PREVIEW Frame #138 JAN/FEB

THE NEXT SPACE

FORGET WFH. THE OFFICE IS THE FUTURE

Covid makes interior designers change course Maggie’s CEO on patient-empowering design Ekene Ijeoma turns sociopolitical data into art Bringing bricks into the 21st century Music and fashion livestreams transcend space ISSUE 138 JAN — FEB 2021

BP BX €22.95 DE €22.95 IT €24.90 UK £19.95 JP ¥3,570 KR WON 40,000

Alya Executive

by Lievore Altherr Molina Status

by Estudio Andreu

CONTENTS

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6 REPORTING FROM

Washington, DC, and Berlin 10 BUSINESS OF DESIGN

From the pandemic’s influence on the interiors profession to hospitality’s local lens

Fran Parente

John Short

22

42

IN PRACTICE

Jocelyn Tam

24 INTRODUCING

São Paulo studio MNMA 34 WHAT I’VE LEARNED CL3’s William Lim 42 THE CLIENT

Maggie’s CEO Laura Lee 52 INFLUENCER Nigerian-American artist Ekene Ijeoma 62 LAUFEN Manufacturer turned ‘industrial partner’

34 Frame 138

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Matthijs van Roon

64 SPACES

The rebirth of bricks, the physical side of XR shows and a new blueprint for cruise ships 112 WORK LAB 114 How the workplace remains relevant

126 The office of the future

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Grégoire Vieille

102

Hiroyuki Oki

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144 IN NUMBERS

Lien Foundation’s Hack Care: fact and figures

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Courtesy of Sabine Marcelis

134 MARKET

Ippolito Fleitz Group’s 111-coloured collection for Object Carpet, plus the best of Milano Design City

138 Contents

L AUFE N 1 8 9 2 | SWI T Z ERL A ND

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Editor in chief Robert Thiemann – RT Head of content Floor Kuitert – FK Editor at large Tracey Ingram – TI Editors Anouk Haegens – AH Lauren Grace Morris – LGM Business editor Peter Maxwell – PM Copy editor InOtherWords (D’Laine Camp) Design director Barbara Iwanicka Graphic designer Shadi Ekman Translation InOtherWords (D’Laine Camp, Maria van Tol) Contributors to this issue Lukas Feireiss Emanuel Hahn André Klotz Ruth Lang Kourosh Newman-Zand Rosamund Picton William Richards Jocelyn Tam Cover Bureau Borsche office by Gonzalez Haase AAS in Munich, Germany, features a furniture system

by Stefan Diez and Wagner Living (see page 121) Photo by Gerhardt Kellermann

PUBLISHING Director Robert Thiemann

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Lithography Edward de Nijs Printing Grafisch Bedrijf Tuijtel Hardinxveld-Giessendam

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Colophon

REWORKING THE WORKSPACE In May, Twitter boss Jack Dorsey told his employees that, as far as he was concerned, many of them would never have to come into the office again.

Kindred spirits at Google and Facebook were a little less extreme, but expected that their staff would be working from home for at least a year, until spring 2021. But that’s the world of Big Tech, made up in particular of young digital natives, who might as well open their laptops at home to Zoom and tap out code.

It’s logical that they’re not expected back at the office right away. But what about lawyers, administrators in banking and insurance, civil servants – in short, the service sector? You’d think they’d be more traditional and attach more importance to the corporate solidity of their own office, a well-equipped meeting room and conversations around the coffee machine. It turns out that’s not the case at all. Numerous studies point to the same major trend: the majority of knowledge workers now wants a hybrid-remote office model. Only a small minority wants to return to the office full-time.

(Including the Frame team, by the way.)

So in this issue’s Lab we asked the question: Is the office dead? We talked to a dozen experts and asked them what conditions the office needs to meet to become relevant again. None of them doubted that the central workplace has a future. What shone through in every conversation is that the office actually represents a great promise but just hasn’t lived up to it to this day. In the Lab, we comprehensively explain the success factors of the office of the future. The key takeaways? Make it a place people like to be in, by handing them the reins and taking into account their (often divergent) emotional and psychological needs. Make it a place that promotes creativity and collaboration in ways that digital platforms cannot.

Make it a place that celebrates an organization’s culture and values. Embrace the stimulating and healing properties of nature and minimize the impact on the Earth, now and in the future. In the end it’s all about me, we and the planet. That’s the shortest possible checklist I can think of.

The fact that the office has a future doesn’t detract from that of working from home. But will that future look like we now think it will? Five years from now, will we be working more from home than at the office? I have my doubts. Lots of people will feel lonely and lost without seeing colleagues. Business cultures will suffer, because they’re difficult to maintain remotely, let alone communicate to newcomers. And real innovation requires not only working in close groups, but also chance but meaningful encounters.

What’s the likelihood of having those at home?

Let’s grab this opportunity to take a really good look at the workplace. The folks at Twitter will be begging Jack Dorsey to allow them to come back to the office.

Robert Thiemann Editor in chief

Editorial

5

Courtesy of Perkins + Will

business of design F138 p001 Contents

16 How to build a carbon-neutral interior 18 The revival – and reinvention – of vending machines 20 Hotels offer (school)working vacations

�

How the pandemic helped interior designers change course

Interior designers expect the pandemic to bring a renewed focus on health, sustainability and social habits to the industry. Mexico Citybased Esrawe Studio’s new office therefore places more emphasis on its interdisciplinary team members interacting with and learning from one other.

There’s been no shortage of surveys tracking how the business community is coping with the state of work disruption published over the last year. Mostly, however, these have looked broadly across knowledge-based industries, focusing on roles that require little more than a laptop and Wi-Fi access to function.

That’s rarely the case for those working in spatial design, which is why the newly published results from the American Society of Interior Designers’ (ASID) ‘Interior Design Resiliency Report’ make for interesting reading. What the report reveals is an industry that has rarely felt more relevant, nor more aware of where it can improve.

