A day spent in the studio alone

A day spent looking at art with my husband

A day spent by the sea with my kids

A day spent laughing with friends

Every minute, a building in Europe is destroyed –

not by natural disasters, but by human hands.

While others profit, you pay the price:

with rising rents and rising temperatures.

As an architect, being part of the problem:

the construction sector, causing 40% of all CO2 emissions,

causing global warming, social unrest and economic
decline.

Fix it.

Join the movement.

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my perfect day.

Waking up at 6.38 a.m. (without an alarm), just like every day, because: “senile Bettflucht”… drink a coffee in bed, scroll up and down the entire internet… shit! It’s already half past seven, so I can forget about sport exercises. Throw myself onto a train to Berlin. Getting 6 hours of work done on a 4.5-hour trip (attention: this is Deutsche Bahn mathematics!) I crash at my friend’s place in Moabit, Dahlem, or Mitte to unpack my suitcase, only to repack it again 36 hours later. In the meantime, I’ve met 5,284 people, seen 3,256 exhibitions, 1 theatre play, spent 45 hours on a dance floor, and stroke minimum one dog. Back in Düsseldorf, I swap my suitcase for my bike, ride to my new office in Oberkassel and drown my Berlin hangover in coffee.

I wake up and think to myself— A perfect day is one that doesn’t begin with worry. Not about what’s next for me, not about the state of the world. A day that opens gently, where I can rejoice in being here, in the present, doing my thing. I move through routines. I am a jack of all trades. Aligned with the figure of the trickster, I begin the day by watching the news—tracking what stirs people across the planet, then trying to piece together what actually took place. Reading follows. Long hours of it. Texts, fragments, sources that matter to me only now, only in this moment. I leave space for inspiration. That is my favorite form of architecture. Sometimes the day wanders. I allow it to digress—if the economy allows, that is. There is karaoke in the studio. A guitar leaning against the wall. Filipino meals simmering. Laundry turning slowly. I find myself increasingly drawn to domestic life, to its quiet choreography. To me, a perfect day is one where hustle dissolves. A day off, in the most natural sense. These days often arrive after moments that feel significant— after something has been risked, shared, or completed. Perhaps celebration seals the day, making it whole. When evening comes, it is always the people who complete it. Conversations that drift between warmth and friction. Questions exchanged between friends, lovers, family, strangers. These encounters are not bound to place—they happen anywhere. As an artist, my days unfold mostly among friends in Europe and the US. Many of those days feel perfect to me. Café Knülle in Düsseldorf holds me gently when I’m in Germany—a place to think, to research, to debrief. On Sundays, I wander the St. Ouen flea market in Paris alone.
In New York, I find myself on Knickerbocker Avenue, inside L-Train Vintage, letting time slip. Some of my most perfect days live in the Philippines, with my family. Their sunny energy. Their curiosity about my life elsewhere. Sharing stories over Filipino BBQ, narrating distances while staying close. And the beach—always the beach. I return to it when winter tightens its grip on Europe, where I currently reside. A perfect day wears many dresses. It shifts with my mood. Sometimes it follows my plans faithfully; sometimes it resists them entirely, only to surprise me by nightfall. I am still learning what perfection means, still letting it reveal itself. What I know is this: a perfect day comes with a soundtrack. Music moves through me continuously, from morning to night. Think Frank Ocean — “White Ferrari.”

It doesn’t have to be a perfect day. A successful day of writing will do. For me, by the way, this doesn’t depend on the cappuccino or latte macchiato or the right exercise equipment; it can already be a good day by noon if I’ve managed to finish a text, one I’ve been intending to write or one I’ve perhaps put off for a long time. It’s about knowing that I can simply type it out as soon as I sit down. Which can prove to be a mistake (as it is for the character of the author of a major treatise in Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Lime Works, who unfortunately simply cannot bring himself to start writing it down) for various reasons. Because, in the certainty that the piece in question will write itself, I will have not yet applied my brain cells enough or looked at it from a sufficiently high bird’s-eye view to see what is really essential (I always, essentially, want to say something essential about art in every piece I write); or because I perhaps had no clue what it should be about to begin with; or, worst of all, because it’s back: my writer’s block. It strikes every 18 to 24 months for about ten days, and there’s nothing I can do about it, everything comes to a standstill. But when I have a successful day, as is rather more often the case, it’s fun… although—Hellmuth Karasek once answered the question of whether he finds writing fun by saying: Having written is fun. Brilliant answer! In any case, yes, yes, writing can be fun, but being able to revise your own work at the end is especially fun. And sending it off.

For the past nine years, I’ve lived in Miami Beach but Düsseldorf has always remained a little bit of home to me. If I could defy time and space to combine these two places, that would make for a perfect day. I wake up in Miami Beach on a crisp and sunny January morning. At 8 a.m., party-hungry tourists and locals are still nowhere to be found and the beach is empty. Every now and then I spot a manatee, those majestic grey lumps, that float along the coast right beneath my window. I slip out of the house and walk about 15 blocks along the water, which now has the perfect temperature (think North Sea in August). I arrive at Moises, a small, old-school Venezuelan bakery on 74th Street and Collins Avenue, where I grab a café con leche and a guava-cheese pastry. Fueled by plenty of caffeine and sugar, I set out to see some art. In Miami, I love exploring the visionary public art commissioning program that the city initiated in the 1980s. Train stops feature large-scale installations by now seminal artists like Beverly Buchanan and Betye Saar and the public library displays a series of murals by Ed Ruscha. Or I stop by CENTRAL FINE, an artist-run space that focuses on younger generations of artists while also showing some of the most important contemporary artists from Haiti, including Myrlande Constant, Frankétienne and Frantz Zephirin. In the Rhineland, there is an unparalleled range of museum institutions, from Essen to Witten, from Aachen to Bielefeld. It’s hard to choose between getting lost in Hans Hollein’s Po-mo labyrinth at the Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach and exploring the sacred and profane deep cuts at the Kolumba Museum in Cologne. As I get hungry, I might stop by Café Heinemann on Düsseldorf’s Bahnstrasse for some Spinat and Spiegelei mit Bratkartoffeln or for an Erdbeerbecher at Eiscafé da Forno on Schwerinstraße, a pocket of the city that has barely changed since the post-industrial krautrock days of the 1980s. I round off the day with some vintage art book hunting at Antiquariat KAMAS before heading back to Miami Beach. At home, I sit on my balcony and look out over the Atlantic Ocean as curtains of rain drift in from the horizon. People on the beach pack up in a hurry—everyone except my undaunted retired neighbors, who stay put with a minibar and portable speaker alternating between Frank Sinatra and Enya. The music mixes with the soothing sound of the rain and crashing ocean waves. As it lets up, I head out to dinner. Maybe I’ll have some fresh fried fish with spicy pikliz at Chef Creole in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood, or I bike down to South Beach for a glass of Rosé at Á la Folie, a little French café on Española Way, zooming past iguanas and Art Deco buildings. But I might just walk over to Bar Olio in Düsseldorf to have some spaghetti alle vongole with old friends, catching up on the latest Rhineland news. As I go to bed, I start plotting tomorrow’s hike through the mountains surrounding my new home Basel.

Probably everyone who works in the curatorial field has a wish list of artists they would love to meet one day. For more than a decade, Charles Ray has been on this imaginary document for me. His sculptures, photographs, drawings, and films—whenever I have had the opportunity to experience them in exhibitions—surprise, confuse, and inspire me. By chance, I met the artist, born in 1953, last September in New York. The encounter made that day perfect for me. Since then, we have been talking on the phone from time to time and sending each other postcards.