THE NEXT SPACE
PHYSICAL RETAIL SAVES THE PLANET
Why spatial design is key for virtual reality Picturing the post-clinical Shoplifter on art without the theory Lessons from Ace Hotel’s little sister Introducing: Business of Design ISSUE 130 SEP — OCT 2019
BP BX €19.95 DE €19.95 IT €24.90 CHF 30 UK £14.95 JP ¥3,570 KR WON 40,000
CONTENTS FROM
Yong Joon Choi
10 REPORTING Mumbai and NYC
BUSINESS OF DESIGN Digital apparel, curatorial home staging 15
and resilient communities
35 33
IN PRACTICE
35 INTRODUCING South Korean studio Labotory 44 A DAY WITH Information designer Giorgia Lupi Andrew Meredith
49 HOW TO Win on Instagram 52 W HAT I’VE LEARNED Tina Norden of Conran and Partners
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59 THE CLIENT Hospitality entrepreneur Riad Farhat
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Frame 130
Irina Boersma
Jon Emmony
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64 SPACES From holistic design 2.0 to conservation through prosthetics 66 NEW TYPOLOGY Designing the VRcade Jan Vranovsky
120
90 INFLUENCER Artist Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir on inhabiting hair 106 LOOK BOOK Post-clinical interiors 130 ARIOSTEA Pushing porcelain to the limit
RETAIL LAB
Six ecofriendly in-store solutions The future of sustainable retail Climate-conscious strategies from Nike, Ikea and Starbucks
176 IN NUMBERS The 19” Living Rack in facts and figures
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163 Contents
Courtesy of Genesis Mannequins
161 MARKET Customizable partition walls and smart desks for the open-plan office
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Courtesy of Normann Copenhagen
133 134 140 146
Courtesy of Moncler
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ALBERT SEATING SYSTEM— VINCENT VAN DUYSEN D.151.4 ARMCHAIR— GIO PONTI ATTICO COFFEE TABLES— NICOLA GALLIZIA ATALANTE CARPET— NICOLA GALLIZIA ARTWORK— SANTO TOLONE
MILANO PARIS LONDON NEW YORK ATHENS BEIRUT BEIJING BRUSSELS BUDAPEST CHENGDU CHICAGO DUBAI GENEVA HELSINKI HONG KONG ISTANBUL JAKARTA KIEV LOS ANGELES MADRID MANILA MEXICO CITY MIAMI MOSCOW NANJING OSAKA SEOUL SHANGHAI SINGAPORE TEHERAN TOKYO TORONTO
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Junior editor Lauren Grace Morris – LGM Web intern Antonio Graniero – AG Copy editor InOtherWords (D’Laine Camp) Design director Barbara Iwanicka Graphic designers Zoe Bar-Pereg Shadi Ekman Translation InOtherWords (Maria van Tol) Contributors to this issue Aileen Kwun – AK Shonquis Moreno – SM Kourosh Newman-Zand – KNZ Jonathan Openshaw – JO Rosamund Picton – RP Debika Ray – DR Avantika Shankar – AS Jane Szita – JS
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Cover Concept store for Mujosh eyewear in Guangzhou by DAS Lab (see page 106) Photo Shao Feng Lithography Edward de Nijs Printing Grafisch Bedrijf Tuijtel Hardinxveld-Giessendam
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Frame 130
NEXT PHASE, NEXT SPACE Journals are alive. They quite literally report on the developments du jour. We live in a time in which changes take place at breakneck speed. This applies to the industry – spatial design – as well as to the way information about the industry is collected and shared. A medium as popular among designers as Pinterest has only been around for ten years; the possibly even more attractive Instagram had its big breakthrough less than five years ago. These image-based platforms allow both professionals and amateurs to immerse themselves daily in a never-ending stream of kitchens, bedrooms and living rooms as well as offices, shops and hotels. But what does it mean, this avalanche of pink, flashy and resin-packed projects? Why are they mediagenic at this particular moment in time? And which industry trends are less easy to sum up in Instagram posts? Our editors felt it was time to add some interpretation. To not only explain what is and what isn’t relevant in the news flooding us every day, but also to draw lessons from it. This resulted in an editorial makeover of Frame. So what’s new? The following pages show that we have our ear to the ground outside of Western Europe, too. In columns from Mumbai and New York, insiders explain what moves the interior design scene in their cities. The section Business of Design contextualizes design in the wider markets in which it operates, while In Practice looks at the realities of operating in spatial design. It does so from multiple perspectives, including that of the client.
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The heart of the magazine, the Spaces section, has been upgraded as well. Look Book presents a striking visual trend commented on by semioticians – from page 106 onwards they contemplate the new, warmer, more colourful and tactile look of clinical spaces such as dentist practices, pet shops and opticians. In New Typology, we look for new fields to which spatial design can contribute. Can the design of real spaces, for example, speed up the adoption of virtual reality? The case studies you’ve come to expect of us are now accompanied by takeaways that indicate what we can learn from them – adding a toolkit function to the magazine. To emphasize its experimental aspect, Frame Lab has been extended with a challenge to young creatives. This time, we asked them how retailers might operate more sustainably and help consumers make ecoconscious choices (see page 140). Thanks to design director Barbara Iwanicka and her team, the graphic design enriches the editorial renewal. The multilevel approach to content achieves clarity, while strong leading typefaces bring directness and colours boost the visual hierarchy. Balancing classic construction with boldness, they effectuate focus and enhance the reading experience. Frame 2.0 transcends passing fancies. It’s an insight-led, future-facing platform on an endless quest for the next space.
Robert Thiemann Editor in Chief
Editorial
MU MB AI
Shankar is a Mumbai-based cultural critic and playwright. She currently works as a reporter covering art, design and lifestyle for Architectural Digest India.
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Avantika Shankar believes Instagram could aid India’s design culture, both at home and abroad.
