Innholdsfortegnelse for July - August 2020 i Frame

Wash your hands, keep your distance, sneeze in your elbow, wear a face mask: it’s remarkable how fast the world population has adapted to what we have come to call the New Normal. Other phenomena we’re now used to: plastic screens at checkout, tape on the ground that reminds us to stay 1.5 metres away from others, stickers on shop doors that make it clear that no more than three people may be inside at the same time, bars that sell drinks through their windows, top restaurants that offer only takeaways and deliveries, and couriers that drive back and forth to drop off parcels and food. Humans are inventive. Disaster strikes, we get scared, we rearrange our lives, devise measures, invent clever things and carry on where we left off.…

It was a combination of frustration with existing office offerings, and inspiration from the service-led hospitality industry that urged Stijn Geeraets, Maarten Van Gool and Serge Hannecart to start Fosbury & Sons in 2016. They were amazed by the fact that most workspaces, unlike hotels and restaurants, don’t look anything like a place that you would actually want to spend time in. And, in terms of adopting progress, they often lag behind their users. ‘The majority of offices still look the same as they did 50 years ago – bland and monotonous – but the needs of today’s generations are vastly different,’ says Geeraets. ‘What we are seeing is a hunger for more autonomy, fulfilment and synergy, coming from everyone – whether that be a team of lawyers, a web-design…

TOKYO Multigenerational living is already popular in Japan, a country with one of the world’s oldest populations (over a quarter of its inhabitants are aged 65 or above). And with home ownership becoming increasingly unattainable in many parts of the world and an aging global population at risk of social isolation, the trend is likely to take off in other areas. BETA’s Three Generation House in Amsterdam, for instance – which was nominated in the Innovation category of this year’s Frame Awards – restores the grandparents-children-grandchildren configuration common to the Netherlands until the Second World War. Rather than deem vertical circulation strictly functional by hiding a stairwell away in the recesses of the building, the architects at BETA made it a central, sculptural feature. Having a head start, Japan can…

History has already shown us quite how drastic an effect disease can have on spatial design. Many of the tropes of modernist interior architecture were inflected with a desire to develop more hygienic spaces, spurred by outbreaks of diseases like tuberculosis. The sanatoria designed to treat them, with their emphasis on light, air, simplicity of form and material, still inform what we think of as aspirational today. Regardless of whether Covid-19 will continue to play such an outsized role in future design, it will undoubtably impact how we create space. This will be true across sectors, but is perhaps most influential in retail, where we’re witnessing an era of maximalist store design. That means exploratory (read winding) circulation routes, esoteric material palettes and an excess of surfaces, all of which…

Research by Global Workplace Analytics predicts that up to 30 per cent of people will continue to work from home several days a week post-pandemic. Many first-stage reoccupation proposals already include provisions for companies to work in an A- and B-team structure, and it looks like a behaviour that might stick. As employers come to terms with conducting departments that are constantly shifting between spaces, they are going to have to develop systems that help them manage where people are at what time, when they have to be together and when they can be apart. They will need to work across contexts, from home to car to office, and from room to room. This idea of choreography – directing movement – will inflect every aspect of the relationship between user…

01 DISTRIBUTE YOUR BRAND Brands across sectors have discovered that they can use a combination of media and delivery to distribute their offer at distance. Chefs are out in full force on social media, for instance, and have even beamed themselves into homes via videos that introduce their delivered dishes. Designing spaces that make it easier for you to document and disseminate the core of your on-site experience will mean these new channels complement, rather than compete with, existing trade. 02 CREATE SAFETY-FIRST SEMIOTICS Companies that communicate the cleanliness of their premises will be the ones who win back consumer trust. The trick is how to do this without reverting to an aesthetic equation in which safe equals sterile. Our Post-Clinical Look Book from Frame 130 is a good place…

It’s the 26th of March – my boyfriend’s birthday – when I scribble my first thoughts for this column. Under normal circumstances, we would go for a way-too-fancy dinner at one of Amsterdam’s many hospitality venues. But it’s not a normal day, by any stretch of the imagination. It’s day number ‘I-stopped-counting’ of the ‘intelligent lockdown’ that the Dutch government put into place, resulting in many bars and restaurants being forced to shut their doors. And so my reservation at the i29-designed restaurant in the newly renovated monumental Felix Meritis building – forced to close even before its official opening – was cancelled a few days earlier. Inevitably and understandably, but also unfortunately. Having takeaway delivered to our doorstep instead just doesn’t feel as celebratory. Or so I thought. During…

KONSTANTIN GRCIC: I was raised in Wuppertal, a German city shaped by its textile industry. My father was an immigrant from former Yugoslavia and my mother, German. She was much younger than he was, so in a way they represented two different generations. It was special, these completely different lives coming together. My father’s passion was collecting 18th-century drawings, while my mother was a contemporary art dealer. Antique furniture from my father’s side lived next to 1970s plastic Italian furniture. Being exposed to a continuous juxtaposition of old and new heavily influenced my understanding of design. I see myself as a designer of today, looking towards the future, but I always draw on my profound experience of seeing old and new live perfectly alongside each other. My sister and I…

