THE NEXT SPACE
THE POSTPANDEMIC PLAYBOOK
Co-working 3.0: agile, efficient, automated Dining for the delivery generation Why restaurants and bars are going dark Learning from chair man Konstantin Grcic How to revive the shopping mall ISSUE 135 JUL — AUG 2020
BP BX €19.95 DE €19.95 IT €24.90 CHF 30 UK £14.95 JP ¥3,570 KR WON 40,000
CONTENTS
Yuhao Ding / Elbe
06 REPORTING FROM Amsterdam and Warea
Virginia Woods-Jack
Jeroen Verrecht
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IN PRACTICE
12 INTRODUCING Jessica Wu and Mengjie Liu of Shanghai-based Sò Studio
HAT I’VE LEARNED 22 W Industrial designer Konstantin Grcic 30 INFLUENCER Australian artist and director Anita Fontaine 38 THE CLIENT Fosbury & Sons’ cofounders Stijn Geeraets and Maarten Van Gool
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44 AXOR Material memories Frame 135
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48 SPACES Delivery-driven dining, working showrooms and mall makeovers 100 POST-PANDEMIC 102 Covid-19's impact on retail, hospitality and work 124 Shaping the 1.5-metre society
Les Garçons, represented by L'Éloi
Xiao Yun, courtesy of Daylab
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LAB
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102 Kevin Mak, courtesy of OMA
144 In Numbers VanMoof’s S3 and X3 bikes in facts and figures 2
Contents
Alessandro Paderni, courtesy of Moroso
132 Market From an augmented reality sofa to Riso-inspired rugs
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Takumi Ota, courtesy of Nendo
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Frame 135
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FRAME is published six times a year by Frame Publishers Luchtvaartstraat 4 NL-1059 CA Amsterdam frameweb.com EDITORIAL – FE For editorial inquiries, please e-mail frame@frameweb.com or call +31 20 4233 717 (ext 921). Editor in chief Robert Thiemann – RT Head of content Floor Kuitert – FK Editor at large Tracey Ingram – TI Editors Anouk Haegens – AH Lauren Grace Morris – LGM Business editor Peter Maxwell – PM Copy editors InOtherWords (D’Laine Camp) Design director Barbara Iwanicka Graphic designer Shadi Ekman Translation InOtherWords (D’Laine Camp, Maria van Tol) Contributors to this issue Simon Flöter Olivier Hero Kourosh Newman-Zand Amandas Ong Rosamund Picton Virginia Woods-Jack Cover Factory of the Future by Dutch Invertuals and Edhv for High Tech Software Cluster in Eindhoven (see page 121) Photo Ronald Smits
PUBLISHING Director Robert Thiemann
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ISSN FRAME: 1388-4239 © 2020 Frame Publishers and authors
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Colophon
design after disaster Wash your hands, keep your distance, sneeze in your elbow, wear a face mask: it’s remarkable how fast the world population has adapted to what we have come to call the New Normal. Other phenomena we’re now used to: plastic screens at checkout, tape on the ground that reminds us to stay 1.5 metres away from others, stickers on shop doors that make it clear that no more than three people may be inside at the same time, bars that sell drinks through their windows, top restaurants that offer only takeaways and deliveries, and couriers that drive back and forth to drop off parcels and food. Humans are inventive. Disaster strikes, we get scared, we rearrange our lives, devise measures, invent clever things and carry on where we left off. Because humans are also creatures of habit. In recent months, there’s been talk of a necessary ‘reset’. The pandemic has made it clear that we can no longer go on like we had been. Why did we always have to be at the office and our children at school? The lockdown demonstrated that with Zoom, Slack and a couple of other apps we could easily work and learn from home. No more daily commute. No time-wasting chitchat with colleagues at work. And wasn’t the lockdown also a great opportunity to really take a closer look at our urge to consume and travel? Do we really need so much new stuff? Do we have to undertake time-consuming and exhausting business trips to the other side of the world all the time? Are weekend trips to cities two hours away by plane and holidays abroad three times a year actually necessary? Why are we always in a hurry? And under so much stress? It’s a romantic thought: a historical, radical reset of society as a result of the worldwide outbreak of a disease. The goals: a fairer distribution of wealth,
greater wellbeing for more people, and living in solidarity and harmony. The by-product: a cleaner, healthier planet. As much as I’d like to believe in it, I don’t think the pandemic will be the breeding ground for such a New World Order. I once read that the past is the best predictor of the future. And even if the pandemic leaves deep scars, it’s doubtful whether it will bring radical change. In this issue, we examine the consequences Covid-19 has on work, hospitality and retail. Of course we report with today’s knowledge, however we can nonetheless state with some certainty that paradigms will not shift, but that existing developments will accelerate as a result of the pandemic. Further digitization of work and retail was already in the air. As was a heightened focus on people’s health and wellbeing. And if the sharing economy continues to grow and we travel less – forced or not – it will also benefit the Earth. As I said: humans are creatures of habit. We want to hug our loved ones, see our friends and consult with our colleagues. We’re physical beings in search of physical experiences. It’s in our nature to come together for football games, concerts and, yes, design festivals. The pandemic is not going to change our DNA, but it is going to change the way we shape our habits. This is the moment for designers to give new meaning to their work.