A decade ago, Indian homes were in a form of post-colonial, post-socialist limbo: design was functional, furniture was heirloom, and pale colours were unthinkable in a country so prone to dust. I remember a time when almost every friend’s home I visited seemed to have a cabinet dedicated to showcasing a mismatched array of china figurines and glass ornaments, the standard attempt to create aesthetic value. It’s been some time now since one has crossed my path. ‘There’s been a shift in the mindset,’ interior designer Rukmini Ray Kadam explains to me. Kadam’s social feeds embody contemporary Indian design in all its characteristics: an affinity for whites, pops of paisley, house plants on bookshelves, and the occasional colonial antique. ‘People are spending a lot more and the idea that “this has to last forever” has gone.’ There are a host of socioeconomic factors that initiated this change in attitude, but they’ve been brought to the boil by the sudden Indian expansion of that global catalyst of design trends – Instagram. Indians’ internet connectivity is increasing at an exponential rate, jumping by 100 million people in 2018 according to research by Datareportal. That accounted for more than a quarter of the total global growth. Social media
use was a major driver here, with 60 million signing up to a social platform over the same period. The big winner? Instagram, which averaged a new user every two seconds in the last three months of the year. India is now the brand’s third biggest market. Consequently, Indians who may not have had the means to travel to Milan or New York – indeed, who may not have even had an active interest in design – were suddenly able to see what the global market had to offer. Sensibilities began to change and manufacturing followed suit. Now, whether it’s Scandinavian or mid-century American, it’s being made in India. That change tallies with a wider 21st-century cultural shift. Millennials are increasingly defying the tradition of living with their parents and instead moving to small city apartments. They’re on their own and excited to express themselves. Western trends like white, open-plan kitchens now make spatial sense in a modern Indian context. Previously, as Sonam Gala Gosalia of Kiran Gala and Associates informs me, this would have been a cause for concern. ‘You can’t maintain a white countertop because the most essential ingredient in Indian cooking is turmeric.’ When I bring this up with Rukmini, however, I can almost hear the shrug in her voice. She tells me she has white
Reporting From
countertops in her kitchen, and she’s even got what few Indians would dare bring into their homes: a carpet. She calls herself a part of the ‘no-chicken generation’ – the generation that isn’t going to be held back by fear of dirt. Design brands have pounced on this new demographic: Berger Paints offers a stain-proof white wood paint, and for her carpet, Rukmini books a specialized cleaning service online. In an age where colonialera planters’ chairs now sit by Ikea side tables and Scandinavian style is executed in Indian materials, tradition no longer has the hold it once did. Some worry that the Instagram effect is going to result in a homogenized interior aesthetic, Westernized and washed of all culture – you wouldn’t be able to tell whether the apartment on your feed is in London or Mumbai – but I’m more hopeful. The service allows for give as well as take. Indian designers have an equal platform to share their work with a global market. Perhaps Instagram can also pave the way for our material culture to evolve in fascinating ways across other territories?
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FORM FOLLOWS PERFECTION
Setting oneself apart from the masses. Gratifying the need for uniqueness. Striking out in a new direction. This is the mission statement of AXOR MyEdition. Clear, linear design sets the stage for personal fulfilment. For one’s own creativity. A personal statement. In perfection. axor-design.com
NE W YO RK Aileen Kwun sees something disturbing in America’s current mid-century obsession. 12
Less than five years since The New York Times pronounced midcentury modern design passé, a nostalgia trip for the Space Age has landed in the city. It seems only yesterday that the Memphis revival had hit its peak in the wake of the mid-century backlash. Now, as the allure of the squiggle subsides, the pendulum swings back again. But much has changed in those few years, and in 2019 a backward glance no longer reads as innocent. Design holds a mirror up to society, and principles of taste can act to hide the politics of distaste. In July, several arts institutions in New York mounted exhibitions to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the moon landing by NASA’s Apollo 11 – a scientific triumph for mankind (if a problematic Cold War–era military flex) that captured the minds of a generation and inspired the Space Age, an aesthetic that seemingly surfaced in every imaginable vein of pop culture. From The Jetsons to Googie architecture, Pierre Cardin (who is the subject of a current retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum), the image of the Blue Marble, and Verner Panton’s undulating plastic furniture, future visions from the 1950s and ’60s have continued to persist in the public mind. Over at JFK, the shuttered and neglected TWA Flight Center – Eero Saarinen’s curvaceous concrete structure opened in 1962 – has, after years of extensive renovations and historically faithful refurbishments, reopened as a kitschy hotel: a Technicolor textbook image come to life, complete with a restored flipboard marquee. At a recent press conference, staffers dressed as flight attendants and pilots donned original TWA uniforms while offering round trays of retro refreshments. Honouring history is one thing, and restoration efforts are not to be dismissed, but sugarcoating the imperfect past in the age of information overload is another. TWA’s opening was significant in many respects, to be sure. But the shiny shell of design landmarks can make it easy to forget that these milestones
Reporting From
coexisted with social injustices and blemishes on our history: the country was in the throes of the Civil Rights movement and two years shy of outlawing segregation with the Civil Rights Act. The airport, then called Idlewild, had not yet been renamed after President Kennedy, still alive and well. Fifty years on, we can no longer afford to borrow the optimism along with the nostalgia. I wasn’t won over by the TWA time warp. As a design writer engaged in history, I marvelled at the building – how could I not? And yet, it was painfully obvious to whom these Good Old Days belonged. Repackaging it as a luxurious novelty for a stopover, and for a price, seems to exploit that point even further. It’s the reason why Confederate statues are being removed in the South, at the same time as a Betsy Ross-era American flag is being used as a fashion statement, embroidered in miniature on the backs of (now recalled) Nike sneakers. It’s why an august design institution such as the MoMA can own and exhibit plastic furniture of the 1960s, yet step up to the necessity of debating the perniciousness of that once-wondrous material and the damage it’s wrought on our planet, as curator Paola Antonelli did at a recent salon. Nostalgia should be a more difficult pill to swallow for a nation in political and social tumult, rather than acting as a balm. Living under the hateful rhetoric of a Trump administration has awakened the dark side of American history, recalling an era that is less inclusive and less tolerant – a society that has much progress to achieve and does not embrace the immigrant story of my family, and those of many others. The flat slogan, ‘Make America Great Again’ presents nostalgia at its most sinister. If we’re to look to the past, it should be in order to see how much further we’ve still to come.
