studio-residence nearby, where he works andJust as we are about to go check on the progress of those new works, the wail of the studio’s midday siren announces the lunch hour. (When mealtime ends, the alarm bell goes off again, signaling the end of the break: “If you don’t have the siren, then people could go on eating for hours. They have to make art,” van Lieshout tells me.) We head downstairs to the canteen to join the staff for a simple meal of soup and do-it-yourself sandwiches. I assemble one of the latter and join van Lieshout on the edge of a communal AVL-designed fiberglass table, where he sips mushroom soup from a white cup. I sense that this is a rare appearance; no one talks to him, nor does he speak to anyone, and the others look rather surprised to see him there. Are they afraid of him? I ask. “Well, I’m the boss,” van Lieshout says, adding that he comes by only once or twice a week, preferring to spend most of his time in his smaller lives alone, leaving the day-to-day operations of AVL to others. “I have really qualified people managing things for me now. Basically, I’m quality control.”

With that, he briskly suggests we go to the studio. Before I catch up with him, he’s already inside the massive 1920s-era structure, originally a warehouse for cotton offloaded from ships and, van Lieshout proudly informs me, the first concrete building in the Netherlands. Inside, the 20,000-square-foot space feels more like a small manufacturing plant than an artist’s studio. In addition to affording plenty of room for the simultaneous execution of at least four or five different works on variously large scales, the place provides storage for a vast inventory of artworks, crated and not, as well as hundreds of tools, all kinds of construction equipment and shelves that seem to be piled as high as the 40-foot ceilings. Someone is idling a forklift near an AVL composting toilet that looks like it’s been bisected. In a corner, a welder’s sparks cascade like a mini fireworks display in the chilly air. “It’s impossible to heat the place,” van Lieshout says. “Too big.” It’s expansive enough to allow the construction of an entire house, although admittedly a small one: Van Lieshout’s own beach cottage is nearing completion and sometime this spring will be removed and installed, prefab style, in the dunes just outside Rotterdam.

From here I follow van Lieshout to the other end of the studio, where two artists are at work on the several-foot-long Slave City headquarters building, comprising womb- and penis-shaped forms. Nearby are models for the shopping mall, a baroque biomorphic structure—“I’m building two; one will be intact and the other will be falling down, like Babel,” he tells me. “It’s an allegory for the end of consumerism”—and the 25-story Museum of Digestion, inside which art is consumed, digested and spit out. “I’m thinking about unbuildable architecture now,” van Lieshout says. “It’s much more interesting than things that are possible.”

But as always, the practical coexists with the imaginary in van Lieshout’s world. He has also translated motifs from Slave City into furniture designs. The top of the low welded-steel Infrastructure table is a map of the system of underground cables, pipes and tunnels that run beneath the streets of Slave City. Created in an edition of 10 and priced at £18,000 ($36,600), the tables were shown last October in London at the Carpenters Workshop Gallery along with some of AVL’s Bad furniture—a small, black-steel end table and AVL’s pared-down interpretation of a club chair (£8,000; $16,000). Van Lieshout explains that “Bad is just a name we use. These pieces are really about reuniting designer, producer and client again.” He adds that it’s not meant to be fashionable furniture. “There are too many unnecessary details—the legs are a strange shape; there are curves that don’t need to be there.”

The London show did very well, he tells me. “Art furniture is selling like sandwiches. It’s less risky for people to buy design than an artwork. If you spend a lot of money on a painting, you have to explain why it’s so valuable. With furniture, people just say, ‘Wow, that’s a really nice table.’” And he’s happy they think so. “Maybe I should make more tables,” he says, adding that any profits go right back into making works. Which for this virtuoso means an endless array of projects, each one bigger or more ambitious than the last, always pushing his creativity a little further. He pauses and adds, “Well, I don’t have an idea that I’m going in a particular direction. It’s more gypsy style. In the end, I’m an artist.”