Innholdsfortegnelse for January - February 2016 i Frame

The world’s forests are disappearing at an alarming rate. An industrialized timber industry has made trees into commodities, with no regard for their role as living organisms. Today’s environmentally aware artists and designers are reconsidering this traditional material resource. Refusing to waste, they utilize each precious tree from crown to roots. Their goal is a forest that not only regains its ecological value but also recaptures its mysterious, majestic identity. ➀ For his S/S 2016 collection, James Kelly imagines a woman ‘waking up after an event that left her abandoned in a forest’. ➁ With the support of Creative Industries Fund NL, Studio Thomas Vailly reappraises the resinous Pinus pinaster in a research project entitled Reconfiguration of a Tree. ➂ Part of Ymer&Malta’s Morning Mist collection, Benjamin Graindorge’s Fallen Tree…

As any athlete knows, having the proper performance gear goes a long way. In collaboration with 3D-printing experts at Belgian outfit Materialise, sportswear brand Adidas gives us a glimpse of Futurecraft 3D, which it considers the ultimate in athletic footwear. Prototypes of the trainer, being developed to offer users high-tech speed and comfort based on innovative manufacturing and design, are ‘in testing and limited production’ as we speak. One experiment involves a treadmill that measures the unique pressure points and contours of an individual’s feet while running. Using the latest in foot-scan and 3D-printing technology, the team focuses on the midsole, the shock-absorbing layer between the shoe’s inner and outer soles. The midsole is laser-sintered in TPU (thermoplastic polyurethane). The forerunner to a potential line of Adidas shoes, the concept…

Adam Goodrum discusses his work at Melbourne’s NGV in the digital magazine MELBOURNE — At the National Gallery of Victoria, three houses sit primly in a row. Shards of light striking the iridescent structures – composed of dichroic-laminated acrylic – feed the overarching shadows behind them. The colour-bending homes, aka Unfolding, scored Sydney-based Adam Goodrum the 2015 Rigg Design Prize, Australia’s prestigious triennial award for contemporary furniture and object design. The title of the work holds its premise. Unfolding was inspired by Goodrum’s investigations into flat-pack housing. Each shimmering abode is an extension of the cardboard shelter that Goodrum designed a decade ago as a place of refuge capable of being transported by and released from a helicopter to aid victims of an emergency. Unfolding recalls Goodrum’s earlier concept: a…

SEOUL — Designer Sophie Hicks’ flagship for Stockholm-based fashion brand Acne Studios in Seoul’s Gangnam district sits – gossamer and luminous – in a bed of wild strawberries, crowned with ductwork and lined with concrete. This industrial-ethereal contradiction reflects the area’s identity, as well as the contrast between Acne’s vocal aesthetic (the name of the label could refer to blemishes but is actually a cheeky acronym for the collective’s primary pursuit: Ambition to Create Novel Expressions) and the more retiring aspects of Swedish culture. ‘Sweden is a culture of light and air,’ Hicks writes, one that values ‘modesty and discretion’. Inside, two floors of concrete poured in rough timber forms float amid – without touching – exterior polycarbonate walls through which daylight diffuses onto freestanding steel garment displays. There is…

MISATO — Located in a residential neighbourhood one hour’s drive from Tokyo, Yutaka Kindergarten features classrooms that surround kids in what looks and feels like a mountainous landscape. The school was designed by architect Daisuke Sugawara, who responded to a brief that asked for a learning environment which would nurture children to actively develop their own personalities and to socialize with others regardless of age. Rather than confining pupils to one room, the rectangular building facilitates movement and participation. Six classrooms are arranged around a common area where children of different ages play together. The use of partitions makes the individual rooms feel almost like a single space. Cut-out panels of layered plywood form the silhouetted foothills and slopes of mountains whose peaks help to support the ceiling. The mountain…

