Name: Emmanuel Olunkwa
Age: 27
Hometown: Los Angeles
Now Lives: In a one-bedroom apartment in the Stuyvesant Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn.
A Multifaceted Designer Gets a New Platform. Mr. Olunkwa is a filmmaker, independent magazine editor, and furniture designer who was just appointed as the new editor of Pin-Up magazine. He sees his cross-disciplinary activity as adhering to Marshall McLuhan’s slogan, the communication theorist who emphasized that “the medium is the message.” “I come from the Tumblr generation,” he explained. “I’ve always been able to curate my world.”
Mr. Olunkwa first became interested in design while growing up in Los Angeles by scrutinizing his hometown’s real estate. “I was always interested in who built my friends’ houses or what substantial remodels they had done,” he explained.
He traveled to New York in 2014 to study race and architecture at the New School’s Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts. In 2019, he enrolled in a prominent, multidisciplinary programme at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.
He also headed November Magazine, a cerebral “publishing, and programming initiative” he helped create in 2020 and was an editor for The Broadcast, a virtual magazine by Pioneer Works gallery. “Everything has picked up for me in the last year,” he remarked.
Latest Project: He took over as editor of Pin-Up, a witty biannual architecture newspaper based in New York, earlier this month. (The magazine’s founder and former editor, Felix Burrichter, takes on the new post of creative director.) “Pin-Up takes pride in its rigorous optimism, so I want to keep challenging what the concept of ‘architectural amusement’ may mean,” he said.
Next Thing: Mr. Olunkwa is known as a furniture designer for his flower-shaped side tables and sculptural chairs constructed of high-grade plywood (beginning at $650 and sold on eandko.com and at Picture Room in Brooklyn). Ssense will launch a new furniture capsule collection this fall. “When I initially moved out on my own last year, I started constructing furniture because I wanted my room to represent myself for the first time,” he explained.
Deep Play: He studied the spatiality of “Slave Play,” Jeremy O. Harris’ Tony-nominated production about racism and sexual fetishes, for his graduate thesis at Columbia University (he graduated with a Master of Science degree in May). “It’s a pretty incisive work that invites people to consider how we place ourselves as viewers of art and identity,” he said.