ASID members painted a picture of an industry that felt it was being increasingly ‘sought for our expertise in design focused on health, safety and well-being’ during the pandemic. The fact

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that there’s been no lack of work gives a clue as to why only 6 per cent of respondents reported having been put on furlough, as well as why 73 per cent reported experiencing burnout with some level of frequency. Pay cuts are a part of the industries’ current reality, however, with 27 per cent having seen a reduction in wages, rising to 42 per cent among those working at firms with 100+ employees.

Respondents did notice a significant drop off in work from certain industries, with travel, hospitality and conferences/ tradeshows identified as the client groups most affected. However, this shared sense of jeopardy also fed into a greater ethos of collaboration. ‘We set up a peer group among our clients that created a safe environment to discuss how they have been addressing Covid issues unique to their industry and their mission,’ Leigh Stringer,

lead Asia Pacific managing principle at EYP Architecture and Engineering, told ASID. ‘They have been excited to share ideas and strategies with each other in real time. And because they are all in the same business, they feel this knowledge will help them be more confident in their decision making and in making a business case for trying new things.’

Design studios had to be equally flexible about working methods, with a large proportion (69 per cent) of the interior design community working from home during the crisis. These challenges have created new business practices that many believe will remain part of the industry going forward. Chief among them are virtual client meetings (60 per cent), consultations (41 per cent) and product demos (30 per cent). Respondents also shared their views on which practice areas would see

the most changes going forward, with entertainment venues (84 per cent) and shared living facilities (78 per cent) topping the list. Notably, only 15 per cent predicted a change in residential design. Overall 47 per cent of respondents expect some change and 40 per cent expect major changes in the nature of their industry going forward, with some seeing the pandemic as an important moment to change course

‘I keep looking at this as an opportunity for designers to reset our definition of “good design”.

The challenge to our industry is how do we better address human health and sustainability within the framework of resiliency, and create spaces that reinforce the better social habits we now know we need,’ Scott Briduea, studio principal at Little Diversified Architectural Consulting, told ASID. PM

Genevieve Lutkin

Business of Design

13

Emanuel Hahn

in practice 24 MNMA on making space for solitude 34 CL3’s William Lim on being a foreign architect in his homeland 42 Maggie’s on empowering patients through design 52 Ekene Ijeoma on turning sociopolitical data into multimedia

24

In Practice

MARIANA SCHMIDT and ANDRÉ PEPATO, cofounders of São Paulo studio MNMA, talk about why they purposefully create ‘unfinished’ projects, how they found their niche in an incredibly competitive market, and why thinking about materiality first offers a new view on spatial design.

Words Tracey Ingram Portrait André Klotz

Introducing

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‘It’s pronounced “minima”,’ says Mariana Schmidt, with a laugh, ‘but no one knows how to say it.’ She and André Pepato cofounded São Paulo studio MNMA in 2014, deleting some of the letters from mínima to make the smallest possible configuration that would still convey their idea. ‘But I don’t like it when people tell me our work is “minimalist”,’ says Schmidt. ‘It’s more that we’re creating what’s essential.’ MNMA’s portfolio of sensual yet stripped-back spaces combine Schmidt’s prior education in psychology – ‘I’m very interested in the way people behave within a space’ – and Pepato’s focus on the intersection between a project’s technical, artistic and socioeconomic aspects. They now head a small team of five, pulling in creative contributors to enrich their material-driven designs.

What inspired you to start MNMA? MARIANA SCHMIDT: Architecture shouldn’t be seen as a profession or service because it’s much more than that. Architecture’s greatest potential is that it’s a performer. By that I mean it tells stories, produces profound connections between people and their environment. You can create intimacy on so many scales, from the city to the building to the details within that building – a window or even a dinner plate. We didn’t open the studio just to have huge, great projects. It makes me happy to think about a door or an even a more minute detail. The smallest of interior elements can have a massive impact on the way people interact with that space. To me, the simplest route is the best route, and we always look to the past and to the future. We might, say, use a technique that’s rooted in tradition yet updated for today with modern technologies. We factor in art, philosophy, psychology.

We create space for people, about the people.

ANDRÉ PEPATO: Despite my interest in science and socioeconomic factors, I consider architecture as an art form – art for use, like design is. We always photograph our spaces when they’re empty, but it’s when I see someone actually using one of our projects that I feel truly happy. The activity is important for me.

MS: We photograph them empty because we create ‘unfinished’ projects: sensitive places that people can appropriate by adding their own personal touches.

Is it difficult for younger studios to establish themselves in São Paulo?

AP: São Paulo is the major market in our country. In big markets, there tend to be more niche architects. I’m from São Paulo, so it was natural for me to set up here. It’s a huge city, very competitive, and we initially struggled to

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fit in. But we found our own niche in which we perform well, focusing on intimacy, simplicity and materiality.

MS: São Paulo is very cosmopolitan so there are more possibilities here.

But setting up a studio doesn’t just happen like that. [Clicks fingers.] That said, we’ve developed quite organically. Our first project was Roupateca, a boutique clothing store inspired by something the client had seen in Amsterdam. It was very small, very simple, with a modest budget, but it received a lot of international press. That was the beginning. The next year we did the Egrey store and were invited to represent Brazil in the iF Design Awards. From then until now, we’ve focused a lot on material research. Materials are our toolkit. Materiality becomes a vehicle for immersion; surfaces have the power to transform a space. We try to create new experiences, not just spaces. We never buy materials and apply them to the walls.

We develop and create new surfaces that combine ancestral techniques with the latest technologies. When we made a wall using sand for the work-in-progress Jo De Mer office in São Paulo, for example, we actually created a new way to use sand. It’s not just a supporting material but valued as a finishing material, giving its natural tone to the environment.

São Paulo has been called the city that never stops, but your projects feel like the antithesis to this: meditative and almost religious . . .

MS: I really like how Mexican architect Luis Barragán described nature as a kind of religion. I believe spaces need a sense of silence.

