PREVIEW Frame #140 MAY/JUN

THE NEXT SPACE

Why quiet is the new loud for hotels

How to design for neurodiversity Yabu Pushelberg on emotive spaces Furniture for the digital realm How flagships are flexing for the future Ace & Tate on responsible retail ISSUE 140 MAY — JUN 2021 BX €22.95 DE €22.95 IT €24.90 CHF 33.00 UK £19.95 JP ¥3,570 KR WON 40,000

BP

BLOWN AWAY

Soda Coffee Table by Yiannis Ghikas info@miniforms.com

CONTENTS 12 REPORTING

Quito and Hanoi

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FROM

Andrés Reisinger

Unreal Studio

17 BUSINESS OF DESIGN

The growth of furniture largely for – or solely in – the digital space

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30 INTRODUCING

South Korean design practice Artefact

Lennart Wiedemuth, courtesy of Ace & Tate

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IN PRACTICE

38 THE CLIENT Ace & Tate’s Ruud de Bruin and Doortje van der Lee 46 WHAT I’VE LEARNED

Multidisciplinary practice Yabu Pushelberg 52 INFLUENCER Sensory experience company Listen

38 Frame 140

5

60 FLOS Lining up lighting 65 SPACES

Flagships flex for the future, luxury goes low-key, work blends with . . . everything UK Studio, courtesy of Daga Architects

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116 ROCA Zero contact, maximum hygiene 119 HOSPITALITY LAB 120 How hotels are becoming inner-city escapes

138 What’s next for urban getaways?

86 Texture on Texture, courtesy of Z_Lab

Sun Liwen, courtesy of AIM

126

160 IN NUMBERS

Marjan van Aubel’s Sunne in facts and figures 6

154 Frame 140

Raffaele Merler, courtesy of Atelier Tobia Zambotti

149 MARKET

The latest releases from Molteni&C, Maharam, Ton and more

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Colophon

AXOR ONE — THE ESSENCE OF SIMPLICIT Y DESIGNED BY BARBER OSGERBY

STAYCATIONS TO STAY The multi-billion-euro question that has gripped the hospitality industry for months now is: Will we be able to travel like never before this summer? And even though most of the developed nations will have finished their vaccination programme by then, it seems unlikely. China, for example, will only allow foreign travellers to enter who have been vaccinated with a Chinese vaccine. Other countries are considering exclusive access for those with a vaccination passport.

And then it turns out that even the vaccinated aren’t safe: research shows that half of the elderly can be infected with the coronavirus a second time.

In short: forget going back to ‘normal’ this year. And that’s only from the perspective of Covid19. A lot of people don’t actually even want to travel like they used to, even if they can. Read the result of our own research in this issue’s lab. See how terms like mass tourism, social hotspots and exotic places are being exchanged by more and more travellers for small scale, privacy and proximity. And hospitality entrepreneurs are responding to this.

The past year has turned tourists into familiarists, says Booking.com in a traveller survey covering 28 markets. We were forced to rediscover our own environment. The use of the search term ‘staycation’ went through the ceiling in 2020.

Apparently, it yielded good results, since more than 40 per cent of Booking’s customers are planning to stay in their own country this year.

What are people looking for close to home after a year of being more or less housebound and probably indulging in a lot of navel-gazing? Peace and quiet, remarkably enough. Time for themselves, friends and family. Simple relaxation, like reading a

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book, going for a walk or visiting the sauna. Meaning, too. As über-hospitality designer George Yabu says elsewhere in this issue: ‘A sea of beautiful furniture isn’t enough to resonate anymore. People want to feel the romance behind something.’ Translate romance into meaningful experience and you’re spot-on. Not just a city walk, but a tour ‘in the footsteps of the great philosophers’. Not sitting on an average bench in the city’s main park, but on that one in the sun with a view of a beautiful pond in the most hidden park in town.

A new kind of hotel is in the making. In a city like Paris, it might be tucked into a back alley with access to a courtyard garden. In Beijing, it could take the form of something that most resembles a library where you can sleep. But it can also be in a second- or third-tier city with rooms without televisions, but with a communal area for tea ceremonies and an abundance of sensuous music, aromas and light for salutary tranquillity. As Yabu’s partner Glenn Pushelberg puts it: ‘A hotel with the spirit of home where there is space to gather but guests have the option to live life independently.’

Robert Thiemann Editor in chief

Editorial

Courtesy of Moley

business of design

22 Co-living and remote working’s timely coalition 24 Could robots ease the burden at home? 26 The furniture manufacturers getting behind gaming

At the start of the year, designer Andrés Reisinger auctioned ten pieces of virtual furniture for a total value of $450,000.