Robert Thiemann Editor in chief
Editorial
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AMS TER DAM
It’s the 26th of March – my boyfriend’s birthday – when I scribble my first thoughts for this column. Under normal circumstances, we would go for a way-too-fancy dinner at one of Amsterdam’s many hospitality venues. But it’s not a normal day, by any stretch of the imagination. It’s day number ‘I-stopped-counting’ of the ‘intelligent lockdown’ that the Dutch government put into place, resulting in many bars and restaurants being forced to shut their doors. And so my reservation at the i29-designed restaurant in the newly renovated monumental Felix Meritis building – forced to close even before its official opening – was cancelled a few days earlier. Inevitably and understandably, but also unfortunately. Having takeaway delivered to our doorstep instead just doesn’t feel as celebratory. Or so I thought. During one of my shockingly elongated Instagram scroll sessions (I’m carefully ignoring my screen time app), I come across a photo of Michelinstarred chef Joris Bijdendijk dressed in Deliveroo teal. ‘Crisis also makes us creative,’ states the corresponding post. ‘We understand that some of our
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guests prefer staying at home, therefore Rijks [the restaurant of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum] is starting a delivery service.’ There it is. The solution! Clearly I’m not the only one enthusiastic about this move. At the end of that very same week – yes, on my phone again, or still – I can’t say, I read the restaurant’s next message: ‘Yesterday evening we already had more than 1,000 meals on order before six o’clock. Unfortunately the system crashed and we had to shut it down.’ Luckily for me – and true to their own statement about creativity in times of crisis – a new system is quickly put in place by the team at Rijks. So, I pick a time slot and hop on my bike to pick up the three-course meal and accompanying wine. Instead of working my way through a flock of delivery e-bikes and cube-shaped backpacks, a common picture at restaurant entrances these days, I follow a lantern-lit path into a space decorated with white carton food boxes overlooking the kitchen. It instantly and radically changes my perception of a takeaway experience. The top-tier takeaway comes with a letter that includes
Floor Kuitert, who saw her Amsterdam apartment transform into a Michelin-starred-restaurant while social distancing, witnesses a promising (make)shift in the takeaway and delivery-driven hospitality market.
tips on how to make your dining room cosier, and a QR code to the restaurant’s Spotify playlist compiled by bartender Rik, to which you can shamelessly dance without spectators. In a series of YouTube videos shot at the restaurant, Bijdendijk personally introduces every dish. He even sticks around a little longer during dessert, discussing the challenges of having the kids home from school. I’m pretty sure that doesn’t happen at every physical visit! I’m hooked, so this evening is followed by a series of extensive at-home dinners – all with their own unique elements, to my surprise. Restaurant Breda’s six-course menu comes in a colour-coded preparation kit, while I’m able to cook up my favourite dish from another neighbourhood address by streaming their chef ’s instructions straight into my kitchen. Of course I’m aware these initiatives are enforced by long-term social distancing measures demanded by the coronavirus crisis, and that the revenue they bring in is not enough to keep the hospitality sector out of harm’s way. But I do believe that creative delivery
Reporting From
and takeaway solutions hold the potential to help restaurants make up for at least part of the loss they’re having to deal with due to the reduced customer density that comes with the postlockdown, prevention-focused reality – dubbed the 1.5-m society in the Netherlands. And I sure hope Amsterdam’s city council will grant entrepreneurs the leeway to flexibly extend their terraces into the outdoor public space come summer, without running the risk of being fined.
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Floor Kuitert is Frame’s head of content.
Having left Amsterdam on a working holiday right before shelter-inplace orders were issued, Tracey Ingram has had to hunker down in rural New Zealand – a location that puts the isolation in self-isolation.