If you believe in the metaphoric power of architecture, then comparing the Tate Modern with the Design Museum can tell you a lot about the place held by art and design in our lives. The thrusting, phallic, industrial grandeur of the Tate is impossible to ignore, whereas the Design Museum is housed in a former banana warehouse tucked away in a quiet corner of London that few people actually go to. Contemporary art is the charismatic enfant terrible of our times, whilst there’s still a sense that design is encumbered by its function, made mundane by its usefulness. The situation may be about to change. This year the museum will make its long-anticipated move to the former Commonwealth Institute in West London. Restored by John Pawson, the listed building is over three…

The digital magazine offers the full breadth of King’s Stockholm office FOR most of us, the days of working solely for a paycheque are long gone. Employees are looking for satisfaction in their jobs and for bosses who care what happens to them. As a result, companies are adapting workspaces to the requirements of the staff, in hopes of attracting and retaining a good workforce. Set to hit our screens this year, the film adaptation of Dave Eggers’ novel, The Circle, features a young girl who is hired by an influential internet company. The campus of this futuristic tech business offers everything an employee can imagine, and Mae Holland is wowed by the impressive amenities. Along with its forward-looking reputation, the company lures the smartest minds with sensational perks. Off-screen…

What led to the founding of Second Home? And of all the things to disrupt, why choose the workplace? ROHAN SILVA: With over half the world's population now living in urban areas, this is the most important time to be thinking about the future of the city. That's what Second Home is about – how to make our cities more livable, more sustainable, healthier – and how to achieve a built environment that might better support creativity and entrepreneurship. The workplace was the obvious starting point, as structural changes in the economy simply aren't adequately reflected in office design, and the likes of Regus and WeWork are obviously such soulless and cynical places. Concepts of work and career have changed dramatically in the digital age. People are always on, and…

‘BECAUSE they are invisible, acoustics have been relatively neglected in architecture,’ says Kenichi Sato, founder of Ply Project. As part of the company’s mission to make plywood ‘a smart engineered material for improving people’s lives in the 21st century’, Ply Project combines layers of plywood and foam to make Wavy, a lightweight, tactile material for acoustic applications. ‘Simple cuts make the plywood sheet entirely flexible,’ says Sato, who describes Wavy as panels with ‘a flat, resilient surface that provides not only an aesthetic and organically natural appearance, but also acts as a reassessment of plywood’. Pongs’ Silencio is another innovative acoustic fabric that combines aesthetic and functional properties. In this case, Silencio owes its effectiveness to a distinctive 3D honeycomb structure. ‘The three-dimensional surface refracts and absorbs sound waves, and…

The End of Sitting by RAAAF Amsterdam Although all submissions to the competition are thoughtful and well executed, not all of them push the boundaries and show us new ideas. This project is a prototype and a wonderfully creative attempt to think spatially about future workscapes. Formally reminiscent of Zaha Hadid’s early paintings, the design is not about taste but about the subject being addressed. Will we, in 20 or 50 years, be working while leaning over, lying down or standing up? raaaf.nl Uber Office 11th Floor by Studio O+A San Francisco Uber represents a new breed of business in the service industry, and its offices express the essence of its innovative concept. This is the shape of now – a space that reflects the rhetoric of the casual; it…

Magdas Hotel by AllesWirdGut Vienna A project that deals with a notably topical and urgent social situation, Magdas is a hotel that welcomes conventional guests and refugees in the same manner, making no distinction between their financial circumstances and/or nationalities. A mix of second-hand furniture, natural materials and soft tones, the hotel has a homey feel. Of all the competition entries, it has the most visible social purpose, enabling encounters among users with the help of design. alleswirdgut.cc Kawaii Preparatory School by Matsuya Art Works / KTX ArchiLAB Kobe The architects’ display for a school on a busy street opens up and ‘advertises’ the building. Bright colours and geometric forms appeal to a target audience of young girls. In a highly competitive environment with lots of schools, such a display…

100 kilometres per hour is the speed of the first prototype. Later iterations fly much faster 12 is the number of prototypes Alec Momont developed during the creation of Ambulance Drone 70 per cent is the survival rate if defibrillation is delivered to patients with ventricular fibrillation within four minutes. Survival rates based on standard methods of emergency response are 8 per cent 4 kilograms is the drone’s total weight 800,000 people in the European Union die from cardiac arrest each year 1 minute is the average flight time for the first prototype to reach an emergency within a 12-km2 zone Alec Momont’s Ambulance Drone won the Frame Public Award, a prize that was announced at Dutch Design Week 2015. Under Momont’s supervision, a team in the Dutch city of…

