Episode 9: Felix Burrichter

In Episode 9 of Handle with Care, Adam and Laura speak with the brilliant Felix Burrichter: curator, editor, publisher and founder of PIN—UP: The Magazine for Architectural Entertainment, a first of its kind publication where Felix now serves as Editorial & Creative Director. Recorded ahead of PIN—UP 40, the Spring/Summer 2026 Issue and the magazine’s 20th anniversary, Felix discusses the early days of PIN—UP, what it is like to create each issue from scratch, his collaborations with guest editors, and how his incredible team at PIN—UP has grown and changed over the years.

Find out more about Felix Burrichter and PIN—UP Magazine, or follow on Instagram @pinupmagazine

PIN—UP 40 is available for purchase now at this link.

Follow our adventures @adamcharlaphyman and @laurakugel_

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:07

Hello, this is Adam Charlop Hyman.

SPEAKER_00 0:10

And this is Laura Kugel. Welcome back to Handle with Care, the podcast you didn't know you needed about curtains, chairs, lamps, and architectural entertainment.

SPEAKER_02 0:19

We are beyond excited to be here today with the brilliant Felix Berrichter. Felix is the founder and editor-in-chief of Pinup magazine. Basically the best, or at least my favorite, and I think also the most fun architecture publication out there. I am always spellbound by the issues he puts out into the world and have always wanted to have an in-depth conversation with him about how this strange, highly detailed, and totally unique document comes together biannually and how it came to be in the first place.

SPEAKER_00 0:50

We recorded this episode with Felix a few weeks ago, ahead of the spring summer 2026 issue, which releases this month on the occasion of Pinup's 20th anniversary. Congratulations. For anyone who has ever fantasized about starting a magazine, get ready for this. Hi Felix, welcome.

SPEAKER_01 1:07

Yeah, so nice to meet you.

SPEAKER_00 1:09

Nice to meet you too, and I'm delighted because um Adam and I have also talked about so much that we are at this golden age of magazines, and yet only a very few of them stand out as managing to be great resources for a wide audience, but also a specialized audience, which I guess is the hardest thing. So yeah, I think people will find it very interesting to get a little bit behind the scenes of how do you make and how you describe your magazine.

SPEAKER_01 1:36

The tagline has been since the beginning it's architectural entertainment. I think that's still what it is. Your request came at a really incredible time for me and for pinup because we literally just put our 40th issue to bed. Wow. So we are celebrating 20 years of pinup this year. It's obviously a point of pride, but it's also completely insane that it's been around for so long. And it's also led to a lot of thoughts about what time we're living in. And I think the red thread of the issue that we just finished is what does it mean to be a practitioner in architecture and interior design in the first quarter of the 21st century? So I think five years ago we had our 15-year anniversary, which already felt kind of like a moment of reflection. And this time around, after 20 years, it's more like look at we've done collectively as in architecture and design in this century. Like what happened in the past 25 years and what are the things that define this century so far?

SPEAKER_02 2:42

Congratulations. I mean, the magazine has such a profound impact on the field. I'm curious about who you see the readership being. Is it mostly people in the biz? Is it architects?

SPEAKER_01 2:56

I think the primary readership is me. I mean, I think the first sort of litmus test is always like, does it excite me? And this is also where the idea of entertainment comes in. So my whole background is architecture, right? I studied architecture in Paris and then in New York. But then there's always been this sort of tension between architecture as a practice and the representation of it and documentation through magazine, but also the documentation of culture. And I always understand architecture as inherently part of culture at large rather than this sort of insular trade. The idea is that it is a culture magazine that doesn't treat it as architecture as construction, but that is like something that's tied to fashion, to media, to power, to sex, fantasy, sometimes maybe even celebrity, taste, you know, all of those things. But I think architecture as a sort of lens through which to look at all these things.

SPEAKER_00 3:58

So this is where the entertainment comes in.

SPEAKER_01 4:00

This is where the entertainment comes in.

SPEAKER_00 4:02

And Felix, how is it like to create a magazine? I mean, you have your idea, you have your tagline. What do you do? Who helped you? How did you do it?