W AR EA 8
I’m reporting from Warea, population around 100. It’s somewhere probably 99.9 per cent of Frame readers have never heard of. I’d never heard of it myself until a few years ago, when my brother bought a property out of the city – even though it’s only 40 minutes’ drive from New Plymouth, the place where I grew up and that my parents still call home. It’s beautiful here – fewer than 100 metres to the ocean in one direction and a view to majestic Mount Taranaki in the other. Mount Taranaki’s main claim to fame is its role as Mount Fuji in the 2003 Tom Cruise film The Last Samurai. The wider region of Taranaki served as the set, earning it the cringeworthy alias ‘Tom-inaki’ at the time. If that titbit of trivia didn’t make it clear: not that much happens around here. My partner and I normally live in Amsterdam, but had planned a working holiday-slashfamily visit before Covid-19 rapidly escalated in both the Netherlands and New Zealand. The idea of coming to a community so quiet it doesn’t even have its own corner store was mighty appealing after spending the last few months dealing with a very stressful home renovation in Amsterdam. Everyone warns you that renovations will likely run overtime and over budget. Check and check. But how could we predict that a global pandemic would be added to the list of pressure points? We were visiting other family members in the capital city of Wellington when Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern gave a nationwide
address. After 48 hours, she said, the country would move from Covid-19 Alert Level 3 to Level 4, the highest grade. With no (finished) home to return to in Amsterdam for self-isolation, we had little choice but to continue our nomadic lifestyle – well, as nomadic as you can be when the country you’re visiting goes into complete lockdown. From Wellington, the plan had been to travel towards the mountain ranges in a camper van, but with all domestic travel banned and campsites quickly shutting their gates, we had to turn back and hunker down here in Warea. Suddenly the camper van – a symbol of freedom and flexibility on the road – became synonymous with restrictions. That said, we’ve held onto the camper. It’s parked outside my brother’s house in Warea, a back-up room for private meetings and quiet time – a necessity since we’re all working from home while my two young nephews roam the house. The experience has made me ponder what makes me feel at home. How can I carve out my own metaphorical space when I don’t have a physical one? I’m also reminded at this time how flexible we as humans are. How easily we can adjust and adapt to new levels of personal space, or lack thereof. We don’t know how long this will go on for, nor when we’ll be back in Amsterdam. Days have rolled into weeks, and Level 4 became Level 3 and then, 2. If she wasn’t one already, Jacinda Ardern has become a household name for not merely flattening the curve, but squashing it.
Reporting From
Unlike in cities, the shift here in Warea has been measured not by the reopening of shops or restaurants, but by the reappearance of boats on the water and groups of people gathering shellfish. Domestic travel is opening up again, meaning that when our renovations are finally done, we can more easily make our way home. I’m experiencing first-hand what many of our readers must be going through: trying to make design decisions remotely. Being a tactile person, I’m extremely glad we defined all the materials in real life before we left. What an interesting time to try out virtual reality, though, if that were an option. And if social distancing is still the state of affairs when we return to a completed apartment, perhaps we’ll just have to hold an online flat warming. At least then no one will spill red wine on the new floor.
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Tracey Ingram is Frame’s editor at large.
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Anita Fontaine shot by Virginia Woods-Jack
in practice
012 Sò Studio on the art of (its) interiors 022 Konstantin Grcic, the ‘chair man’, on more than just chairs 030 Anita Fontaine on the realities of virtual and augmented reality 038 Fosbury & Sons on creating workplaces worth frequenting
Tim Adler
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In Practice
K O N S T A N T I N G R C I C talks about how his early encounters with the old made him look towards the future, what he thinks about being called the ‘chair man’, and why predicting the post-Covid landscape is a form of design process. As told to Tracey Ingram
What I’ve Learned
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Robert Rieger
Grcic calls the chair ‘one of furniture’s most complicated, challenging and interesting typologies’. His stackable seatcum-table Stool-Tool for Vitra (left) and 360° Stool for Magis are pictured.
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In Practice
KONSTANTIN GRCIC: I was raised in Wuppertal, a German city shaped by its textile industry. My father was an immigrant from former Yugoslavia and my mother, German. She was much younger than he was, so in a way they represented two different generations. It was special, these completely different lives coming together. My father’s passion was collecting 18th-century drawings, while my mother was a contemporary art dealer. Antique furniture from my father’s side lived next to 1970s plastic Italian furniture. Being exposed to a continuous juxtaposition of old and new heavily influenced my understanding of design. I see myself as a designer of today, looking towards the future, but I always draw on my profound experience of seeing old and new live perfectly alongside each other. My sister and I had a happy childhood with lots of freedom to play outside and build things. I enjoyed making things and quickly realized that I was good at it. My mother worked with contemporary artists and would often take us with her on studio visits. That was how, at the age of 12, I found a role model in work and life being one, even though I was yet to understand its implications. After high school I didn’t want to go to university. I wanted to keep making things, to do work that was practical. And I was seeking the life of those artists I’d visited, with no separation between life and work. Building boats was my dream, an idea that stemmed from childhood play. The problem was that, at the time, it was impossible for me to find an apprenticeship with a boat builder in Germany. I ended up working for an antique furniture restorer, which wasn’t at all what I wanted to do. But as fate would have it, it was there that I discovered my passion for furniture. Working with antiques gave me a deep understanding of construction and taught me the ability to judge quality. Not all antique furniture was good, but the pieces that were really stood out. One year later, I moved to the southwest of England to start an apprenticeship at the John Makepeace School for Craftsmen in Wood. John Makepeace followed the tradition of the Arts and Crafts movement, which considered craftsmen to be creators – or as we called it, ‘designer makers’. Learning how to make things was fundamental to my understanding of design, and this attitude still informs a lot of the work I do today. The school had a small library where I found two design books, one on Marcel Breuer and the other on Gerrit
