Designer Joseph Algieri’s Off-the-Wall Work Starts With This Cinder Block

In 2015, I quit my day job on the visual team at a department store and got a studio space in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood. I had worked with interior designers and lighting companies and had done some ceramics, but I wanted to use my background in industrial design to focus on my own work. The studio was in this dilapidated building with other artist spaces and residences and a yeshiva on the ground floor. There was a crooked wooden staircase going up to the roof, where I would take smoke breaks. Other people would go up there to party or work on projects and leave things behind. I didn’t have a ton of money, so I would improvise with stuff I found there.