SPEAKER_01 4:10

I don't think I really understood what I'm doing as a business until maybe the late 2010s. I mean, it was always my primary job. For some reason, I never understood it as a business. I've gotten much better at it. But I think when you start a magazine, you're not doing it because it is a genius business proposition. I think the driving force is always something else. It's a sort of passion or I would even say obsession with something. And those I think are the best magazines. And as I said, I was always studying architecture, but I've been obsessed with magazines since I was a kid. I grew up in Düsseldorf in Germany, and I would do this monthly pilgrimage to the main train station. And well, the two magazines I would always buy were Harper's Bazaar, US, because it was the 90s, and then The Face. Those were my Bibles. And so I always had this fascination for creating worlds through a curated print experience. Then what happened is that I studied architecture in Paris, and then I was really bored simultaneously working at Numero. Numero magazine had just started, and I was interning there for probably two years. So there was always this sort of parallel experience of being in this fashion editorial world while also studying architecture. And then later I moved to New York and I did what you're supposed to do. I worked for a big architecture firm, Calm Patterson Fox, after graduating from Columbia. And they were paying for my visa, and it was a proper job. And I was very happy with my visa, but I was miserable with the kind of work I was doing. Really miserable. And then there was a break in my visa. And I was like, okay, I need to get out of here. I need to do something that I actually enjoy doing. And I was a huge fan of Butt magazine. It's a self-declared fagazine. It's printed on pink paper. And it was started by these two Dutch guys, Van Benekom and Gert Jonkers. I was a huge fan. It came out four times a year. I sent them an application. I was like, I want an intern for you for the summer. And I think I sent them a cover letter with a picture of me hanging off my fire escape in Hell's Kitchen, only wearing boxer shorts. And that worked. And that worked. So I worked there for a whole summer. And they had just started The Fantastic Man. And then I came back to New York and I thought, well, if three people can make two magazines, then you know one person can make one magazine. And so that was the kickoff for pinup. And you need a little bit of money to print, obviously. But I think issue one was 500 copies. It was fairly cheap. I didn't even know whether there was going to be more than two issues. It was a complete experiment. Pinup is a term from architecture school. A pinup is a sort of informal review that you do before a final presentation. You do a pinup, you pin stuff up on the wall, and it is informal, it is a work in progress. And that was kind of also the idea for the magazine, that it would be an informality to it. And that I also loved that it was a bit of a dog whistle for architects because a pinup can also be very traumatizing. So for architects, it is a very familiar term, but I also loved that it was also meant something completely different to everyone else. I love this French expression, like un peu olé ole, you know, like there's something frivolous to it, no? It's a little naughty and a little frivolous. So I like the idea of that being the tenor of how to speak about architecture. I love being an architect as well, but it was so incredibly slow. I'm not even sure I was a good architect, and I'm not sure I have any interest in going back to being an architect. I much prefer being with architects. I mean, I'm kind of sublimating my own creativity through other people's creativity.

SPEAKER_02 8:13

When you started the magazine, did you already feel like you had the community of people you needed in terms of the architects and designers that you were going to include in the first issue or the second issue or the third issue? But how did you move from magazine world effectively to knowing all the architects that you would include, basically?

SPEAKER_01 8:37

There was already an existing community because I recently looked at the first issue. I was kind of impressed how we had an interview with Zaha Hadid. We had Rick Owens on the cover, which was the first time he'd ever shown his furniture. Incredible. His first sort of proper quote unquote home story, you know, of his much published house in Place du Palais Beaumont, which I think many people know now. And of course, everybody knows Rick Owens furniture. But I think it was the first time that he kind of talked about it very specifically. And the cover was his bedroom with his unmade bed, that iconic bed, which we reproduced actually for this issue. They led us back into the bedroom. But to answer your question, the stories in issue one were really kind of the perfect template. And I would say interestingly, the template hasn't changed that much. People have changed, but the template is still very much the same. Like the mix of positions, you know, between Rick Owen, Zaha Hadid. There was an interview with Anka Petrescu, who's no longer with us. She was this sort of insane architect who built the palace for the people in Bucharest. I think that is the size of the Pentagon. And she was Ceausescu's, the Romanian dictator's sort of main architect. We did an interview with her. And yeah, I think the combination of subjects already feels very much like the sort of recipe for every issue that we've done since.

SPEAKER_00 10:08

Would you say, Felix, that you are more like a curator or a collector of stories?

