Innholdsfortegnelse for November - December 2017 i Frame

What inspired your concept? EREZ NEVI PANA: Most of us in the West are affected by stress-related illnesses, because we limit ourselves to one state of being, based on the idea that competition is the way to success. This attitude takes away the essence of harmony, the very thing that supports life’s most enjoyable, peaceful experiences. How do you plan to change the situation? I’m convinced that stress has an impact on people who do not meditate and who are most likely unaware of the power of consciousness. My design can help them use the state of consciousness for self-healing. Can we call it a placebo? Possibly. Participants in medical experiments who are given placebo pills often have a positive outcome – one that’s similar to that of participants who…

DIANA BORN IN Bavaria, Germany, Diana Scherer moved to London to pursue her dream of becoming a fashion designer, but life took a different turn when she met her Dutch partner and had a baby. The family relocated to Amsterdam, where Scherer studied art and photography at the Rietveld Academy. After graduating in 2002, she focused on art photography until a portrait series she made featuring plants and their roots prompted a change of direction. Intrigued by root systems, she began to develop techniques for manipulating them. Just two years later, as well as exhibiting the resulting textile-like pieces as works of art, she’s investigating their potential as new materials. Two years ago you were an art photographer. Today you’re a plant-root artist and a materials researcher. How did you…

CAPE TOWN – Africa’s first museum of contemporary art unites three visions. Art collector Jochen Zeitz, curator Mark Coetzee and the V&A Waterfront banded together to conceive the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA), which occupies nine floors of a historical – and heritage-protected – grain silo in South Africa’s Cape Town. The 9,475-m2 museum – whose permanent collection was accumulated privately over the past 15 years by Zeitz himself – includes over 6,000 m2 of display space. Zeitz MOCAA shares its premises with The Silo Hotel, a project by hospitality group The Royal Portfolio. London-based Heatherwick Studio was responsible for both the interior of the museum and the exterior of the entire building, and The Royal Portfolio’s Liz Biden designed the hotel spaces. Externally, the biggest visible…

BEIJING – While most interiors are the result of an additive process, Lily Nail Salon in Beijing is an exercise in subtraction. Archstudio seems to have filled Lily completely before carving out a series of voids. Chief designer Han Wenquiang wanted to achieve a natural environment – a signature of the studio – for a type of business rooted in the artificial, while giving its client’s customers the unusual sensation of sitting inside a hill. Through a large glazed façade, passers-by can see the abstracted slope inside, as it rises gently and irregularly inwards from the entrance. Excavated from the mound are seven ‘caves’ of different dimensions, which are revealed or concealed depending on the observer’s perspective. The resulting experience makes each void feel alternately isolated and connected to the…

NEW YORK CITY – The Melissa flagship in New York City, having relocated from Greene Street to a larger retail space in SoHo, is a dynamic jungle of irregular geometries infused with layers of reflection and abstract moving imagery. In fascinating flux, the entrance to the shoe store is ‘a pyramidal, kaleidoscopic funnel that sucks people from Broadway into the store’, as its designer, Muti Randolph, puts it. Like the Brazilian brand’s recent Covent Garden showroom, also created by Randolph, the SoHo space has a main entrance and one room that accommodates installations, including interactive works that are driven by visitors’ movements and a Kinect sensor. The imagery that Randolph designed for the store’s August opening – and for segueing between seasonal installations by various artists – recalls a drawing…

MIAMI – Crafting a shop interior is all about understanding the message of your client’s brand. In the case of In-Sight, the message is ‘bold’. ‘Being bold is a strategy for maintaining a concept store’s singular image within the ocean of different brands, styles and languages that compete against one other in a confined space,’ says Jaime Oliver of Spanish design studio Ohlab. ‘It’s a way to create coherence and clarity.’ Housed in Miami’s Brickell City Centre shopping mall, the 170-m2 all-white retail space is the first US-based outlet of a multi-label brand with a number of locations in Spain. A cheeky take on In-Sight’s binocular-themed logo, the interior is dominated by a series of intersecting circles that give rise to various display modules on both sides of a wide…

OFFICES ARE not best known for their flexibility. Directly descended from the monastic scriptoriums of the Middle Ages and the clerical counting houses of the Industrial Revolution, today’s offices are still largely about control, management and productivity. They are architectural edifices to efficiency, where top-down rules and regulations are imposed on indentured workers. The situation is changing, however. Digital technology has transformed not only our behaviour as consumers but also the way we operate as producers. Contemporary office workers no longer need a complex corporate structure in order to get things done; they have access to a whole host of digital tools that make entire departments of traditional businesses redundant. A growing sense of employee empowerment means that the office as we know it is under attack. Workers are no…

