‘I set up my office almost like a film director,’ says Kulapat Yantrasast, the Thai-born architect behind Los Angeles-based WHY Architecture and a 2026 Art Basel Awards medalist in the category of Cross Disciplinary Creator. ‘Or an orchestra conductor…I’m not a prima donna.’

‘My metaphor for my creative approach is Thai food,’ Yantrasast continues. Compared to the minimalist cuisine of Japan, where he cut his teeth as an architect, a Thai meal, he thinks, finds ‘unity through diversity’ – sweet, spicy, salty dishes and tastes, all melding and contrasting with each other. ‘Something that seems contradictory can work together.’

Yantrasast’s projects have ranged from the new Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, to the striking ilmi Science Discovery & Innovation Center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and in 2027 he will direct the Bukhara Biennial. He is at the forefront of creatives celebrated in the art world for their contributions across different fields. In the past two years, the Art Basel Awards have brought this into focus, acknowledging not only artists, curators, and patrons, but musicians, fashion designers, writers, institutions, and others with scant regard for fixed categories.

Having it all?

Wide-ranging practices, it should be noted, are nothing new. Yantrasast moved to LA to follow in the historical footsteps of his ‘heroes’, Charles and Ray Eames. Though they may be best remembered as the designers of stylish mid-century chairs, the Eameses ran an influential multidisciplinary design office between 1943 and 1988. During that time, they made films, and designed furniture, toys, exhibitions, and buildings.

But it was in the 1990s, when it became common practice for a generation of artists to step out of their usual lanes. Damien Hirst opened his Notting Hill restaurant, Pharmacy. Rirkrit Tiravanija served pad thai in galleries. Michael Rakowitz designed and distributed portable homeless shelters. Lucy Orta made a series of ‘Refuge Wear’ for unhoused or displaced people. Superflex devised a system to harness biogas. In recent years, as audiences became reenchanted with craft and skill, leading in part to a resurgence of interest in traditional forms like representational painting and ceramics, the transdisciplinary problem-solver was cast in a less favorable light. A jack-of-all-trades, supposedly, is master of none.

A new way of doing things

There’s an important difference to the multi-hyphenate creatives who predominate once more today. Many of the leading proponents are designers, architects, and musicians who move comfortably in the world of art galleries and museums but who also excel in specific creative disciplines, with their own technical conventions, channels of distribution, and commercial structures.

Design has long been a field that relied on the collaboration of specialists. Traditional architectural offices, for example, often include structural engineers, interior designers, lighting experts, and landscape architects. But WHY pushes this multi-disciplinarian approach to new extremes. For a 2015–16 proposal for the redevelopment of Pershing Square in Downtown LA for instance, the studio consulted economists, bicycle and homelessness specialists, chefs, artists, musicians, and local business owners. In East Palo Alto, WHY’s design for EPACENTER, a youth arts center, entailed a yearlong consultation process with the local community, especially with its young people. Ultimately, Yantrasast says, ‘I can see that not all of the design decisions are mine.’

Questioning existing systems

A practice like WHY has more in common, perhaps, with the structure of a multivalent institution than it does with a conventional design studio. The Berlin-based SAVVY Contemporary, is one such space. Though it’s a medalist in the Art Basel Awards’ Museums and Institutions category, it bills itself not as a traditional art venue, but as ‘a laboratory of form-ideas.’ Its diverse staff encompass expertise in cultural studies, economics, cultural policy, science…and the arts. Its projects include ‘For the Phoenix to Find its Form in Us’, a 2021 discursive exhibition focusing on restitution and reparation, and ‘Colonial Neighbours’, an ongoing participatory archive to which the public was invited to contribute objects and memorabilia telling the story of Germany’s colonial past.

‘We are constantly interrogating and questioning, to try and develop multiple answers,’ explains Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock, the executive managing codirector with Lema Sikod. ‘Something that is key to our practice is questioning existing systems,’ Sikod ventures. ‘We are thinking about how to form new ways of being.’

Despite the range of skills and specialisms within SAVVY Contemporary, the organization values ‘working out of the comfort zone,’ Sikod says. ‘A lot of the process has been autodidactic, and maybe that’s a way of challenging one’s own capabilities.’

The contemporary multi-hyphenate creative, it seems, does not aspire to have every answer to every question. Instead, these individuals are remarkably open to learning, to recognizing experience and skillsets that are not their own, and collaborating in ways that prioritize measurable outcomes.

Social innovation and ecology

Simone Farresin, cofounder of the Milan- and Rotterdam-based design studio Formafantasma – renowned for an expansive approach that often includes extensive research, advocacy, strategic planning, and dematerialized outcomes, and a Gold Awardee at the 2025 Art Basel Awards – is equivocal on the benefits and pitfalls of specialist knowledge. The idea of a discipline – with its own culture, accumulated knowledge, and operational methods – can be useful, Farresin says. ‘What I think is important,’ he cautions, ‘is to always acknowledge the inherited clichés and stupidity you’re working with. There’s plenty in design. There’s plenty in art.’

When invited to mount an exhibition of Formafantasma’s work at London’s Serpentine Galleries in 2020, Farresin and his partner Andrea Trimarchi chose not simply to showcase their previously designed products, but instead embarked on research into the ethics and regulation of the timber industry. They presented informational panels and films documenting their research along with samples of extinct wood species, collected artefacts, and specially designed wooden furniture. Serpentine Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist referred to it as a ‘manifesto.’

Afterwards, they collaborated with the Finnish furniture and lighting company Artek. ‘We began looking at ways of making the company more thoughtful and sustainable,’ Farresin explains. Artek’s timber suppliers were persuaded to use more of the tree, accepting imperfections such as knots and insect trails. ‘Design is a discipline that sits in between economic interests, social innovation, ecology, and aesthetics,’ Farresin says.

Traversing artforms and audiences

Honored as a medalist in the Cross Disciplinary Creator category of this year’s Art Basel Awards, the musician, performer, filmmaker, animator, writer, photographer, and installation artist Laurie Anderson, has moved freely between avant-garde cultural forms for nearly five decades. When she was once asked what she thought about the term ‘multidisciplinary’ however, she shot the question down: ‘I don’t like ‘discipline’.’

Indeed, Anderson trained in sculpture but received early notice for radical, avant-garde performances such as Duets on Ice (1974), in which she played the violin while wearing ice skates encased in melting blocks of ice. In the early 1980s she encountered pop fame with the single O Superman (1981), traversing not just art forms but also audiences. Though in subsequent decades she made installations for galleries and had exhibitions in museums, she did not consider herself part of ‘the art world.’ Anderson has long resisted labels. ‘I’m not really into the language and history of form,’ she has said. ‘I’m much more interested in how scary it can be to be a human being.’

It’s a sentiment echoed by Farresin, who emphasizes the importance of a project as a whole: ‘I’m sure in my final days, I won’t be preoccupied by the question of whether what I did in my life was art or design.’ Instead, what matters to these category-defying practitioners is that their work has a meaningful impact on the world at large.