SPEAKER_01 10:14

I mean, even if the word curator is overused, I would say curator. Because I don't collect anything. I think I get bored too quickly with things. Not with people. Like ownership is not interesting to me because that's what that implies, right? Is collecting is owning. And sort of sounds like there is a financial transaction involved, and that's not the case. So I think curating is probably the most accurate. I look at it almost like a party or a dinner party. Because you have a certain number of chairs they need to fill, and the things need to make sense next to each other, or the people need to make sense next to each other. And if it's all the same type of people, it's boring. They have to be able to be in conversation with each other. I like to think of everything together as a really good dinner party.

SPEAKER_02 11:02

I feel that the magazine is actually really warm and inviting. It's not intimidating, even though there are always a lot of things to learn when you open one.

SPEAKER_01 11:15

I can give you a little rundown of the small books that are included in this issue. So there's a main book, which is sort of more a classic proposal of the print magazine with about 100 pages. And on the cover is Solange Knowles with her design practice, Saint Heron. And I think that was interesting to me because it kind of speaks to also the moment in culture where architecture and design has become a platform for creative expression for people that maybe in the past would not have been interested in. This is something over the past five, six years where design culture has really seeped into the general cultural conversation to the point where people who you would have never thought to be interested in it are now exploring it. And I think Solange does it in a really interesting way. But then in addition to that, so there's nine other ones, and one is called 40 Objects, where the curator Alexander Cunningham Cameron selected 40 objects that sort of represent the century. And there's things like the ring light, you know, or a BlackBerry. In a way, it is a continuation of a project that we started for issue 15. It was called 30 objects. And so Alexandra's project is a sort of continuation of this process. So it's something I've been thinking about for a while, kind of like what represents our time? How is our present and recent past reflected in objects? What do objects mean to us? You know, what do they represent and what do they project?

SPEAKER_00 12:50

I think if you are able to define in your view what you feel like the taste of the first Q1 is, I'd be very curious to know.

SPEAKER_01 12:58

Now we are surrounded by systems and artificial technological intelligence, you know, all these things. And I think as a result, what has happened is that the objects that we are surrounded by are both in response to this new environment of this new situation that we're in, but also in as sort of reactionary, where an increased desire to create nostalgic environments. And I mean, like the ring light, for example, we're using one right now. I think it has become such a common piece. And that is something that is not a decorative object, but it's an object that helps us cope with this new reality. But then on the other hand, I think when we're looking at more style or taste or decor, I think the general trend is to go towards things that are very inoffensive, not aggressively new, you know, almost soothing. And the flip side of that is, of course, reactionary, overly nostalgic, retro cosplay of sort of a past that maybe never quite existed in that way.

SPEAKER_02 14:11

I like the idea of the taste of our time being slightly nostalgic but a little sinister. That kind of makes sense to me.

SPEAKER_01 14:17

I think most of most of the things that we are exposed to now are exposed to through a screen. Yeah. And I think maybe to speak more positively, there has also been a response to that that is sort of based in craft or objects or experiences, right? You know, the experience economy is like such a buzzword, and that's why the hospitality industry is so huge. But I think that is a reaction to the isolation that's also part of like this hyperconnectivity era that we're in. But on the flip side, this interest in craft can also turn into nostalgia or like or like a histing aesthetic without any real depth to it. We live in an era of an overly historicized aesthetics. And I think it takes people like you too to make that distinction of what is the real meaning of objects that are not of this time, you know, that are historic, but that are not history.

SPEAKER_02 15:11

I mean, I feel like the taste of our time is defined by a sense that there's nothing new to make. I think that that is like the central thread probably in a lot of the nostalgia, the cynicism, all of these different sort of facets of a taste. They all sort of come back to this kind of postmodern conundrum that we've worked ourselves into that also has to do with increased clarity about how the world works and I think a questioning of history and like what really changes over time, questioning the idea of progress in a really meaningful way. It changes how you think about the future if you are grappling with the idea of progress at all, which I feel like is a big element of what challenges designers.

SPEAKER_01 15:59

Well, you had Robert Couturier on the on the podcast, and I loved listening to that episode. And one of the things he said is that clients are afraid to have personal taste or to develop a very idiosyncratic taste because they're so aware of other people looking at it. And they almost look at too many things. You're exposed to too many things and everything gets flattened because of it. And so you almost flatten your own aesthetic preferences as a result of it.

