With significant venture capital funding, the resuscitated 1980s theme park, now in New York City, is a joy to explore—if you ignore the current moment.
The modern incarnation of Luna Luna is not the 1987 theme park envisioned by artist and curator André Heller. It’s not even close. Instead of a park in Hamburg, Germany, this resurrection is hosted at The Shed—a relatively new 200,000-square-foot structure in Midtown Manhattan constructed to "welcome innovative art and ideas." In a broader cultural landscape that’s dripping nostalgia and pastiche, this $100-million-dollar (funded in part by rapper Drake’s media company, DreamCrew) restaging of pieces from the ’80s by big business interests is a compelling window to a time when provocative Pop art looked toward—and attempted to influence—the future.
In 2025, the ticket to attend is no longer 20 Deutsche Marks (around $22 today), and you can’t get on any of the rides. But for $44 dollars ($64 on weekends), you can still view the majestic attractions created by artists like Salvador Dalí, Keith Haring, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. It’s not a fairground built for running and laughing—it’s an exhibit staged for milling and posting on social media. There are a few interactive experiences: walking around the two halls of mirrors, getting (fake) married in the wedding chapel, engaging with actors patrolling the floor, and playing with stuffed rubber blocks.
Arik Brauer’s Carousel. A holocaust survivor, much of the artist’s work draws on Jewish mystic tradition to create his unique flavor of Fantastic Realism.
Brian Ferry courtesy Luna Luna LLC.
Despite the contrast to the original, Luna Luna finds a successful middle ground between trendy participatory "immersive museum," curated exhibition, and historical preservation project—marrying a serious art show with Instagram-perfect photo ops. This formula has proven incredibly popular, first welcoming 150,000 visitors in L.A. for the better part of 2024 and now on an extended New York City run until February 23.
Roy Lichtenstein’s Luna Luna Pavilion, and Keith Haring’s industrially fabricated tarps and painted carousel, from left to right. For Luna Luna, Lichtenstein continued the style he developed in his 1985 "Perfect/Imperfect" series, transitioning from examining mass media to parodying the art world.
Brian Ferry courtesy Luna Luna LLC.
Upon entering, an usher advises visitors to work their way along the perimeter and read a historical timeline on the walls—a new element of the exhibit—before taking in the artifacts themselves. The timeline begins at the turn of the 20th century, combining historical context with a history of the park and its contributors. Holocaust tragedies, notable art history moments, and political upheavals give the viewer context and a sense of urgency. But the timeline stops in 1987 at the park’s debut. A short addendum details Luna Luna’s quiet retreat from public view and mentions a few historical events such as 9/11, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the sale of a Van Gogh for $53.9 million. The timeline restarts in the 2000s, with a much shorter space dedicated to a practical account of restoring Luna Luna. No historical context was added to the more recent history.
The lack of interest in the contemporary feels apt for our current moment. Amid a precarious future due to climate change, regressions of civil rights under a forthcoming administration, and widespread artist censorship, it’s no surprise we are awash in economically and politically safe reboots and live-action adaptations. In Ghosts of My Life (2014), pop philosopher and music critic Mark Fisher wrote about "the slow cancellation of the future," detailing how—thanks to a variety of political and social factors—pop culture of the 2000s and onward has become less and less interested in breaking new creative ground. Its focus is reminiscing and recycling the past. Similarly, Dean Kissick’s recent (much applauded and criticized) Harper’s essay, in part, lamented the art world’s "nostalgic turn towards history"—looking towards the past as a bland way to reconsider our present moment.
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painted ferris wheel features music from Miles Davis and references to Jim Crow-era segregation. Basquiat only agreed to participate in the fair once Heller acquired permission to use Davis’ music.
The cozy three-bedroom getaway neighbors a 468-acre nature reserve on the coast of Kent.
Location: Dungeness, Kent, England
Price: £875,000 (approximately $1,110,427 USD)
Footprint: 1,591 square feet (three bedrooms, two baths)
From the Agent: "This inventive three-bedroom house, positioned on the broad shingle expanse of Dungeness, encloses an original train carriage from the 1880s. The approximately 30 homes within the private estate at Dungeness started life as traditional railway carriages. In the 1920s, the railway company enabled their workers to purchase rolling stock and drag them down onto the shingle beach, where many of the workers chose to remain.Renovated to sit in harmony with its coastal position, this home has a neutral palette intended to create a seamless interaction with the surrounding landscape. A large, south-facing garden unfolds at the rear, filled with a variety of flora and fauna (including sea cabbages) indigenous to Dungeness’s 468-acre nature reserve, which is designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest. The house is lined with rows of glazing, affording the home a light, expansive aspect with views across Dungeness from every room."