�

Should you invest in virtual furniture?

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How much would you pay for a virtual easy chair? ‘Hold up,’ you’ll say back, ‘why would I want to pay anything for a virtual chair?’ It’s perhaps easiest to explain by referencing another class of digital asset that’s gained much industry attention over the last couple of years: fashion.

The rise of virtual garments as a product category for which consumers are willing to pay hard cash started in gaming and spread to various social media platforms. Now you can dress your League of Legends avatar in Louis Vuitton, or adorn (an image of) yourself in flaming CGI versions of Buffalo London’s signature high-rise sneakers and share it on Instagram.

Those sartorial experiences can be had for tens of dollars, and your purchase has no real exchange value. But they’re just a small sample of a much

Business of Design

larger market for ephemeral fashion, one that is increasingly attracting serious investment.

The Fabricant (you’ll have seen the Dutch digital fashion house at our 2019 awards show) is leading the charge here. Responsible for creating Buffalo’s sneakers, it also sold a piece of digital couture for $9,500 at auction two years ago, and has just launched a series of garments with Atari. Ownership of the latter is verifiable using NFTs (blockchain-based nonfungible tokens), which means they can easily be traded, with buyers likely hoping that their fictional fabric greatly appreciates in value from the current $245 ticket price.

So, about that easy chair.

In short, furniture seems to be following in fashion's trajectory of dematerialization. If anything, it could end up moving at a faster pace. That’s thanks

»

While many of Reisinger’s works will remain digital only, several will be realized and shipped to the auction winners.

to a well-established demand for virtual interiors, long part of the value chain of architectural production in a way that has not historically been true for the fashion industry. But while the internet abounds with insipid CAD files of futons and standing desks for visualizers to drop into 3DS Max, that’s really just the context on which a more aesthetically extravagant form of digital production has been built. This has been driven by the fact that more and more brands are opting to use virtual scenography for their product and campaign imagery. The digital artists responsible for these hyper-real, pastel-pop stage sets, such as Ezequiel Pini and Alexis Christodoulou, have since found a ready audience for their work

on platforms like Instagram; their cultural moment was duly sanctified last year in publisher Gestalten’s Dreamscapes & Artificial Architecture.

So, about that easy chair.

At the end of February one of this cohort, designer Andrés Reisinger, auctioned ten pieces of virtual furniture (each certified via NFT), for a total value of $450,000. Prices stretched from a couple of thousand for a pneumatic pink table to a high of $67,777 for a custom commission that Reisinger will design in collaboration with the buyer. While many of the lots will remain digital only, several will be realized and shipped to the winners, aping the lifecycle of the Hortensia Chair that drove Reisinger’s rise to province after he posted

it on Instagram in 2018, which was subsequently realized as a physical piece. Another addition to your study is less interesting than the other contexts these are designed to fill, however, with the ability to port your luxury purchases into sandbox games such as Minecraft, or proto-metaverse experiences like Decentraland, or simply enjoy studying it in AR as it hovers over your desk.

How much pleasure you can really derive from viewing your design piece across any of these media is questionable; certainly, beyond potential resale value, the concept of virtual design collectibles is still one that feels like it is waiting for a definitive use case. But it’s clear that there are plenty of willing early adopters: just a few weeks

Business of Design

after Reisinger’s sale, fellow digital artist Christodoulou raised $340,000 for nine of his animated architectural environments. This more experimental end of the digital-furniture spectrum will doubtless ride on the coattails of the same tokenized art wave that recently saw Grimes shift $6 million in NFT-based art, or auction house Christie’s announcement that it would host its own NFT sale at the end of March. PM

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Andrew Boyle

in practice

30 Artefact on creating spatial order in Seoul 38 Ace & Tate on rolling out responsible retail design 46 Yabu Pushelberg on portraying stories in every setting 52 Listen on the importance of sound in space

HYUNGJIN KIM and YEKYUNG KANG of Seoulbased practice Artefact discuss the kinks in South Korea’s design education system, how to make spaces stand out in the commercial battlefield of a densely populated city, and why they opt for materials that provide both structure and finish.

Words Floor Kuitert Portrait Unreal Studio

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In Practice

Creative director RUUD DE BRUIN and retail expansion director DOORTJE VAN DER LEE of eyewear brand Ace & Tate explain why some services are best delivered in physical spaces, how shorter leases and modular interiors will revolutionize their retail model, and how sustainability can be accessible, not intimidating.