People in São Paulo seem to have no time – you could compare it to New York City in a way. In my opinion we create spaces where you can be alone and experience solitude. I like the word solitude because it’s not the same thing

In Practice

as loneliness. Solitude is an incredible feeling whereas loneliness is negative. Our projects may feel religious but they’re not – they’re commercial spaces. But they are places in which you can simply spend time – where you can just breathe. I’m not sure if we intentionally tried to create an antithesis to the craziness of São Paulo, or whether it’s just something I’m drawn to because I’m an anxious person.

How do you go about designing a space that’s so determined by how people feel when they’re in it?

MS: We always start with something human: a thought, a line, a drawing. Then we develop that with the help of computer programs. To us, that’s having the best of both worlds. Artist Marina Abramović once said the best place to create is the place in-between. I believe that.

AP: The idea comes from the hand; the design comes from the process.

One important thing we’re always doing on the side is building up knowledge and references, no matter what project we’re working on. A new technique we discover might later translate into a material solution.

MS: The site tells us a lot, too.

Sometimes what seems ugly or complicated in an existing space becomes the starting point. What if we build around that seemingly unsightly column in the middle of the store, for instance? As the years have passed, I’ve also started to think about materiality first.

It offers a new point of view for architecture, space and design.

You also involve many different points of view in your projects, inviting artists to collaborate with you . . .

AP: Architecture is complex. Managing everything – materials, services, client demands – requires many different abilities.

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André Klotz

São Paulo shoe store Selo – which was awarded the Prix Versailles Special Prize in the Interior Design category for the region covering Central and South America and the Caribbean – uses a kintsugi­­-esque technique to honour the cracks sustained during renovations.

Introducing

27

John Short

Ab Rogers’ design for the Maggie’s Centre on the grounds of The Royal Marsden Hospital in Surrey is clad in terracotta and glazed in graduating shades of red from deep carmine to translucent coral.

42

In Practice

John Short

LAURA LEE, CEO of the Maggie’s cancer support centres, explains why architectural briefs should prioritize feeling over function, what interiors can do to ease anxieties, and how flexible, open-plan environments can make patients feel empowered, rather than exposed.

As told to Floor Kuitert The Client

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‘Please be patient with us if this seems like a long preamble to the specific spatial requirements of a Maggie’s Centre. More than anything else this brief is about the feelings we need the design of these places to convey to the people who will be visiting them.’ These are some of the first words an architect reads when commissioned by Maggie’s to design one of its cancer support centres. ‘People describe our brief as very surprising and unusual,’ says CEO Laura Lee, ‘but we don’t want it to be prescriptive.

We need our buildings to make people walk out more confident, reassured and relaxed than they walked in. There isn’t necessarily one way to achieve that, so we don’t have pre-conceived ideas about how the architects we approach are going to get there.’

Lee previously worked as a Clinical Nurse Specialist at the Western General Hospital, where she treated the late brainchild and founder of Maggie’s: Maggie Keswick Jencks. She worked with Maggie on the blueprint for the human-centric model of cancer care that became Maggie’s. Laura has led Maggie’s since its inception in 1995, first as centre director at Maggie’s Edinburgh and since 1998 as CEO.

Humanizing healthcare

LAURA LEE: Although we build on hospital grounds, our function differs from that of a hospital. The hospital diagnoses and treats, we support. You want hospitals to communicate that they are efficient factories that are highly technical and clinically capable. Those things can make a patient feel safe when they’re going through the technical aspect of their treatment. But then how do you also make them feel whole as a human being? A hospital can actually help represent more than the tumour that is about to be excised. I think hospital architecture often is driven by responding to the clinical team of health professionals and their technical requirements, as opposed to the patient experience. There must be a way to marry both, but it will require client consistency. Often in the UK we are in a hurry when we decide on a hospital, but good design takes time and a lot of thinking. We as Maggie’s have the benefit of being independent. We are able to set out our own brief, budget, timeframes and perimeters in which to operate. And most importantly, we are involved from the very beginning of the process down to the selection of the toilet roll holders and cutlery. We can be a consistent client, whereas with those massive hospital projects, clients can be transitional. Hospital sites tend to grow incrementally as more and more treatments and equipment become available and this can easily lead to hopelessly confusing buildings characterized by an overload of sign-posting and endless, artificially lit corridors.

Such spaces are hard to negotiate for the patients that visit them, who feel small and like they are out of control.

I think if a client is involved over the course of the entire process, the vision you set out with has got a better chance of being realized. I believe most hospitals start with a vision that focuses on the patient experience, but that vision often diminishes along the way.

Site-sensitive building

Each hospital site has its own difficulties and challenges, which, in turn, inform our choices. We think about what architect might have the right characteristics to respond to the site’s specific conditions. To give an example: for our location at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in the centre of London, which dates back to the 12th century, we

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needed someone who could work alongside a Grade 1 listed building. So we asked Steven Holl. He’s known for his ability to design contemporary buildings that live in close proximity to traditional ones. Hence he was a great fit for the historically charged site. On top of that, he’s very good with natural light, one of the most important aspects of our buildings.

Creating a safe space between home and hospital

Maggie’s Centres are trying to be a number of different building types. Part home, part hospital, but neither at the same time. It’s a place for the spirit that wants to stimulate curiosity and creativity like a museum does. Mostly we want to create a safe, calm, friendly and inviting space where cancer patients and their families and friends can explore their anxieties. In a hospital, patients often perform for their doctor. They put on their best outfit and lipstick and they want their doctor to feel like they are coping, that they are doing okay so their treatment doesn’t get affected. At home, there’s another role to play – of husband, parent, wife, lover, grandparent. It’s why counselling in the home space is difficult. Having a place to let those roles go for a period of time and say ‘actually I’m finding this really harsh’, having that counterpart environment, is really important.

Our interiors should look cosy, but not too cosy. They shouldn’t belittle what people are going through. Comfy chairs and cheerful paint don’t fix the brutal possibility that you could die and how that can make you feel. Yet people who are living with cancer need courage, self-confidence and resourcefulness to get on with their lives and our spaces and gardens are designed to help people draw on strengths they may think they have lost.