‘We can use technology to control the “time” needed to change people’s perception of space’ FOR SOME TIME NOW, the internet and iCloud have allowed us to retrieve information on demand, virtually eliminating the need for paper. Today’s advanced digital technologies go even further: what we think of as ‘fixed interiors’ can become spaces that change in response to human movement. TeamLab, an artist collective of digital technologists, has proved that interactive art can arouse a feeling of joy. The next step was to design a responsive workplace environment. It’s no secret that technology-driven companies are keeping their hard-working employees happy with mind-blowing workplaces, but the office is also a place for meetings that sometimes include external visitors. It’s crucial to convey an image to ‘outsiders’ that reflects the corporate…

It’s no accident that the co-working space is often derived from a hospitality original. The growth of entrepreneurial culture is a key factor in this development. A good example is Soho Works, an offshoot of members’ club and hospitality group Soho House in London. As start-ups multiply, so too does the need for workspaces that offer not only Wi-Fi but also a sense of community, allowing micro businesses and solo entrepreneurs to reach out and support one another. Shared workspaces try to combine the comforts of home with the sociable atmosphere of a café or club. Offices of all kinds are joining in. No longer formal and hierarchical, they’ve learned a thing or two from the hippest hangouts. People need to collaborate and to focus, and offices increasingly cater to…

With specializations in cultural studies, film and communication studies, CHAHINEZ BENSARI earned a BA from Montreal’s McGill University, where she is currently pursuing an MA in communication studies. Bensari was involved in research at the University of Groningen’s Film Archive and the Moving Image Research Laboratory in Montreal. She gained writing and editing experience while working for Formerly Known As Magazine and interning for Frame. For this issue, she explored how architecture is influencing product design. Swedish photographer MAJA FLINK lives in Copenhagen and works in both Denmark and Sweden. Portraits are her speciality. Among her subjects are professionals in a variety of fields, ranging from fashion and art to politics and science. At present she is working on her second book, which features photographs of families from five Scandinavian…

Talk us through your concept. ALLISON CRANK: Like the immaterial forces that cause so much of today’s stress – looming emails, social pressures, et cetera – my design is largely intangible: a hypnotherapeutic dream world in which you’re guided to focus on finding balance and whose virtual-reality component is affected by your physiological senses. What does the guide do – and who is it? None other than Alice in Wonderland’s Cheshire cat. He guides your hypnotic state – ‘you are getting very sleepy’ – by instructing you to concentrate on your breathing in an attempt to relax both body and mind. But the beauty of working with virtual elements lies in the opportunity to transform and customize the world you inhabit. For some, the therapist could be a Cheshire cat,…

Most people go to parks to relax, but that doesn’t seem to work for you . . . ANNA SITNIKOVA: Today’s parks are unnatural, meaningless and disconnected, because they are designed in opposition to the rest of the city. Even though they represent nature in an urban environment, they lack the natural components of change, heterogeneity and idiosyncrasy – qualities that are, funnily enough, embedded in the city. Somehow cities have become more natural than parks. What can be done to improve the situation? In order to de-stress staff, many modern offices are like greenhouses. But what if a city’s breathing spaces – its parks – flourished with offices? Expanding office life to fill these spaces would restore a heterogeneous, idiosyncratic environment in the midst of a natural setting, while…

ETIENNE ‘The retail experience should be contextualized within its neighbourhood’ ‘BEIRUT’S DESIGN landscape is a virgin terrain with great potential for becoming a regional pioneer,’ says Armenian-born designer Etienne Bastormagi as we drive around the city that’s been his home since childhood – a place he calls ‘very progressive’. As a first-time visitor, that’s exactly the impression I’m having, not least because the city is hosting Beirut Design Week and celebrating its inaugural Beirut Pride as we speak – events that plant a city known for its buzzing nightlife even deeper into the heart of today’s developing Middle East. Regardless of the festivities, however, it’s impossible to ignore the effects of a 15-year-long civil war and the current Syrian crisis, severe challenges to the city’s resilience. The resulting slightly chaotic…