Words Tracey Ingram The Client

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PREVIOUS SPREAD Often choosing to work with local studios, Ace & Tate commissioned Spacon&X for its Copenhagen store. The designers envisioned the space as an artist’s atelier, using colour as a playful element that sends products into the foreground.

OPPOSITE A collaboration with Berlin-based studio New Tendency, Ace & Tate’s fifth London store marks a new era of flexible, modular interiors based on the brand’s Responsible Retail Design concept.

In 2013 Mark de Lange launched Ace & Tate, a direct-toconsumer brand born from the founder’s own frustrations with the laborious process of buying eyewear. After starting as a web model, the company opened its first physical space in Amsterdam’s Van Woustraat in 2015 and has quickly amassed a portfolio of 70 stores across ten countries. Ace & Tate still intends to grow, but the pandemic’s pause button has given the team space to put a strategy in place for how – to focus on core markets first and to give due attention to projects long in the pipeline, such as a master plan for responsible retail. Creative director Ruud de Bruin and retail expansion director Doortje van der Lee discuss the strategy behind Ace & Tate’s physical spaces – and how their new direction opens up a world of possibilities.

Adding brick-and-mortar to an online-first model

DVDL: Ace & Tate started as an online brand. At some point we realized eyewear is an extremely high-touch product and requires some specific services that are still best delivered in a physical space. People prefer offline eye tests, for example.

RDB: We’ve found that consumers often prepare at home before visiting; 80 per cent of our customers have seen our brand or our products before they set foot in an Ace & Tate shop, so going to a store to try on frames is the final step in the process. I think this is especially important for eyewear – frames have a huge aesthetic impact on your face, and every millimetre counts. Using physical stores in this way is particularly true for first-time buyers, who then feel more confident making future purchases online.

Different stores that speak the same language

RDB: We don’t have strict brand guidelines that we apply to different locations. All of our 70 stores are fundamentally different from one other, but line them up and they speak the same language. I’ve been trying to figure it out: What is the connecting thread? There’s a certain aesthetic taste, of course. Our brand is clean, bright and optimistic, and our stores need to look fresh. They also rely on big gestures and shapes. That’s because our products are quite small – if there was too much detail in the space they’d recede into the background.

What’s universal for us is the customer journey. No matter what a store looks like, the way someone interacts with our products and buys our frames should be consistent. Being able to grab any frames and try them on – that was basically unheard of when we started out. Frames – especially sunglasses – are typically behind glass panels or have little locks on them. You have to ask someone to open up that special case to be

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able to try them on. The purpose of our stores is that you can wander around, try everything on, and we’ll sort out the rest.

Deliberately avoiding delineation in displays

RDB: We don’t assign genders to our products in-store – all the frames are mixed up. We also don’t believe in the whole theory of basing eyewear on your face shape. It’s up to you to choose what you want – that’s the freedom consumers should have and feel when interacting with Ace & Tate. Plus, nothing is forever. The traditional idea of eyewear is about choosing a style that suits you and sticking with it. We prefer to think of eyewear as something you can change daily if you want to. The trouble is that this isn’t a very sustainable story. That’s why we started the Reframe project: customers can bring back their old frames and we take care of the post-consumer side of things, refurbishing or recycling them.

Stimulating creativity with outside collaborations

RDB: At one point we were basically designing a new store every two to three weeks with a team of three people. But we also work with external studios. It doesn’t always save time, but it’s a great opportunity, creatively. We don’t want to become a cookie-cutter brand that rolls out a store concept across all locations. Outsiders bring a completely fresh point of view that inspires us going forward. We look for people we have a steady connection with – we have to share the same values and vibe.

One of the reasons we haven’t worked with big design studios is that, especially in the beginning, we would be a small player for a large studio. We’d more likely have to do what the studio wants to do, whereas we want to be part of the whole process. Smaller, younger studios are more willing to work as an extension of our in-house design team.

DVDL: We also want to create a stage on which emerging agencies can explore and expose their work. We’ve worked with OS&OOS, for example, product designers who’d never done any stores before ours.

But they do know about materials, products and product displays. It was a great collaboration, and we learned a lot from each other. It’s also nice for them to do something outside of their normal scope that other companies might not ask for. Working in this way creates a cool synergy, and we’ve broadened our material knowledge while gaining new insights and ideas.

We typically proactively contact studios we want to work with. Our lead retail designer does a lot of research, either online or at exhibitions like Dutch Design Week. Or we’ll look for locals, like Spacon&X for our Copenhagen store.

»

In Practice

GLENN PUSHELBERG and GEORGE YABU talk about the importance of emotive spaces, creating movie scripts for each project and why innkeeping is the future of hotels.