Designing in detail

When you have cancer you often feel temperature more acutely. You can feel cold and many of the drugs cause what you call peripheral neuropathy. They alter your sensations. The use of wood in hospitals can be dissuaded for reasons of hygiene and infection control, but wood is a very human material. In our Maggie’s Centre at The Royal Marsden Hospital in Surrey, which was designed by Ab Rogers, the door handles are wooden. It’s like your hand is being hugged. Even if you don’t realize it, it’s a sensation that’s communicated to the brain and it changes something. So: every detail does matter.

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‘We want our buildings to free people from their feeling of isolation, while making them feel sheltered at the same time’

In Practice

Inside Maggie’s at The Royal Marsden, comfortable, private spaces for quiet reflection are nestled alongside welcoming communal areas that encourage interaction and connection.

The Client

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EKENE IJEOMA, NigerianAmerican artist and founder of MIT Media Lab’s Poetic Justice group, explains how he draws on data and lived experience to explore social inequality through his multimedia works, why looking at people as citizens rather than consumers helps to go beyond the design of products and services, and what his public lecture series teaches us about the state of Black mobility and safety today.

Words Floor Kuitert Photos Emanuel Hahn 52

In Practice

Isometric Studio

Commissioned by the Museum of the City of New York, Wage Islands #2 submerges a topographic 3D map of NYC underwater to visualize where low-wage workers can afford to rent, highlighting the city’s salary disparity.

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In Practice

From an interactive installation that submerges a topographic map of New York City underwater to visualize where low-wage workers can afford to rent to a series of music performances and sound-reactive light installations in which a self-playing piano deconstructs the Star-Spangled Banner by removing notes at the rate of mass incarceration: the works of first-generation Nigerian-American artist Ekene Ijeoma transform sociopolitical data and statistics into a multitude of media, employing both computational design and conceptual art strategies while at it.

You studied Information Technology and Interaction Design and then moved into conceptual art. How did that come about?

EKENE IJEOMA: I think it was a response to working in the industry connected to my studies and not seeing myself – my identity – reflected in the products, services and experiences that were conceived there. They weren’t telling me anything about myself and my communities. That said, I don’t think I would be producing the type of art I’m making now if I’d studied art. I now combine computational strategies with conceptual art.

From apps and websites to music performances and interactive installations – your projects take on very diverse shapes. What do you believe are the benefits of such an interdisciplinary approach?

I don’t know if I can speak to the pros or cons of it. All I know is that not everything can be said in a painting, not everything can be said in a photograph, and not everything can be said in sculpture. So I try to speak through the medium I feel is best for what I’m trying to say. In every work I’m speaking about issues that are intersectional. So I think there’s something about translating that through an interdisciplinary practice that just feels right.

Your work focuses on visualizing social injustice through art. What do you hope to achieve by doing so?

I wouldn’t use the word visualizing, because not all of my work is visual. I also work with sounds, for example. The goal is to expand people’s imagination around social justice, and justice in itself.

During your speech at Design Indaba a few years ago, you said: ‘I want to see data as poetic and not just pragmatic and I want to look at people as citizens not just consumers.’ Can you explain why?

Data is something that’s used in a lot of pragmatic ways, to look at what’s true and what isn’t. But I believe the truth lies somewhere between life experiences and big data. You can’t navigate that truth in a way that is purely pragmatic, you need to do so with poetics.

As for citizen versus consumer: the design industry is mostly there to work within commerce and commercial practices. So most design is determined by the consumer-product relationship, which is a commercial relationship. It changes the way you think of people and the things you design.

If I’m thinking about someone as a consumer, then I’m going to design products or services that will be marketed to that person. But if

Influencer

I’m thinking about a person as a citizen, the needs change and it’s no longer just products and services that can answer those needs.

The possibilities are different. My installation Heartfelt is an example of that. It’s designed around human connection. Participants need to use their bodies as conductors to close the circuits between lights. So it’s more than physical, I would say. It’s metaphysical. Participants can’t see the energy that’s travelling between the poles, but they will ‘feel’ it. It’s both a participatory and interactive work that brings people hand-in-hand with others to close the circuit of social polarization in New York, one of the most diverse yet segregated cities in the US. There is all this diversity here, but is it actually diverse if people are still segregated? I’m trying to find ways to get to the essence of humanity and the one thing that we are connected by is that our bodies are conductors. A lot of my work is about that: reducing ideas to their essence and designing a space for that.

Do projects that require audience interaction, like Heartfelt, need to deal with a whole new set of challenges in today’s age of social distancing?

Yes, but a lot of my current and upcoming projects are accessible remotely. One of the works, for example, is A Counting, created in response to the census, which

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Courtesy of Lynk & Co

spaces

66 Bringing bricks into the 21st century 88 The churches prioritizing community over communion 102 How live performances look in (extended) reality

COLOUR Terracotta tones dominate terrestrial interiors built with wooden and rammed earth bricks in a range of earthy tones, from auburn and burnt reds to tanned oranges and ashy greys.

Floor and walls are finished with silver and yellow oxides, while the use of plant-based materials including cane, discarded linoleum and redwood adds extra warmth to spaces rich in cold-coloured concretes and steels. Lush planting, in its turn, brings in contrasting green tones.

TEXTURE Experimentations with, as well as modernizations of bricklaying methods lead to complex structures in herringbone and lattice-like patterns. Porous walls with extruding stones are seemingly hastily arranged, causing a lively play of shadows when hit by light. Elsewhere, the advantages of computational design become evident through the erection of dynamic and highly articulate architectural works of art sporting intricate metamorphic surfaces.

FORM Cavernous architecture reminiscent of the shape of kilns features slanting and undulating walls that dance left and right.

Arched structures are the result of brickwork arrayed along curves and continued from wall to ceiling, subtly challenging the perception of depth and interior geometry. Alcoves and corners, in turn emerge as areas of inhabitation and display. And, on buildings’ exteriors, angled façades lend a sense of movement to otherwise static brownstones.

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Spaces

Jino Sam

Pirouette house by Wallmakers in Thiruvananthapuram, India.

