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Davidson Rafailidis play the long game when retrofitting a Buffalo restaurant

Limbo State

Davidson Rafailidis play the long game when retrofitting a Buffalo restaurant

(Naho Kubota)
Photography in the hands of an architect can tend toward hyperrealism. The documentation of a space becomes an opportunity to “restore” fidelity to a situation that has devolved from the project ideal. Perceived imperfections are weeded out, surfaces are touched up, and people, if they appear at all, affect un-peoplely mannerisms.

“There’s something that starts to become unconvincing or flat in staged architectural photographs,” Stephanie Davidson, who runs a design studio with her partner, Georg Rafailidis, in Buffalo, New York, told AN Interior. “Our projects don’t have that ‘moment,’ because we are more desirous of the unknown. We try to cultivate an intentional ambiguity.”

Ambiguity of use is an apt way to describe the conversions, retrofits, and additions that the couple has completed in the past few years, a handful of which were examined in a studio visit in The Architect’s Newspaper last year. Even so, the conceit of Space for Something, as the architects named the project, is open-ended to the point of woolly uncertainty. Project photographs, shot by Naho Kubota, depict a limpid interior from odd heights and angles. Where pastel trim delineates thresholds, pink, baby blue, and yellow walls indicate zones of activity, and a few minimalist chairs are scattered about. Wedges of light and the shadowy bend of an exterior railing rhyme with the acute angles of notched cupboard doors. Everything is still, and you could be forgiven for thinking that Kubota’s lens has been set to soft-focus.

Read more on aninteriormag.com.

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