‘If you had to tell the history of furniture, you’d tell it through the chair, not the table’ What I’ve Learned
Rietveld. These two books became my supplementary teachers. A third was an exhibition catalogue about Achille Castiglioni that my sister sent me for my 21st birthday. I’ve always had good instincts about my own pace of development and my capacity for what I can – and cannot – do. After finishing my apprenticeship in 1987, I took a year off and headed for Spain. Having just emerged from Franco’s regime, the country had recently been awarded the 1992 Olympic Games and World Expo, which created a huge economic and creative boost. I arrived in Madrid with a small suitcase, knowing nobody. I learned Spanish, read Hemingway and followed bullfighting. And I travelled. When you’re young in a foreign country, your senses are open to absorb everything. It was an amazing time – free and light-hearted in an inspiring environment. And it was the perfect mental preparation before moving to London to study design at the Royal College of Art (1988-1990). There’s a great myth about the RCA: some consider it the Holy Grail. When I arrived there, I was quite disillusioned and confused. I came with certain values in place from my training as a craftsman. Being thrown into a melting pot of interesting and talented creatives from different disciplines brought my self-confidence crashing down like a house of cards. My years there weren’t very productive; I was trying to find balance amid all the input. Jasper Morrison and Vico Magistretti were both visiting professors in those years, and they helped me reinstate a form of belief in my own way of doing things. Just before graduating from the RCA, Jasper Morrison introduced me to Sheridan Coakley, the founder of a small furniture manufacturer called SCP Ltd. SCP produced Jasper’s early works and presented them at the Milan furniture fair. Memphis had passed its peak and people were looking for the next big thing. Jasper became one of the great protagonists of what followed: a return to industry and simplicity through production-oriented work. SCP launched my first two products in Milan in 1991. That year I moved from London to Munich. I probably should’ve gone to Berlin: they were the wild years, just after the wall had come down, but I wasn’t looking for that kind of life. I wanted to work. Setting up in Munich was simple – the city was so much smaller than London and I could live on a very low budget. From the day I opened my first office, I called myself an industrial designer. That’s what I wanted to communicate to the outside world. I wanted to design for industry rather than for private commissions, even though I had no idea how to find producers that would put their trust in me. But I took it one step at a time and one thing led to another. Through SCP I met Cappellini and through them, Driade. The art director of the German company ClassiCon coincidentally lived around the corner from my home in Munich. He recognized me in a local grocery store and invited me for an interview. From there we established a beautiful collaboration that boosted my first ten to twelve years of practice and led to such designs as the Chaos chair, and the Diana and Palace tables.
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Robert Rieger
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In Practice
After spending over a decade commuting between Munich and Berlin, Grcic moved his studio to Berlin in 2018.
What I’ve Learned
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Having spent the last 20 years traversing the globe, Australian artist and director A N I T A F O N T A I N E has landed in New Zealand, from where she discusses her work in emerging technologies, the link between wellness and VR, and why spaces should have sentience. Words Tracey Ingram Portrait Virginia Woods-Jack
Influencer
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To ensure there was a shared experience surrounding Bitmap Banshees, a dystopian VR survival game installation, Fontaine x The Department of New Realities (DPTNR) outfitted a physical bike as the interface for the game, ‘turning players into performers’.
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In Practice
Fontaine x DPTNR reimagined a classic children’s fairy tale in VR, presenting the result – Senseless Fairytale – at the Cinekid film and digital media festival.
‘Instead of headsets being used as a gimmick, could they add layers of wellness and actually improve your inner landscape?’
Influencer
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Jeroen Verrecht
Fosbury & Sons’ second location, in Brussels, respects the heritage of its monolithic modernist building by postwar architect Constantin Brodzki.
In Practice
Beeldhouwers
Together with Serge Hannecart, Stijn Geeraets (left) and Maarten Van Gool started Fosbury & Sons in 2016.
Stijn Geeraets and Maarten Van Gool, cofounders of Belgian co-working company F O S B U R Y & S O N S , discuss their service-led and peoplecentric brand, what a valuable worklife environment should look like today, and why it’s more important than ever for workspaces to support business flexibility. As told to Floor Kuitert The Client
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It was a combination of frustration with existing office offerings, and inspiration from the service-led hospitality industry that urged Stijn Geeraets, Maarten Van Gool and Serge Hannecart to start Fosbury & Sons in 2016. They were amazed by the fact that most workspaces, unlike hotels and restaurants, don’t look anything like a place that you would actually want to spend time in. And, in terms of adopting progress, they often lag behind their users. ‘The majority of offices still look the same as they did 50 years ago – bland and monotonous – but the needs of today’s generations are vastly different,’ says Geeraets. ‘What we are seeing is a hunger for more autonomy, fulfilment and synergy, coming from everyone – whether that be a team of lawyers, a web-design firm or a group of employees of a big corporation. With Fosbury & Sons our goal is to provide a professional workplace including useful services that enhance the quality of life – not just work.’
Building habit-ats
MAARTEN VAN GOOL: There’s this phenomenon of global nomads – people that are constantly on the go and work wherever they happen to land. I might know one person who actually lives like that. Most people are creatures of habit and follow a daily routine. Work is part of that. Our job is to make that routine as pleasant as possible. So, we aim to make our members feel at home – quite literally. STIJN GEERAETS: We build habitats. If you can tune into certain habits, create a space that feels familiar, people feel much more at ease. Within our co-working spaces, we make very ‘human’ environments that feel natural, intrinsic and not overdesigned – with some imperfections – just like people. We tear down walls between companies and people, creating a very fertile platform where collaborations occur every day: in the end, that is exactly what makes people happy – connection.