BoysPlayNice

RENEWED FAITH With religious affiliation numbers dropping across the globe, are churches set to crumble? Not if they can attract new audiences, which is precisely the ambition of a number of new (or renewed) establishments. Instead of setting ceremony in stone or holding tenaciously to tradition, they’re flinging their doors wide open for a vast array of activities, both sacred and secular.

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Spaces

Atelier Štěpán designed the Church of Beatified Restituta in Brno, Czech Republic, as a contemplative space to counteract the sensory overload of today’s world. A ring of tinted glazing around the church’s cupola provides a modern spin on stained-glass windows.

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Spaces

RCA graduate Ravi Woods developed a modular furniture system to give church staffers the flexibility to use their space in new ways – particularly in light of the current pandemic.

When Olafur Eliasson filled the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall with the hypnotic glow of the sun in 2003, visitors likened The Weather Project to a religious experience. ‘I am not really a Christian but you almost can feel the presence of the gods as soon as you walk down the ramp,’ Maria de Casto told The Guardian at the time.

The same could be said about Your Rainbow Panorama, Eliasson’s series of circular walkways that guide guests through a changing colour spectrum, almost as if they’ve stepped inside a stained-glass window.

It’s little wonder that the designers of actual religious architecture would find inspiration in Eliasson’s creations. The comparison is hard to ignore at the Church of Beatified Restituta in Brno, Czech Republic, where Atelier Štěpán capped the building with a ring of tinted windows in all the colours of the rainbow. Unlike Eliasson’s work, though, where a continuous curve restricts visitors’ line of sight to around 20 m, revealing one tone at a time, Atelier Štěpán’s cupola captures the entire colour spectrum at once. The ceiling, when viewed from below, conjures images of a giant levitating soap bubble.

The Church of Beatified Restituta isn’t your average-looking church, and it’s not meant to be. Atelier Štěpán was determined to create a space that reflects the zeitgeist, not one that conforms to dogmatic imagery and ideals.

‘The question of the perception of a church is the question of the contemporary perception of the world,’ says principal architect Marek Jan Štěpán. He refers to the Baroque period, when the church interior was completely filled with religious depictions. ‘It served as a kind of comic book because the visitors were not able to read – so the lives of Jesus and the saints and the stories of the Old Testament were depicted in the church in various forms.

Today, the situation is reversed. We live in a

world full of easily accessible information, of visual and other sensations attacking us on every front, so the church should serve as a space for contemplation.’ In his opinion, churches should be stripped of superfluous sensory stimulation.

As discussed in Frame 136’s Look Book, creating meditative environments as antidotes to the cacophony of contemporary life is happening even outside the religious realm. It’s a strategy that feels particularly pertinent for digital natives, who are coming of age in an era of dwindling religious affiliation. Over a decade ago, political scientists and educators Ronald F. Inglehart and Pippa Norris analysed data on religious trends between 1981 and 2007 in 49 countries. ‘In 33 of the 49 countries we studied, people became more religious during those years,’ writes Inglehart for Foreign Affairs. ‘Our findings made it clear that industrialization and the spread of scientific knowledge were not causing religion to disappear, as some scholars had once assumed.’ But, he continues, ‘since 2007, things have changed with surprising speed.

From about 2007 to 2019, the overwhelming majority of the countries we studied – 43 out of 49 – became less religious.’ He concludes that several forces are driving this trend, the most powerful of which is ‘the waning hold of a set of beliefs closely linked to the imperative of maintaining high birthrates. Modern societies have become less religious in part because they no longer need to uphold the kinds of gender and sexual norms that the major world religions have instilled for centuries.’

Providing a meditative space alone won’t be enough to reach new audiences, especially when younger generations are turning to the likes of yoga and mindfulness – activities that tend to take place in serene studios – in their quest for inner peace.

Institution

To remain relevant, churches are transforming from places of worship to places of kinship.

From places to take communion to places of community engagement. And they’re using design as a means to communicate those messages. Take Hackney Church in London.

The building was given a breath of fresh air with the meditative mastery of John Pawson and an installation by stage designer Es Devlin – whose work is more likely to have been seen by those who think Beyoncé is a goddess than believe in an almighty God. ‘The vision driving the refurbishment of this East London church was always of a “cathedral of creativity”, where architecture and people can come together in the richest ways possible, for a variety of purposes and activities, sacred and secular,’ says Pawson. Hackney Church has widened its scope to become a centre for the arts and an events venue, holding creative workshops and the like for both members and the wider community as well as hosting such big-name musicians as Coldplay, Robbie Williams and Ed Sheeran.

It even partners with a brewery, and runs an apiary and garden project. London design consultancy Omse was brought in to create a new identity to communicate this breadth of scope and the church’s role as a creative hub.

The result, which superimposes a cross on an arched window, forms a grid for all imagery.

For the launch campaign, bold typography was teamed with photographs of young East Londoners, helping the surrounding community to personally identify with the institution.

Developing links with growing communities is also the aim of Genesis, aka the Floating Church. Also based (for now) in East London, the Denizen Works-designed barge will remain in place for up to five years before sailing off to reach other canalside neighbourhoods – a modern-day

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LIVESTREAMING SETS In 2020, livestreamed events have increasingly taken the place of in-person experiences, offering a moment for connection with brands, performers and audiences across the globe. How should such events, which are primarily experienced through the flatness of a screen, be staged?

Words Ruth Lang

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BILLIE EILISH, WHERE DO WE GO? THE LIVESTREAM, LOS ANGELES When Billie Eilish’s international tour was curtailed with the arrival of Covid-19, Moment Factory joined forces with extended reality company XR Studios to create an hour-long, 13-song augmented digital performance. To regenerate – at least partly – the connection between audience and performer that’s paramount for live events, the concert enabled online attendees to engage not only through sidebar chat functions, but by joining the artist on stage via a wall of fans’ faces that appeared during the song ‘Everything I Wanted’. momentfactory.com xrstudios.live

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We were only just beginning to accept the digital creep encompassing our professional and leisure time when Katy Perry performed ‘Daisies’ for the American Idol final back in May 2020. The set design literally tore apart the constraints of the blank studio environment she initially appeared to be performing in. Through the use of XR – or Extended Reality, in which a performance within an LED set is augmented in real time with a full digital landscape to extend beyond the physical limitations of the stage – Perry was able to interact live with the cartoon-edged world in which she became immersed. She was exploring the set in much the same manner as if it had been constructed, but with the additional freedom that it, too, could freely move around her.