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Kwun is a design writer and editor who has written for titles such as Domus, Disegno, Fast Company and Surface. She is the author of Twenty Over Eighty: Conversations on a Lifetime in Architecture and Design.
VISIT US
23-27 September, 2019 Hall 26 - Booth A242-B249
HOUSE OF SURFACES
BERLIN LONDON MILAN SÃO PAULO
BUSINESS OF DESIGN
Jon Emmony
P.17
Digital apparel enters the high street P.22 A fashion designer helps sell houses P.24 The built environment serves as a canvas for AR gamers P.29 Urbanists use data networks to become self-sufficient Frame 130
What can property developers learn from luxury brands? MARKETING
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London’s property market continues to stutter, buffeted by Brexit uncertainty, a natural cyclical correction in prices and a massive oversupply. There were 31,508 unsold homes in the capital as of 31 March, the highest number since such data has been collected. And problems are worst at the top end: Bloomberg’s analysis suggests London is facing its longest slump in luxury property sales in decades. Not ideal conditions into which to launch the centrepiece residential development of a regeneration project almost two decades in the making, but that’s the situation Argent faced. Its WilkinsonEyre-designed apartment complex, situated inside a cluster of Victorian gasholders overlooking Kings Cross station, was completed in early 2018. Prices for studios start at north of £800,000 and run to the mid-7 millions for a penthouse. A year and a half on and the developer has been forced to invest in some creative marketing, calling on fêted fashion designer Roksanda Ilinčić to stage one of the most expensive units. Once a rarity, home staging has become an increasingly important part of the estate agent’s arsenal in recent years. It now seems to be metamorphosing into a practice that goes beyond merely dressing a space to help buyers imagine what it might be like to live there, and towards something far more curatorial. The inference has shifted from ‘what could you make of this home’ to ‘what could this home make of you’. Ilinčić’s treatment is a case in point. With its juxtaposition of furniture by the likes of Lina Bo Bardi and Charlotte Perriand, Pierre Jeanneret and Tobia Scarpa, the space could well be accompanied by a series of wall texts and velvet ropes. As it is, a series of scents chosen by Lyn Harris of Perfumer H acts as an olfactory guide. Add in a liberal scattering of literature that runs from monographs on the likes of Barbara Hepworth and Anni Albers to books by Nell Dunn and Joan Didion, and you begin to understand that nothing here is incidental. You can buy the
Business of Design
property in this fully furnished state for £7.75 million. Argent clearly knew what it was doing. A majority of the major UK newspapers and most of the design press has covered the story – which is ostensibly about a complex that has been on the market for 18 months. That’s largely down to Ilinčić. Despite this being her first interior, the collaboration makes a lot of sense. She originally studied architecture in Serbia, before moving to London to pursue a fashion MA at Central Saint Martins, whose new campus is within throwing distance of the gasholders. But perhaps more importantly, the fashion designer has greater name recognition with potential buyers than an equivalent interior designer or architect might. Indeed, this project speaks of a property developer paying attention to the wider shifts in the way luxury consumers – and this demographic treats property as a luxury good like any other – are being engaged by brands. Fashion houses in particular are appealing to customers by contextualizing their products within an elevated cultural field. Take Prada’s Mode members club, which launched at Art Basel in Miami Beach last year with a site-specific intervention by Theaster Gates (see Frame 127). Whether Ilinčić’s penthouse will sell rapidly – furnished or otherwise – is something to watch, but the opportunities provided by such developer-funded crossovers can add value to design nonetheless. PM roksanda.com argentllp.co.uk
Ilinčić’s interior treatment focuses on the work of female artists and designers, featuring pieces such as Eny Lee Parker's Skin lamp and Lina Bo Bardi's Três Pés Armchair.
Michael Sinclair
THE SPIRIT OF PROJECT
RIMADESIO.COM
STRIPE SLIDING PANELS, ZENIT WALK-IN CLOSET, PLANET COFFE-TABLES DESIGN G.BAVUSO
IN PRACTICE
Yong Joon Choi
P.35 Labotory
on keeping up with South Korea’s pace of change P.44 Giorgia Lupi on turning the interior into a canvas for data P.49 Olson Kundig on using Instagram to create an office culture P.52 Tina Norden on helping hospitality clients understand the value of design Frame 130
After graduating from the interior-design programme at Konkuk University in 2013, Seoul natives Kee Min Park and Jin Ho Jung initially went their separate ways. Park founded his own studio, while Jung joined a company called Base to learn more about the design process within the ranks of an established firm. Despite working separately, they kept in touch during that time, each becoming the other’s sounding board. It was during those conversations that Park and Jung realized just how aligned their design philosophies were, prompting them to team up as Labotory in 2016. Since then, the studio has populated its portfolio not with mere spaces but with what it calls ‘brand experiences’. The designers think of brands as human beings – ‘as people we want to understand on an intimate level’.
