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THE NEXT SPACE

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Models for a more liveable city Gender-neutral beauty hits salon spaces Bjarke Ingels: is BIG getting too big?

Post-Covid offices: dispersed, decentralized Luxury retailers turn to livestreaming ISSUE 136 SEP — OCT 2020 BX €19.95 DE €19.95 IT €24.90 CHF 30 UK £14.95 JP ¥3,570 KR WON 40,000

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CONTENTS 12 REPORTING FROM Singapore and New York City

BUSINESS OF DESIGN From phygital spectator experiences

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Rafael Gamo

Alastair Philip Wiper

to luxury-retail livestreaming

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28 INFLUENCER 3D artist and art director Santi Zoraidez Santi Zoraidez

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28

IN PRACTICE

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36 WHAT I’VE LEARNED BIG's Bjarke Ingels 44 I NTRODUCING Hong Kong-based architects MLKK 54 THE CLIENT % Arabica’s CEO Kenneth Shoji 60 LAUFEN Harnessing human waste Frame 136

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Parham Taghioff

65 SPACES Virtual (reality) exhibitions, genderneutral beauty and ritualistic retreats 116 JUNG The small-living switch 118 STREETSCAPE LAB 120 Turning the city inside out 136 Making streets more liveable Courtesy of 100 Architects

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Iwan Baan

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156

160 IN NUMBERS Toward inclusion: fact and figures 6

Contents

Courtesy of Lex Pott

147 MARKET From a complete micro kitchen to furniture for introverts

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Colophon

Hula

by Benjamin Hubert

INVERTING THE CITY

What will urban life look like post-pandemic? After decades of migration from the countryside to city centres, the concept of living in a city seems to have lost its shine. Millions of people have spent months in lockdown in their expensive, often small apartments.

Numerous facilities, including workplaces, theatres, restaurants and sports centres, have become no-go areas. Outdoor facilities? Nature? Too little, too unattractive. After years of planning and talking, mayors all over the world have had to take real action to make their cities more accessible to pedestrians and cyclists. Paris has laid down 50 km of bicycle paths in the past few months. Cities such as New York, Berlin, Denver and Philadelphia have marked off cycling zones on their roads, temporary or otherwise.

These are the first steps towards the city of the future. For it is certain that city centres as we know them will change dramatically in the coming years. The pandemic has only accelerated that process. What’s gone wrong with the metropolitan city, which until recently was so popular for its wide range of work, culture and leisure activities? First and foremost: the high cost of living. A combination of urban attractiveness, strongly growing tourism and the associated room rentals have led to housing shortages and rising prices. City centres are barely inhabited and mainly offer access to shops and restaurants. Most cities are continuously clogged with commuter and freight traffic and a system of bicycle paths is lacking.

Access to nature is scarce and not integrated into the urban fabric. Facilities such as hospitals, universities and libraries have for the most part been relegated to the suburbs. Not to mention the poor quality of the air and water, nor the enormous energy consumption.

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All in all, it’s not a rosy picture and Covid-19 hasn’t done it any good. Now that both employers and employees have noticed that work can be done from home, the exodus from cities worldwide has started.

In villages and provincial towns larger houses (with gardens!) are cheaper, there aren’t any traffic jams and access to nature is abundantly available. On the other hand, a visit to the theatre, a museum or a restaurant will require making an effort.

Are there no alternative models for a more liveable city? In this issue’s Lab, we’re taking a look at that. We’ve broken up the smallest infrastructural element, the street, into its constituent parts: façade, pavement, road and intersection. We show that almost every sector, from housing to health care, retail, work and wellness, will literally be turned inside out and oriented towards an urban life that will be more outwardly focused than ever before.

Robert Thiemann Editor in chief

Editorial

The smart choice. Everywhere.

Smart KNX-technology, international socket systems, refined design: installations from JUNG offer maximum comfort and flexible solutions for travelers from all over the world.

JUNG-GROUP.COM

Courtesy of BMW

business of design

18 Taking stock of the shelved smart city 22 Turning cars into commerce channels 24 Sports fans prepare to go phygital

What does Sidewalk Labs’ setback mean for the smart city?

The termination of Sidewalk Lab’s plans to transform a stretch of Toronto’s waterfront brought up questions about whether organizations such as Alphabet and their proxies have either the level of patience or the right organizational ethos to engage in large-scale urbanism.

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�

Business of Design

Picture Plane

Once destined to be the most extensive application of the smart-city principal yet seen, at the start of May Sidewalk Lab abruptly walked away from its project to transform a stretch of Toronto’s waterfront.

A subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., Sidewalk Labs was uniquely positioned in terms of both financial and intellectual resources to realize such an ambitious plan, one that involved the creation of a new neighbourhood ‘built from the internet up’ and that the organization described as ‘a testbed for emerging technologies, materials, and processes’.

What that would have meant in real terms ranged from heated sidewalks to automated garbage collection, all mastered by an array of sensors that could monitor the movement of people and inform long-term urban planning.

Having dominated the discussion about how future cities might be built for the last three years, what does the Quayside project’s ending mean for how we think about technologically enhanced urbanism

going forward, and for Toronto?

Despite its apparent failure, Jon Ramscar, executive vice president and managing director of CBRE Canada, remains sanguine about Quayside’s impact.