Hailed as making television history, this live broadcast marked a seismic break with a previous reliance upon AR and VR technologies for digital performance. The advent of XR has accepted the limitations of the availability of hardware required for such experiences and instead reappropriated the foundational techniques in ways that enhance and open up new opportunities for our increasingly screen-orientated lives. The technology has developed rapidly over the past seven months, due to its capacity for the production team to work collaboratively on set while being remote from each other, using spaces and equipment that would otherwise be gathering dust. Yet it seems the opportunities it presents not just to emulate, but to enhance these events are here to stay, long beyond when vaccines might permit us to return to our in-person lives once again.

Livestreaming, and the opportunities afforded by XR in particular, are currently led by the music and fashion industries. The visual showcase is an essential vehicle to demonstrate their own creativity, and to generate press. In contrast to the necessarily blank, green-screen environments of AR that rely on postproduction and predetermined camera angles to effectively graft in a virtual context, the nascent technology of XR enables the performer to see, respond to and interact with their digital environment in real time, as seen on the LED walls around them. The movement of the film camera in the space is tracked by sensors and mapped via tools such as Unreal Engine, which then adjust the environment depicted, and provide a parallax effect.

This makes the image appear to provide an immersive context for the performance. The resulting ability to explore the virtual environment in real time, as Perry demonstrated, differentiates XR from pre-recorded events, animation or video, with its predetermined outcomes and fixed camera viewpoints. Instead, it

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offers a complete environment – with no ‘backside’ to the set, and nowhere to hide – that devolves the agency to drive the event from director to performer, and enables the performer’s creative response to their surroundings to be retained. As JT Rooney of Silent Partners – the designers and producers of Perry’s performance environment – explains, the live interaction this enables reclaims the immediacy of the ‘moment’ in livestreamed events.

The upshot, however, is that whereas once an event’s success hinged on the design of a singular, physical environment, the livestreaming paradigm forces us to consider three distinct yet interwoven domains. First, there’s the limited physical environment of the performance stage, then the limitless digitally animated environment framing the experience. Furthermore, there’s the liminal platform interface through which it is consumed by the audience. All of these must be embedded in the creative process for the event to operate seamlessly.

While seemingly infinite in the possibilities presented for what can be created, the design of spaces for XR still entails some surprising parameters to consider.

The limits of the stage boundaries, as well as the physical size and resolution of the LED screen hardware, are as much a factor as the field of view of the cameras, and the server processing speeds (as the digital landscape is rendered in real time).

The precision in the staging of lighting and shadow as if the performer were actually in the digital space is imperative. It also requires a certain amount of choreography so as not to interfere with the overlaid digital effects – to accidentally walk through digital walls, or to cast shadows – and thereby reveal the artifice of the animated context that is being performed in.

An additional consideration for livestreaming musical performance is the acoustics.

While the performer might appear to be in a cavernous concert hall, for example, the »

Spaces

S/S 21 PRADA WOMENSWEAR SHOW, MILAN Freed from the spatial demands imposed by the presence of a live audience, AMO completely tailored the physical space for Prada’s S/S 21 Milan Show to its digital representation. Inside a 16 x 16-m cube adorned with ­curtains and carpets, a series of technological ‘chandeliers’ provided cameras for the audience’s viewpoint while adding to the decor. oma.eu prada.com

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Alberto Moncada

Agostino Osio

Out Now

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

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MOMENT Redefining the Brand Experience

HYBRID FOOD RETAIL Rethinking Design for the Experiential Turn

Tokyo-based design firm MOMENT’s book of the same name highlights a versatile and skillful visual approach, focusing on detail-oriented spatial branding and lighting design for interior solutions that are both functionally and emotionally driven. €39

This handbook prescribes hybridization – a fusion of gastronomy, co-working, hospitality and performative formats – as a powerful remedy against digital disruption. €29

THE THEATRE OF WORK Clive Wilkinson

FUTURE FOOD TODAY A Cookbook by SPACE10

This book proposes six humanistic principles that will inform a holistic and collaborative workplace design – each demonstrated by the award-winning work of Clive Wilkinson Architects. €39

Straight from the test kitchen of IKEA’s research and design lab SPACE10 comes a collection of future-proof and delicious recipes. €39

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BE bottom-up, not top-down BE an engine for the unexpected BE open to outside influences BE built for a lifetime of tenants BE responsive to neurodiversity BE for everyone, all of the time BE a place of purpose BE a conduit for nature

frame lab WORK Challenged by the remote-working experiment of 2020, we asked global thought leaders if there’s still a future for the good-old hub office. Based on their visions, we lay out what a more resilient, responsive and responsible workplace might look like.

how the office remains relevant Words The Frame Team

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The events of 2020 have seen largescale employers question the need to continue to invest in centralized office spaces. The work-from-home revolution has fast-forwarded a decade in the space of six months, leaving many staff weighing the time and cost savings of being permanently OOO against the often poorly defined benefits of a dedicated workplace. Or should that be poorly designed? We’ve never had more insight into the impact our working environments have on our wellbeing, performance and personal progression than we do today. Rather than see 2020 as a sign that the era of the office is over, it’s an opportunity to take a look at what has been preventing it from reaching its full potential.

For the office to regain relevance in the next decade, it will have to meet a set of stringent requirements.

Conditions dictated not by boards or business owners, but by employees who now have more power than ever to decide when and where they work.

That means addressing each of them as an individual with emotional and psychological needs that must be met if both they and the company are to thrive, empowering creativity by making the office act as a tool that brings people together to collaborate in ways that digital platforms cannot. That in turn means reinforcing a brand’s culture and

ethos, and acknowledging its changing relationship with nature.

‘What we now have is this realization that the office is not dead.