You started Labotory with a shared design philosophy. What was it? JIN HO JUNG: Our keywords are ‘sincerity’ and ‘romance’, which are somewhat abstract in relation to a design philosophy. Sincerity relates to our passion for what we do, whereas romance reflects our tranquil, informal approach to space. These ideas unite in our projects. KEE MIN PARK: The most crucial factor is that people feel optimistic when in a Labotory space. Our desire to have a positive influence on visitors’ mindsets isn’t just a goal we started out with, but something we’ll continue to develop in the future. What do you think prompted those ideas? KMP: We feel a very strong responsibility to provide users with the positive atmosphere they desire. Design projects are rife with challenges: budgets, construction difficulties and so on, and making a space relies on the combined effort of a number of different individuals. But visitors should neither see nor feel any of those concerns when they step into the final result.
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What are the biggest challenges facing young designers in Seoul who want to set up their own practices? JHJ: We were both born and raised in South Korea, which is why we established Labotory here. Over the years we’ve seen and experienced radical changes in the market, a market that’s still in constant flux. Anything that doesn’t align with the rapid shifts taking place is completely forgotten. Tastes – of customers and clients – seem to switch in an instant. Our biggest challenge is to adjust to continual change – and to continuously improve. How do you maintain your design integrity when the status quo can about-face so quickly? KMP: Having a strong identity is so important to young South Koreans. Who I am as a person won’t suddenly change because the city does. For instance, I’m concerned with how I can best live in our current society. Based on these concerns, one of my ideals is minimalism, something I channel in both my everyday life and in design.
In Practice
JHJ: We’re also drawn to constructivism and to the Bauhaus movement. We read the geometric shapes, dots and lines of a Kandinsky like a floor plan, and try to make spaces based on similarly ‘simple’ elements. Whatever typology we’re working on, we always find a connection between the brand’s concept and our own concept. Finding that middle ground, that connection, is what makes a Labotory space a Labotory space. Can you walk us through Labotory’s design process? JHJ: We always start with analysis, with exploring the characteristics of a brand. Take Oriente in Seoul [2018], a café serving traditional Korean desserts and coffee. We began by examining iconic curved-roof Korean houses, which are often surrounded by nature. Our ancestors in Korea didn’t want to clash with nature, they wanted to harmonize with it. We were also inspired by a photograph depicting the silhouette of a Korean mountain range against a cloudless sky – there’s so much beauty in the blank
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PAGE 35 Kee Min Park (left) and Jin Ho Jung are broadening the scope of their studio by assessing each project’s social impact. ABOVE Geometric forms in different sequences are intended to establish rhythm within The Ilma, a showroom in Seoul. RIGHT Ilma means ‘weather’ or ‘air’ in Finnish. Labotory combined four materials – rough stone, translucent glass, warm wood and cold metal – to express various contrasting atmospheric conditions.
Introducing
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For 291Photograph, a retail space in Seoul selling cameras and prints, Labotory overlapped transparent and translucent materials to reference the way a photographer brings an image into focus.
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In Practice
Introducing
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Pentagram’s newest partner has spent her career exploding the accepted definition of data visualization, working for clients such as IBM, MoMA, Google and the United Nations. Here she maps out an average day, and why the relationship between data and the built environment is occupying an increasing amount of her time. As told to Peter Maxwell Portraits Andrew Boyle
GIORGIA LUPI 44
In Practice
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In Practice
06:00
parameters of this fairly new discipline with my peers. Data is not an objective representation of reality and there’s always a question of authorship underlying data sets. We need to be aware that we’re primarily using data as a lens and a filter to see the world through. Coming primarily from a design background, I work with data in a different way from statisticians and computer scientists. My focus over the years has been on how we can make data speak in our language, how we can embrace the imperfections and human qualities hidden in our data. This is what I call ‘data humanism’, where the approach is always to present the reality that gave rise to the data, as opposed to simply the numbers. Most of the time that requires developing completely customized visual languages for each project, rather than relying on the standard tropes of data visualization.
GIORGIA LUPI: I wake up pretty early and start thinking about work straight away. It’s a force of habit, from spending the last seven years in New York communicating with my team at Accurat, the company I cofounded back in Italy. By the time I woke up here, 40 people over there had already been working for six hours. Since joining Pentagram earlier this year things are slightly more relaxed. I try to not open my emails for at least 15 minutes, and never while I’m still in bed. I also often try to squeeze in either a yoga class or a walk before I get to work, so there’s a bit of a buffer.
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Once I get to the office, as you can imagine, my days vary. I can be in meetings for the whole morning, or focusing on writing proposals. I’m in a peculiar situation, because from time to time I still work with the team in Milan. One of Pentagram’s greatest assets is all of the alliances that the partners have been able to build over the years with external companies or freelancers that are really specialized in what they do. For every project that I work on with the Milan team, there needs to be space in the morning for check-ins. I t’s important for me to be constantly vigilant of what’s going on in the industry – let’s call it ‘input mode’ – rather than just buried in my own work. For instance, I do a lot of speaking at conferences, and I’ll then also try to attend the talks that connect to my current interests. Right now I’m fascinated by how physical spaces can act as contexts for data. I come from a background in architecture, and I believe that there’s still a lot more potential to be explored in that relationship. Last year, for instance, I worked on the first Starbucks in Italy, in which an augmentedreality-enabled wall – where data are carved and etched in brass – depicted the company’s history and coffee-making process. When you are in a three-dimensional digital environment, interacting with a physical space, there are endless opportunities to rethink the visual architecture that we use to represent data. I’m particularly looking forward to developing systems for how we can use the body, via gestures and proximity, to control and explore the type and amount of data we receive.
19:00
I love to take advantage of all the museums New York offers, especially to see abstract art. I think of visual representations of abstract symbols as a form of data. It inspires me to think about creating graphics in different ways. Afterwards I like to go for dinner with close friends, the sort who don’t mind me drawing as we speak, as that’s how I’m able to feel fully involved in the conversation.