Accessed by a stone-pebble pathway, the one-level house sits back from the road, with a bright blue door bordered by vibrant stained glass.
Photo courtesy of The Modern House
Photo courtesy of The Modern House
Part of the living area is located within the well-preserved railway carriage, while the outer portion is lined with windows overlooking the surrounding coastline.
Sugarhouse Design & Architecture sought to "pack in storage at every opportunity" as they revised this 1,171-square-foot Manhattan apartment.
When a couple bought this 1,171-square-foot Upper West Side apartment in 2012 and moved in with their two toddlers, they weren’t in love with its looks. "It wasn’t beautiful, but the layout was pretty perfect for us at the time," one homeowner says—and they were particularly fond of one amenity. "We had had laundry in the basement before, and now we have a full-size laundry room. It seems like a silly thing, but I thought that was amazing."
The family lived there for a decade before considering a remodel. In the interim, small things started adding up, quite literally. The kids’ (now teenagers) sports equipment was spilling out of closets, the parents’ papers teetered in stacks on the office floor, and the living room’s built-in media cabinet could only fit a tiny TV, which put a damper on family movie nights. "We really moved away from watching things together on that TV," says the owner.
In 2022, they hired Sugarhouse Design & Architecture to double the storage, bring in more light, and weave in finishes that they liked better. First up for designers Jess and Jonathan Nahon was addressing the elephant in the layout: the laundry room.
Before: Entry
Before: There simply wasn’t enough storage in this Upper West Side apartment for the family of four living there. The long and narrow entry hall was dark, even on sunny days.
Courtesy of Sugarhouse Design & Architecture
After: Entry
Sugarhouse Design & Architecture lightened up the entry hall with fluted glass panels, white oak floors, and custom oak closets that reach to the ceiling. The bench was custom-designed by Sugarhouse and fabricated by Elwood Design Co in Orange, CA, and the ceiling light is by Modern Forms.
Jacob Snavely
The designers realized that the laundry room was so nice because it had a full-sized window on the facade of the building that got the best light. Jonathan had a suggestion: "We could make that room part of the actual living space, where it could be accessed and used by everybody." The owners were game.
Before: Entry
Before: "The storage was not attractive and not that practical, and there just was not enough of it," says the owner.
Judy Becker discusses crafting László Toth’s modernist on-screen universe—including his buildings.
Brutalism is architecture’s frenemy—beloved for its stylistic concrete heaviness and inventive shapes, while often reviled for, simply, being "ugly." As a movement that became prominent in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s, brutalism has often been characterized by alien spaceships or Cold War relics.
But a new film, The Brutalist, presents an alternate stylistic inspiration with roots in the Holocaust. Directed and produced by Brady Corbet and cowritten with his partner, Mona Fastvold, The Brutalist is a fictional biopic. Set in 1940s America, the film stars Adrien Brody as László Toth, a Hungarian architect who struggles to rebuild his life and his architectural practice, while attempting to execute his masterpiece: a cultural and religious building called the Institute.
For the film, Becker’s team constructed and shot a model of the building.
Lol Crawley
The three-and-a-half-hour film follows Toth after he escapes the Nazi concentration camps. Toth has gone to live in Philadelphia with his cousin, Attila (Allessandro Nivola), who has changed his last name in the hopes of becoming "American." We watch Toth return to his Bauhaus roots; first, as a furniture designer for his cousin’s shop, where he goes from building modernist desks to being commissioned to redesign the library of a wealthy collector, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pierce). Later, Van Buren commissions Toth to design the Institute: a massive community center that includes a church, gymnasium, theater, and library, which he designs in the brutalist style based on his time in a concentration camp.
Toth and his brother in Van Buren’s finished library.
Lol Crawley
Judy Becker, a production designer who has worked on films such as Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Carol (2015), brought the universe of Toth to life. While Becker isn’t an architect, her job, she says, is to "design the world the movie takes place in." She’s responsible for managing furnishing, color palettes, wallpapers, and overall sets—crafting a world with the most minute details. Dwell spoke with Becker about how she designed and built the environments that defined Toth’s career—the library and Institute—by tapping into his motivations and persona to produce a style unique to the fictionalized architect.