2 Kith 1 Prada 3 Molly Goddard As ultra-skinny mannequins continue to dominate the runways, food might not be the first thing we associate with high fashion. This season, however, clothing brands are debunking clichés and serving up some fashionable feasts. Milan is the most obvious setting for a combination of fashion and food – two industries rooted in Italian culture. Prada ? cherishes the city’s heritage by acquiring 80 per cent of iconic pastry shop Pasticceria Marchesi, an establishment dating back to 1824. Now a welcome addition to Milan’s upscale Via Montenapoleone, the new location boasts an interior designed by architect Roberto Baciocchi. Snarkitecture ? revamps the Brooklyn location of multi-brand store Kith, now enhanced by a slightly unusual feature. In the space between footwear and apparel, shoppers find…

AS a professional in the world of architecture and design, you’re expected to keep abreast of trends, of course, particularly when you write a column for a leading design publication. Type ‘interior trends’ into Google and you get more than 23 million hits: countless websites eager to provide you with information. With this in mind, I spot an obvious opportunity to poke a bit of fun at trendcasters. People who call black the new white one year and – you guessed it – proclaim just the opposite a year later. But it’s not that simple. Still and all, why not give it a try? Now that we’ve entered a period of guarded economic recovery – following more than half a decade of one recession after another – it’s about time…

Watch Bureau Betak’s floral affair blossom to life with the digital magazine PARIS — We’re all familiar with the green wall. Now Alexandre de Betak of Bureau Betak has given us the violet hill. De Betak, scenographer for innovators from Rodarte to Viktor & Rolf, brought spring to autumnal Paris when he was tapped by the House of Dior to produce the show for its S/S 2016 ready-to-wear women’s collection. Dior introduced its A/W 2014 couture line against a canvas of 150,000 orchids; this season’s show was another floral extravaganza, a lavish gesture to mark the end of Raf Simons’ successful stint as creative director of womenswear at Dior. To match Simons’ diaphanous designs in organza and cotton voile, De Betak raised a hillock of delphiniums over the Cour Carrée…

EINDHOVEN — Most of us are familiar with the concept of a smart shop. Chances are, a wacky interior radiating with the dazzle of multicoloured florescent lights pops into mind. Add to the equation a flock of tourists sporting Amsterdam-themed souvenir apparel, and the picture is complete. But in Eindhoven – the world’s smartest region according to the Intelligent Community Forum – things look a little different. The House of Smart, yet another psychedelic experience conjured by Dutch designer Maurice Mentjens, attempts to reflect the city’s brilliant brainwaves through a surprisingly sober palette. Mentjens, who together with Arnout Visser presented titillating mushroom-shaped lamps at this year’s Dutch Design Week, is certainly no stranger to the provocative. Despite the shop’s monotint interior, however, the hallucinogenic gestures are hard to miss. Defining…

TOKYO — Schemata Architects has unveiled a simple yet strategic concept for Descente Blanc, a new line of apparel from one of Japan’s leading sportswear manufacturers. Descente is defined by its urban aesthetic – a mix of cutting-edge versatility and sophistication that architect Jo Nagasaka incorporated into the store’s spatial identity. Currently, outlets can be found in three Japanese locations: Osaka,Daikanyama (Tokyo) and Fukuoka. Nagasaka utilized existing materials from the surrounding environment, including timber, which he moved from the exterior into the Tokyo store. Clothing hangs from the ceiling of the raw industrial space on long tubular rails that can be raised and lowered mechanically. These racks display multiple copies of one design, an apparent reference to mass production. The factory feel is reinforced by the prevalence of steel, bare…

