk about architecture. It seems to be a social taboo.

MARINO: No, because it’s a profession. Do you really want to sit next to a kidney expert and hear him talk about kidneys the whole time?

MUNIZ: Well, now you have to. Let’s start from the beginning. You were a product of the cultural environment in New York during the ’60s and ’70s. Is there a pop influence to your work?

MARINO: Well, I simply loathe the crude 1960s distinctions between commerce and art. For me, Warhol and pop obliterated all of those separations—that was the whole point of the Brillo Boxes and Campbell’s Soup Cans. And believe it or not, in 2009, moronic journalists are still saying to me, “Your work is so commercial.” Didn’t we cover that 50 years ago? Where have you been? It’s so pathetic. If you do a museum, that’s sacred, and if you do a store, that’s profane. I just say, “Oh, please, get over it. I don’t know what rock you’ve been living under, but you have to crawl out.” So, in a sense, I do have a Warholian thing going on. I loathe when architects only analyze architecture in intellectual, nonvisual ways. I really love direct response, and that’s very pop. I don’t want to discuss abstract transparencies with a bunch of kooks. [laughs]

MUNIZ: What was the difference between Warhol the artist and Warhol the client?

MARINO: As a client, Andy’s taste was so Catholic. I mean, only he could collect early American furniture, French art deco, modern -paintings . . . [sighs] His taste was so varied, which is great because so many artists and architects have such narrow fields of vision. I find it embarrassing for them. Working for Andy opened up a lot of doors and allowed me to like a lot of things that they tell you in architecture school you aren’t supposed to like.