SPEAKER_02 16:25

Yeah, there is something about that. In thinking about progress, I guess. What do you see as the future for Pinup?

SPEAKER_01 16:31

Oh, for the future of Pinup. Okay. You said something actually that was so curious about when one of the questions was like, We open Pinup, you feel like it's a magazine from the future? Because that's not usually what I hear. Is that you know, because to do a print magazine in 2026 can't get more retro than that. What do you mean by that?

SPEAKER_02 16:48

Well, when I was in Pinup for the first time, we were included on the cover with a bunch of other amazing architects. And I was reminded of this afternoon with my grandmother, who was 92 or 93 at the time, and extremely dismissive of everything contemporary when it came to design. And she would just talk about how the world had gone to shit and no one had any taste anymore. No one knew what they were doing, and you know, really not into it. And I was not looking forward to showing her this super esoteric weird magazine. And she sat there looking at this magazine for like two hours. It was so shocking. And she basically concluded with this assessment that it was like a magazine from the future. And that she didn't quite get it, but she got that it was really good. Yeah. And is there any sort of spatial principle going on with the way that you get through the magazine? Might be a stretch, but we were working with a graphic designer on our website. We kept thinking about the website as a series of rooms and wanting it to be navigable in such a logical way as it would be to move through a house. I'm glad I get to talk about it because it's the graphic design of the magazine.

SPEAKER_01 18:16

Which is so distinctive and amazing. Thank you for saying that. I've been incredibly lucky to work with super talented designers since the beginning. And the people we work with and who did the first few issues is Dylan Frecaretta and Jeffrey Hann. They really set the template for the size of the magazine, the kind of typography that we use, which is a lot of versions of Ariel, because I like the idea of using something very generic to create something that is uh very distinct. Looking back at some of the first issues and thinking back to what was the vision board for that I put together for Jeff and Dylan in the beginning was basically this weird uh East German uh photography magazine that I found at Gallagher's, weirdly, in the East Village, which was a sort of store for vintage magazines. This East German photography magazine that was from 1988, but it looked like it could have been from anywhere between 58 and 96. I mean, it had this sort of timeless, very Bauhausan rigor to it. And it also didn't have any ads because it was East Germany, you know. And then I gave them a copy of the catalog from The Crazy Horse in Paris. And those were the kind of the references, and they kind of distilled it into this very graphic proposal. And every designer since then, there was Aaron Knutsen, who later went to El Decor, and now Ben Gans, who's been working on Pinup for over 10 issues now, he was amazing, and he really kind of went even further with reappropriating these different fonts and creating something that's so distinct identity. Your question was whether there's different rooms. I think each issue is a room, each issue is almost like an exhibition in and of itself. So each issue has its own identity. I think about it spatially in the sense that it is something that you physically hold in your hand and it's a physical experience. And design is such a huge part of it. I love working with Ben.

SPEAKER_02 20:19

Where do books fit into all of this? What is the relationship to book publishing?