The Brutalist is a fictional biopic. How did fiction and reality play into designing this film? There are heavy themes from very real events like the Holocaust and internment camps; how did you balance this with a creative architectural vision?
One of the many reasons that Brady, the director, and Mona, his wife and co-screenwriter, wanted to make this movie was…they were thinking about how much talent and creativity was lost in those camps. And they invented this person who did survive, László, whom many people have asked me about as if he were a real person. He wasn’t. I think one of the reasons that László is so stubborn, so determined to create his art, is because otherwise, I don’t think he could have survived. So I really did thoroughly try to channel him when I was designing for him. And I talk about him as if he’s a real person, because I had to think that way.
It’s interesting that you say you’re able to channel a fictional architect to execute his vision.
I have often said that I’m a method designer. I try to embody the characters in any movie I design, because I think a lot about what their world would be like and what they would have. With László, it was a whole trajectory: he comes to the United States; he has nothing. He’s just got out of the camps. He’s had a horrible journey. He’s depleted. He goes to his cousin’s furniture shop. He’s lying on a cot in the storage room. His cousin’s American now. The whole thing is pretty depressing. And then his cousin asks him to design some furniture. So I felt like that’s his earliest work in which he’s going back to his Bauhaus training. He’s using found materials. There’s a whole story about how he’s designing that furniture, taking from some of the furniture in the shop and being influenced by other furniture there. And the next stage, Harrison’s library, is where László becomes very modern. It’s modernist design of the time and he doesn’t become himself as an architect until we see the Institute.
I’d like to hear about the design process. You’re not an architect but you crafted a realistic vision for what a brutalist community center and church might look like.
I designed the Institute before I did anything else; Brady asked me to, because it was when I first started on the film. It wasn’t even official yet, but we had to figure out how we were going to shoot parts of the Institute. We knew we couldn’t build the whole thing to full scale. So in order to do that, we needed to design it. The way I work is to channel [László’s] experience as a prisoner, and what it felt like to be a prisoner, to be a refugee, to come to America, to experience what he experienced in America, which maybe wasn’t as great as he hoped it might be—putting all those things into his design for the Institute. It was an emotionally difficult process to channel him creatively and architecturally. Once I kind of cracked a few things, it became easy. We ended up building parts of it, and also building a model that we shot as the Institute.
Detail shot from the Institute; Becker cites Tadao Ando’s Church of the Light as inspiration.
The country is trying to reverse its legacy of under-investing in public housing by churning out projects that defy expectations of the building type.
When you picture the world’s best building of the past couple of years, perhaps a gleaming glass skyscraper or museum springs to mind. But the 2024 winner of the prestigious biannual RIBA International Prize is a building type rarely associated with being ‘the best’—social housing. Modulus Matrix, a six-story housing development of 85 socially rented homes in Cornellà de Llobregat, Spain, designed by Barcelona firm Peris + Toral Arquitectes, took the plaudits. RIBA president Muyiwa Oki described it as a "blueprint for delivering sustainable, quality housing around the world at scale."
This has come at a time when cities across Spain are facing challenges similar to many others globally: increasing evictions, growing energy poverty, people living in substandard and overcrowded housing, and skyrocketing rents. Given its high levels of tourism, Barcelona’s housing shortage has been compounded by a spate of properties being converted to short-term rentals, which can generate two to four times the usual profit for owners and has seen vacation rentals boom to over a quarter of the rental housing stock in some neighborhoods, pricing many locals out. In June, the city announced plans to ban short-term rentals by November 2028. But Barcelona started tackling its housing crisis years earlier, setting out an ambitious Right to Housing Plan, 2016-2025 with a wide-reaching series of goals, from improving housing-related IT infrastructure to doubling its social housing provision.
Barcelona firms MIAS Architects and Coll-Leclerc completed 72 social housing units in the Marina del Prat Vermell neighborhood in 2023. The facade features alternating vertical strips of glass and ribbed fiber-reinforced concrete. The triangular building’s openings are designed to maximize solar gain in winter and provide solar shading and cross ventilation in summer on all floors.
The Plan was championed by Ada Colau, Barcelona’s former mayor (from 2015 to 2023), who inherited a city with a paltry social housing stock of just 7,500 homes for a population of 1.6 million, due to widespread sell-offs on the private market. Eduardo González de Molina, a policy advisor with Barcelona’s council housing unit, described the Plan’s long-term vision as "Vienna 2.0," referring to the Austrian city’s legendary housing success, where a quarter of the population are social housing tenants. Despite being ousted in June 2023 by socialist Jaume Collboni, Colau’s time as mayor helped kickstart serious efforts to finally upgrade the city’s social housing sector that are being carried forward by Collboni.