As told to Kieron Marchese Portraits Andrew Boyle

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In Practice

STEVE MILTON and BRETT VOLKER, founders of sensory experience company Listen, discuss the importance of sonic branding across touchpoints, how to compose environmental sounds that are purposeful instead of pollutive, and what multimodal experiences mean for accessibility.

Words Floor Kuitert Portrait Drew Reynolds

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In Practice

Influencer

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Henry Bourne, courtesy of Maison Margiela

spaces

66 How Asian space exploration is informing interiors 78 Designing for neurodiversity in healthcare spaces 106 Will the charging station be the design challenge of the decade?

PLANET B

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 a new era of space exploration is inspiring otherworldly forms of interior design and architecture.

Words Rosamund Picton and Kourosh Newman-Zand

Shiinoki Shunsuke, courtesy of AMKK

ABOVE Paludarium Tachiko and Yasutoshi by Azuma Makoto in Tokyo, Japan.

OPPOSITE Jinmao Capital J Space office by Daga Architects in Beijing, China.

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Spaces

UK Studio

Outer Vision

Spaces

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DESIGNING FOR NEURODIVERSITY The experience of visiting a hospital or healthcare centre can be harrowing enough, let alone for a child. Then think about children who are struggling with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the symptoms of which can include unusual emotional reactions and exceptional responses to the way things sound, look and feel. With the prevalence rate of ASD increasing globally, designing for neurodiversity needs serious attention – and healthcare spaces are leading the charge.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that one in 160 children has an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a figure that’s expected to rise. ‘Based on epidemiological studies conducted over the past 50 years,’ writes the WHO, ‘the prevalence of ASD appears to be increasing globally. There are many possible explanations for this apparent increase, including improved awareness, expansion of diagnostic criteria, better diagnostic tools and improved reporting.’ That said, the why is irrelevant. What’s important is that designers factor neurodiversity into their buildings to make them more inclusive.

Judging by a series of recent projects, the healthcare industry seems to be a good place to start. Take, for example, a new joint facility from the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC). Designed by Perkins+Will in collaboration with McMillan Pazdan Smith Architecture, the 58,064-m2 MUSC Shawn Jenkins Children’s Hospital

and Pearl Tourville Women’s Pavilion in Charleston aspires to be one of the most autism-friendly hospitals in the US. The creative team didn’t just assume what design elements would fulfil this goal. Instead, they embarked on a collaborative process that included clinical and administrative leadership, and the MUSC Patient Family Advisory and Youth Councils. The team harnessed feedback from parents with ASD children to deliver a full-sensory design response. ‘Truly listening to the challenges of families and caregivers enabled us to collaborate together to solve for the complex needs for both,’ says Carolyn BaRoss, healthcare interiors design director for Perkins+Will. ‘We drew inspiration from their honesty and aspirations.’

The team went a step further than simply creating a calming environment – they assessed and removed potential triggers that could result in an overwhelming space. The result is a highly curated interior that’s free

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Institutions

OPPOSITE Designed by Atelier Caracas in the Venezuelan capital, Fun Maze features therapy spaces conceived as linear ‘parks’. Visitors are invited to peer through the acrylic domes that dot the walls into alternative ‘universes’ to find their own perspectives.

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BEAUTY AND BANANAS

Sun Liwen

Essential/non-essential: for many retailers, this distinction determined business as they knew it in 2020. Which is why it’s intriguing to see Harmay – the disruptive Chinese retailer of international cosmetics brands – position high-end beauty products alongside everyday goods like a bottle of milk or a hand of bananas. Located in Shanghai’s Xintiandi district, Harmay Market intends to blur the line between luxury and commodity, need and want.

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Spaces

Annik Wetter

BALENCIAGA PASSEIG DE GRÀCIA, BARCELONA Occupying 356 m2 spread across two floors of a monumental building on Barcelona’s bustling Passeig de Gràcia, Balenciaga’s flagship has a site-specific architectural concept. Existing stone and concrete are preserved and set against modern materials like extruded aluminium, glass and steel. balenciaga.com

Retail

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KITH RUE PIERRE CHARRON, PARIS Located nearby the Champs-Élysées in a 19th-century mansion, Kith’s Paris flagship is the American streetwear brand’s biggest project yet and its first standalone store in Europe. Designed by Snarkitecture and offering a ‘holistic lifestyle experience’, the nearly 5,000-m2, multi-storey shop incorporates a variety of retail environments in addition to a restaurant and a full-service bar housed in a glass-enclosed courtyard. The ground floor accessories department is modelled like an intimate, shoppable living room environment. snarkitecture.com kith.com

Stéphane Muratet

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Spaces

The shoe room at Kith Paris features bespoke marble benches and shelving built into the original, historical windows.