SPEAKER_01 20:27

Well, I love books, period. I want to do more books for sure. So whoever's listening, hit me up. I love working on books. I think a big highlight in our book publishing was the Barbie book. Mattel approached us in anticipation of the rollout of the Barbie film 2023. They wanted to do a special project uh around architecture and design. They didn't even approach us with the idea of a book. They just wanted to do something. And it was actually Ben Ganz who said that why don't we make a book about Barbie houses? Because a lot has been written about Barbie. I mean, you know, entire PhDs have been written about Barbie and what she represents, what the doll represents, but nothing had ever been written about the world around her, the world of Barbie, the interiors, the furniture, the houses. And there have been over 60 houses in since 1962, different iterations of the Barbie house. And so we proposed this architectural survey of Barbie's dream houses. And it was so fun to work on that because I was a huge Barbie fan when I was little, and I actually had a Barbie house which was repainted and redecorated on a regular basis. And so it was also kind of a personal project for me. It was so interesting to see how each era's values, uh, tastes and sort of ideals were reflected in this. And and Adam, you know very well how much I value dollhouses. We worked on an entire exhibition around the theme of a dollhouse. So it was incredible to work on that and to actually treat the dollhouse as an actual architecture. We hired an architect to redraw all the plans for each of the Barbie houses and for each era. We photographed individual furniture. It went from kind of like very sort of space age-esque from the 60s and 70s to very retro Chippendale in the 80s, to this sort of like internet, social media age, fun house, Airbnb slash sort of like content production background house in the 2020s. So it was fascinating to work on that. Yeah. I think that was probably the most fun book we worked on. But the book that has sort of crystallized out of the production for this new issue, issue 40, is a project that we call 40 houses. And it's similar to 40 objects in the way that we looked at what are the 40 most influential homes or houses that have been built since the year 2000. But instead of having one curator select, we actually reached out to over a hundred architects to submit what they consider the most influential house built in this century. And it was fascinating. So I think 95% of the people that we reached out to came back with clear contenders for the top three. There was Antivilla, Brandel Huber, you know, which is obviously speaks adaptive reuse. So that Brandel Huber or Antivilla is a building on a lake near Berlin that was a former lingerie factory, a very banal building, a concrete box, basically. And what Brandle Huber did with his team is to just gut it. And where the windows used to be, he just kind of pierced through the wall and left it sort of the construction exposed. And it's has this almost like cave-like quality, but at the same time, it's this sort of pre-fab factory building on the side of a lake. But also it's an industrial ruin. And yeah, it's a very strange mix of different elements that feel very 21st century. Then number two is Solo House by Office, Kirsten Heiros and David Van Zebren. For those who are not familiar with it, it's the sort of circular house in the Spanish countryside that looks like a mini Apple HQ, but it is a very smart design that is incredibly open, but also it is almost not a house. And then number one, uncontested, is Moriyama House by Ruinishavo from 2005. And I'm gonna be honest, I did not expect for so many architects to list this as to them the most influential house of the 21st century. But I would say at least a third everyone we reached out to listed the Moriyama house.

SPEAKER_02 25:10

Can you describe it a little bit?

SPEAKER_01 25:13

Well, I think why it is so present in so many architects' imagination is the way it breaks up the idea of the single family house. You know, it's these individual units, but they form one house, and you can uh adapt it to whatever use uh or uh sort of uh uh consolation uh that you need because it provides privacy and uh community at the same time, uh individual use and collective use and done in this incredibly stylized way that is just really beautiful. So this 40 houses proposal, which is one of the books within the box in the 40th issue, I want to turn this into a book because the variety of these houses is so incredible and it's such a good merit of what building in the 21st century looks like. But we've gone through so many different styles in this century from parametricism to a lot of critical regionalism. There's so many different styles that we've already filtered through in the past 25 years or that still exist parallel to each other. And so I think seeing this variety all together and not selected based on aesthetic or stylistic value, but to have actually peers and architects choose these is really incredible. And it was super fun to work on too. That's nice. One of the things to our 40th issue, the top 40 box, another little element of this beautiful box set is this publication called New York City Architects, where we brought together every New York-based architect that we featured in the past 20 years in pinup for a group photo. Adam Charles Hyman actually happens to be in it. And that was an incredible moment to bring all these people together and also see at which point in their career we first met and see all the work they've done since and what they've accomplished. I mean, I feel honored that we were able to be part of that trajectory, but also may have contributed to it in some way, but also feel the sort of kinship that a lot of them felt with the magazine. I think anybody who was in town said yes. Yeah. And everybody showed up on a Wednesday morning at 11 for the screw shot.

SPEAKER_02 27:36

It was amazing to see so many architects gathered in one space. It was very cool.

SPEAKER_01 27:41

So, Laura, it's a little bit like a Vanity Fair Hollywood issue, but all architects. So a little bit less glamorous, but everyone was wearing black. Well, we told them to. The way we were at the printer, I was like, damn, no one has slept in this picture. I gave them all a good night of sleep with a retoucher. I was like, we need to fix some all-nighters here. Oh my god, still 10 years later.

SPEAKER_02 28:08

I know. I remember once we were talking about finishing an issue, and I wanted to ask you about what it's like to finish an issue because I remember you stay at a hotel. Don't you have kind of a ritual around finishing an issue?