‘The smart city was a great vision for Canada’s future in technology and innovation,’ he tells us from his base in Toronto. ‘It was an ambitious goal with good intentions that created a lot of hope for the city.’

For others, any latent positives of the proposed smart neighbourhood were far outweighed by concerns about Sidewalk Lab’s ultimate intentions. ‘A lack of transparency and engagement as plans were drawn up, coupled with fears about the governance of data, meant the scheme threatened to derail long before the Covid crisis,’ explains Tom Symons, head of government innovation at Nesta. Liam Young, founder of the think-tank Tomorrows Thoughts Today and author of Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the Post Anthropocene, concurs: ‘Quayside was a trojan horse, an experiment

in radical surveillance and AI governance presented as a gesture toward community. It was unclear whether we would be customers or citizens of Quayside.’ Young points out quite how incongruous the project appeared at a time when the debate on digital rights and data as a public good has gained supremacy.

‘The days when access to the network was something we might opt into are long gone and all of the “internet-first” systems that Google was putting in place in their city should now be thought of as public infrastructure, a utility as fundamental as water, power and sewage,’ he argues.

It’s also worth reflecting on whether organizations such as Alphabet and their proxies have either the level of patience or the right organizational ethos to engage in large-scale urbanism.

‘The gleeful, fail-fast mentality of the tech industry with its culture of beta launches and hackathons always sat at odds with the slow art of city-making,’ says Christine Murray, founding director of The Developer. ‘The main problem

with experimental neighbourhoods are their permanence. A line of code can be rewritten, a website can be tweaked or deleted, but the legacy of a bad place is hard to unravel.’

Toronto’s waterfront will now be revitalized along different principals, and Ramscar is optimistic that ‘the opportunity still remains to balance stakeholder interests and to deliver on an exciting vision for urban innovation’. He also acknowledges that developments with any scale of ambition often go through several lifecycles before realization, signing off on the note that ‘it sometimes takes losing a deal to get it done’. In contrast, Murray shares a sense of relief with the multitude of Torontonians who have actively campaigned against Sidewalk Lab’s involvement in the future of their city. ‘The demise of Toronto’s Quayside project reminds me of a Cedric Price quote: “Technology is the answer, but what was the question?”’ PM

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Kriskadecor info@kriskadecor.com kriskadecor.com

With Kriska and Snina you can create versatile and personalized space dividers to reinforce the feeling of protection and physical distance. Among other functions, you can manage the flow of people, signpost common spaces and create different environments. In addition, the lightness of the material allows games of transparency and luminosity, achieving total aesthetic integration with the environment.

MiQ, New York by Sydness Architects / Design Republic / Emma Louise Ingham Design. Photo by Jon Nissenbaum.

Santi Zoraidez

in practice

28 Santi Zoraidez on balancing the real and the surreal 36 Bjarke Ingels on whether BIG is getting too big 44 MLKK on reviving elements from Hong Kong’s heritage 54 % Arabica on the end of the third-wave coffee boom

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In Practice

Buenos Aires-born 3D artist and art director SANTI ZORAIDEZ talks about the unlimited possibilities of computer-generated imagery, why it’s important to find a balance between the real and the surreal, and how digital channels can transform product presentation.

Words Floor Kuitert

Influencer

29

Digital environments and platforms have seen a surge in visitors and users over the past few months, which were defined by social distancing. Simultaneously, enforced by the cancellation of trade fairs, fashion weeks or any physical industry event for that matter, brands and manufacturers have felt a greater urge than ever to enter – and capitalize on – the ever-expanding virtual sphere. From AR-enabled furniture to in-game exclusive apparel and digital-only festival grounds: digitally generated versions of physical products and spaces are experiencing unprecedented growth. One of the creatives giving shape to these artefacts and environments is South-American 3D artist-cum-art director Santi Zoraidez. After starting his career in Buenos Aires, he found his way back there via Copenhagen and Berlin. However, Barcelona is already calling his now family of four. With his ability to create spellbinding digital images and animations, Zoraidez has built a client base that includes brands that are operating at the forefront of their industries, from Apple, LG and Nike to Ikea, Visplay and Cassina.

You gained experience at established creative studios – including Punga in Buenos Aires and Zeitguised in Berlin – before fully committing to the freelance life.

What has that brought you?

SANTI ZORAIDEZ: Before joining Punga, I had worked at more traditional agencies.

And until that time I had zero experience working on animation projects, so I got a crash course in digital creativity. I learned about 3D design, the use of colour, how to create balanced compositions, but also about how to tell stories, how to work with a storyboard and how to transform a brief into something unique and special. It felt like being in school while working on commercial projects, which ranged from advertising to TV channel branding. The team there, and especially the founder Tomi Dieguez, helped me realize in which direction I wanted to steer my career. I started to discover what other studios and creatives across the globe were doing, and I remember that the first time I saw the work of Zeitguised I instantly fell in love. That mix of art, design and commerce combined with powerful aesthetics and strong ideas attracted me. Since then it was my main reference when thinking about my career goals. When I moved to Copenhagen to assist a studio I found myself physically closer to the Zeitguised office in Berlin and reached out. The founder Henrik Mauler was super kind and I started doing some remote work for the studio. It taught me the importance of proportions and how to use light to develop a sense of materiality.