ENGAGEMENT With a less transactional future for physical retail on the horizon, flagships have to reconsider their role within a brand’s retail portfolio. ‘Having that physical space as a kind of brand mecca is still really important,’ says Baron. ‘I think the flagship is still entirely worth it.’ Part of a brand’s broader (real estate) footprint that may include temporary pop-ups and smaller locations in suburban areas and secondto-third-tier towns, city-centre megastores should serve as a more cultural base for consumers to pilgrimage to. A pivot mentality, taking an omnichannel approach, fostering a sense of belonging, thinking in terms of content, and being attuned to the cultural conversation will be paramount to truly get consumers engaged – and invested – in your brand in store.

Retail

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COBE, DENMARK Cobe’s ultra-fast charging stations embody the architecture firm’s belief that time spent charging should also become a meaningful break for the driver and passengers. The stations employ biophilic principles, with a focus on natural light, landscaping and the use of wood throughout. ‘With our design we offer EV drivers an opportunity to recharge mentally in a green oasis,’ says Cobe founder Dan Stubbergaard. ‘The energy and the technology are green, so we wanted the architecture, the materials and the concept to reflect that. Hence, we designed a charging station in sustainable materials placed in a clean, calm setting with trees and plants that offer people a dose of mindfulness on the highway.’ cobe.dk

CHARGING STATIONS 106

Spaces

Rasmus Hjortshøj, COAST

With a lack of charging capacity bottle-necking EV uptake, and endof-decade deadlines for phasing out combustion engines, the 2020s will require us to transform our roadside infrastructure.

Words Peter Maxwell

New Typology

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A story that did the rounds of the British media a few months ago gives you an idea of the ongoing challenges of owning an electric vehicle (EV). A couple, who had just taken receipt of a new EV, went on a trip to the coast. Thanks to a series of closed, broken or overburdened charging stations, the journey home, some 210 km, took them nine hours.

It should have taken two and a half.

While that experience can be attributed an unusual level of misfortune, it still highlights the fact that mass adoption of electric vehicles won’t now be held back by the cars themselves, but rather the infrastructure that serves them. Indeed, while ‘range anxiety’ – the distance an EV could travel on one charge – used to be purchasers’ key concern, now it’s ‘charging anxiety’: how easy is it to find a charging point, how enjoyable is the experience when I get there, and how long will that experience last?

The cause of that anxiety looks likely to only get worse. In its annual study of EV charging point availability, ACEA found that the sale of EVs in the EU increased by 110 per cent over the past three years, compared with a rise of just 58 per cent of the number of charging points. ‘This is potentially very dangerous, as we could soon reach a point where growth of electric vehicle uptake stalls if consumers conclude there are simply not enough charging points where they need to travel, or that they have to queue too long for a fast charger,’ ACEA director general Eric-Mark Huitema warned.

In short, this isn’t simply a numbers game; scaling available units and coverage is necessary, but insufficient by itself. Even the current fastest (and scarcest) charging units take 20 to 30 minutes, and that’s once you’ve reached the front of the line.

There’s an urgent need for qualitative improvements to match quantitative, and that means providing mechanisms to make better use of that time. There have been promises in the past. In 2018 Elon Musk Tweeted: ‘Gonna put an old school drive-in, roller skates & rock restaurant at one of the new Tesla Supercharger locations in LA.’ An outlandish idea, perhaps, and one that hasn’t yet come to fruition, but many in the industry are following Musk’s train of thought. Danes may already be familiar with Cobe’s charging forecourts for e-mobility brand Clever and energy provider E.ON, which use various biophilic strategies to enhance the user experience. The first of

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these began operation in September of last year, with plans for over 40 more along Scandinavia’s highway network in the near future. Another E.ON project, this time with architects Graft, pushes the concept further.

Again modular in nature, the proposal focuses on creating a ‘high-quality stopover environment’ that ‘breaks new ground by placing emphasis on user experience’. At its centre is a customer lounge, powered by photovoltaic cells on the station roof, that provides a sheltered rest area and media centre. Larger stations could host a whole range of amenities, Graft suggests, such as the expected shopping and food provision, but also spa and fitness centres.