The Plan’s ambitious rhetoric is, importantly, backed by financial clout, with €1.7 billion of direct contributions from the City Council—77 percent more than the annual average spend in previous years—and close to €3 billion in public and private funding earmarked over ten years, or around €300 million a year. (For comparison, Vienna’s social housing budget is said to be closer to €400 million, though the city also has a larger population of two million.) Through the Plan, the city has been purchasing existing buildings and buying up vacant apartments at 50 percent their market rate to increase its social housing stock. Barcelona’s municipal organizations have also run social housing architectural competitions, giving established and emerging Spanish firms the chance to cut their teeth with innovative social housing designs.
"The best architects, they participate in competitions for social housing, even if the conditions are not very good—they’re not the best paid projects, but they have a lot of status," says architect Carles Baiges Camprubí of Lacol, a Barcelona practice that specializes in cooperative housing.
The conventional approach in apartment design is to locate rows of cellular units along either side of a long, central passage—a model referred to as a "double-loaded corridor." This can waste circulation space and limit opportunities for light and cross ventilation. Much of Barcelona’s new-build social housing outright rejects this, with architects instead opting for layouts that are compact and standardized, but also offer greater possibilities for social interaction between residents, along with more access to sunlight and air.
For instance, at the 67 publicly subsidized dwellings in Barcelona’s La Trinitat Nova neighborhood, completed in 2023 by Narch Arquitectes, Maira Arquitectes, and dataAE, access to each apartment is via a private terrace connected to a partially open hallway and stairwell, with just two units on either side of the landing. This allows each open-plan living space to span the width of the structure, channeling breezes through openings on both ends. Balconies on the east and west also provide every unit a place to sit in the sun in the morning and evening—the kind of experience typically reserved for luxury apartments. At Baró Tower, a housing block with 47 state-subsidized units completed by the same three firms the year prior, groups of four apartments are also accessed via shared, open terraces connected to a central atrium. This means each apartment can open up on three sides, offering light and through-breezes. The atrium provides a communal space for the building and can be opened and closed in different seasons, trapping warmth during winter, or expelling excess heat using the stack effect in summer. Across both buildings, natural materials like brick, ceramic tile, timber, and stone are all used in abundance.
Peris + Toral Arquitectes, the same Barcelona firm behind the 2024 RIBA International Prize–winning Modulus Matrix, designed Borrassá, a mixed-used building with 54 social housing units, in the city’s Besòs district. The brick lattice walls help ventilate the atrium.
The use of mass timber is another common feature of several recentsocial housing projectsin Barcelona to both speed up construction and reduce embodied carbon (the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that occur during the construction of a building). The award-winning Modulus Matrix, for example, used 8,300 cubic meters (10,856 cubic yards) of Spanish-harvested timber for the floors, walls, and solid wooden stairs. Its modular layout means every room is the same size—3.6 by 3.6 meters (11.8 by 11.8 feet)—creating apartments that can be easily reconfigured over time, while also reducing build cost. At 151 social housing apartments completed in Barcelona’s Sant Martí district in 2024, the use of prefabricated timber panels reduced construction time from two years to one, while also reducing carbon emissions by 30 percent.
Innovative design approaches mean quality is achieved despite tight budgetary constraints. In Barcelona firm MAIO’s scheme for a four-story, multifamily building with 40 social housing units, shading is provided by wrapping the building in experimental fabric curtains. This low-cost, low-maintenance approach helped construction costs come in at €950 per square meter (about $92 per square foot), almost half the national average of €1,700 per square meter (around $165 per square foot).
Beyond conventional social housing, Barcelona’s City Council has also created a cooperative housing committee to facilitate cohousing, a model in which the city or a private owner provides a property or abandoned site for a cooperative group to build on and occupy for up to 50 to 100 years, with construction often financed by socially responsible banks. The cooperative pays a deposit and monthly installments at below-market prices, but since the housing is not for profit, these payments can be around 40 percent lower than average rents in the city.