21:00
I still hand draw a lot and consciously make room for it. Every single project, even if it ends up being an interactive digital installation, starts with drawing. It’s my preferred way to make sense of a data set. Even when you work with big data, the whole point is making it smaller and understandable, so I spend time drawing samples of tiny bits of a set in order to fully process the dimensions and the organizational principles underlying it. Drawing is my way of realizing that I’ve had an idea in the first place. Being the only partner at Pentagram to have a specific focus on data visualization, it’s important for me to share my understanding of the
A Day With
I still like working on books, which is a side practice. I’m not really a serial author, as I’ve done only two books and they have been collaborations with others. I want to do my own, though, but it’ll be a slow process. pentagram.com
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OPPOSITE Working from the New York office of Pentagram, the world’s largest independent design consultancy, Giorgia Lupi has to be ‘constantly vigilant of what’s going on in the industry’.
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SPACES
P.66
Physical venues help speed up the adoption of VR P.102 Hoteliers switch from demographics to psychographics P.106 Post-clinical interiors present an evolving wellness aesthetic P.124 Prosthetic architecture counters prudent preservation Frame 130
Jan Vranovsky
THE DESIGN OF REAL SPACES IS KEY TO THE SUCCESS OF
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Spaces
VR BOOTHS AT CPH:DOX, COPENHAGEN At Copenhagen’s international documentary film festival earlier this year, architecture and design studio MBADV balanced challenging video content with an intimate setting to help visitors relax.
Courtesy of Normann Copenhagen
mbadv.dk
New Typology
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A new generation of entertainment venues mediates between the public and private experience of VR, helping to overcome users’ embarrassment. Words Rab Messina
There’s something slightly off about Marina Abramović’s avatar in Rising, her first virtual work of art, on display during the 2019 Venice Biennale. The face that launched a thousand MoMA seatings is almost pristinely replicated in the stand-in, but the body belongs to a previous, slimmer iteration of the Serbian artist. This glitch is too calculated to be a technical deficiency. It seems that even an agelessly sensual woman, one whose well-known modus operandi is to humbly use her corporeality as a messenger, has body issues. Outside the climate catastrophe scenario Rising depicted, I stood in a small open corner, with about one metre’s worth of manoeuvring room, putting on my VR goggles. Aware that her work often elicits knee-jerk reactions, I asked the male attendant to leave the room – I didn’t want to potentially embarrass myself in front of a stranger. ‘I can’t leave you alone,’ he replied. ‘People tend to hit their arms against the wall when they try to walk towards her, so I’m instructed to keep an eye on you.’ As a result, I planted my feet and limited my hand movements, as nervously aware of the black corridor around the real me as I was of the swiftly melting icecaps around the virtual me. As human beings, our relationships with our bodies are complicated, and as such we are innately afraid of looking stupid and feeling exposed. We instinctively want to save face, even when our faces are covered by large goggles. In fact, there’s a reason why VR users in action have spanned many an internet meme: on the outside, we certainly look stupid and feel exposed using the technology – and that may be one of the largest barriers to ensuring its market permeation. But oddly enough, conventional spatial design has proven an unlikely ally in this matter: it seems that the key to speeding up the mass
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adoption of virtual spaces is to focus on the qualities of the real spaces that enable them. Take, for example, the VR cinema booths at the most recent edition of the CPH:DOX in Copenhagen. The selection in this documentary festival does not shy away from divisive political, gender and psychological quandaries – and so, the three videos on display through the goggles were not necessarily going to be an easy watch. Maria Bruun and Anne Dorthe Vester, the designer and the architect behind MBADV, decided to give viewers a sense of intimacy to experience them, creating 16 halfway booths with curved walls made of cardboard tubes. ‘And we knew it had worked because, instead of sitting stiffly, as usually happens in the beginning of VR experiences, people felt relaxed and comfortable enough to swivel around in the chairs,’ Bruun explains. ‘With this setup, you don’t feel like a monkey in a cage – instead, it’s a very private experience.’ That monkey-in-a-cage feeling is something the technology has been battling since its debut. The gap between early adopters and the majority of consumers is particularly large in VR, due to a negative halo that computing critic Thomas Ricker has dubbed ‘when new tech is just too embarrassing to use’. There’s also the social stigma around the fact that the users most willing to consistently engage with the goggles are on the, erm, geeky side. As the established thinking goes, who in their right minds would want to spend their hard-earned free time flailing their arms around an empty room, fighting in a virtual zombie apocalypse? The visitors of London’s Otherworld, to be sure. The new virtual reality arcade, devised by The Dream Corporation with spatial design from Red Deer, allows users to rent out 40-minute sessions inside »
Spaces
Clementine Schmidt
WINGS OF DESIRE, MILAN Can VR be enjoyed by both the watched and the watchers? During Milan Design Week, the Morph collective explored the question by translating VR-associated gestures into a new dance vocabulary. morph.love
THAT MONKEY-IN-A-CAGE FEELING IS SOMETHING VR HAS BEEN BATTLING SINCE ITS DEBUT New Typology
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Luis Beltrán
CRAFT BRANDS SHOULDN’T DISREGARD THE DIGITAL Purveyors of slow-made and slowly used products are doubling down on their roots to retail
distance themselves from tech omnipresence – and thus become more attractive to consumers in need of digital detox. But as this notebook store designed by Masquespacio shows, brands can embrace progress while honouring their heritage.