LONDON — Cypriot fashion designer Hussein Chalayan is known for creating the extraordinary by taking something banal (a coffee table) and turning it into something equally banal (a skirt) using a less-than-banal gesture (telescopic levitation). Most recently, he came up with shirtdresses that dissolve under a shower of water to reveal evening-wear beneath. We can only hope that Chalayan will one day come up with an entire collection that mutates into, say, a shop featuring clothes from that collection. Until then, London’s ZCD Architects are distilling physical space for him. The outfit’s latest boutique, which in true Chalayan fashion can be converted from store to event venue, opened this autumn on London’s Bourdon Street; described by ZCD as a ‘shop-within-a-shop’, the store is defined by a black steel frame. The…

ISTANBUL — A state of immersion is a state of consciousness in transformation. A bit of a mouthful? Not to worry. Turkish artist Refik Anadol’s installation, Infinity, offers a window through which to explore the abstract experience of artificial awareness. Presented at Zorlu Center of Performing Arts Centre during the Istanbul Biennial, the mesmerizing space invited visitors into an alien audiovisual landscape created to transgress the normative boundaries of perception. An elemental part of Anadol’s ongoing project – Temporary Immersive Environment Experiments – the installation ‘questions the relativity of perception and how it informs the apprehension of our surroundings’. To achieve the desired effect, the artist constructs provocative artificial worlds intended to soak the neurons of those who enter his stimulating settings, which deconstruct and rearrange reality. For the biennial…

PARIS — During Paris Fashion Week in October, Miuccia Prada once again tapped AMO, the research branch of Rem Koolhaas’s Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), to frame its S/S 2016 runway show. AMO’s solution involved the insertion of an arching, brutalist construction into Auguste Perret’s rigid and monumental Palais d’Iéna. To define the path taken by the models while providing a background for the fashions, AMO designers threaded the aqueduct-like structure through the building’s hypostyle hall, alternately hiding and revealing its columns and forming the abstraction of a ‘timeless ruin’. The insertion’s squiggling mass, both voluptuous and sharp-edged, was in stark contrast with the blunt linearity of the architecture around it. Unlike the decay of a ruin, however, the installation was well clad with aluminium thermal insulation in three gold…

1 JASPER MORRISON’S SIMPLE PHONE FOR PUNKT ‘This very elegantly designed phone (Frame 107, p. 224) is smart enough to leave us alone when we want to switch off from work.’ 2 GRAND THEFT AUTO V ‘Neither movie nor game, it introduces a new cultural form. It also reflects on the dematerialization of the world and the remarkable speed with which new products can spread; in this case millions of purchases were reported the first weekend after its release.’ 3 VINYL DISC ‘We are still hungry for material objects and the analogue world.’ 4 GOV.UK ‘The British Government had the courage to shut down dozens of individual government websites and condense them all into one clear, easy-to-use site – its most powerful form of communication with its citizens – that…

BASED in San Francisco, Studio O+A is the go-to practice for some of the biggest tech innovators in the world: clients include Yelp, Facebook, Uber, Cisco Systems, Open Table and Samsung. In Ten Typologies, a publication that is part guide, part manifesto, the studio lists the spaces a contemporary workplace needs in order to function properly. These include the ‘library’ (a designated area for privacy), the ‘town hall’ (a central gathering space, often a multipurpose kitchen with several access points) and the ‘shelter’ (a tentlike structure that cloisters but doesn’t remove staff from the action). ‘When a workplace is too sterile or formal, people are less inclined to share ideas, to socialize with each other,’ says Primo Orpilla, cofounder and principal of Studio O+A. Technology may have made it possible…

What inspired the Mosa Pattern Generator? We had many sources of inspiration, but what influenced us most were our close ties with architects. What we noticed from these relationships was a growing need for customization. The Mosa Pattern Generator is intended to give designers the freedom to develop different atmospheres, signatures and identities using our tiles. We wanted to break with traditional ideas that depict tiles as being purely functional. How does your new software adapt to the user’s circumstances or environment? The Mosa Pattern Generator is a user-friendly online design tool for making unique compositions with products from the entire Mosa range. As soon as a pattern is designed, it can be exported to 2D and 3D technical software programs such as AutoCAD and Revit, or 3D rendering tools…

