Innholdsfortegnelse for July - August 2021 i Frame

The news that many of us want to continue working more flexibly has been shown across innumerable recent studies. What’s often been lacking is more granular detail on how we want that flexibility to manifest, and what cost burden workers are willing to take on to achieve it. A new survey by Accenture, covering almost 10,000 respondents across 19 countries, adds some colour. Specifically that almost four-fifths (79 per cent) would like to work from a third space at least some of the time. What’s more, over a half would be willing to pay up to $100 a month for access to a café, bar, hotel or retailer with dedicated workspace. Analysts are confident this presents a huge opportunity for retail and hospitality brands. ‘I think the shift away from…

The new headquarters of international law firm Milbank are in a building designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox. But at a time when corporations the world over are debating whether workers will go back to the office – or not – post-pandemic, isn’t it really what’s inside that counts? If so, Washington, DCbased studio LSM did the interior architecture and collaborated with Italian workspace solutions brand UniFor to furnish it. Milbank made its move to Hudson Yards after 150 years on Wall Street, a handful of subway stops to the south. Because the firm bought into ten floors (27,000 m2) of the Gold LEED-certified building while it was still under construction, LSM was able to incorporate dramatic design elements, including two double-height terraces on the 35th floor, framing spirit-inflating views of…

With in-person collaboration being one of the main reasons for employees to return to the physical office at least part time postpandemic, there is an increased need for flexibility to be embedded in the design of workspaces. The main campus building for IT logistics company IGZ in Germany shows how everything from the architectural structure to the selection of the construction materials and furnishings can contribute to a building’s ability to bend. FALKENBERG For the 2021 edition of the yearly State of Remote Work survey, Buffer asked 2,300 remote workers about their biggest struggles. Collaboration and communication difficulties were second on the list, followed by loneliness and preceded by ‘not being able to unplug’. What’s important here is to note the difference in responses from those who worked remotely as…

01 Family members’ clubs are a fast-growing global trend. In 2021 Maggie & Rose opened two new spaces, in London and Shanghai, and plans to open a further three clubs in China this year. It also has plans to launch in North America, but these are on hold due to the coronavirus pandemic. The communityminded nursery group N Family Club plans to open ten sites across London and southeast England in 2021. 02 With the highest concentration of family members’ clubs, London has a longstanding market-driven approach to childcare. This is down to a shortage of day-care places and high costs. According to the OECD, 36% of a UK couple’s average earnings are spent on childcare. In New Zealand it is 37% and in the US, 33%. 03 A report…

Jeffrey Liu and Haylie Chan propose a new typology of community-based affordable housing for a low-rise, lowdensity city. Your home base Los Angeles was the starting point for your contribution to The Challenge. Why? JEFFREY LIU: In introducing densified living as a solution to the housing shortage, we were interested in what form density could take within a sprawling, low-density city such as Los Angeles. While LA is dictated largely by single-family residential zoning, historical multifamily housing typologies such as the bungalow court and the dingbat reveal possibilities for densification in the city. HAYLIE CHAN: Indeed. Built mostly between the 1910s and the 1930s, the bungalow court arranged several small houses around a central outdoor walkway on a single lot. The typology provides certain amenities inherent to single-family homeownership, such…

A K-shaped recovery means that the wealthy will exit the pandemic not merely unharmed, but with ample extra liquidity and enthusiasm to spend; being unable to shop and travel freely really adds up when you’re in the top tax bracket. That’s great news for the luxury end of the hospitality market. What that wealthy clientele values in a hospitality offer will have undoubtedly been shaped by the trauma of recent events, however. The excitement of being able to access new experiences once again will be tempered by the need to build trust around those you’re sharing it with. For members’ clubs, that means their ability to engineer social serendipity within a bubble of siloed safety has never been more prescient. Certainly, that rush to firm up the boundaries of our…

In Frame 131, the last issue of 2019, we did a deep dive into the design of living facilities for senior citizens. The context then was that life expectancy was booming, with predictions of a 4.4 year rise over the coming two decades according to research published in The Lancet. The same study predicted that, in leading nations such as Japan, Singapore, Spain and Switzerland, most citizens living in 2040 will likely live to see their 85th birthday. The caveat was that, while we were forecast to live longer, we weren’t necessarily living well during those final years. Could the design of care homes and retirement communities – a typology long lacking in innovation – help overcome that? 2020 quickly reasserted how poor much of the extendedcare home stock across…

