Innholdsfortegnelse for May - June 2022 i Frame

In the past two years there’s been a revolution that, more than ever before, has made our home the centre of our existence. For many, the physical separation between work and home has simply disappeared. In addition, even post-pandemic, people are still doing a lot of sports, learning and meditating at home – activities that generally took place outside of the house pre-pandemic. So, we’re using our housing stock much more intensively and completely differently than we did a few years ago, even though it wasn’t designed for that. Sure, the happy few have a ‘study’ that can double as a yoga room. But the truth is that John Doe’s home is too small rather than too generous and that he will therefore have to adjust either his behaviour or…

Tell us about the early days of your practice. BENJAMIN HUBERT: My early work consisted of concrete and cork lights, ceramics and other objects that were quite singular. I was interested in recontextualizing materials in simple yet expected typologies: the classic silhouette of a lamp, for example. Over time, I became much more interested in testing the properties of materials and began working with small, specialized producers throughout Europe. The years 2008 and 2009 were marked by austerity. Because banks were going bust, there was a return to what people innately valued. Craftsmanship, things that were less polarizing, became popular again. There was a desire for comfort. Everything was moving towards the idea of singular expression. For me, this approach eventually evolved into much more complex projects – not just…

Shopping was once a highly sensory experience, with physical stores attracting consumers based on touching and trying on future possessions. This tactility was first upended by e-commerce and disrupted further by the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, when concerns about the spreading of the virus suddenly transformed touch into a much-maligned term. After a prolonged period of touch deprivation, the impulse to experience the physicality of goods is reinvigorating offline retail. According to ICSC, as half of US consumers planned to make more visits to stores during the last holiday season, they cited being able to touch and feel products as one of the top reasons to make the trip. Retail designers are thus presented with an opportunity to experiment with how they engage customers’ senses. Typically, sensory retail would…

Particularly in the last few years, our homes have taken on a much greater and more diverse role in our lives, becoming not just our residences but our offices, social spaces, exercise rooms and more. In addition, the nuclear family has been replaced by a smorgasbord of domestic configurations and situations, and residential space in urban environments is becoming more sought after and expensive. All this begs the question: Why are typical homes so static? Carlo Ratti, founding partner of Carlo Ratti Associati and director of the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), believes the post-pandemic landscape is the perfect breeding ground for a home revolution. ‘Following the Spanish flu pandemic a hundred years ago,’ he says, ‘many countries thought about how homes could be built…

What could be more responsive than a home that doesn’t merely react to your needs, but anticipates them? ‘In the smart home of the future … AI platforms could serve as the brain for entire homes, learning about residents and coordinating and automating all of their various smart gadgets,’ writes Patrick Lucas Austin for Time. Think software that automatically aligns your calendar schedule with your wake-up alarm, tracks what music you want to hear at various times of the day or adjusts the heating and lighting based on your typical room usage. In some cases, the future is already here: the aforementioned Bumblebee system of drop-down furniture, for instance, is powered by software that relies on sensors to understand what you want, when you want it. Such systems can learn…

What were your first thoughts when answering this Challenge? SOFIE ASCHAN: What makes a home? Is it authenticity, your belongings, or a place to feel safe and calm? While our original homes were designed as places to relax and recharge, our future homes have, due to the pandemic and the much-appreciated hybrid work model, an additional role – to cater for performance and focus. Creating a well-functioning home office can be quite hard when it’s impossible to enlarge the space itself. Since many of us don’t have enough room to dedicate a space just to working, the office is instead shoved into a corner of the living room – an open area shared with other people, objects and functions. There’s a great amount of visual clutter attached to not being…

10 is the number of 3D-printed modules that are stacked to form Blue Tree, which is 199 cm tall when compiled. 2,540 discarded cups were transformed into indigo-dyed, sterilized paper pulp to feed a 3D printer and create Blue Tree. 60°C is the temperature at which the column is dried post-printing, helping to solidify the structure and ensure its potential as a loadbearing building element. 16 km is the maximum distance Blast Studio is willing to travel by bicycle to collect waste cups from London providers, thus eliminating transport emissions from its production process. 2,749,945 points – or in other words coordinates – were generated to guide the printer in shaping Blue Tree, whose form was designed using an algorithm that takes inspiration from natural tree trunks. blast-studio.com…

Most of you would’ve seen the images earlier this year: skiers and snowboarders flying in front of large concrete cooling towers, amid traditional-looking pagodas and the occasional small mountain. An odd scene, certainly. Let me explain how it came to be. The story of the life, death and rebirth of Beijing’s Shougang steel factory embodies all of the phases of the city’s urban development, and has a strong connection to the occurrences and legacies of both the 2008 and the 2022 Beijing Olympic Games. The site was established as the Shijingshan Steel and Iron Plant in 1919, following the fall of the Qing empire. The factory’s growth accelerated after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. In 1967 it was renamed the Capital Steel and Iron Corporation…