Soon after, I moved to Berlin to pursue more collaborative projects.

How has the Covid-19 crisis affected your work? Do you feel global lockdowns

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increased the relevance of – and demand for – digitally generated designs?

Change is happening, for sure. The arrival of Covid-19, and the global pandemic that followed, is forcing people to live their lives through their mobile devices. And, social distancing has accelerated people’s escape into digital environments, whether for work or leisure. Simultaneously, brands faced the impossibility of filming and photographing, which means they had – and still have – to look for alternatives. Solving everything digitally being one of them. During quarantine I was approached by clients to create 3D visuals based on set designs because they were unable to continue shooting, for example. For some brands it’s a totally new world, but generating digital imagery can be faster and cheaper than complete photography productions, and often allows for more creative freedom. That hasn’t always been the case. A tiny modification used to take up to 40 minutes. Today, I can design while watching the final result in real time.

I think my field of work will only grow and expand as people become more exposed to – and thus familiar with – digitally generated designs and animations. I’m lucky my profession isn’t going through a crisis, like many others are.

What are the benefits for brands that invest in digital versions and visualizations of their products, specifically when thinking about the interior design and furniture industries?

It allows brands to give shape to, and enter, completely new worlds with infinite possibilities in which products can show ‘impossible’ behaviour or appear in ‘impossible’ environments. These are all things that would be

In Practice

much more difficult to achieve, and be more costly, in the real world. Digital designs can be used to introduce new messages and concepts much more easily. With 3D animations you can tell a story. Apart from featuring the final product by developing videos or still images, clients often ask me to show the making process of products, where the materials used came from, or how a product composition can be modified depending on the needs of users. I like to use animations to represent a product’s main character. In a video I created for Cassina, for example, I showed how comfortable and light a Patricia Urquiola-designed sofa was by making it interact with soap bubbles that didn’t explode upon touch. In that same video, a carpet seemingly generated light breezes, making the sofa change its composition.

Another benefit: in the virtual sphere you have a very wide reach to gain visibility. I know from personal experience: media platforms like Instagram have helped me enormously in growing my business and client base.

Congolese fashion label Hanifa put on a virtual fashion show during lockdown, Gucci released a set of tennis outfits in the mobile game Tennis Clash, Helsinki Fashion Week 2020 paired designers with 3D artists to realize their collections, Louis Vuitton released a collection within League of Legends and digital fashion house The Fabricant auctioned the first item of virtual ‘haute couture’ for $9,500. In short: the fashion industry seems to be one of the quickest sectors to capitalize on the potential of going digital.

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‘Get a comfy seat and enjoy a movie! Stay home!’ This was the message behind one of Zoraidez’s personal works, created during quarantine in Buenos Aires.

Influencer

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Best known as the name behind architectural practice BIG, Ingels also has a hand in furniture and other industrial design objects as a partner of KiBiSi.

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In Practice

BJARKE INGELS talks about how he was destined to be a graphic novelist, designing his own curriculum, get-rich-quick schemes, the importance of partnerships and why 150 is a magic number.

As told to Peter Maxwell Photos Alastair Philip Wiper

What I’ve Learned

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BJARKE INGELS: When I was in school there was a teaching assistant who would spend all of his time drawing, narrating stories as he went. Doing this he could pacify a group of ten young children for hours. I ended up spending the better part of a year watching him and then producing drawings for him. I think that acted as a trigger. My parents raved about the fact that, from a very early age, I was able to produce drawings with perspective, as if it was some mark of genius. I just assumed that was my trajectory, that I would grow up to be a graphic novelist.

For me, what is fascinating about any story, before getting captured by the narrative and the characters, is the world. It’s the idea of spending time in that world that draws you to science fiction or fantasy. I didn’t really have the purchase power to get my hands on many graphic novels, so when my mum went shopping, I would go to the bookstore and start flicking through them in order to get more of a visceral sense of what they were all about. That kind of world creation or worldcraft has always been what’s most universally important to me. It was just originally rooted in fiction rather than fact.

You can say that as an architect, you create the framework for people’s lives, use some form of structure to orchestrate the unfolding of their daily experience. I think that is also what a graphic novel does. As fate would have it, when we had to do our first monograph, Yes Is More, it ended up coming out in the form of a graphic novel.

When I finally graduated from high school, I found there was a complete absence of academies in Denmark where I could study cartoons. I didn’t know how to pursue this passion. Some representatives from the architecture school had come to my school to discuss their course. Even by the standards of the day, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture was extremely old-fashioned, with the first two years based on technical drawing tasks. I thought okay, it couldn’t hurt to spend two years honing my skills drawing landscapes and buildings to form backdrops for my future novels.

Because it was an art school, The Royal Danish Academy was extremely relaxed, bordering almost on apathy. There was no curriculum. If you wanted to hide from the teachers you could, nobody would notice. Because I came to it without any kind of prerequisite, I was frustrated by that void of academic and intellectual offerings. So I ended up using my library card, and because I didn’t know anything about anything I just started pulling books down at random. It was a kind of serial monogamy, as I would fall in love with one architect, then dig deeper into their oeuvre. I kept reaching a moment of finding the fundamental underpin-

‘World creation or worldcraft has always been what’s most universally important to me’ 38

In Practice

nings of each architect, at which point the tower would crumble and I would move on. In this way I slowly began a kind of reverse engineering, creating my own curriculum.