The paleolithic period – or ‘Stone Age’ – has an evocative place in the modern popular imagination. It looks both backward and forward, an ancient clean slate from which to project and describe humanity’s near future. While The Flintstones are a prehistoric family, their lives are enmeshed in the trappings of an emerging post-war modernity: domestic appliances, fast food and entertainment. We see this duality emerge once again, between the Stone Age and modernity, expressed in a new Modern Stone Age. The character of these spaces eludes and obscures the hand of human design and planning. The sinewy columns, misshapen doorways and globular window portals appear gelatinous, like extruded, misshapen bone marrow. Form is persistently organic, never repeating to the point of motif or feature. Territories morph and billow onwards,…

LEGACY Generations of Creatives in Dialogue Legacy is a star-studded, cross-generational compendium of key conversations with and between some of the most revered creative minds in recent history. It prompts a radical reappraisal of how we examine the concept of influence as an empowering call to action, one ultimately aimed at furthering innovation and intrepid experimentation. €39 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…

Until recently, 3D printing’s viability as a large-scale production process seemed more fanciful than factual. But things are starting to change. In April, for example, a Dutch couple in Eindhoven became Europe’s first tenants of a 3D-printed house. ‘In addition to affordable homes, the market increasingly demands innovative housing concepts,’ said Yasin Torunoglu, alderman for housing and spatial development for the municipality of Eindhoven in a statement. ‘With the 3D-printed home, we’re now setting the tone for the future: the rapid realization of affordable homes with control over the shape of your own house.’ But what exactly is ‘rapid’? To use the Eindhoven house as an example: It has 94 m2 of living space and, according to one of the parties involved in the construction, the actual time needed to…

01 CHOOSE MATERIALS CONSCIOUSLY The housing shortage shouldn’t turn into a materials shortage, nor should it put the precarious future of the planet at further risk. Look to sustainable, renewable materials that are low in embodied carbon – some of which can actually sequester carbon – as well as existing and waste materials. 02 RETHINK TIRED METHODS Some of the ‘old’ ways of building are simply slow and inefficient. The use of new technologies like 3D printing and effective methods like prefabrication can rapidly speed up the process, even if human hands come in to finish the job. 03 CREATE SYSTEMS, NOT PRODUCTS Rather than one-off, customized designs – products that are handed over to their end users – housing can be considered more systematically. How can it be scaled…

The secondary effects of the pandemic have impacted different communities in different ways, but there are a few universals that seemingly transcend borders: chief among them, a deterioration in the quality of our sleep. According to the BBC, so called ‘coronasomnia’ has impacted up to 20 per cent of the people in China, 25 per cent in the UK and 40 per cent of the Greek population. Globally, Google searches for insomnia hit an all-time high last year. If you’re nominally in the business of providing customers with a good night’s sleep, 2021 should be ripe with challenges and opportunities. I say nominally, because for the hotel industry, sleep hasn’t felt like it’s been a top priority for some time. In the 2010s, the focus shifted elsewhere, towards the food…

We’ve written at length about retail’s key strategies for physical space in an increasingly online-oriented market. In short: create a destination, foster communities, engage your audience. But more recently there’s been another shift that’s less about what retail spaces offer and more about how they offer it. It stems from a growing consensus that fixed equals risky, whether that ‘fixed’ refers to a fit-out or a tenancy agreement. As retail expansion director Doortje van der Lee of eyewear brand Ace & Tate explained in Frame 140: ‘Traditionally retail has been about signing a lease for five to ten years and staying in one place… Landlords are starting to open up to different ways of working together, and creating modular stores gives us the flexibility to pick up our concept and…

LITTLE SPACE, LONDON Little Space is part of Third Space, a 4,366-m2 premium health club that opened in Islington in 2020. The group has six clubs in London but decided to open a dedicated kids’ club as part of its latest offering, which can either be used as a drop-off childcare while parents work out, or as a space for the family to play together. It has a training pool, sports hall, crèche, dance studio, climbing area, athletic rig and restaurant. thirdspace.london A new type of private members’ club has been popping up in the likes of London, Shanghai and New York City. Not places for hobnobbing city types, media darlings or ultracool creatives, but for families. These spaces are designed to appeal to adults as much as kids, with…

ALPI WAVY FIR The wood-manufacturing experts at Alpi have paired up with London-based design duo Raw Edges to introduce Wavy Fir, a surfacing collection in two colour variants. Raw Edges drew inspiration from the ‘typical striped grain of fir and pine’ for the FSC-certified series, which is crafted from poplar wood sustainably sourced from Italian arboriculture sites. The designers, wanting to emphasize the intriguing graphic patterns of natural wood, opted to present the surfaces by shaping them into curvaceous forms. alpi.it MEMPHIS MEDUSA TABLE Originally designed in 1982, Masanori Umeda’s Medusa Table for Memphis has been renewed for modern times. The piece was presented as part of Umeda’s Post Design collection Night Tales at Milano Design City. It’s a sculptural design that changes colour depending on the lighting and viewing…