ESSAY
The Courtyard Is Not Nostalgia
How the Iranian hayat keeps solving problems that contemporary housing pretends are new.
NASIM RAHMANI · 14 MINEST. TEHRAN · READ EVERYWHERE · DESIGN CULTURE ECOSYSTEM
FROM
SURFACE
TO LIVING
GROUND.
būm is not a magazine, a store or a feed. It is a city of design — a shared public square where designers, architects, artists, makers, brands, students, collectors and institutions stand on the same ground. Discover, discuss, experience, learn, exhibit, collect.
Every district of the ecosystem can be reached from the square, and from every other district. Nothing here is a dead end.
HOW THE CITY WORKS
NINE DISTRICTS,
ONE GROUND.
The city is the strategy. Each district has its own rhythm and its own residents, and all of them open onto the Agora. Enter anywhere; you will always be able to keep walking.
THE JOURNAL
Long reads, essays and criticism on contemporary design.
SIGNALS
What moved in design today, filed from everywhere.
CREATORS
Designers, architects, artists and makers with a face and a practice.
BRANDS
Independent labels and manufacturers, told as cultures.
OBJECTS
Things worth owning, each arriving with its story attached.
BOOKS
The reading list of the city — new, rare and reissued.
EVENTS
Exhibitions, fairs, openings and studio visits worldwide.
LEARNING
Workshops, courses and craft passed between generations.
TALKS
The open table. Arguments, interviews and unfinished thoughts.
THE JOURNAL
LONG READS
CRITICISM
Against the Frictionless Object
A defence of resistance, weight and repair in a decade of products designed to disappear.
TOMÁS FERREIRA · 9 MINFIELD NOTE
Tehran, After Hours
Nine studios, one night, and the informal infrastructure holding a design scene together.
BŪM EDITORS · 18 MININTERVIEW
Aino Lehtonen on Slow Manufacture
Twelve years to get a chair right, and why the industry no longer knows how to wait.
MARTA KOWAL · 22 MINWHERE DESIGN
FINDS PEOPLE.
Creators and brands are residents, not listings. A practice, a city, a way of working — and a door you can knock on.
OBJECTS BECOME
STORIES.
Nothing in the store arrives without its origin. Who made it, where, out of what, and what was argued about along the way.
HAYAT STOOL
KAVIR ATELIERCut from a single walnut plank, joined the way courtyard doors were.
SĀZ PITCHER
HAND & KILNA glaze recipe recovered from a closed factory’s last notebook.
GRID LAMP 02
FORMWORK OSLOAluminium offcuts from a shipyard, folded and left unpainted.
BĀZĀR RUG
RASTI CARPETSSeven weavers, one loom, a pattern argued over for a year.