I spent a year out in Barcelona, where I was lucky enough to stumble upon some talks that Rem Koolhaas had given at the architecture school there. I ended up digging up everything I could that he had ever published. I found in Rem a more conceptually contextual approach. That each project is its own thing: even though there is an overarching agenda, it doesn’t have to display the typical ideological or fundamentalist underpinnings that most architects suffer from. Each project becomes an exploration of a certain set of criteria or conditions, almost in a journalistic sense.

Rather than seeing some kind of autonomous art form disassociated from a society, it suddenly became an interesting tool in the creation and accommodation of society.

In the end I did an internship with him at OMA and was lucky enough to be brought back after graduation because they had just secured the commission for the Seattle Public Library. It was an intense year, full blast, travelling back and forth to Seattle and just experiencing that kind of incredible non-stop grind that it takes to make something interesting happen. Every aspect of that project was constantly under attack. There was like a massive public outcry. A local politician wrote an essay comparing the design to a giant fist coming out of the ground with the index finger raised in an absurd, obscene gesture. I had pretty comprehensive responsibilities. I was running all these battles to try and save elements like the continuously sloping ramp as the main archive for the books, trying to save the mixing chamber as an idea for bringing the librarians out of the stacks and into this kind of information exchange. Exciting, but exhausting.

From a personal point of view, navigating the internal politics of an office became just one additional obstacle. I was fighting all these battles, of course for myself, but ultimately for someone else. That’s how my first office, Plot, materialized. I thought, why not just do it on my own? At that time it was just before the first NASDAQ crash. My friends and I were reading about people becoming internet millionaires in their twenties and we were stuck in a profession where you often don’t even get to build before you’re 40. We had a fantasy to get involved and came up with a couple of ideas, such as selling stock design plans on an online marketplace, and another called Nomad that was like an early version of Airbnb. I’m not saying ‘we got there first’, we were just messing around, but we did get as far as

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LEFT When Ingels couldn’t find the right sofa for his home, KiBiSi – the design group he cofounded with Lars Larsen and Jens Martin Skibsted – created the Brick series.

BELOW Ingels resides in a 450-tonne car ferry moored in the Port of Copenhagen.

What I’ve Learned

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54

In Practice

Derry Ainsworth

CEO of international coffee brand % Arabica, KENNETH SHOJI explains how to go hyper-local and global, why he collaborates on the design of every store and what his team is doing to prepare for coffee’s next pandemic-induced wave.

As told to Lauren Grace Morris The Client

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The power of shifting gears

KENNETH SHOJI: My father owned a company that produced chemicals for the printing industry. In Japan, it’s still common for the eldest son to take over the family business, so I grew up with one path in mind: to take charge of the family business and expand to the next generation. I spent years preparing, studying and training for the role and took over in 2005, when I was 35. I was young and ready to grow the business. But at the same time, I saw that the future of the printing industry was unsure, as the internet encroached on it more and more every year. So, even while expanding throughout Asia, I was also looking for a new opportunity. In 2013, the company’s 50-year anniversary was approaching and it was the perfect time to start a new business to commemorate the occasion. At that time, I mainly worked in Tokyo. My wife and I had a small beach house in Fukushima Prefecture where we spent every weekend, raising our small boys, surfing and growing vegetables in the garden. Then on 11 March 2011, big earthquakes hit Fukushima. Our house was destroyed by the tsunami. What’s more, we found out that there was a nuclear power plant only 50 km away. We had to evacuate.

I’ve been a keen coffee drinker all my life, and when we moved to Hong Kong that year I had a hard time finding good coffee beans to brew my own coffee. Then, an idea hit me: Why not start my own coffee brand? Perhaps this was the new business I had been looking to start for the anniversary? But my father always taught me that I would never make money doing what I like – that business is business and to make a profit I have to do something I don’t like. So I wasn’t sure if doing it was a good idea or not. In the end, I decided to give it a chance. I started my own production by buying a coffee farm in Hawaii, and began international trading by becoming a distributor of Slayer Espresso and Chemex. Then, in February 2013, I opened the first % Arabica in Discovery Bay, Hong Kong – and in September 2014, the global flagship store in Kyoto. When I opened that store, it was all about finding franchise partners in foreign countries. To my surprise, our Kuwaiti partner approached us in the first month, and then our UAE partner. Since then, it has been a non-stop rollercoaster ride.

Seeing the world – through coffee

We are open in 14 countries already and we are signed up to have shops in 30 countries in total. Through % Arabica, I want to create opportunities for customers and young baristas to see the world by opening our stores in amazing places such as Kyoto, Chengdu, New York City, Paris, Marrakech and so on. In my early twenties, I travelled to Bahrain by myself and it was my first time visiting a Muslim country. On the first day, I went to a local coffee shop. While I was enjoying a coffee outdoors, prayer time

started, and the Muslim call to prayer played in the neighbourhood. It felt so romantic to be alone in a new country and culture. It was an unforgettable moment for me – I’m always trying to create such experiences when I open a store. It’s why we seek original designs that draw on local beauty and concepts as much as possible.