It may just be very, very different,’ says Kursty Groves, founder of Shape. ‘What we need to do now is consciously weigh the things that we learnt about and experienced during an enforced period of working remotely versus the things that really add value to company culture.

So that we can start bringing people together again.’ Over the coming pages we’ll outline what the future office must be if it is, ultimately, to remain relevant.

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BE BOTTOM-UP, NOT TOP-DOWN Workspaces that are created and operated in tandem with their users, rather than just the executive committee, are crucial to building brand culture.

The reason that is arguably most often cited for retaining a hub office? The role it can play in creating and sustaining a company culture. To achieve that, however, employers will have to realize that collective identities will only flourish if workplaces are co-created, not mandated. ‘Workplaces should be defined by the people who actually use them,’ argues Groves. ‘We need to focus on co-creation and designing experiences that draw people together based on their own understanding of how to get the most out of being together. It’s going to be about managing communities when we’re apart, and then bringing people together for the right reasons at the right time.’ Mijail Gutierrez, design director at Perkins + Will, agrees: ‘I feel that only workplaces co-created with end users can really foster culture and express the values of an organization. The office should be an area where you come to experience the extraordinary, to engage with colleagues – enough to pull you away from home and give you a sense of belonging to a much bigger purpose and contribution to a much better world.’

Ole Scheeren, founder of Büro Ole Scheeren and architect of the Shenzhen Wave, one of the first mega-office projects to be revealed post-pandemic, believes the employers and developers will undoubtably need to cede more control to users. This is especially true as offices switch from emphasizing floor numbers to floor scale, something that many major employers are now pursuing as they seek to house all operations on one level. ‘Office buildings are supportive of certain forms of identity, both on an individual level and with regard to the wider company,’ he explains. ‘If there’s an iconic image that you can generate and then attach an identity to, that allows you to release control on other levels. You see this in the Shenzhen Wave with the creation of several huge stacked floor plates, each one a hectare large. These provide a great degree of flexibility and amorphous potential.

Working at that scale, the way we think about the interior is more akin to urbanism than traditional office planning. This means that we don’t need to prescribe what happens in such a granular way, but rather develop a catalogue of possibilities that can

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evolve over time.’ For Scheeren, the analogy of the city is again useful in understanding the changed role of governance: ‘It’s not something over which one entity can exact complete command, and I think that principle will become increasingly important to workplace design because, as in all areas of life, people want to be able to define the parameters of their own space.’

BE AN ENGINE FOR THE UNEXPECTED Architecture’s ability to engineer chance encounters, off-diary discussions and moments of serendipity make it vital to creative enterprise.

The need to strike a balance between what can be controlled and what should remain indeterminate, even chaotic, is central to the views of many who still see value in the dedicated urban office. Jeremy Myerson, Helen Hamlyn Chair of Design at the Royal College of Art, fears that, due to the pandemic, ‘many of the trends in the office around densification – random encounters, the bump factor, shared communities and social interaction, which are very much part of creating new ideas – have been sidelined . . . Collaborative innovation is a way for large businesses to link their scale and resources, with the ideas and agility of start-ups and specialists. It allows multiple players inside and outside the organization to contribute to the development of new products, services and business solutions, and to openly share what they develop.’

Rosie Haslem, director at Spacelab, agrees, pointing to Spacelab’s newly redesigned office as an example. It’s currently being transformed into a ‘flexible, dynamic space’ that will become ‘much more than just a place to work’, with a gallery, event space and café. ‘Users will have the agency to reconfigure spaces in line with the types of gatherings or collaborations they organize. Agency is key for people to work as and where they want and need.’ Furthermore, workspaces need to ‘allow things to unfold, because we’re certainly not going to reach an endpoint anytime soon’.

The need for such user-driven spaces is intimately linked to the increasingly hybrid nature of much of today’s work. ‘In the 1960s and the ’70s, and when I started as an architect, the mantra was always “is it fit for purpose”,’ says Torben Østergaard, »

Frame Lab

Buro-OS

Büro Ole Scheeren’s Shenzhen Wave – future headquarters of leading Chinese telecoms company ZTE – is billed as offering a borderless transition between park and building, outdoors and in. ‘It’s about asking how nature and the natural environment should merge with the places we inhabit to build one habitat,’ says Scheeren.

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Matthijs van Roon

HofmanDujardin and Schipper Bosch have transformed an old nylon factory in the Dutch city of Arnhem into a 3,300-m2 office building. The floors are designed to be dynamic and adaptable to the present and future needs of the tenant.

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partner at Danish architecture firm 3XN. ‘I think we should drive that question in a different direction, because it’s impossible today to fix a single purpose, and also acknowledge that work is a social activity. Architecture that is instrumental in the sense that it’s telling people what to do is part of the past. The future will be architecture aided by digital systems that allow the user to negotiate the use of spaces. Maybe architecture’s role is now more one of proposing, suggesting, hinting, but not really determining what people should do.’

Echoing Scheeren, Simon Allford, director at Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, invokes the figure of the city to better explain how the use of space might be determined within the workspace. ‘In our cities, buildings come and go, but the streets are permanent,’ he explains. ‘In our buildings, the permanent elements are the architectural promenade. What we must do is enrich that promenade, then look at the user experience in terms of things we can impact upon, because we don’t control organizational structures. To me the biggest thing for companies not to say is “this is how you’re going to use the workspace”. Instead, they should say, “this is how you might move through it, but it’s pleasurable enough for you to discover ways of using it that we never even thought of ”.’

This is an aspect of the modern workplace that Scheeren argues simply can’t be replaced by technology: ‘I think architecture has an incredibly important social component in which it can foster and almost even agitate its user, acting as a social catalyst for people to come together in a spirit of exchange.

Because of the isolation the pandemic has brought, everybody has become acutely aware of what we can now achieve remotely thanks to digital tools, but also of all the things we still can’t achieve with them.’

BE OPEN TO OUTSIDE INFLUENCES Businesses that don’t expose themselves to external ideas, opinions and personalities will fail to create innovations that are relevant to, and representative of, their customers.