How does Axor One contribute to the brand’s vision of the bathroom as a living space? Axor One allows a completely fresh interpretation of water control: by consolidating multiple individual controls into one simple element, it streamlines both the look and functionality of the bathroom. In other words, its all-in-one property declutters the shower space by incorporating all functionalities in one element. This opens up the traditionally confined bathroom, leaving ample room for an individual arrangement of the shower space, whether large or small. Why was it important for Axor to develop a product with an all-in-one control system? We were aiming for something that would be intuitive, interactive and responsive without distracting from a soothing shower experience or cluttering the shower with unnecessary controls. The result is a system…

The Gallery at Sketch Restaurant by India Mahdavi London A pink room with chairs and tables that look like lavishly decorated cupcakes or a fin-de-siècle tearoom? This place is all about being different. It’s a total environment that challenges preconceptions by appealing to our senses in a dramatic way. Apart from its adventurous colour choice, the space is dotted with intriguing details and amusing framed illustrations by David Shrigley. india-mahdavi.com Hueso Restaurant by Cadena + Asociados Concept Design Guadalajara, Jalisco There’s lots of strange stuff going on in this cabinet de curiosités. Dipped in a powdery white coating, the interior is a pastiche of bones designed to evoke Mexico’s surrealist tradition and macabre All Souls’ Day. It’s a dreamy place – and is conjuring dreams not a major goal of…

Eager to attend the annual Cersaie trade show, flocks of international ceramics enthusiasts poured into Bologna’s Fiera district for a taste of the tile industry’s finest fare. This year, no fewer than 101,000 visitors turned up, the most the event has ever attracted. Setting the scene were super-natural imitations, textural nuances and cross-disciplinary fusions. ➀ Ceramica Sant’Agostino’s Blendart collection merges the rustic aesthetics of authentic wood flooring with the DNA of porcelain tile. Blendart’s virtually unlimited colour and grain variations rely on the latest in digital ink-jet printing.   ➁ Inspired by architectural drawings done by hand, Lea Ceramische’s Naïve range, designed by Patrick Norguet, is distinguished by a seemingly random network of intersecting lines. Part of the Slimtech Series, the tiles come in a spectrum of soft hues. ➂…

‘I GREW up with a mother who was not always cooking, like many other Italian mammas. She didn’t like cooking at all. But in the summer and on weekends we often went to my grandfather’s beach house, a half-hour’s drive from my birthplace, Oviedo, in the coastal town of Salinas. [Urquiola designed the Salinas kitchen for Boffi.] The house had a big messy kitchen with a table in the middle – not for eating but for working. Whenever you got anywhere near that table, someone would ask for your help. You’d end up cutting bread or cleaning fish. It’s the first laboratory I can remember.’ ‘When I became a designer, my mother said: “How is it possible? You were always breaking down the house!” I was a very curious child,…

BORN in England, artist John Sabraw was still known as a realist painter when he horrified his agent by producing Chroma, a series of circular abstract works. Made with pigments derived from the toxic run-off that pollutes the coal-mining region of Ohio (Sabraw is an art professor at Ohio University), the pieces underline the theme of environmental activism in Sabraw’s work: he once devised a carbon-offset scheme for artists, which he applied to Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. Sabraw and chemist Guy Riefler, his paint-making partner at Ohio University, have big plans for pollution-based pigments as a means to clean up industrial sites. What inspired the idea of making paint from pollution? JOHN SABRAW: Ohio has over 4,000 abandoned mines leaking lifeless but dazzlingly coloured mineral streams. I was struck by the…

ZURICH — Ever since British fashion designer Christopher Kane launched his galaxy-print designs five years ago, many in the industry have been engrossed by outer space. What’s been a trend, however, is becoming an invasion. Proof of the phenomenon is the work of German artist Michael Najjar, who was commissioned to design a Space Suite for the Kameha Grand Zurich Hotel. Those familiar with Najjar’s life and work know that he is well acquainted with the conditions of extraterrestrial existence: the Berlin-based artist has been training to prepare for his role as one of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic Pioneer Astronauts. The expedition will make him the first contemporary artist to set foot in outer space. For the time being, Najjar’s vision of space takes the shape of a silvery hotel…