I want to open my shops all over the world, but I don’t have the time and energy to set up companies in all of the countries, so franchising is a perfect model for me. I receive franchise requests from across the world every day. My first task is to select the right partner – someone who fully understands % Arabica’s concept. I make sure to protect the standard of quality by selecting all the locations myself, developing all the stores together with the designers, and closely monitoring everyday operations.

Between location hunting, design trips and final checks of new stores I am constantly on the move.

Drink local, design local

In my twenties, I loved Starbucks – I was like their numberone fan. It’s an amazing brand, but now they are a huge global company and it’s not exciting to walk into their stores because they all look identical. On the other hand, brands like Aēsop use local designers and locally focused concepts – which is the direction we prefer, too. I love design, so when I have free time, I’m constantly looking for new ideas on the internet. When I go to a new country, I try to absorb the local culture and designs. I suppose all designers do the same to some extent. For each location, I brainstorm the store concept with the designer and architect until the right one comes to us. Sometimes, I come up with an idea right away, other times, the designer comes up with a perfect plan. The majority of the time, we struggle to find the right idea for weeks! I want each store to look unique, although the basic atmosphere should be the same.

For the first collaboration, I worked with Masaki Kato of Puddle Inc. We were friends for years, and he had just started his own design studio. We travelled to San Francisco, Portland and other cities together and developed % Arabica’s made-in-Kyoto concept. I had lots of ideas, he had his own, and we created a nice synergy together. I still work in a similar way with new designers.

I’m currently working with around 11 creatives from six companies, including Precht, Cigue and Tacklebox Architecture. I know the strength of each designer, so it’s pretty straightforward for me to select one when I see a new location.

Covid-19 and the end of the third-wave coffee boom We currently run 59 stores globally, and during the lockdown around half of them had to close. You really need to be good at business to operate a café from now on – to

‘Covid-19 has more or less ended the third-wave coffee boom’

56

In Practice

be able to run a business tightly and turn a profit even in difficult times. I see so many young baristas start their own café, but making coffee and doing business are two completely different things. I feel Covid-19 has more or less ended the third-wave coffee boom. When we reopened after lockdown in Kyoto, our three stores were run by only three baristas in the first week. At the same time, we protected – and are still protecting – all the full-timers’ and part-timers’ jobs, with the support of the government.

Before the pandemic, our sole focus was on how to provide good service to customers who kept coming every day.

Now it’s a completely different ballgame.

We should expect that the second wave and third wave of Covid-19 will attack us until a proper vaccine is created, so the coffee industry should focus on online sales. In Japan we are working to develop new original products including at-home coffee-brewing equipment. % Arabica has always prioritized in-store custom roasting to order using our small-batch roasting

machines. We ask our customers to purchase just a week’s worth of coffee, and come back every week. In many countries, the custom-roasting business has grown since lockdown happened.

Process, percolation, time and place

For me, business is like surfing. You position yourself in front of a wave, and if you stand up at the right time, it will carry you forward. % Arabica was fortunate enough to be able to catch the third coffee wave, the 2020 Tokyo Olympic wave, and society’s globalization and digitalization waves. At the same time, you cannot become a successful brand without originality, and you cannot survive just by chasing trends. We believe in the concept of kaizen – to improve something every day – which has been fundamental to our fast growth and appeal. Catching the right waves, being original and timeless are the elements of a successful business today. arabica.coffee

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PAGE 54 Tokyo-based No.10 of Nomurakougeisha is responsible for a number of % Arabica stores including the location in Dubai’s Mall of the Emirates, whose architecture combines Arabic and Mediterranean elements.

BELOW For its playful, tubular ‘nextgeneration % Arabica Kiosk’ – located within Shanghai’s Two ITC commercial complex – the brand collaborated with Austrian studio Precht.

The Client

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Shao Feng

spaces

66 Interiors become inner sanctums 86 Making beauty salons nonbinary 104 Exhibitions head to cyberspace

Rasario boutique by Architectural Bureau WALL in Moscow, Russia.

Ilya Ivanov

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Spaces

Hui Sheng

MONASTIC MODERN

Sense hair studio by Neo Design in Taizhou, China.

In each issue we identify a key aesthetic trend evident in our archive of recent projects and challenge semiotics agency Axis Mundi to unpack its design codes. Here, we look at how a typology of spaces offer clarity and sanctuary from the heated distortions of the world outside.

Words Rosamund Picton and Kourosh Newman-Zand Look Book

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Earlier this year, images of Kanye and Kim Kardashian West’s home, designed by Axel Vervoordt, provoked a flurry of think-pieces commenting on the incongruity of its minimalism, given the status of the West family at the apex of a hyper-materialistic culture. Across retail and hospitality spaces, features of the stylistic minimalism of the West home are cohering into a design typology that offers sanctuary and refreshment within, from the heated unpredictability of culture without.

It is a minimalism that is not subservient to negative space. Liberated from adornment, the raw material textures of the environment take centre stage – as if the walkways and rooms are carefully chiselled from and chipped into a slab of precious rock. Wobbly or roughly hewn openings and surfaces are restrained by strict principles of proportion, learning from the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi. The spaces are sunken into mellow and primitive shades of grey and off-white, brushed and smudged with the dusty texture of clay or charcoal. Mirrors, glass or otherwise reflective surfaces are generally conspicuously absent, intimating that truth is preferred to vanity.

