details

2024
A5 portrait, 48 pages
Designed by Sam Kim
Published by Common Imprint
£8
@of__uk
@maxcreasy

artist

Of Architecture is a young architecture studio working in London & Seoul. Their project to design the SABA Korean convenience store on Kensington High Street is the subject of For Your Convenience.

Max Creasy is a half-Australian half-Norwegian visual artist living and working between London and Berlin. He regularly collaborates with other artists, designers and architects including Sauter von Moos, OK-RM and James Taylor-Foster.

publication

For Your Convenience came about as a way to document the SABA convenience store project – an experience-orientated venue simulating Korean city life. ‘We found that SABA is quite an unconventional project, where our design intent was to create a temporary space for an imported culture to be consumed at our convenience,’ explains Of Architecture’s James Mak. ‘We want to use the zine to capture the pop-up grocery store as snippets.’

Max Creasy was commissioned to photograph the venue, and the photos are featured in the publication alongside essays discussing the histories and current conditions of convenience culture written by architect-writers, a curator and chefs. The publication was edited by architect-writer, Emily Priest, together with James Mak and Jongwon Na from Of Architecture. It was published by Berlin-based Common Imprint.

This is Of Architecture’s first time documenting an architectural project in this way. ‘We thought SABA shouldn’t be represented in a conventional journalistic way, but rather, we were interested in using photography and writings in a zine to talk about a cultural phenomenon,’ James explains.

Max adds: ‘I feel like the zine isn’t used widely enough within architectural dialogue because there is a culture for static, formal representation. The zine lends itself to immediacy and that can be important part of architectural discourse.’