CHANGCHUN – Nothing better demonstrates the growing prosperity and sophistication of China than Setsugekka Japanese Cuisine, a restaurant whose upscale aesthetics rival those of its counterparts in Tokyo. And it’s located not in one of the major eastern cities, as one would expect, but in Changchun, China’s most northerly provincial capital. The city of eight million was laid out by the Japanese to serve as the administrative centre of Manchukuo, a puppet state established in 1932, and is now a hub of the automobile industry. Given the brutal history of Japan’s occupation of this region, it’s even more remarkable that the smartest restaurant in town should be an expression of traditional Japanese values. Tianwen Sun, principal of Shanghai Hip-Pop Architectural Decoration Design, found inspiration in the northern climate and in…

LONDON – Aberrant Architecture’s palette for a school in London’s De Beauvoir Town is an adventurous defiance of monochromatic interiors. The East London practice and think-tank introduced refreshing tones – with a grown-up twist – into the Rosemary Works School. For the second phase of the ongoing project, Aberrant reimagined the main hall of the Edwardian structure as a multipurpose space. Curtains in warm pastels – complemented by several in a rich purple with a striking resemblance to Pantone’s recently released Love Symbol #2, a tribute to the late singer, Prince – form both an aesthetic backdrop and an acoustic barrier for the school’s new gathering area. Hanging from a series of meandering rails, the curtains cleverly subdivide the hall. Varying in opacity, the durable drapery offers maximum flexibility for…

SUZHOU – Printed books have been around for more than 500 years and are likely to outlive all the digital devices we currently use and most of those we can imagine. They are durable, portable and require no batteries, and they wait patiently on the shelf for a second reading, decades after the first. And yet, publishers and bookstores worldwide are under siege from online retailing and the distractions of social media. Jin Hao, a Chinese bookseller who is also a publisher, decided to replace his 20 small outlets in Shanghai, which were steadily losing business. He commissioned designer Li Xiang (Frame 116, p. 92) to create a spectacular interior in the historical city of Hangzhou, and he named it Zhongshuge after his second daughter, Zhongshu. The success of his…

Today’s offices need informal, unconventional and flexible meeting experiences THE WORLD OF WORK is changing and with it the conventional office of the 20th century. IT companies have been leaders when it comes to finding new workplace solutions, but they are no longer alone, as shown by the new Milan office of QuintilesIMS. The US company provides support to various health-related industries and advises both commercial companies and governmental agencies. Just a few steps from Milan’s main railway station and across from Gio Ponti’s iconic Pirelli Tower are the headquarters of the corporation’s latest Italian branch, refurbished by Milanese architects Nicola Russi and Angelica Sylos Labini of Laboratorio Permanente. Inside the five-storey building, a flexible modular frame incorporates a variety of functions, ably combining spaces for nose-to-the-grindstone activity with the…

As the pace of change in business accelerates, linear ‘design-once’ offices are becoming a thing of the past. Today’s keyword is ‘future-proof’, which describes workplaces that can respond to changing times, evolving needs and a probable succession of different occupants. Naturally, office architecture, furniture and systems all play major roles in facilitating the new flexibility, hence the rise of the modular office, which consists of personal work environments that can be arranged in any number of configurations. Office-system companies are also involved in the collection of feedback – on space use, work patterns, employee wellness and efficiency – in order to ensure that the workspace, whatever form it may take, is always up to the job. The corner office as a status symbol is being relegated to history, as 21st-century…

BIG DEVELOPMENTS are afoot at Domotex, the leading trade fair for floor coverings, which will take place with more than 1,400 booths in Hannover, Germany, from 12-15 January 2018. A new exhibition layout will bundle product segments for a clearer overview of the market and will feature Unique Youniverse, a theme that embraces such trends as personalization, self-determination and singularity. Exhibiting brands selected by a panel – chaired by architect Peter Ippolito of Ippolito Fleitz Group – will have the opportunity to co-design a display area in Hall 9, which will be separated into four experimental zones. In addition to Flooring Spaces and Living Spaces, the Nu-Thinkers zone will be dedicated to forward-thinking projects by student designers and architects from the universities of Hannover, Mainz and Saarbrücken: their presentations are…

BEIJING – Having been a guitarist in a rock band for over a decade, architect and designer Cao Pu wanted to replicate that addictive on-the-road feeling in his latest endeavour. Together Hostel, located in Beijing’s Fengtai District, is inspired by music festivals. Its interior reveals a utopian, open-plan expanse that accommodates performance, group activities and lodging for 120 guests. The young team behind Together Hostel rents two floors of a traditional Chinese hotel, keeping costs low. Differentiating the project from other cheap lodgings in Beijing, however, is a minimalist decor, common areas for work and entertainment, and a target group consisting of millennials. The second floor of the building, where the music-festival theme takes hold, was formerly a grand restaurant complete with private rooms and garish chandeliers. Cao Pu pulled…