Arches dominate, either gently structuring vaulted ceilings or as smoothly rendered archways peeling off of long corridors. The repetition of archways or of spotlights and small windows elicits a meditative perspective. Table surfaces are proffered as slab-like altars or empty plinths, clearing territories for ritual ablutions or quasi-religious offerings. Withheld by the stern opacity of the material and hidden behind shaded doorways, ancient mysteries are insinuated.

In an economy that prioritizes transparency and access, indistinct allusions take on new value.

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Light augments and delineates the purpose of the environment. Mindful contemplation is encouraged by pathways intermittently smudged by shafts or pools of light with a fluffy, divine hue. Light is neither synthetic nor blinding. It is scattered in spotted stars or it gently floods and surges as the sun rises and sets, reconstituting a circadian rhythm for shattered attention spans. Light invariably gives way to the absence of it. Shadow cloaks and conceals territories behind columns and archways, and we imagine a breeze winding with us through crypt-like walkways: a refreshing sensation of synesthetic coolness.

Transitions are gentle and graded, contributing to the sensation of ‘sunkenness’, as if we are on the sea bed, swayed by the gentle ebb and flow of deep, slowmoving currents. Instead of intrusive sharp corners, rounded curves, as if lovingly moulded by a master ceramicist, prevail across table-top edges, between walls and along arches. Colours drift into adjacent shades, never sharpening or contrasting, but mildly twinkling through a limited palette of whites, eggshells and oysters.

In an age of acute anxiety, these spaces affirm the truth and simple ‘there-ness’ of substances, both solid and vaporous or nearly imperceptible. It’s hoped that the obfuscation of purpose and the clearing of physical space can prompt the clearing of cognitive space.

In addition, reinvesting daily life with the mystifications of ritual is a conduit for renewal and ideation.• axis-mundi.co

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Mobai

Fnji office by Xiaoxi Xiong in Beijing, China.

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CONCEAL/REVEAL Bricks are more commonly associated with solidity than transparency. Any windows in a brick building’s façade are usually framed by the blocks, not within them. In Iran, Hooba Design Group took the material in a completely new direction for Kohan Ceram’s headquarters, turning the building into a billboard for the brick manufacturing company’s expertise.

TEHRAN Dutch architecture practice MVRDV made international headlines in 2016 with Crystal Houses: an Amsterdam retail façade made almost entirely of glass bricks. The concept turned what could have been a closed-off store exterior into one giant shop window, and a humble and ubiquitous construction material into something avantgarde in the process. But then the cracks started to appear – literally. After rumours of fractures in the bricks, MVRDV confirmed the issues were instead with the polymer, the adhesive used for the vertical joints. ‘There is not a single constructive risk,’ MVRDV’s Gijs Rikken told newspaper de Volkskrant. The client and architect were both apparently happy to write off the problem – which has since been solved – as part of the project’s extremely experimental nature.

But what about buildings – or cultures – looking for some of the benefits of MVRDV’s idea without the fully fledged transparency? In Tehran, local practice Hooba Design Group took the bricks-turnedwindows concept in a more modest direction.

The headquarters of Kohan Ceram join a new breed of brick buildings in Iran that challenge the routine running-bond configuration.

Whereas some designers opt for patterns that reference Iran’s heritage and others install bricks at intervals to filter sunlight, Hooba

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Design Group worked with its client to redesign the building blocks themselves. It helps, of course, that the client is a brick manufacturing company. ‘This gave us a unique opportunity for a broad investigation of this material,’ says Hooba founder and managing partner Hooman Balazadeh.

Kohan Ceram’s brief was to create an office building, showroom and residential suite. ‘We decided to use the company’s product as the building material for the exterior and interior,’ says Balazadeh. ‘The building itself represents the company.’ As such, the structure becomes a celebration of brick, utilizing the material’s inherent qualities while pushing its boundaries. The newly developed ‘spectacled brick’, a solid block with a circular aperture at its core, speaks strongly to its location. ‘The high density of buildings as well as city regulations in Tehran have caused sunlight exposure problems in office and residential buildings around the city,’ says Balazadeh. ‘The special brick in this project enables sunlight penetration, even in parts of the building where windows are not admissible.’ Moreover, the façade louvres can be adjusted to closed or open positions to optimize sunlight exposure during the day. Unlike MVRDV’s completely see-through solution, Hooba Design Group’s structure balances views from the outside with views

Spaces

to the outside – not too much of the former nor too little of the latter. This is particularly important for the residential section of the property, where privacy is paramount.

Tehran ranks among the world’s most polluted cities, another factor Hooba Design Group addressed in the building.

When compared with many other standard construction materials, ‘brick absorbs less air pollution and dirt during long-term use’, says Balazadeh. In addition, green spaces that extend from the façade into the interior are designed to filter both air and noise pollution from the adjacent motorway. ‘If used as a common solution in different parts of Tehran, this building strategy could affect the overall city pollution in the long term.’ TI hoobadesign.com

The Kohan Ceram headquarters incorporate a newly developed ‘spectacled brick’, a solid block with a circular aperture at its core that helps sunlight to enter the interior.

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Deed Studio

Parham Taghioff

Incorporating a showroom, Kohan Ceram’s building uses the brand’s product as a construction material both outside and in, turning the entire project into a poster child for the company.