While Cobe’s tree-like wooden system and Graft’s more futuristic pods both certainly offer improvements over a charger placed at the edge of a concrete car park, they still lack much in the way of comfort and distraction. Back in 2019, engineering firm Arup partnered with sustainable energy brand Gridserve on a concept for a multi-charger station that combined much of what each offers, but with a little more ambition for the typology in terms of design and programme. The proposal echoes Cobe’s nature-first approach, with extensive landscaping, ‘grasscrete’ surfaces, a green-walled rest centre and a viewing platform that looks out over the surrounding countryside. When it came to ancillary services, the team envisioned the addition of a running track, fresh food outlets and an ‘education hub’ extolling the new and future benefits of electricity-powered transport.

Three years later and some of those ambitions have been realized, if in a very diminished form. Gridserve’s first Electric Forecourt, in Braintree, UK, opened in February and offers charging for up to 36 cars. The verdant surroundings and sustainable design principles are absent, however. In their place sits a two-storey plate-glass-and-panel box that screams ‘industrial park’ rather than ‘area of natural beauty’. Inside you’ll find a chain coffee shop and news agent, as well as a post office.

Upstairs holds a play area for children, bookable meeting rooms and, in a small gesture to wellness, two exercise bikes that feed a small amount of energy back to the cars charging below.

In sum, while the Electric Forecourt provides plenty of ways to pass the time, it’s packaged in a manner that borrows from the worst of its motorwayservice-station forebears. An emphasis on the ‘consumer experience’ isn’t completely misguided. »

Spaces

‘Establishments will probably offer charging the same way many currently offer free wi-fi’

VW, GERMANY VW’s mobile charging robot, which the automaker aims to bring to market in some version over the next few years, operates totally autonomously, from travelling to the target vehicle to opening the charging socket, connecting the plug and decoupling it again once full. ‘Available charging infrastructure is key in the success of electric mobility,’ says Thomas Schmall, CEO of Volkswagen Group Components.

‘But it needs to be demand-led and efficient. Our developments do not just focus on customers’ needs and the technical prerequisites of electric vehicles.

They also consider the economical possibilities they offer potential partners.’ To that end, VW hopes such robots will enable operators of parking bays and underground car parks to easily ‘electrify’ every parking space without the need for costly retrofits. volkswagenag.com

New Typology

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T IN PR D IR TH

Out Now

CMF DESIGN The Fundamental Principles of Colour, Material and Finish Design In this first book about the young discipline of CMF Design, author Liliana Becerra consolidates its key principles, so that they can be consulted, referenced and utilised by both design students and professionals.€33

store.frameweb.com

ARCHITECTURE IS A SOCIAL ACT Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects Good architecture needs to meet head-on the forces that are shaping today’s world. Featuring 28 projects drawn from across LOHA’s nearly 30-year history, this book underscores this urgent idea and points the way ahead for both people and architecture. €39

WHERE WE WORK Design Lessons from the Modern Office The office isn’t dead. But just in what form will it live? As we think about the future of the office in a post-pandemic world, this book explores 51 ground-breaking workspaces, providing an indispensable reference tool for interior designers, architects and companies alike. €49

LEARNING FROM CHINA A New Era of Retail Design As e-commerce uproots the norms and conventions of physical retail, Chinese retailers are showing the way forward. What can designers, architects and industry leaders learn from this melting pot of innovation? A curated selection of 50 case studies, this book provides a window into the future of the industry. €49

FASHION SPACES A Theoretical View Created via a practice-oriented approach to academic teaching, through the collaboration of academics, students and the retail industry, this book sets out to define fashion spaces as an emerging area of research within architectural writing. €15

Architects and designers!

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Texture on Texture, courtesy of Z_Lab

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HOSPITALITY After closing the books on its toughest year to date, the hotel industry is still in the midst of a period of serious uncertainty. City hotels, once heavily reliant on business travellers, major events and conferences, are having to rethink their position. Here we look at how accommodations in and around major metropolises are turning inwards to offer respite from busy life.

A new, closer customer With visitors from abroad no longer guaranteed, some hotels are focusing on the audience in direct reach: their neighbours.

Hotels and locals: the two have been trying to link arms for a while now. Our Sep/Oct 2017 Frame Lab was dedicated to the topic, looking at how hospitality spaces were striving to be local in every sense of the word, from the food they offer to the plates on which it’s served.

Back then, going local was about sustainability – using what’s around you – and trying to create a so-called ‘authentic’ experience for guests. A shift away from the cloned spaces of chains across the globe towards providing visitors with a sense of place instead.

Post-pandemic, hotels are facing a different challenge. How can they treat tourists to a genuine experience when there are barely any walking through their doors?

According to the latest research from global real estate advisor CBRE: ‘The recovery of the European hotel market will initially be driven by domestic travel demand, with hotel revenues not forecast to recover across the market to pre-pandemic levels until 2024.’