Spaces
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Nic Gaunt
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CHINA’s very recent history has seen the rapid rise of both Western desserts and dairy consumption. Between 2003 and 2016, China’s bakery industry reportedly averaged 20 per cent growth, and the country is predicted to become the largest producer and consumer of baked goods (source: Global Times). Dairy consumption is similarly ballooning. Euromonitor International announced that annual dairy product sales in China are predicted to grow 16.8 per cent to 480 billion yuan by 2023, while an article in The Guardian revealed that the average person’s intake has catapulted from ‘barely drinking milk at all to consuming about 30 kg of dairy produce a year’. Let’s put it this way: if it’s got butter, it’s better. Or, in the words of architect and KCA founder Kostas Chatzigiannis: ‘The dairy industry is rapidly growing in China, mainly because of Western dietary habits entering the daily life of the Chinese, such as a morning or afternoon coffee, a dessert break or ice creams.’ KCA’s Yakafu bakery is one of three Chinese spaces that have materialized to meet the growing demand. What are the strategies for standing out in the scene? Don’t just treat your customers. Teach them, too. Yakafu is a DIY bakery – that is, a
spot where people can buy ready-made bread and pastries and learn how to make them on their own. The 300-m2 space is part of the growing trend of experiential retail and hospitality spaces in China, where the workshop is king and is allotted a permanent location in the layout. At Yakafu, that learning space
is on the first floor, where adults and children are schooled in baking and decorating their own bread, cakes and pastries. ‘That’s another growing trend in China, the DIY – any experience basically based on teaching something in a creative way,’ says architect Chatzigiannis, who has worked in Asia for more than a decade. ‘And it’s often a teambuilding activity for company employees and various other teams.’
linked to the serving of desserts during a choreographed food show. ‘During this show, we’ve seen that everyone finds a creative role to play,’ explains the firm’s design director, Nic Lee. ‘The unceasing play of living and eating becomes a reality: people in the theatre are interpreting their food.’
Consider how performance can promote both pics and play. High-end desserterie
something as sweetly sedate as a French macaron could be the inspiration for such a boldly bonkers space in Hong Kong? That’s the origin story for Eat Darling Eat, a selfdescribed ‘postmodernist dessert laboratory’ in the Asian city. How so, a laboratory? The space, designed by NC Design and Architecture, serves contemporary updates of iconic local desserts such as egg tarts, pineapple buns and tong sui, as well as bespoke sweet cocktails. To compete with the outbursts of fluff and colour on the plates and in the glasses, the NC team used reflective surfaces in fluorescent shades to carve out furniture in the shape of playful references to comfort food. Beyond that, custom stools are shaped like doughnuts and macarons, while others appear to have the consistency of jelly. Further down, the centrepiece bench seating is shaped like a cake cut-out. ‘The whole idea was to create a fully immersive environment,’ explains NC founder Nelson Chow, referring to the optical illusions achieved with bespoke elements. ‘It’s a utopian remedy that escapes from the global perspective of popular culture.’ FE
Doko Bar acts as an immersive theatre of sorts. Instead of decrying the many diners that insist on photographing their food before eating it – to the detriment of the hospitality experience – the Waterfrom Design team embraced and one-upped this tendency. When other designers respond to the consumer thirst for Weibo-friendly dining spaces, they often do so with a nearly cynical buffet of shapes, colours and materials that effectively pop when viewed through a lens. Waterfrom Design instead created a live image that allows diners to be observed and admired in real time. The studio’s inspiration came from New York City’s Fuerzabruta, where the audience stands within – or sometimes under – a dance troupe defying physics to the sound of Argentinean drums. At Doko, the ground floor revolves around a chef bar, but the first level acts like the floor-cum-stage of Fuerzabruta, where guests become part of the show: instead of booths and walls, diners are separated by 10,000 nylon threads that form a semi-transparent shield, with music
Make your interiors as experimental as your cross-cultural desserts. Who knew
EAT DARLING EAT, HONG KONG To compete with the experimental outputs of ‘postmodernist dessert laboratory’ Eat Darling Eat, NC Design and Architecture treated the furnishings like sprinkles on a sundae. ncda.biz
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‘I SECRETLY BLAME BOY GEORGE FOR ALL THIS’ Icelandic artist Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir, a.k.a. Shoplifter, talks about growing up in the 1980s, why art should be agnostic to art theory and how to be serious without standing on ceremony. Words Tracey Ingram Portraits Emanuel Hahn 90
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Elisabet Davidsdottir, courtesy of Shoplifter
For Chromo Sapiens at this year’s Venice Art Biennale, Arnardóttir completely covered the pavilion with bright synthetic hair to disorient the viewer’s relationship with space.
She goes by the name Shoplifter. No, the New York-based Icelandic artist didn’t steal the first set of hair extensions that initiated a lifelong love affair with the medium. The pseudonym is an acquaintance’s misinterpretation of Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir’s distinctly Icelandic forename. ‘Shoplifter stuck,’ she says. ‘I never worried about having a signature medium and I didn’t want an artist name. Be careful what you wish for.’ Set on embracing New York City’s cultural melting pot and vibrancy, Arnardóttir relocated to the Big Apple in 1994 and received her Master’s degree from the School of Visual Arts two years later. ‘I wanted more punk, more exposure to pop culture and electric energy than I could find in Iceland.’ With recent projects that include the Icelandic pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale, a rug for Hay x Chart Art Fair and a giant installation commissioned by Moncler for Milan Fashion Week, Arnardóttir isn’t your average artist. ‘A long time ago I dismissed trying to decipher which drawer I fit into. Stylist, designer, textile artist? I don’t want to have any limitations, or to close any doors.’
Why hair? I secretly blame Boy George for all this. I grew up in the 1980s, and one day I went to the hairdresser with his photograph in hand, asking for that look. The stylist didn’t know how to re-create it, so perhaps my work is partly my unfulfilled desire to wear bright hair extensions. Before I moved to New York, I worked in an antique shop in Iceland where I came across Victorian mourning wreaths made of human hair – a way to pass down part of a deceased loved one to future generations. I found the idea simultaneously morbid, beautiful and romantic. Hair is the remnant of the beast we once were, and we’re constantly trying to tame it. It can represent our greatest pride, our identity. Losing our hair – our crown – can also be traumatic. I started working with hair because of its links to vanity, but now I’m also fascinated by the
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amount of materials humans mass-produce. People add synthetic – plastic – hair extensions to their bodies to make them feel more beautiful or creative. Because plastic can live forever, it can have damaging effects on nature. But my work plays with the idea that art is supposed to live forever. I love that hair carries so many different meanings and connotations. Hair is also perceived so differently by men and women, and by different cultures. Is this a factor for you? My husband is from Poland. When people there saw my work they immediately thought of Auschwitz. In my privileged innocence, I hadn’t thought of that connection, so I started to explore other cultural associations. Humans have a longstanding history of cutting off hair to break down resistance and identity – to mould people into the same form.