VIRTUAL (REALITY) EXHIBITIONS

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Once the struggling sidekicks to their physical counterparts, exhibitions held in cyberspace have been forced to the foreground thanks to stay-athome orders. But are we – and the necessary technologies – ready for the revolution?

Words Tracey Ingram

When Covid-19 forced the world into lockdown, almost everything moved (more) online. Team meetings, yoga classes, concerts. No longer able to welcome guests onto their physical sites, industries across the board had to rely on website visits instead. ‘We are in the midst of a new digital revolution, yanked kicking and screaming

by Covid-19 into a new reality,’ writes Lenox Mhlanga for Zimbabwean newspaper The Standard. ‘Where innovations such as virtual reality were relegated to a new breed of digital nerds, there is a mad scramble by mainstream organisations to adapt and play catch-up.’

Enter the explosion of virtual/online exhibitions. Some have gone so far as to call them virtual reality exhibitions, even if what appears is no more than a click-through website – no headset in sight. The latter is understandable, given how few homes actually own a VR headset. Despite the technology becoming more accessible and reports of the industry’s rapid growth – the market size of consumer virtual reality hardware and software is projected to increase from $6.2 billion in 2019 to more than $16 billion by 2022 (Statista) – it’s likely that most at-home usage is by gamers.

According to TechJury, 70 per cent of VR headset-owning consumers have bought a game on it. In an article for The New York Times, Kevin Roose predicted that virtual escapism would be perfect for a pandemic, only to conclude that ‘outside of gaming, there isn’t much you can do on a V.R. headset that you can’t do more easily on another device’. That’s because the technology is still very much in its infancy – or as Fredrik Hellberg of Space Popular describes it, ‘we’re at the fax machine stage. It’s still so basic, expensive, inaccessible. We’ll look back on

this period later and think it’s hilarious we had to wear these big clunky headsets.’

Holding an exhibition in cyberspace is not exactly a brand-new concept. David Zwirner Gallery, for example, opened online rooms in 2017, the same year as the launch of the online-only Universal Museum of Art. But as has been the case in other industries – retail, hospitality and offices being prime examples (see more on this in Frame 135) – the crisis has accelerated the adoption of existing ideas by both providers and consumers. David Zwirner Gallery is evidence of the latter, with David Zwirner Online experiencing increased traffic during lockdown. Similarly, Seoul’s Savina Museum of Contemporary Art – which in 2012 became one of the first museums in South Korea to offer VR exhibitions – has seen visitor numbers to its digital offerings increase almost tenfold since the coronavirus outbreak.

Some took to social media instead, capitalizing on the immediacy and reach of platforms such as Instagram. Around five weeks after authorities in China first sent Wuhan and other cities in the Hubei Province into lockdown, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage decided to provide the housebound population with some cultural sustenance. It rallied museums around the country to launch virtual exhibitions on existing digital platforms such as Weibo. As reported in March by the China Global Television Network, ‘according to preliminary statistics, more than 1,300 museums have exhibited more than 2,000 items online through websites, Weibo and WeChat’. The article stated that Weibo has become an important platform for online museum visiting, and the official Weibo of museums at all levels has been used to push »

New Typology

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Rossner explores how interaction could change in virtual exhibition spaces: works of art are no longer off limits to the hands of curious visitors.

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New Typology

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Martin Argyroglo, courtesy of Studio Robert Stadler

frame lab

STREETSCAPE Frame may deal almost exclusively with the indoors, but that’s one place in which most of us have spent far too much time over the past months. As lockdowns lift in many areas, heading out into the city streets has exposed fundamental flaws in the structures beyond our front doors – cramped pedestrian areas and a lack of green space among them. Now, we’re faced with the rare opportunity to renegotiate the relationship between indoors and out, turning the latter into an extension of the former.

THE FAÇADE

Bringing domestic life into the open

Only 62 per cent of renters in the 15 most populated US metro areas have access to a ‘balcony, patio, deck, or a porch’ according to the American Housing Survey. In the New York metro area that drops to 21 per cent. Moses Gates, vice president of housing and neighbourhood planning of the Regional Plan Association has been calling for a redefinition of roofs as public space since 2017, but believes current events create even more impetus. ‘Most buildings without an actual deck prohibit roof access for insurance purposes and to prevent wear and tear,’ he wrote in a recent open letter to the New York Daily News, ‘[but] being outdoors isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity of human life and mental health.’

The outlook is similar in the UK, with 81 per cent of Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors members forecasting a rise in demand for balcony or garden access. ‘The pandemic has emphasized the need for new high-density schemes to be able to guarantee residents access to amenities and outdoor space, not to mention the liberating power of balconies,’ writes Martina Rotolo, a member of LSE London, an urban research group based at the London School of Economics.

One vision of how that could be realized has been put forward by Stefano Boeri Architetti, which has designed what it claims is the first master plan to directly address the fallout of the Covid-19 crisis. Named Tirana Riverside, the Albanian capital’s new 12,000-resident neighbourhood will feature 29 hectares of green space, much of it covering the buildings themselves. Most vertical surfaces will host some form of planting, either in the form of balconies or hanging gardens, while the rooftops of residential structures will be reconceived as ‘fifth façades’. The roofs will fulfil a variety of uses, functioning as reception points for drone deliveries and spaces to play sports, pursue leisure activities and engage in agriculture.