How did you two meet? What led you to start Back of the House together? THOMAS WARREN: I studied architecture and spatial design in Brussels, and then started working in production for many festivals and exhibitions in the architecture and design fields. That’s how I began collaborating with Anne Sophie. ANNE SOPHIE PREVOT: I got my start as a rock-concert photographer, travelling with bands like Aerosmith and Nirvana and taking pictures of the shows. I’m a workaholic – I started to get a little bored and do production with the tour managers. At that time, I was based in London, but eventually came back to France and began working on productions for television agencies. In time I moved to Brussels and entered the fashion world, where I met Thomas. For…

As if awakening from a prolonged state of hibernation, the emergence of vibrant interiors full of energy and life signifies the eager anticipation of warmer weather. Metaphors of organic growth and elemental transformation proliferate, inviting inspiration from the outdoors in verdant bursts of lime green and ultramarine. Uncanny aspects of nature are distilled and reimagined to imply Edenic abundance in unlikely places. In one instance, the abstract expression of a bamboo grove rendered in saturated hues offers an opportunity for forest bathing while browsing merchandise. The curation of an optimistic ambience is further fostered by insistence on full-spectrum, full-bleed finishes that flood rooms with the aesthetics of joy. Mood-boosting rainbow stripes enrich and uplift otherwise sleepy store interiors, harnessing maximalism and providing an invigorating source of irrepressible positivity. Striking signature…

From the gimmicky to the ingenious, spaces that magically flip between functions are in no way new. But the necessity for today’s homes to switch from family space to workspace to event space to gym (and everything in between), combined with the trend towards smaller living spaces in increasingly crowded cities, has given the movable movement renewed significance. ‘The need to do more things in one location, which isn’t always that large, has become palpable,’ says Benjamin Hubert (see p. 54), founder of design studio Layer, whose work addresses how we’ll live, work, travel and communicate in the future. ‘I think that the way to solve this in the future is through fluid, changeable, hybridized spaces. At one moment you can fold and close things and the next unfurl and…

Your Aperture Reality concept combines technology with the physical window. How come? CASEYSIMONE BALLESTAS: As an architect first and a technologist second, I concern myself with employing new spatial computing concepts for the built environment that can be implemented through retrofitting. In other words, as architects, we consider replacing a window before replacing the entire building. As such, in my concept we see augmented reality technology enter the home through the aperture of the window. Think of it as the updated version of double glazing, or akin to the emerging selective sound-dampening window technology by start-ups like DeNoize. How do you envision the future of the responsive home? Call me a luddite, but I don’t see the future of the home as a series of virtual reality pods. Rather, all…

If visiting Madrid Design Festival made anything more obvious to me, it’s that design is all around us, all the time. While Madrid is evidently a thriving urban expanse, the fifth edition of the festival revealed how the city, its residents and its most forward-thinking design professionals are combatting a range of issues unique – and less unique – to the Spanish capital. How can design help us deal with imminent, existential concerns? Since this question and its tangents are core to the design industry’s current landscape, contemplating them may seem like a routine redundancy. But the festival reinforced the importance of continued interrogation: If we stop asking these questions, we run the risk of neglecting our core issues or becoming too peripheral in how we address them. Confronting the…

MICHELE DE LUCCHI: I was not yet 30 years old when I met Ettore Sottsass, who gave me the opportunity to become a designer for Olivetti. At the time, Olivetti was the most important and well-known office machinery brand in Italy, perhaps even in Europe. In the same year, sometime in the late 1970s or early ’80s, I started the adventure of Memphis together with Ettore. You can imagine how fantastic it was to have these two kinds of experiences: the very professional one and the very avant-garde one. To see the world of industry from the inside while discovering a cultural alternative. Thanks to Ettore, I understood the role of a mentor in the world of design and architecture. He taught me how to see reality. He was half…

Since restaurants and cafés could be called the living and dining rooms of a city – places to entertain and fraternize outside of homes perhaps too small to host groups – their absence from the urbanscape during lockdowns created a significant social deficit. Heading back to hospitality hotspots was unsurprisingly high on the agenda when establishments reopened: when respondents to a 2020 Allegra Strategies survey of UK consumers were asked which three social outings they missed most during the lockdown from 17 suggested choices, an overwhelming number picked visiting cafés and coffee shops (second choice at 42 per cent), restaurants (fourth at 29 per cent) and pubs and bars (fifth at 19 per cent). Visiting friends and family topped the list (60 per cent), while travelling/day trips came in third…

We’ve long been accustomed to pre-defined spatial boundaries in the home – the living room, the bedroom, the bathroom – but what if our interiors were more open to interpretation? ‘I think we almost need to go back to the drawing board and re-think and re-evaluate what the home actually is,’ says Jenny Lee, creative director of Studio Aikieu and Ikea’s Life at Home Leader. ‘It’s not just about being pragmatic – this is where we sit and watch TV, this is where we sleep, this is where we eat. We need to start to think about a seamless fluid space that actually adapts to the different frameworks and needs of each individual.’ Lee’s description can be applied to a Madrid home by the designers at Takk, who also added…