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Think of the army. Yes, a crew cut is practical, but it’s also impersonal. When I moved to New York I was blown away by the spectacular scupltural quality of some African American hairstyles. The experience prompted me to start human hair sculpture events. I would have a stand filled with all kinds of hair products, offer guests a chair to sit in, and chat with them like a psychiatrist would, using what information the subject shared to create an elaborate look. When did your work take on a more spatial quality? A strand of hair is like a line on paper. I felt that 2D wasn’t enough for me, and hair led me effortlessly to working in 3D. Some of my early hair works were wall murals. Later I had the desire to completely fill people’s field of vision with the material. I began to bring my work away from the wall to create textured free-form sculptures, an ongoing series called
Memory, vanity, trauma: Arnardóttir is drawn to the innumerable connotations associated with hair.
Imaginary Friends. Now it has become both the walls and the environment itself, as in Chromo Sapiens for the Venice Art Biennale. How does the spatial element influence the reading of your work? In Venice I decided to go above and beyond, completely covering the pavilion so you don’t see the structure. It disorientates the viewer’s relationship with space. To me, the effect on the psyche is similar to being in extreme natural phenomena, such as the Grand Canyon. You lose your understanding of scale. When confronted with intensely tactile surfaces and an overwhelming range of colours, you become no more than a sensing body. And in Chromo Sapiens there’s a soundscape too. If sound is well integrated into a work and used for the right reasons, it brings time and movement to something static. I wanted sound to stir the visitor, to massage their insides – the
way you can feel a concert reverberating through your body after it’s over. The encompassing experience of my work turns on neurological receptors in your brain, triggering excitement and releasing endorphins. There’s also something about the joy we feel from the colours and materials that speaks to primal playfulness. Those who enter don’t have to read a lot about it to initiate a response. They don’t have to be an art insider who can theorize it, even though you can theorize it. You’ve been commissioned by brands such as Moncler, &Other Stories and Hay. How do these commercial projects relate to your self-initiated work? One of the reasons I make textile art is because it triggers my creativity. I feel inspired when I’m playing with fibres and textures.
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I can then communicate those feelings directly with the viewer. My work takes itself seriously, not ceremoniously. People are thankful I let them touch it; it’s hard for them to resist. That’s why I allow myself to do projects in other areas. I work with musicians and design companies. If I get excited about this stuff, why should I deny myself because it’s not ‘fine art’? It’s a challenge to translate art into something usable and practical. But when I do, my art gets to jump off the pedestal of a museum and live in the real world. Loads of people are interested in art but can’t afford to purchase a big piece. We want that inspiration around us – something that reminds us of our admiration of or connection to art. shoplifter.us
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PORCELAIN SURFACES FOR LUXURY DESIGN Milan
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Aaron Marcus Sutton
FRAME LAB
RETAIL How can retailers operate more sustainably
and help consumers make ecoconscious choices? And what will that mean for the future of brick-and-mortar venues?
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We live in confounding consumer times. E-commerce has opened up a new frontier of acquisition, with endless products scrolling in front of our eyes like multicoloured sweets in a vast digital candy store. The real-world impact of our online actions has become increasingly opaque, leaving many of us unsure of how to make sustainable decisions. But might shopping in real life offer the answer? Here we dissect six innovative in-store solutions.
The need to address environmental issues in retail is no longer up for debate – the briefest of Google searches will pull up endless studies pointing to 70 per cent of consumers agreeing that packaging has a strong influence on purchasing decisions (courtesy of Ipsos Mori) or 91 per cent of UK shoppers wanting to see entirely plastic-free aisles in shops (thank you, Populus). According to a recent study by the University of California, some 161 million tonnes of plastic packaging is produced every year and less than 20 per cent of that is recycled. Although pragmatic factors such as price and convenience still ultimately drive mainstream purchasing decisions, environmental concerns are no longer a fringe issue. E-commerce giants have been quick to jump on this trend, with Amazon’s website proudly proclaiming that ‘innovation has the power to change the world’ and ‘online shopping is inherently more environmentally friendly than traditional retailing’. The e-comms giant also likes to talk about its 100 per cent recyclable packaging, while in China, Alibaba made much fanfare of introducing fully biodegradable packaging back in 2017. Physical stores require lighting, air conditioning, signage illumination, employee transportation, electronic tills – not to mention the carbon footprint of shoppers physically making their way to them in the first place. Surely a simple click of a button is more environmentally friendly than all this hulking Old World infrastructure?
