Following a contact established at OMA,
Kanye West approached Family to work on
his Paris apartment and, ultimately, a stage
for the singer’s North American Yeezus tour.2013
YEEZUS STAGE
A Kanye West crowd is not your typical
design-lovers’ audience either. But in 2013
fans bore witness to Family’s ‘travelling
mountain and LED sun’ during the singer’s
North American Yeezus tour. ‘While work-
ing for OMA prior to joining Family, Oana
met Kanye through a project done by the
Rotterdam firm,’ Wong recalls. ‘A year and a
half later, Kanye called up and asked us to
work on his Paris apartment.’
The designer boarded a plane bound
for the French capital the following day for
an undertaking that preceded two homes in
LA and other ‘crazy, ambitious Kanye ideas’.
One such scheme was a stage design. ‘We’d
never done a set before, but through Kanye
we tapped into a world of other experts.’
Family developed the show’s general con-
cept and chapters, which were then handed
over to the performer’s larger stage-design
network, which includes Es Devlin. ‘At that
point the assignment seemingly disap-
peared. We had no idea what would be
built. Later we got a call to visit rehearsals
and found that our humongous mountain
was already complete. To us it popped out
of nowhere, even though they’d been work-
ing out the details for some time.’From sketch to stage: that’s how it felt to
Wong. ‘I’ve never since had such a direct
translation from concept to end result. And
they were using it in ways we had imagined
but hadn’t communicated.’ From then on
Wong placed more importance on hand
sketches. ‘I’d been doing them all along, but
I didn’t think anyone would want to see them.
Kanye gravitated towards my rough drawings,
and I realized how quickly they communicate
ideas. They’re the perfect balance between
clear and concrete: more convincing than a
rendering but they don’t lock you in. Sketches
have now become a studio signature.68 PORTRAITS