When it comes to amassing material resources, younger practices don’t have the advantage of more established studios with centralized offices, which have spent decades assembling samples for their libraries. And that’s assuming these fledgling firms even have a home base. Although they’ve been late to adopt the gig economy, architects and engineers in the construction industry are expected to join the freelancing frenzy. Ramzi Jreidini – the CEO of Handiss, a freelancing platform for the architecture and engineering industry – predicts that the gig economy will open up ‘new talent pools and international workforces into construction for the first time… serving an industry that desperately needs new workers on the ground’. Since freelancers often operate from co-working spaces, it was only a matter of time before suppliers in the design-project…

Earlier this year, photographer Seph Lawless released Abandoned Malls of America: Crumbling Commerce Left Behind. The book – which joins the growing list of media dedicated to what’s been dubbed ‘ruin porn’ – memorializes the downfall of the shopping mall, which some consider to be the architectural embodiment of American consumerism. And it’s not only on US soil that shopping malls are struggling. Take China, for instance, a country found by CBRE research to have built half of the brand new mall space in the world in 2013, only to see 30 per cent vacancy in malls in 2014. Or the UK, where a significant number of shopping malls have been teetering on the edge of administration for several years. With new pressures brought on by the coronavirus crisis, even…

POST-PANDEMIC SPACE Checkouts have been silent, desks empty and stools upturned on the bar. The current pandemic has pressed pause on the businesses whose activity usually fills these pages. But now is not the time to be inactive. If we are to share space with one other again then the nature of those spaces will have to be rethought, incrementally at first and then more fundamentally as we start to build our capacity to better weather such crises in the future. Many of the clues as to what this could look like already exist – what’s required now is to identify, invest and implement them more fully.…

I’m reporting from Warea, population around 100. It’s somewhere probably 99.9 per cent of Frame readers have never heard of. I’d never heard of it myself until a few years ago, when my brother bought a property out of the city – even though it’s only 40 minutes’ drive from New Plymouth, the place where I grew up and that my parents still call home. It’s beautiful here – fewer than 100 metres to the ocean in one direction and a view to majestic Mount Taranaki in the other. Mount Taranaki’s main claim to fame is its role as Mount Fuji in the 2003 Tom Cruise film The Last Samurai. The wider region of Taranaki served as the set, earning it the cringeworthy alias ‘Tom-inaki’ at the time. If that…

After Anita Fontaine studied fine art photography in Australia, her interests diverged into video games. ‘I was obsessed with what felt like the ultimate medium for all these textures and assets I was generating,’ she says. She pictured someone walking around in these virtual environments, exploring her imagined spaces, surfaces, textiles and photographs. Environments that offered infinite possibilities. Schooling in the world of video games ensued, as did tech-related art residencies. Through her art practice she met Geoffrey Lillemon, who became her long-time creative collaborator. Until 2014 they operated under the alias Champagne Valentine to create ‘art for brands’, with an emphasis on using emerging technologies. Now based in New Zealand, Fontaine has founded future labs in the advertising industry, worked for start-up incubators in San Francisco, and directed films…

In the era of social media spectacle, interiors have become theatres for publicity, implicitly optimized for content capture and screen-based appraisal. However, accelerated by newly established lockdown etiquette, Instagram-friendly design appears to be entering its denouement. Nascent signals of the experience economy-driven switch to ‘privacy mode’ can be read in dark hospitality spaces, where daylight exposure is replaced by the mystery of nocturnal shadow, and deep intimacy is offered as respite from shallow conspicuity. A veil of secrecy enshrouds hospitality enclaves, shielding the activity within. As a means of hiding in plain sight, building facades adopt subtle strategies of deflection, distortion and disguise. The dull glow of waxed concrete and bronze exteriors, tinted mirror windows and stained timber cladding evoke the elemental stillness of nature amid the chaos of the…

Broadly speaking, retail optimization centres on maximizing foot traffic and dwell time. The ideal metric for each will vary based on product and sector, with some prioritizing throughput while others aim to make customers linger longer in the hope of generating a higher basket total. Either way, apart from those at the premium end of the market, a critical mass of bodies is key. The pandemic has now taught consumers to desire the exact opposite. What this has meant on a practical level is the adoption of customer quotas in most major supermarkets, with long (socially distanced) queues a regular site across urban centres. Some have already been addressing this new pain point, with innovators like cannabis brand Curaleaf adopting Waitlist Me, an app traditionally used by restaurants to let…

Fred Erik’s inflatable attire suits up our society for social distancing Your project started with an observation… FREDERIK DESCHUYTTER: Indeed. While keeping a 1.5-m distance is quickly becoming the new normal, many of us are roaming public spaces in an imaginary bubble. Walking from A to B has evolved into a precisely planned act. People plot their routes to dodge all potentially dangerous encounters. Supermarkets fuel this behaviour by obligating the use of shopping carts. Thus they materialize the aforementioned mental bubbles with carts as bodily extensions, consequently solidifying the 1.5-m economy. In more extreme cases, individuals only enter public space wearing DIY suits, forcing bystanders to keep a sufficient distance. I want to build on these new phenomena. In what way? Given that pandemics and the accompanying 1.5-m society…