Well, not necessarily, is the less than illuminating answer. Of course innovation can improve efficiency and there is much about traditional retail that needs to be updated, but scratch the surface of the e-commerce dream and the picture gets muddier – a carbon-black core to a greenwashed shell. Like all successful internet-age industries, e-commerce draws its power from facilitating seamless interactions (not to mention encoding addictive behaviour). Barriers to purchase are so reduced online that it’s estimated anywhere between 30 and 50 per cent of e-comms goods are returned, choking urban centres with ‘last-mile’ log jams of couriers, and recently forcing retailers from Asos to Harrods to threaten the blacklisting of serial returners. What’s more, the physical brick-and-mortar infrastructure is not eliminated; it’s just tucked out of sight and out of mind in vast suburban warehouses. Add to this the disingenuous environmental claims made by many e-comms operators (it turns out China doesn’t actually have the recycling facilities necessary to facilitate the biodegrading of Alibaba’s packaging) and it becomes clear that what is now needed is clarity, not catchphrases. Innovative brick-and-mortar operations can offer this clarity, and much more besides. When sitting behind a screen it’s easy to become alienated from the real-world impact of your actions, whereas smart in-store retail makes for more considered human moments. Physical stores are also becoming far more »
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than just points of purchase – more like experimental crucibles for innovative practices, ranging from environmental education to closed-loop design.
fine for those found flouting the ban. This has created an innovative environment where retailers are looking to find closed-loop solutions, and one such answer is Nous, a French chain of zero-waste supermarkets that REPACKAGE Plastic packaging is the light- sells ‘rescued food’ deemed unsellable by other outlets ning rod for environmental concerns around shopping, (either for aesthetic reasons or because of overzealous and only the most apathetic of retailers are still ignorbest before dates). Elsewhere, in the fashion sector, ing the issue. In the UK, the plastic bag tax has been brands from H&M to Zara have launched in-store in place since 2015, with the government claiming it recycling initiatives, while luxury group Kering has has helped cut single-use bags by 80 per cent. This has agreed to set garment collection targets by 2020. For sparked something of an ecological arms race among many observers, these solutions are a band aid on the supermarkets, with Iceland pledging to become the first core problem, which is the unsustainable economic global retailer to go completely plastic-packaging free model that sees many fashion brands rolling out over by 2023, while at the other end of the market, Waitrose 20 collections a year. But by turning over part of their recently launched its Unpacked initiative, where only in-store offer to engage the issue head on, retailers are loose items – from vegetables to coffee – will be on offer. at least joining the conversation in a direct way. This follows innovators on the continent such as Ger many’s Original Unverpackt, which has been selling RESELL There was a time when consign packaging-free produce since 2014 and whose founder, ment was synonymous with musty charity shops ped29-year-old Milena Glimbovski, won the 2018 Berlin dling slightly stained hand-me-downs. Those days are Entrepreneur of the Year award. Also gaining traction long gone. Re-commerce, as it’s been jazzily rebranded, are consumer-led services such as Useless, which was is now a highly lucrative sector that seems perfectly created by ethical design agency Nice and Serious to in step with the growing consumer desire for guiltsignpost shoppers to zero-waste stores. In recognition free bargains. The global market is already estimated that many products require packing and labels of some to be worth $24 billion and set to take 45 per cent of description, designers are also driving innovation, the entire fashion retail market by 2023, according to whether that’s Spanish operator Laser Food, which uses GlobalData. At that rate, it will outpace fast fashion by strong light to pigment barcodes onto products, or the 2028. It would be obtuse to ignore the role that online Plastic Free Mark recently developed by London-based retail has played in this transformation, with luxury design agency Made Thought and environmental reseller The RealReal’s recent IPO capping $300 milcampaign group A Plastic Planet. lion and sneaker consignment site StockX being valued at a cool $1 billion. Physical stores do have a powerful RESCUE A shameful surplus is built into role to play in re-commerce however, partly because our economic system, where brands routinely overpro- the luxury experience is still best served IRL rather than duce and then scrap unsold stock. This is particularly URL, but also because preowned items need to be careshocking in groceries – up to 50 per cent of US food fully inspected. Japanese cult retailer Pass the Baton gets thrown away every year – but it also impacts every has perfected the art of elevating the second-hand sector, from electronics to luxury goods. France hit the experience, working with the likes of design studio headlines in 2016 by outright prohibiting the destrucWonderwall to create a bona fide luxury experience. tion of unwanted stock, backing this up with a €4,500 Items are labelled with provenance stories »
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REPACKAGE Ethical design agency Nice and Serious created the useless.london website to signpost shoppers to zero-waste stores.
REDESIGN Using 1.5 tonnes of recycled plastic, Corona and Parley for the Oceans created a temporary events space-cumincubator in Bali for collaborations between surfers, scientists and the local community.
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Dutch Design Week 19 - 27 Oct 2019 If not now then when? Eindhoven
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New display options promote flexible staging in store P.165 Agile office furniture activates employees P.176 Data centres are brought to the domestic environment
Courtesy of Penta
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KINNARPS VIBE DESK SCREENS Privacy in busy, open-plan working environments can be difficult to achieve. Kinnarps’ desktop screens Vibe Light and Vibe Focus make it possible by offering partitioning – the latter even includes sound absorption – for full-focus workspaces anywhere. kinnarps.com
Alessio Tamborini
LUCE&LIGHT INTONO Fitting seamlessly into any backyard or terrace, Intono is an outdoor smart wall lamp by Italian lighting manufacturer Luce&Light. The aluminium-body lamp can communicate with speakers through Wi-Fi using the ZigBee protocol, and can house an audio box to play music or ambient sounds. lucelight.it
OFFICE KGDVS AND PIETER VERMEERSCH MANIERA 19 To celebrate the fifth anniversary of Brussels gallery Maniera, Office KGDVS and artist Pieter Vermeersch were commissioned to create the Maniera 19 collection. One of the works is a massive ombré wall divider suspended from an aluminium rail that rotates to reveal two surfaces, one mirrored, the other beige and pink. maniera.be
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BOLON AND MISSONI FIREWORKS When collaborating with Italian fashion and design house Missoni, Swedish woven vinyl flooring company Bolon translates the richness of their textiles into bold surfacing. The newest Missoni Home collection by the pair offers up two new patterns, Trinidad and Fireworks (pictured), in fresh, vibrant colourways. For Dutch Design Week 2019, Frame and Bolon challenged Dutch design studios to explore the possibilities of Bolon’s Diversity flooring collection within the context of hyper-personalization. The winning installation will be on show at the Veemgebouw in Eindhoven from 19 through 27 October. bolon.com
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