Unburdening businesses
SG: We’re seeing a tendency towards products becoming a service. I don’t want to buy or own a car, what I want is flexible mobility. I’m not interested in buying a lamp – I want my building to be illuminated when it needs to be. So a company like Philips doesn’t sell lamps, it sells light. We approach the office in a similar way. We see the office as a total service, where companies don’t have to think about refilling coffee beans or toilet paper. It may sound contradictory to what we do, but companies don’t need an office as such. What they need is a strong workforce and the ability to focus fully on their core business, rather than on side issues. So an office is not an end in itself, it is a means. And focus is the new luxury.
The pros of being porous
SG: Accessibility is important to us. And not just for our members, but for the direct environment, too. I’ve worked for companies that are completely sealed off. To enter, you have to hand over your passport and manoeuvre through secured revolving doors. At Fosbury & Sons, we want you to be able to have lunch with your family, or welcome a
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friend for a drink. External companies can rent a meeting room and our events programme is open to the public. We strive to become anchored in the direct environment, in the local culture. That’s also why we like our teams to consist of locals. I always say it’s a lot easier to solve a problem – should it occur – if you know your neighbours.
Work and wellbeing
Going East, repeatedly
From architecture to interior
SG: The impact of an environment on your wellbeing is huge. And, it is scientifically proven that a pleasant work environment has a positive impact on employee productivity and creativity. Feeling good in a space helps you get into a state of mind that activates an increase in your ability to solve problems – in the world of mindfulness it’s called the alpha level. In stressful situations, instinct takes over and creativity vanishes. Neuroscientists have made a correlation between an increase of alpha brain waves – either through electrical stimulation or mindfulness and meditation – and the ability to reduce symptoms of depression and increase creative thinking. A crucial feature is live greenery, proven to increase cognition by 26 per cent and decrease absences due to sickness by 30 per cent. Which is why plants play an important role in our interiors. Employers – so our members, too – would rather invest in prevention than in healing. SG: We have worked with architecture practice Going East on all five of our current locations. I believe it took them four A3 sheets with pencil sketches to convince us. The pages just breathed our brief, which was quite simple: to create a home for work, not an office. I still remember the studio’s cofounder Michiel [Mertens] entering our building in Brussels. He came straight from his atelier – at least he looked like it, judging by the state of his hands. That’s exactly what attracted us: that hands-on approach. We were working with another architecture agency back then as well and there was a big contrast between their rigidity and the homeliness evoked by Going East. MVG: We’re not married to one architecture practice, however. We’re always looking for new studios that fit our vision. For our upcoming The Hague venue, we will be working with Kraaijvanger Architects. SG: Architecture and design are embedded in our DNA and our co-working spaces reflect that. They are mostly housed in monumental buildings. For us, selecting new venues is based on a combination of gut feeling and area information. When deciding where to set up shop next, we gather social-geographic information about cities, but trust our intuition, too. We also feel there is a certain sustainability and relevancy that comes with iconic architecture. If we come across a 40-year-old building that still feels relevant today, we trust it will still be relevant in another 40 years. It’s that timeliness that we value. We have the ability to see the aesthetics of an older building, where other developers might only see financial burdens.
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In Practice
Francisco Noguiera
When the coronavirus crisis arrived, Fosbury & Sons came up with a programme called Relay to reflect the need for a new balance between social contact, safety, flexibility and working from home and in the office. For example, at its Amsterdam Prinsengracht location (pictured), private suites are now bookable for a workday.
The Client
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Xia Zhi, courtesy of B.L.U.E. Architecture
spaces
050 Restaurants turn out the lights 084 Shopping malls metamorphose 090 Reshaping dining for deliveries
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Shao Feng
Morph restaurant by Various Associates in Shenzhen, China.
Spaces
Kenta Hasegawa
hospitality noir
Sushi Yoshii restaurant by DDAA in Tokyo, Japan.