MORA – Visitors to the main exhibition room at Portugal’s Museu Interactivo do Megalitismo (Megalithic Museum) may feel as if they’ve stepped onto the stage of an excavation-themed theatre piece. Designed by P-06 and Site Specific Arquitectura, the project is housed within a former train station in Mora, a small municipality in central Portugal. Last year CVDB Arquitectos converted the station and its warehouses into two museum buildings and added two new buildings. P-06 and Site Specific led the process that brought the region’s megalithic findings into the museum, where they pay homage to the often invisible archaeological work that goes on behind the scenes. A gallery environment with black walls, floors and ceilings inevitably draws viewers’ gazes to a series of centrally positioned wooden structures inspired by technical markings…

CHONGQING – Daipu Architects’ 2 Cups bar in Chongqing is the first instalment in a series of renovation projects intended to recoup a piece of China’s too-fast, too-generic, en masse construction boom of the past two decades. The first challenge was to remake an interior in a mixed-use concrete high-rise within a width of only two column spans and an overall area of less than 100 m2. The second was to frame the mountainous Yuzhong Peninsula skyline and a distant view of the Yangtze River from both inside and outside the revamped venue. Architect Dai Pu’s solution is a voluptuous wooden ridge that appears to rise from a concrete floor. He translated Yuzhong’s undulating, irregular, alpine landscape into human-scale furnishings that were designed digitally, CNC-carved from solid wood and assembled…

TOKYO – As the name suggests, One@Tokyo is the only hotel of its kind in the Japanese capital. At some distance from the city’s central shopping and commercial districts, the Kengo Kuma-designed venue is in Oshiage, an area in northern Tokyo dotted with workshops and factories. If that makes the hotel more difficult to reach than your average accommodation, One@Tokyo also disguises its function. Passers-by could easily assume they’ve stumbled upon a local café rather than a place to spend the night. And there may be a neon light, but rather than signalling ‘hotel’, it’s simply in the shape of an @ symbol. That said, One@Tokyo does stand out. Kuma’s dramatic and somewhat brutal arrangement of timber boards spans the façade and surrounds the ground-floor entrance to the hotel lobby.…

IN JAPAN, a full-time employee spends an average of 68,400 hours at his or her workplace before reaching retirement age. The calculation comes from Jun Nakahara, an associate professor at the University of Tokyo who researches human learning environments. Even though many companies, especially those in Nordic countries, have introduced standing desks and other health-focused furniture into the office, sitting still occupies a large portion of the employee’s time – a fact that explains why Japanese office-furniture supplier Okamura launched the ergonomic Contessa in 2002 and, owing to the chair’s success, continued to research the art of sitting ever since. Fifteen years have passed, and a new and improved version – Contessa Seconda – has just been released. When we speak with Takuya Takahashi, who represents Okamura’s marketing division, he…

THE IDEA for the open-plan office has its roots in 1950s Hamburg, when design group Quickborner devised Bürolandschaft, a concept that would bring down walls, group workers of all levels together and eradicate hierarchy. Some aspects of the strategy may have gone back into the box by the 1980s, but Bürolandschaft’s essence is still at play in today’s office landscape, particularly in tech companies, co-working environments and organizations focused on teamwork and sharing. ‘Flexible spaces and technological solutions built into the office ecosystem’ are what Jesús Llinares describes as the main forces in the contemporary workplace. Llinares is the CEO of Andreu World, a Spanish manufacturer of furniture for the office, hospitality, the home and the outdoors. The company was founded over 60 years ago; a small woodworking studio would…

As office recycling programmes multiply, office furniture itself is increasingly likely to be made from reused materials or to be recycled in its entirety. According to Technavio, the market for recycled office furniture in the USA will be worth US$2.68 billion by 2020. Driving this growth is the rising pressure on businesses to become more sustainable and more environmentally and socially responsible. Urgently needed are changes in public awareness, targeted government legislation, and people who aspire to work for companies that actively contribute to tackling the problem of climate change. Demands on businesses to keep office costs low are a further factor. Recycled furniture pieces typically cost 30 to 50 per cent less than new pieces, thus offering substantial savings. What’s more, they can give a space the uniquely distinctive…