Any architecture that aims to support a company’s internal innovation engine cannot be hermetic, however. If technology limits employees’ ability

‘When we provide spaces for people with special needs, it really affects all of us’

to have spontaneous encounters with each other, it completely shuts down the potential to do so with people outside their organization. With that in mind, the impetus to create more porous workplaces has perhaps never been greater, despite the short-term challenges.

Indeed, Myerson believes the pandemic may tempt companies to take back control of their borders by returning to siloed solutions such as the in-house innovation lab. Instead, he thinks that they should continue pre-2020 towards concepts such as ‘the shared hub’, a mechanism that helps bring third parties such as ‘start-ups into the organization and mixes things up at the system’s level’. That ‘permeability’ helps larger, more established businesses think and act like their younger, more agile counterparts. ‘It gets the employees – especially of large banks – to rub shoulders with FinTech entrepreneurs, start-ups and disruptors, and the usual corporate space standards no longer apply,’ says Myerson. ‘There’s an accent on high design concepts and hospitality curation and events. With incubators and boot camps, and spaces bookable via apps, this model balances corporate ownership with external influence.’

That ‘dissolving of boundaries’ was also important to Scheeren in the master planning for the Shenzhen Wave. ‘The building addresses its urban context through the way in which we’re lifting it off the ground to create a huge public space beneath it, allowing a porosity of the master plan, progressing to the adjacent waterfront and a large park. We also have cultural and hospitality functions embedded in that landscape. I think it’s the fluidity of the wave space that fuses together the public and the private, showing how the power of an overtly formal gesture can be very important. Here it embeds the notion of a borderless system in the users of the space, and I think that can have a strong impact on the reality of what might happen there.’

The porous office also has an overlooked sustainability dividend. Gerda Stelpstra, associate »

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Courtesy of Tajimi Custom Tiles

market

136 Flexible furnishings for the home, office and more 142 Top picks from Milano Design City 144 How to design for dementia

MILANO DESIGN CITY TOP PICKS FROM THE NEW FUORISALONE EVENT

LAPALMA PIAZZA GORANI Riviera, a creative hub in Milan run by Simple Flair and Lapalma, served as the location for a double exhibition by Lapalma. The furniture manufacturer set up a scene of its new and classic products both inside Riviera and in the surrounding outdoor space on the frequented Gorani square. Anderssen & Voll’s vibrant, curvaceous Kipu ottomans (pictured), Francesco Rota’s versatile Jey side tables and Romano Marcato’s Yo side tables were the Lapalma products in the exterior environment. lapalma.it

Vanni Borghi

CEDIT HOTEL CHIMERA Elena Salmistraro showcases the potential of CEDIT’s Chimera surfacing collection with Hotel Chimera, an installation that takes visitors through a spatial manifestation of the range’s graphic themes – erected to mark the start of Milano Design City at Spazio CEDIT in Brera. ‘It’s not easy to convey the spirit of such a broad collection with a single installation,’ explains Salmistraro. ‘Hence the idea for Hotel Chimera: a sort of non-place, a location free of all ties and bonds to reality, and one that above all that brings a variety of components together to create a crucible for images, where the artificial reigns supreme.’ ceditceramiche.it

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Hiroki Tagma

MARSOTTO MILANO SHOWROOM Marble manufacturer Marsotto tapped Nendo to create a showroom for marble furniture, sundries and samples of processed materials in Milan’s Brera district. The two-level destination has a four-room exhibition space in its basement. While the ground level enables visitors to learn about Marsotto’s marble processing techniques, the expansive basement is designed for people to enjoy the material’s aesthetic and atmospheric properties. Five display stages in various sizes make it possible for the brand to host multiple exhibition layouts. marsotto.com

B&B ITALIA NAVIGLIO Canadian designers George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg’s first collection for B&B Italia, Naviglio, explores the dialogue between structure and form. ‘We began the design process by taking an assortment of simple organic forms and playing with their interactions,’ says Pushelberg. The end products – a chaise longue and ottoman elements as well as a complementary service table – connect this investigation with B&B Italia’s state-ofthe-art moulding technologies. bebitalia.com

MOVIMENTO VIRTUAL EXHIBITION To overcome the inability to be physically present at Milan Design City, UK-based collective Movimento teamed up with Another Artist to render images featuring products by its members, following up on an earlier VR exhibition entitled The Lost Place. Instead of framing the images like an interior shoot, the duo shot the pieces against extraordinary natural backdrops. The selected items, representing work from designers in Milan and beyond, were curated by Artefatto Design Studio. Pictured is the Plump Side Table by Ian Cochran. movimento.club

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DESIGNING FOR DEMENTIA The scale of

dementia cases globally is staggering, and increasing every year. Those who suffer from the corresponding diseases, along with their families and caregivers, encounter a multitude of challenges from day to day – many which are posed by unaccommodating living spaces. Seeking to alleviate this burden and pave the way for dementia-friendly homes, Singaporean charity Lien Foundation joined forces with Lekker Architects and design consultancy Lanzavecchia + Wai. Hack Care, the result of that collaboration, is a guide to more ‘functional, inspirational and accessible’ design.

Words Lauren Grace Morris

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pages include simple interventions and residential innovations for those living with dementia and their caregivers to overcome daily challenges

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practical hacks and tricks, essays and stories comprise the visual guide, which is styled like an ‘IKEA catalogue with online instruction manuals’ principles developed by Professor Richard Fleming and Kirsty Bennett of the University of Wollongong for maximizing enablement and wellbeing through physical design were referenced by the Hack Care team in devising 10 of their own principles

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years were spent working on the Hack Care project, a process that drew on the expertise of the architects and designers in addition to that of healthcare professionals

50,000,000 people worldwide suffer from dementia, the most common form being Alzheimer’s disease, according to the World Health Organization.

That number is projected to rise to 152 million people by 2050

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In Numbers

years is the amount of time that design for dementia is trailing behind the design for physical disabilities movement, explains the World Alzheimer Report 2020 by Alzheimer’s Disease International

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