As their name suggests, cooperatives also promote more communal living. At La Borda, a 28-unit "self-organized" cooperative designed by Lacol in 2018, residents have access to generous shared amenities and facilities, including a large, open multipurpose space, kitchens, laundry, guest rooms, and more. Since the cooperative is the client for the build (rather than a generic developer), it also creates a more participatory design process, giving those who will actually live there a voice on the architecture. According to Camprubí, this means cooperatives look and feel different to typical apartments "because we had the opportunity to discuss with people, to propose them alternatives, and they could evaluate them and decide whether or not they wanted to take the risk."
Spain’s social housing revolution has also seen the creation of homes catering to groups explicitly failed by market-led housing provision. Barcelona firm Vivas Arquitectos’s 100-person Reception Center for Homeless Women is a simple rectilinear block built from thick cross-laminated timber (CLT) walls with a series of interior terraces and balconies. Its metallic facade shimmers in the Catalonian sun, creating an aesthetic that feels more like a contemporary arts museum than subsidized housing or a shelter.
Joan Josep Fortuny Giró and Alventosa Morell Arquitectes designed 54 social housing units in Inca, a town on the Spanish island of Mallorca, on a plot owned by the Balearic Housing Institute (IBAVI). Each of the units have outdoor spaces: private gardens on the ground level, and terraces on the upper floors. Sustainably extracted larchwood sun shields cover much of the facade.
Footprint: 4,200 square feet (four bedrooms, four full and one half baths)
From the Agent: "This exceptional home delivers an imaginative blend of two lifestyles. Taking inspiration from the trees that once lined the Minetta Brook, which flowed beneath this house, architect Adam Kushner has created a one-of-kind four-bedroom home filled with whimsy and purpose. This home is situated in a landmarked district of the city. Inside an Italian wrought-iron gate, which serves as the front door of the original building, is the front courtyard. A second gate leads to the hub of the home, the kitchen, which connects to an interior courtyard that leads to the lower level. The showstopper in this home is the second floor, with 23-foot-high ceilings and two fireplaces. Easily travel to the floor of your choice while enjoying the sight of the breathtaking 83-foot-high rock-climbing wall. Above the trees, the view is a nearly 360-degree vista of Greenwich Village."
The historic home is set beside a soaring tree in a landmarked area of Greenwich Village.
Photo by Real Estate Production Network for Sotheby's International Realty
Photo by Real Estate Production Network for Sotheby's International Realty
The living room has 23-foot-high ceilings and two fireplaces framed by timber sourced in the Hudson Valley. Floor-to-ceiling windows fill the immense space with sunlight.
Photo by Real Estate Production Network for Sotheby's International Realty
Sugarhouse Design & Architecture sought to "pack in storage at every opportunity" as they revised this 1,171-square-foot Manhattan apartment.
When a couple bought this 1,171-square-foot Upper West Side apartment in 2012 and moved in with their two toddlers, they weren’t in love with its looks. "It wasn’t beautiful, but the layout was pretty perfect for us at the time," one homeowner says—and they were particularly fond of one amenity. "We had had laundry in the basement before, and now we have a full-size laundry room. It seems like a silly thing, but I thought that was amazing."
The family lived there for a decade before considering a remodel. In the interim, small things started adding up, quite literally. The kids’ (now teenagers) sports equipment was spilling out of closets, the parents’ papers teetered in stacks on the office floor, and the living room’s built-in media cabinet could only fit a tiny TV, which put a damper on family movie nights. "We really moved away from watching things together on that TV," says the owner.
In 2022, they hired Sugarhouse Design & Architecture to double the storage, bring in more light, and weave in finishes that they liked better. First up for designers Jess and Jonathan Nahon was addressing the elephant in the layout: the laundry room.
Before: Entry
Before: There simply wasn’t enough storage in this Upper West Side apartment for the family of four living there. The long and narrow entry hall was dark, even on sunny days.
Courtesy of Sugarhouse Design & Architecture
After: Entry
Sugarhouse Design & Architecture lightened up the entry hall with fluted glass panels, white oak floors, and custom oak closets that reach to the ceiling. The bench was custom-designed by Sugarhouse and fabricated by Elwood Design Co in Orange, CA, and the ceiling light is by Modern Forms.
Jacob Snavely
The designers realized that the laundry room was so nice because it had a full-sized window on the facade of the building that got the best light. Jonathan had a suggestion: "We could make that room part of the actual living space, where it could be accessed and used by everybody." The owners were game.
Before: Entry
Before: "The storage was not attractive and not that practical, and there just was not enough of it," says the owner.