SPEAKER_01 28:23

You know, there's always something special about each issue. We really kind of push what you can do with a print magazine, you know, whether it's uh die cuts or special colors and special varnishes, and so it we put a lot of work into the physical manifestation of the magazine. You know, we don't just send a PDF somewhere and then wait for it to be shipped. So I go twice a year. I go to the printer. I actually go in person and I'm there for press check and for some of pre-press. And that takes about a week. And so, yes, I check into a hotel twice a year in Belgium, in Antwerp, and I follow the print production. I mean, it's become a bit of a ritual. I sometimes wish I didn't have to do it, but then also I do take pleasure out of it. But I deeply care about the way it is made and printed. And so maybe one day I won't be going. Because of course, when we're doing pre-press, we're still going through like galleys and like changing things and changing titles and you know, changing bios or catching mistakes, or you know.

SPEAKER_02 29:30

How do you lay the magazine out? Are you laying everything out physically in this space where there's like pages all over a wall, or is it all digital now?

SPEAKER_01 29:42

For this one, we didn't do it because I was traveling for the past seven weeks. So I was not in the office. When I'm in the office with the team, we do print it out and we pin it up. That's what we do. You hack at it with a Sharpie? Yeah, sometimes. So definitely, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:55

I want to work at a magazine.

SPEAKER_01 29:59

I mean, print production, it's a very basic work. It's like, okay, where are these ads going to be placed? What are the adjacencies? Like, should this be here? And like, especially for the cover when we do different cover iterations, we do pin them up and look at sometimes we do test audience, we have people from the team. Yeah. Vote. Yeah, but the vote doesn't always count. You know, sometimes you ask people where like if they like it too much, then that's definitely not the one we're gonna use, you know.

unknown 30:27

Right.

SPEAKER_01 30:29

So it goes both ways. I mean, a lot of it is digital because we're not always in the same space, but it is definitely also a physical process.

SPEAKER_02 30:37

Where does this all go down? How many people are there? What do they do? Like, how many people does it take to make a magazine? So we have an office.

SPEAKER_01 30:45

We have an office in quote unquote Dimes Square. We're above karaoke bar and a bus stop. And in the office itself, from pinup, there's Rachel Hahn, our deputy editor. Then there's Cassidy Miller, who is the studio manager, Michael Bullock, who is the associate publisher. And and Michael is a really important figure. He's one of my best friends. He was really and still is instrumental in getting Pinup off the ground in the beginning. He had been with Index in the early 2000s and was the U.S. publisher for Bub Magazine, where I interned. And then when I started Pinup, I approached him if he wanted to help me because he was also selling ads at the time. I remember I approached him before the first issue came out. I said, Oh, I'm starting this magazine called Pinup. He was not really convinced. And then that's what he said, come back to me when the first issue is out. When the first issue was out, he saw that it was serious. And we've been working together ever since. He's a writer now primarily, but he still works on magazines. He works on Pinup. And he also is now working on the Whitney Review of New Writing, which is a broadsheet that Whitney Mallet started, who is also a contributing editor to Pinup. He's really instrumental in a lot of independent publishing in New York. Michael is associate publisher, so that's kind of the group of us in the office, in the physical office. So it's just the four of us, plus an intern. And then there's Ben Gans, he's the designer and our director. And then Kristen Rico is our managing director. She is largely responsible for kind of making me understand just business stuff. And then we have uh Drew Ziba and Whitney Malik, contributing editors. Drew, he was our intern actually in 2016. And it's incredible. He's so smart, and I'm really, really lucky that he still helps out on pinup once in a while because he knows it so well. But he's an amazing writer and is on right. And then, of course, like a huge network of freelance contributors, photographers, writers. Cool.

SPEAKER_00 32:48

Yeah, Felix, I wanted also to make sure that we get that in. When is the issue coming out? Oh, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 32:54

You mean the beautiful box, top 40 box set? Yes. It is coming out May. Yeah, early May. Cool.

SPEAKER_00 33:02

Perfect. So for everyone listening to this before May, just a few more days to wait. And if we don't get to release exactly on time, now it's out and you can buy lots of copies.

SPEAKER_01 33:12

Yes. Or just one, because within the one box, there's lots of little copies. It sounds so fun now to see it. It is very fun. I mean, it was excruciating the process because it felt like a lot of work, but it was so fun to work on.

SPEAKER_02 33:25

So cool. Well, thank you for being so generous with your stories and your time. And I think this will be such an interesting episode for people. I mean, in the age of Instagram, everybody wants to have a magazine.