Leo Marmol, FAIA
Photo: Roger Davies

Leo Marmol celebrates craft as a way of living deliberately in a rapidly accelerating world. As technology increasingly mediates how we live and relate to one another, and instability becomes part of everyday life, he understands craft as play, a process rather than an end product. Tracing the evolution of Marmol Radziner’s design-build ethos alongside decades spent painting, Marmol contends that art, architecture, and design are not separate disciplines but expressions of a single creative impulse. Situated in the unique context of Palm Springs, this presentation explores the desert as a meeting ground between Modernist ideals and Outsider Art traditions. Marmol looks to the desert as a teacher of patience and restraint, informed by his firm’s extensive Modernist restoration work, new homes, and his own abstract paintings in dialogue with the landscape.

Invoking the Bauhaus belief in thinking through making and the myth of Sisyphus as articulated by Albert Camus, Marmol reflects on the human desire for clarity in a world that resists resolution. For Camus, the “absurd” is not despair, but the tension between our need for understanding and the absence of any grand plan or final explanation. Like Sisyphus pushing his boulder uphill, we continue the work knowing it will never be finished. No single artwork or building can resolve this condition, but that failure does not diminish their value. Instead, Marmol frames creative practice as an ongoing commitment: a willingness to begin again, and to find meaning not in arrival, but in return. The Work Continues asks what art can offer as artificial intelligence grows more powerful and complex, and suggests that the imperfect human act of making matters now more than ever.

This panel discussion is part of the Intersect Educational Series at Intersect Palm Springs Art + Design 2026. Open to all ticket holders. Attendees are encouraged to RSVP, as seating is limited.