STOCKHOLM — Extending across the exhibition halls of the Swedish capital’s Moderna Museet, Reality Machines is a retrospective honouring the visionary poetics of Danish-Islandic artist Olafur Eliasson. A champion in the integration of space, light and colour, Eliasson concocts experiences that combine elegant design with the primitive power generated by larger-than-life natural phenomena. His extensive portfolio includes projects as diverse as film, sculpture and interior design, which often problematize, if not entirely blur, the fine line between artefact and observer, perception and reality. Although they often target the senses, Eliasson’s works are nevertheless grounded by potent philosophical and political ideas. This is most explicit in Little Sun, an LED solar lamp he designed for off-the-grid communities in Africa. Eliasson’s refined approach to art reaches its zenith when he tackles physical phenomena…

LONDON — For a month this autumn, Louis Vuitton’s Nicolas Ghesquière translated his 12-minute A/W 2015 ready-to-wear show into a touring installation dubbed Series 3. Covering three decaying floors of 180 The Strand, a brutalist building in central London, the scenography by British set designer Es Devlin (Frame 101, p. 148) suggested that although the well-heeled may make luxury brands rich, it’s a much wider public that makes the brand. Design houses are finding ways to ensure that rarefied industry rituals are no longer the sole domain of the haute set — that those who don’t wear the clothes or attend the shows can experience the collections, too. ‘I approached Louis Vuitton and Nicolas Ghesquière as a pair of characters in a play,’ says Devlin, whose work ranges from small-scale…

FRANKFURT — Asked by Audi to stage its latest range of cars at the 2015 Frankfurt Motor Show, three-dimensional brand specialists Schmidhuber sculpted an ‘experience walk’. Rather than being confronted with the full range of Audi automobiles from the outset, visitors first moved through a series of installations. ‘We turned the traditional communication principle on its head and showed the advantages of the Audi brand in a new and emotional way,’ says Michael Osterstag-Henning, managing partner at Schmidhuber. The journey began on an exterior escalator that ascended through a mirrored structure composed of hexagonal ‘cells’. Advancing to Audi Technologies, visitors caught a glimpse of the goods through a virtual window, which revealed up-to-the-minute data about the cars’ technical specifications. Walls carved from ice in the arctic room embodied the extreme…

BEIJING — The refreshing philosophy of Chinese retailer AnyShopStyle holds that fashion is based on personal taste (as opposed to the opinions of industry insiders) and that emerging designers are as good for business as business is good for emerging designers. In brief: exclusivity is out of style. Tasked with designing the brand’s Sanlitun concept store in Beijing, local firm We Architech Anonymous (WAA) envisioned a space that would make fashion feel inclusive and would establish ‘a democratic space’ in which to showcase a rotating roster of work by 300-plus designers and their micro-collections. To display such a large number of labels equably, the glazed floor-to-ceiling store front was cleared of imagery, signage and branding, thus placing the focus on the apparel alone. Because it is impossible to anticipate all…

MILAN — ‘The shop that changes its skin – that’s the main concept behind it.’ Hannes Peer is referring to his design for Iceberg’s 250-m2 Milan flagship, whose launch coincided with the city’s September fashion-week events. Embodying the quick turnover of fashion, rotating triple-faced billboards flick from mirrored and marbled surfaces to Olivier Zahm's photography for the latest Iceberg campaign. Not only can the brand’s campaign-related artwork be updated each season; the billboards’ remaining two faces can also be replaced over time. Peer envisions filling the shop with colour, with text-based art à la Chris Wool, or with depictions of inspiring interiors. ‘The outcomes are limitless.’ Marble may still be all the rage, but that’s not why Peer picked it. ‘I actually chose to work with high-definition imagery of marble…