‘We must consider the thresholds between the private sphere and the flows of the city as the first line of prevention, points of contact that become multiple garrisons on different scales and extensions of the private life,’ explain Stefano Boeri and practice partner Francesca Cesa Bianchi.

Paris-based Studio Belem’s ‘aula modula’ concept puts a similar premium on integrating open, semi-public space

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within urban residential units. A simple post-and-beam grid creates a modular superstructure that allows the insertion of terraces and roofs that can adapt to a variety of communal programmes and planting schemes, as well as encouraging natural ventilation.

Just pre-dating the pandemic but nonetheless addressing many of these same concerns is Sou Fujimoto’s L’Arbre Blanc, a 2019 residential tower in Montpellier adorned with oversized balconies that the architect believes will encourage a new form of relationship between residents. ‘The building’s walls are thick and porous, making it possible to live both inside and outside,’ the studio explains. ‘Outside areas are unusually large and designed as fully fledged living environments.’

These proposals address what urban theorist Richard Sennett, writing in Domus, describes ‘as the need to find different physical forms for density, permitting people to communicate, to see neighbours, to participate in street life even as they temporarily separate’.

Achieving such an end requires more than just purpose, however; it needs policy. As Cédric Van Styvendael, president of Housing Europe, the Federation for Public, Cooperative and Social Housing, outlined in a recent op-ed, the current crisis provides an opportunity to ‘re-evaluate the policy mistakes which have been made in recent years,’ not least the ‘adequacy’ of building homes that lack outdoor space and natural light. ‘Public authorities should now take a serious look at planning guidelines to make sure that our homes are not just places to eat and sleep, but also places to truly live in.’

Frame Lab

OPPOSITE TOP Aula Modula, a concept by Parisbased Studio Belem, puts a premium on integrating open, semi-public space into urban residential units.

OPPOSITE BOTTOM The result of a collaboration between Manal Rachdi, Nicolas Laisné and Sou Fujimoto and a response to an architectural competition organized by Montpellier’s city council, L’Arbre Blanc promotes outdoor living by adding an exterior space of at least 7 m² to each apartment.

Iwan Baan

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Located in Singapore’s historical Newton district, Eden is an apartment building commissioned

by Swire Properties and designed

by Heatherwick Studio. The tower features intensely planted, wide shell-like balconies and a groundlevel tropical garden.

Hufton+Crow

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Frame Lab

Streetscape

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Courtesy of Sancal

market

148 Focus, play, retreat: products for a new, merged way of living 157 A new Vola release, caught on (spatial) film in the Belgian countryside 160 Learning from the leaders who are making design a more inclusive industry

Simon Van Ranst

BUZZISPACE BUZZIPLANTER There’s nary an open-plan office not in need of partition solutions now that social distancing will be around for the foreseeable future. BuzziSpace’s BuzziPlanter offers a biophilic vision of workspace boundaries. With high-density foam and a layer of fabric, the colourful planter pots not only host moodand-health-boosting greenery and create division, but aid in making spaces more acoustically friendly.

BuzziPlanter comes in six different sizes and can be grouped to meet a variety of interior needs within the office. buzzi.space

Andrea Garuti

PEDRALI BLUME Sebastian Herkner’s Blume pieces for Pedrali offer to bring something beautiful to hospitality spaces in a trying time for the sector: the chair, lounge chair and coffee table are defined by their refined flower-shaped profiles. The coffee tables, which are available in various heights and sizes, can be arranged in different compositions. And once the chairs – with sleek frames and cushy polyurethane-foam seats and backrests – reach the end of their sit-cycle, they can be disassembled and disposed of responsibly. pedrali.it

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Frame 136

SANCAL LAPSO For those looking for a moment’s retreat in crowded public or office spaces, Lapso is a solution. The Lesur & Venot-developed vertical hammock, which won the 2014 Hermès award for Best Author design and was recently added to Sancal’s portfolio, is affixed to walls, inviting people to lean back and have some privacy. Curved upholstered panels create an acoustically friendly hood should the user need to make a call or listen to a message.

Five mesh colours are available to customize the furnishing with. ‘As a “do not disturb” signal,’ says a spokesperson, ‘Lapso communicates that “you are on a parenthesis”.’ sancal.com

Marcello Martinez

CEDIT CHIMERA Florim brand CEDIT worked with Elena Salmistraro to bring Chimera to life, a new collection of largeformat porcelain stoneware slabs. The surfacing uniquely reproduces the texture of leather and fabrics for a tactile, layered effect. Four visual themes – Empatia, Radici, Ritmo and Colore – combine different graphic and colour codes. ‘Chimera is like a book with four different chapters,’ says Salmistraro. ‘I set out to differentiate these graphic motifs to create four totally different stories.’

BRUNNER DRESS The office, conference room, trade fair hall and beyond: Brunner’s first standing aid, Dress, is a positive addition ‘everywhere people sit for a long period of time’ – for instance now, at home during worktime.

The creation by osko+deichmann guards against rigid sitting postures and encourages people to keep moving throughout the day. Continuously heightadjustable and effortless to move around, Dress is constructed using an elastic high-tech net fabric, which can stretch and shrink as needed – it’s reportedly the first standing aid available without a visible gas spring.

Andreas Körner

florim.com

brunner-group.com

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