Going local has thus taken on a new meaning.

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their offer towards ‘staycations’ throughout 2020, a term whose Google search figures skyrocketed during the same period. Hoy in Paris, for example, had been open for only two months when the pandemic struck, forcing owner Charlotte Gomez de Orozco to change tactics. ‘We turned it into an opportunity to get closer to our clients and to offer something different,’ she says, ‘a retreat in the heart of the city.’

But that was 2020, right? With vaccinations underway and travelling high on the agenda once borders reopen, surely staycations will soon be replaced with old-fashioned vacations? Not necessarily. As mentioned in Frame 138, October 2020 research published

by Booking.com covering over 28 major markets shows that ‘consumers [are] evolving from tourists to “familiarists” as they look to explore their local context more fully’. The platform revealed that 38 per cent of people still plan to travel within their own country in the longer term (in over a year’s time). ‘Many are looking again at what’s on their own »

Frame Lab

Yuna Yagi

The tendency to travel closer to home means smaller cities are now competing with their country’s wellknown destinations as staycation spots. Hishiya, Fumihiko Sano Studio’s renovation of a folk house in Fukuchiyama City, is within two hours’ drive of Kyoto.

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What’s next for urban getaways?

In the lead up to each issue, we challenge emerging designers to respond to the Frame Lab theme with a forward-looking concept.

Lingering travel restrictions mean urbanites looking for an escape from daily life are more bound to their immediate surroundings, leaving local hospitality entrepreneurs questioning how to evolve to best serve them.

To find answers, we asked three creative practices to share their ideas.

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Frame Lab

Addressing the lack of outdoor public space in urban hospitality, AIDIA STUDIO brings one of NYC’s most iconic hotels to new heights.

What effects of the coronavirus crisis in the hotel industry have you witnessed?

ROLANDO RODRIGUEZ-LEAL: The 2020 pandemic has exposed the vulnerability of the hospitality sector in unprecedented ways. The impact has been felt more acutely in urban settings where open spaces are scarce and where the quintessential hospitality experience is inspired and driven by the density and

The Challenge

intensity of city life. For all city lovers, this lifestyle is now, as the result of the pandemic, the epitome of the type of reckless behaviour that leads to mass contagion.

NATALIA WRZASK: Yet cities remain important, future-oriented, progressive and innovative places. For over a hundred years, cities have consolidated not just as economic hubs, but as the centre of culture, fashion, art and design.

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But isn’t it an option to divert to the less densely populated and built-up countryside?

RRL: For half a decade now, leading voices in architecture seem to believe it could be. Just in February 2020, Rem Koolhaas, who’s always ahead of the trend, curated the exhibition Countryside, The Future at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. In his words, the exhibition ‘explores radical changes in the rural, remote, and wild territories collectively identified here as countryside, or the 98 per cent of the Earth’s surface not occupied by cities’. Although we tend to agree that there’s been a rebalancing between the rural and the urban, we don’t see them as competing grounds.

NW: The dust of the pandemic has yet to settle to be able to fully examine the impact on city life and to confirm the establishment of emerging trends such as the consolidation of the home office, the collapse of the office space as a monothematic typology, and the cementing of Airbnb as the new hegemonic normal for hospitality. One thing is certain: cities will continue to find ways to reinvent themselves and in doing so will continue to attract business, redefine cultures and act as an inspiration to artists and designers. An invigorated hospitality sector will likely surface. One that reinvents experiences, challenges conventions and attracts curious minds.

So how do you envision this invigorated sector in your concept for this Challenge?

RRL: Full of possibilities, daring in nature and rooted in the sense of wonder, tradition and luxury. Our research for a spatial response to The Challenge takes us to The Plaza Hotel in New York City, designed by Henry Hardenbergh in 1907. Rated by many specialist publications as the most iconic hotel in the world, it is quintessentially urban and therefore the perfect ground to test ideas and explore design alternatives for our postpandemic future. A century-old landmark,

Prior to founding Aidia Studio in 2018, architects ROLANDO RODRIGUEZ-LEAL (Mexico) and NATALIA WRZASK (Poland) worked at Foster + Partners, Zaha Hadid Architects and Ateliers Jean Nouvel.

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it has succeeded throughout the years in reinventing itself and adapting to different times, including the great depression of 1929 and the prohibition era.

How will your idea help it survive our current crisis?