In each issue we identify a key aesthetic trend evident in our archive of recent projects and challenge semiotics agency Axis Mundi to unpack its design codes. Here, we look at how hospitality spaces are starting to reference the enigmatic atmosphere of clandestine environments. Words Rosamund Picton and Kourosh Newman-Zand Look Book
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In the era of social media spectacle, interiors have become theatres for publicity, implicitly optimized for content capture and screen-based appraisal. However, accelerated by newly established lockdown etiquette, Instagram-friendly design appears to be entering its denouement. Nascent signals of the experience economy-driven switch to ‘privacy mode’ can be read in dark hospitality spaces, where daylight exposure is replaced by the mystery of nocturnal shadow, and deep intimacy is offered as respite from shallow conspicuity. A veil of secrecy enshrouds hospitality enclaves, shielding the activity within. As a means of hiding in plain sight, building façades adopt subtle strategies of deflection, distortion and disguise. The dull glow of waxed concrete and bronze exteriors, tinted mirror windows and stained timber cladding evoke the elemental stillness of nature amid the chaos of the city. Surface homogeneity is broken only by modest entrances, whose concealed doorways adorned with humble noren curtains seduce visitors with the promise of forbidden pleasures. Beyond the threshold, narrow passageways illuminated by lantern-like spherical lights and brass wall sconces are reminiscent of underground mining tunnels, dedicated to ferrying visitors towards the brutalist density and cavernous proportions of covert dining and dwelling areas. Within, charcoal slate, mossy-green marble and pitted plaster deepen the evocation of a darkly sublime landscape, swathed in mystery. Reflecting an inward world, subterranean environments encourage retreat from the regular rhythm of daily life. Displacing the need for explicit forms of wayfinding, majestic metal trusses, linen screens and boxy mesh columns layer sightlines and divide expansive cavities into understated antechambers. Demarcated with low-set velvet banquettes and high-sided concrete pews, these discretional zones are tacitly
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intended for clandestine meetings or quiet personal repose. Like a Faraday cage, dark hospitality bunkers isolate guests from signals of outside experience, suspending their consciousness of time and climate. Steel lamellas, clerestory windows and glazed skylights punctuate walls and ceilings with diffuse illumination, dulling interior contours and effecting an illusion of figures wandering through mist. The ambient hubbub of activity and conversation present in public spaces is absorbed by muted matte, near-black hues and woven earthenware feature walls. Austerity of light and sound experienced in the monastic silence of these shadowed cloisters induces heightened sensations of spiritual serenity, offering patrons the refreshed dignity of a life liberated from scrutiny and spectacle. Away from the perpetual stimulation of ‘always on’ social media, guests can direct their attention towards slower, more assiduous expressions of visual culture. Decorative details, from ethereal embroidered screens to ornamental grasses and dried botanicals, echo the veneration of nature and creative sincerity associated with the Arts and Crafts movement. Reference to early experimentations with photography are also present. Convex lenses act as peepholes, offering passers-by a sneak peek inside and illuminating a repast as though it were a still life. Elsewhere, pinholes afford occupiers the experience of being inside a camera obscura through the projection of outside scenes onto an opposite wall. Dark hospitality addresses latent anxiety about the ephemerality and staged superficiality of contemporary restaurant and bar design. Primordial motifs signal rejection of technology in favour of regression into the warm embrace of our archetypal dwelling place, the womb. Visitors emerge reborn, nourished by the opportunity for private retreat and reflection.• axis-mundi.co
Spaces
Haochang Cao
Chuan’s Kitchen II by Infinity Mind in Guangzhou, China.
Look Book
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c o n n e c t /d i v i d e As more and more families are sharing the load through shared living, designers can look to Japan’s nisetai jutaku – or ‘multifamily homes’ – for spatial arrangements that support social and solo time. Nendo’s Stairway House in Japan highlights how one spatial element can act as a literal and metaphorical bridge between generations.
TOKYO Multigenerational living is already popular in Japan, a country with one of the world’s oldest populations (over a quarter of its inhabitants are aged 65 or above). And with home ownership becoming increasingly unattainable in many parts of the world and an aging global population at risk of social isolation, the trend is likely to take off in other areas. BETA’s Three Generation House in Amsterdam, for instance – which was nominated in the Innovation category of this year’s Frame Awards – restores the grandparentschildren-grandchildren configuration common to the Netherlands until the Second World War. Rather than deem vertical circulation strictly functional by hiding a stairwell away in the recesses of the building, the architects at BETA made it a central, sculptural feature. Having a head start, Japan can offer some inspiration for those in locations less familiar with the concept. Like BETA, the architects at Nendo worked with stairs in a recent multigenerational living project – albeit in a very different way. Yes, Nendo may have also favoured sculpture over function – but so much so that the latter is almost irrelevant. The two-family home in one of Tokyo’s quieter residential zones is built around a flight of steps that aren’t actually for scaling. The iconic centrepiece begins in the garden and pierces the external membrane before continuing through the interior. Its tread and rise become ever impossible until it reaches the skylight,
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which serves as a portal to the world beyond. Despite its seemingly limited utility, the sculptural stairway masks various practical elements, including bathrooms and a fully functional internal staircase for actual use. Since stairs aren’t the easiest elements to scale for aging residents, the older couple’s rooms are located on the ground floor while the younger couple and their child live on the two levels above. ‘The house is designed very carefully for the inhabitants’ future,’ says Akihiro Ito, COO at Nendo. ‘The ground floor, for example, is entirely flat with three access points to the outside.’ All this begs the question: if the staircase is solely sculptural, why bother making it stair-like at all? The designers used the motif as a metaphor to represent connection: ‘Connecting outside and inside, the floors, generations, house and town,’ says Ito. The project has inadvertently induced another kind of connection, too, one that’s less familiar to Japan. ‘In our culture, we don’t often invite guests into our homes and instead usually meet people outside,’ says Ito. ‘But this house has a very inviting atmosphere, which is why many of the inhabitants’ friends often come to the house for lunch, dinner or a drink. The design itself is changing their lifestyles. This is a very big thing for them, and a very difficult thing to realize at this time in Japan.’ TI nendo.jp
Daici Ano
Nendo’s two-family home in one of Tokyo’s quieter residential zones is built around a flight of steps that aren’t actually for scaling.
