What started as a friend's birthday trip to Tokyo turned into a eight-month journey around Asia.
While the rest of the group flew back to Istanbul, photographer and artist Kıvılcım S Güngörün stayed. Moving from Bali to Thailand without much of a plan, she followed a rhythm of repetition, rain, all-night motorcycle rides around the island, and small observations collected along the way.
Under Pink gathers fragments from that time through both photographs and short texts written by Kıvılcım herself. A photojournal built through atmosphere and observation, where darkness sharpens light, streets empty out, and leaving begins to feel impossible.
Read the full piece and explore the complete journal on our website.
At Milan Design Week, Studio Yellowdot ( @studioyellowdot ) presents Edible Reveries, a collaboration with ARTISIA that moves between something you hold and something you sit on.
But the work begins earlier, in how Bodin Hon and Dilara Kan Hon think.
One comes from engineering, where every interaction must be anticipated. The other from fine arts, where feeling often comes before structure. Their practice doesn’t try to merge these approaches into one. It keeps both active.
The result is a process built on contrast. System and instinct. Control and flexibility. Istanbul and Hong Kong.
Instead of choosing one direction, they move between them, pushing each other, and the people they work with, into unfamiliar territory.
What emerges is not a compromise. It’s a tension that stays visible in the work.
Read the full conversation with Dilara and Bodin on our website.
Nine billion people now share a planet with finite resources. Consumption is accelerating, inequality remains deeply entrenched, and the environmental cost of growth is becoming impossible to ignore.
In this essay, Can Atacık examines the rise of impact investing and the investors betting that human creativity and capital can be mobilized to address the very crises our economic systems helped create.
Full article available in our first issue.
In her piece, Antara Haldar revisits Aristotle to question the foundations of modern political life. As liberal systems focus on individual rights and freedoms, something else has eroded.
A shared moral language.
Without it, public life turns into negotiation without direction. Institutions lose their role in shaping people, and politics becomes reactive rather than purposeful.
The piece argues that the crisis we are facing is fundamentally ethical, despite its political surface.
And the answer may not be new ideas, but older ones we have learned to ignore.
Full article Can Aristotle Save Us?, available in our first issue.
The idea of a U.S.–China “race” has become a default narrative. But it misses the structure underneath.
In How to Lose Your Leverage, Levent Ertem argues that the imbalance still favors the West across profit, technology, and global alliances. The question is not who is ahead, but how that advantage is used.
Economic ties are not just dependencies. They are pressure points. Once removed, they cannot be reapplied. A full break does not reset the system. It reshapes it.
Timing becomes everything. Move too early, and allies absorb the cost, supply chains reorganize, and the leverage begins to dissolve. Wait, and the system continues to hold its form.
In a landscape built on interdependence, restraint is not hesitation. It is a way of keeping power intact until it matters most.
Read the full piece in our first issue.
Metalworker Takashi Kita builds objects that sit between industry and daily life. Working from his studio in Okayama, his approach begins with making. Form emerges through steel, weight, and structure rather than drawings alone.
From welding machine parts in his father’s factory to building his own studio in rural Okayama, Kita’s path into design unfolded slowly and almost by accident.
In this conversation, he reflects on material, process, and why beauty appears when a structure finally feels right.
Read the full piece on our website.
In our conversation with Maiko Tsubota, director of Tsubota Pearl, we spoke about what it means to design an object that lasts.
Founded in Tokyo in 1952, the company has built its reputation on consistency rather than reinvention. Their most recognized piece, the Hard-Edge, was introduced as a response to decorative, trend-driven design. Clean, rectangular, and direct, it reflects a long-standing preference for restraint over excess.
Each lighter moves through more than twenty production steps, with manual inspection still part of the final stage. Refilling fuel, replacing flints, and adjusting the wick — maintenance is considered part of the relationship between the object and its owner.
For Tsubota Pearl, quality isn’t about nostalgia or status. It’s about making something you keep in your pocket for years.
And in a time of disposable everything, that might be the most radical design choice of all.
Read the full conversation at centremag.com
As AI accelerates, the world is discovering that cooperation needs a new playbook.
In Is Public AI the New Multilateralism?, Jacob Taylor and Joshua Tan explore how countries can collaborate in a landscape where a few private companies control much of today’s AI power. Their starting point is Apertus, a new open-source model backed by an international group of public and private labs — a small but telling example of what shared technology can unlock.
As traditional institutions lose influence, new forms of collaboration are taking shape. Taylor and Tan argue that middle-power countries must work together if they want real independence in the AI age; without it, most nations will be forced into a choice between dependency and irrelevance. They point to a bold idea: an “Airbus for AI,” where countries pool talent, compute, data, and funding to build shared AI infrastructure open to all.
Whether the world ends up with an “Airbus for AI” or something even more ambitious, the message is clear: without collective action, countries will be negotiating with tech giants instead of shaping their own futures.
Read the full article on our website.
In this love letter, Turgay Tuna writes from lived memory. A Turkish author and tour guide, he traces Yeşilköy’s transformation since the 1950s through both personal recollection and archival depth.
From Ayastefanos to Yeşilköy, the neighborhood moves through centuries without losing its sense of place. Greek fishermen and Byzantine churches shaped its early years. In 1640, Evliya Çelebi described a lively seaside village along the Marmara coast. Crusaders passed through in 1204. The naval Battle of Ayastefanos unfolded offshore in 1453. With the arrival of the Rumeli Railway in 1872, it opened to Europe, drawing Levantine families, writers, artists, and intellectuals to its streets.
Read the full feature in our first issue.
In Nişantaşı, inside a quiet showroom shared with his wife’s brand Fey, Ufuk Arkun arranges jackets with the precision of an architect. Art lines the walls, personal sketches rest between garments, and a cat passes through the space as if part of the composition.
Since founding ARKUN – New York in 1994, Arkun has worked against the accelerating rhythm of fashion. Raised in Istanbul, shaped in Italy, and established in New York, his path reflects his approach to tailoring: layered, measured, and deliberate.
“The ’90s were a turning point,” he recalls. “Fashion was ripe for reinterpretation.”
For Arkun, reinterpretation never meant excess. It meant structure and permanence.
His work remains rooted in the belief that clothing can carry memory, culture, and meaning beyond the season.
Read the full profile in our first print issue.
"At Centre, we chase good design. It’s a bit of an obsession, if we’re honest. Hunting, detailing and appreciating. It usually starts with noticing the little things, the details that change the way we move through the world and relate to it and to others. The way we fill our spaces becomes its own kind of language, whether we realize it or not."
Last week, at Paris Fashion Week, our creative director Lina Temelli found herself drawn to something simple.
At MATTER and SHAPE, the real star was exactly what it promised—matter and shape.
She’s gathered the details that caught her eye, the ones that stayed.
Read the full feature on our website.
A year after Sam Altman predicted the arrival of a one-person billion-dollar company, Ceren A. Desnos examines the structural shift developing beneath the hype.
“We still don’t have our winner,” she writes. But the conditions for the “solo-corn” are no longer theoretical.
From ElevenLabs to Lovable, AI-native startups are scaling at speeds that would have been implausible just a few years ago. Small teams. Accelerated revenue. Lower capital dependency.
But this is not a heroic founder myth. As Ceren clarifies, “I am not describing a personality type. I am describing a structural condition.”
Efficiency expands access. It lowers entry barriers. It redistributes opportunity. It also absorbs expertise, compresses collaboration, and unsettles traditional labor dynamics.
“What would once have sounded like a founder’s fantasy… is increasingly becoming reality.”
So where are we headed then? Heaven or hell?
Read the full essay from the link in bio.