‘IT seems like comfort these days is vastly preferred over challenge.’ These are the words of OMA director Rem Koolhaas, speaking about creativity at the Cannes Lions’ Oglivy & Inspire lectures. ‘The working environment now doesn’t really look like an office any more – deliberately.’ As he talks, a background presentation depicts informal office settings with staff in sneakers and jeans and walls covered in Post-its. ‘Creativity and innovation seem more and more isolated as unique experiences that need a kind of hothouse atmosphere to even occur.’ Outside the lecture room, his words are illustrated by images of playground-like offices – a phenomenon whose epicentre is Silicon Valley – that offer employees everything from table-tennis equipment to pubs. With such an array of amenities, why leave your home – or…

MENTION cubicles and what comes to mind are terms like ‘battery hens’ and ‘corporate zombies’ – certainly nothing remotely related to ‘stimulation’. But reading about the original intentions behind Action Office, a system that Herman Miller launched in 1968, you find that enclosed workstations – the original cubicles – were seen as a revelation when presented as the world’s first solution for open-plan offices. As president of the Herman Miller Research Corporation, Robert Propst analysed the way people worked in order to design flexible structures that could be combined in all sorts of ways. Clearly he wasn’t thinking of the kind of static arrangement his cubicles ended up being known for, but it’s this identity that has triggered a more casual approach to workspace design. Just imagine: around 2,800 employees…

THE world is becoming well accustomed to the idea that work doesn’t always take place between four walls in the hours from nine to five. Business traverses boundaries of space and time. Deals are struck in hotel lobbies. Proposals are composed on intercity trains and contracts signed in airport lounges. As a result, business has become even more ingrained in the hospitality industry. Buzzwords – a marketplace for them if there ever was one – such as bleisure, jobbatical and the near unforgivable bizcation – are becoming commonplace. The jobbatical gained prominence soon after Estonian entrepreneur Karoli Hindriks launched a website of that name in 2014, which hooks up employers with talented job-seekers worldwide who are interested in combining globetrotting with short-term work opportunities. Of course, the hospitality industry is…

‘AS technology becomes more significant in our lives and interiors, nature is brought into the mix as a healthy counterpart,’ says Nina Freund, CEO of Freund GmbH. ‘In fact, it has never been more important to create the right balance.’ Her company sets out to do this with moss walls and moss pictures, which are highlighted by real mosses and plants that give a green dimension to homes and offices. ‘We make sure they are easy to install, and we give ourcustomers extensive guidance,’ she says. ‘The mosses are cleaned and preserved using a special process. As aresult, they maintain their natural green colour and do not need artificial light, special care or fertilizers.’ In addition to their calming effect, the panels help regulate the indoor climate and absorb noise. Moss is also…

CHARGED with designing a pavilion to house IMM LivingInteriors’ collection of wall and floor coverings, Jasper Jansen and Jeroen Dellensen of i29 wanted to offer visitors a different take on the subject. ‘Robert Thiemann of Frame magazine gave us three major trends to address,’ Dellensen explains. ‘These are “Inspired by nature”, “Anything, anywhere” and “Smart materials”. Within these three themes, we developed an overall concept that can be communicated in several ways.’ Unity is provided by ‘making one big gesture that is strong enough to display all the different trends in one’. The pavilion plays with the idea of visibility and invisibility, using mirrored glass and lighting to generate a playful effect and to arouse visitors’ curiosity. ‘We wanted to play with optical illusion and space, and to trigger visitors…

Maruhiro Flagship Store by Yusuke Seki Nagasaki To show and sell earthenware in a store with a floor of cast-concrete bowls is not only a functional mode of advertisement – the shop’s open façade reveals a stunning installation of the products – but also a dilemma for visitors, who wonder whether they can walk on the surface. Taking the risk, many seize the opportunity to make selfies. This layered approach to retail design is worthy of further consideration. yusukeseki.com HIC Whitestore by XML Amsterdam Visitors to Amsterdam’s red-light district now have a pristine shop that stocks hangover medicine. A design reminiscent of contemporary art installations, Whitestore shows how retail outlets might function in the future. The design rigour that went into this project makes a strong substantive statement. x-m-l.org Band…