Residence
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Takumi Ota
By positioning the architectural volume to the north of the site, Nendo could capitalize on the available daylight and ventilation. The glassfronted faรงade allows greenery to flourish in parts of the interior.
Onion divided the Boonthavorn Workspace in Bangkok into different areas, each with its own system for displaying materials.
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Ketsiree Wongwan
inner workings
In the main zone – which includes co-working spaces, a café and outdoor terrace – Onion presents architectural material samples within modular shelving cubes. Designers can see and touch the materials – and read the details concerning their manufacturer.
Remote working is changing the way creatives – particularly the younger generation – access resources. Taking note, Thai building-material supplier Boonthavorn saw a gap in the market for designers without a centralized materials library. Its solution? Combine one with a co-working space. In the Netherlands, on the other hand, interior-materials brand Baars & Bloemhoff teamed its HQ with a training centre for knowledge exchange among architects, makers, designers and students. Work
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The walls of Workspace’s laminates display room are covered from floor to ceiling in A5 samples.
When it comes to amassing material resources, younger practices don’t have the advantage of more established studios with centralized offices, which have spent decades assembling samples for their libraries. And that’s assuming these fledgling firms even have a home base. Although they’ve been late to adopt the gig economy, architects and engineers in the construction industry are expected to join the freelancing frenzy. Ramzi Jreidini – the CEO of Handiss, a freelancing platform for the architecture and engineering industry – predicts that the gig economy will open up ‘new talent pools and international workforces into construction for the first time . . . serving an industry that desperately needs new workers on the ground’. Since freelancers often operate from co-working spaces, it was only a matter of time before suppliers in the design-project chain would find a gap in the market. Boonthavorn, for example, one of the best-known multi-brand building material retailers in Thailand, has created a material library-cum-co-working space in Bangkok
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to ‘assist young designers who cannot access material libraries in an office’. The goal is clear from the branding. Going by the name of Workspace, the project – a lesson in pull marketing – is an open office from which designers are encouraged to work. In the three-storey space designed by local studio Onion, they can set up meetings with suppliers and clients with Boonthavorn’s resources close at hand. In addition to this core goal, the secondary aim was to showcase practical solutions that reflect the locality: affordable building materials that can easily be applied in Thailand rather than innovative products that are too expensive to import. Whereas Boonthavorn is home to many brands, single brands are taking a similar path to help strengthen customer loyalty, promote learning, build communities and highlight their expertise. Take Dutch specialists in decorative interior materials, Baars & Bloemhoff. While it’s not at all surprising their HQ includes a material library – these folks are in the business of materials, after all – they’ve combined their own offices in Utrecht
Spaces
with what they call a broeinest, or ‘breeding ground’. Conceived as a city square – presumably as a symbol of bringing people together – the project centres on a training facility for knowledge exchange among architects, makers, designers and students. No membership required. ‘As a company we don’t believe in the traditional push-marketing strategy,’ says Johan van der Meer, a member of the Baars & Bloemhoff in-house team responsible for the interior design of the project. ‘We cooperate with a lot of Broeinest partners in our training centre, so we offer a lot more than only our products. We sincerely believe that clients will buy our products anyway if we help them with the right advice and/or knowledge.’ Within the shift towards e-commerce and digitization, Baars & Bloemhoff sees physical training centres and material libraries as an important piece of its omnichannel strategy. ‘We’re making big steps in the digital era,’ says Van der Meer, ‘but a lot of our clients still like to see, feel and experience materials in real life.’ TI onion.co.th baars-bloemhoff.nl
WORKING SHOWROOMS Moving away from strictly show-and-sell retail strategies, material suppliers are finding an entry into both the co-working and education markets with what we’ll call ‘working showrooms’: places from which designers can work, upskill or connect to industry peers while surrounded by some of the tools of their trade. Particularly relevant as architects and others in the construction industry adapt to the gig economy, this form of pull marketing may help to strengthen customer loyalty, promote learning, build communities and highlight a brand’s expertise.
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Fred Erik
frame lab POST-PANDEMIC SPACE Checkouts have been silent, desks empty and stools upturned on the bar. The current pandemic has pressed pause on the businesses whose activity usually fills these pages. But now is not the time to be inactive. If we are to share space with one other again then the nature of those spaces will have to be rethought, incrementally at first and then more fundamentally as we start to build our capacity to better weather such crises in the future. Many of the clues as to what this could look like already exist – what’s required now is to identify, invest and implement them more fully.
how covid-19 is reshaping retail, hospitality and work
Although the post-pandemic landscape is still uncertain, the work, retail and hospitality industries are already having to respond to the disruption of business as we knew it. Some solutions are Band-Aids to help ride out the storm, while others offer a glimpse of the years ahead. Over the following pages we’ve set out what we believe are some signposts from the present that show how the design of spaces in these sectors can help them not only survive, but thrive. Now, and in the future. Words Peter Maxwell 102
Frame Lab
Les Garçons, represented by L'Éloi
A photography series by Canadian creatives Les Garçons, Distant Dinner portrays the new forms of conviviality – like virtual gatherings – that arose from the period of self-isolation.