NW: Well, the biggest deficit of urban hotels is the amount of open, outdoor spaces, which has never been more critical than now. On top of that, at The Plaza, public space only accounts for 7 per cent of the total floor plan. For the most part these public areas are enclosed, inward-facing and centred on the ground floor. The hotel features an inner courtyard on the fifth floor with fountains and gardens, but that space is mostly contemplative. We saw an opportunity to grow and recalibrate the public-private proportion of the available space.

RRL: We mapped out the public programme of the building and looked into some of the now gone signature rooms such as The Persian Room, Oak Bar and the original Hardenbergh Ball Room and consolidated them into a ‘mass’ to use as our raw material.

We also noted that, when opened, The Plaza, with its 20 storeys, was the tallest building on its block. Today, over a century later, 50-storey skyscrapers dwarf our icon and make us wonder how we could reimagine this virtual void. So we envision a new ‘ground’ on top of the building, activating the rooftop and triplicating the public, open space programme.

These new grounds capture the essence of the hotel’s emblematic rooms and venues, the ceremonial beauty and the sense of awe and wonder, reinterpreted into an open-air version.

NW: In part contemplative, in part programmatic, we imagine a new Palm Court, a reimagined Persian Room and a contemporary Oak Room. Our reinterpreted signature rooms will be surrounded by green, ludic areas, swimming pools, shopping arcades and observation points. Bridges and staircases will connect spaces with broad views of Central Park and the city beyond. aidia-studio.com

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Aidia Studio proposes to fragment, reinterpret and reimagine the public spaces of NYC’s historical Plaza Hotel by activating a new, redefined open-air ground on top of the building.

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150 Modular, recyclable and extendable furnishings 158 Highlights from Stockholm Design Week 160 How to harness solar energy with every surface

STOCKHOLM DESIGN WEEK Highlights from the 2021 edition

Erik Undehn

MASSPRODUCTIONS BAM! What design do you get when your top inspirations are Pop Art and Gothic buttresses? Developed by Massproductions cofounder and designer-in-chief Chris Martin, Bam! is a bold sofa influenced by both.

Available in three sizes, it combines two block-shaped volumes – a seat and back – giving way to a graphic, linear profile. Its complementary cushions, filled with recycled goose and down feathers, sport black embroidered patches reading ‘Bam!’ – a playful touch that pays homage to legendary artist Roy Lichtenstein. massproductions.se

Isak De Jong

GUSTAV WINSTH AND TERESA LUNDMARK DAG Room Service is a collaborative show of product design students at Beckmans College of Design and Swedish furniture producers Dux, Gärsnäs, Johanson Design, Kinnarps, Källemo and Storängen Design. Part of the group collection is a daybed by Gustav Winsth and Teresa Lundmark called Dag, suited for private and social environments alike. The designers joined forces with Gärsnäs to forge Dag’s solid beech frame; the piece’s curvaceous padding is engineered to swell in and out of the woodwork’s cavities as it’s used. roomservice.beckmans.college

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BLÅ STATION BIG TALK Adam Goodrum’s Big Talk design for Blå Station is a seat of many colours: while the snake-like piece’s fronts are unified in tone, the backrest comprises a varied palette of velvet Febrik swatches. ‘The upholstery forms a modular tête-à-tête sofa or Victorian-era “love seat” collection where two or more seats can be joined together in an undulating arrangement,’ says Goodrum of the mouldedfoam composition. ‘Two people can have a quiet conversation (in keeping with Victorian modesty) side-by-side while viewing the back of the other person’s seat and the spectrum of graduated coloured bands.’ blastation.com

Erik Lefvander

ZANAT UNITY Monica Förster Design Studio contributed to Lockdown Dialogues – a project from Zanat exploring design in an age of isolation – with the Unity Stool. Displayed at the feminist collectible design exhibition Misschiefs, the prototype is carved by hand from maple finished in matte black. According to the studio it is the result of an ‘eagerness to bring in the feeling of tactility to the home’ in an increasingly digital time. ‘We aim to emphasize the analogue way it was designed as well as how it was produced by Zanat’s master carvers working from home during the Bosnian lockdown.’ zanat.org

LAMMHULTS SUNNY Marking the unveiling of its Atelier Paul Vaugoyeaurevamped Stockholm showroom, Lammhults organized an installation titled Space Matters.

Communicating the new creative direction of the company – focused on emphasizing ‘the importance of the spaces we inhabit and the influence they have on our daily lives’ – the installation presents three just-launched seating collections. Pictured is Sunny, a range by Note Design Studio and Gunilla Allard.

Newcomers also include an easy chair designed by Peter Andersson and Johannes Foersom and Peter Hiort-Lorenzen’s Trioo series. lammhults.se

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