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Courtesy of CRA
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R E TA I L Physical retailers are having to accept that their customer base is taking a crash course in how to meet all their consumption needs via digital channels. Retailers that already had a strong omnichannel retail play will have to ask whether these customers will continue to see sense in visiting their stores. Those who didn’t will have to ask whether they’ll ever see these customers again. If they do, it will only be through establishing their premises not solely as experiential playgrounds – the last decade’s tactic for drawing people offline – but also as trusted and transparent safe havens.
Designed by Carlo Ratti Associati for tech startup Scribit, Pura-Case is a portable, battery-powered wardrobe purifier that removes most microorganisms, bacteria and viruses from clothing. A prototype at the time of writing, the design holds the potential to improve hygiene in fashion retail.
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Anne van Opdorp, courtesy of Moooi
market
134 Upending conventional ideas of comfort 140 Kettal productizes Richard Neutra’s penthouse 144 How VanMoof aims to get the next billion on bikes
Andrea Ferrari
CESAR INTARSIO Italian architecture practice García Cumini developed Cesar’s Intarsio, a system that treats the kitchen as an area that should ultimately integrate and communicate with the whole residential environment. Inspired by the deconstruction of a two-dimensional wooden door, the polished kitchen model seamlessly combines with various design elements by Cesar, effectively overcoming the conventional division of spaces within the home. cesar.it
KVADRAT HELIA AND SILAS Designer Raf Simons first began collaborating with Kvadrat in 2014. Upholstery fabrics Helia and Silas, one bouclé and the other matte, are the latest creations to arise from the pairing. ‘For this year’s collection, I was very interested in experimenting with woven versions of some of the traditional materials and techniques used in haute couture such as furs and knits,’ says Simons. ‘The result is two sensuous textiles with heavily textured yet extremely soft surfaces.’ kvadratrafsimons.com
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Frame 135
KARIMOKU NEW STANDARD SPECTRUM ST Japanese design brand Karimoku New Standard has launched Spectrum ST, a flexible meeting table designed by Geckeler Michels that takes its graphical lines from the ideals of Japanese minimalism. Crafted from sustainably sourced oak, the table boasts a cable system that enables users to easily install electronic devices. Karimoku’s overarching Spectrum system includes desks and dining, meeting and high tables in customizable sizes.
CROSBY STUDIOS AIR MAX DAY SOFA Every year on 26 March, Nike celebrates the 1987 birth of its iconic Air Max sneaker. For the 33rd anniversary of the silhouette, Crosby Studios founder Harry Nuriev created an augmented reality sofa installation that pays homage. Built using digitally ‘upcycled’ lime-green Nike puffer jackets, the furnishing is meant to encourage community building and widespread access to design during a time of social distancing.
Marc Eggimann
karimoku-newstandard.jp
crosby-studios.com
VITRA CITIZEN What if you could find a whole new way of sitting? This is the intention of Citizen, a lounge chair imagined in two versions by Konstantin Grcic and Vitra. Suspended on three cables affixed to a tubular steel frame, Citizen’s upholstered seat upends conventional ideas of comfort with a backrest that envelops and supports instead of allowing the sitter to slouch. ‘Citizen combines familiar elements with an entirely new type of construction,’ explains Grcic. vitra.com
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RADICAL RIDING The future of mobility is called into
question with public transport and rideshares being potential hotbeds for the transmission of Covid-19. Biking is one solution that not only lowers the risk, but helps retain the improvement in global pollution levels. Dutch electric bike brand VanMoof makes the switch an easy decision with S3 and X3, two state-of-the-art models that aid in flattening the curve – for both our health and the planet’s. Words Lauren Grace Morris
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o wnership of the supply chain enabled the Dutch start-up to sell the S3 and X3 for 40% less than previous models
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f stolen VanMoofs o are recovered within 14 days by the brand’s bike hunters using location tracking
€20 million is the amount France is investing in a scheme to get people to keep biking postpandemic. In early March, New York City bike-sharing programme NYC Citi Bike saw a demand surge of 67%
120,000 people ride VanMoof bikes worldwide, with sales for the S3 and X3 topping 6,200 in the first week of launch
60-150 kilometres is the range of a charged bike
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minutes are spent assembling each bike in the factory, and 15 minutes for the final touches at home
€12.5 million was invested in VanMoof by London VC Balderton Capital and Sinbon Electronic, to be used for international expansion, as announced in May
vanmoof.com
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In Numbers
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kilometre spent cycling instead of driving lowers CO2 emissions by 250 grams
