Retail sweet retail. I adore designing houses, so as not to love designing their opposite. It’s my usual instinct for freedom, that wild frontier spirit that makes me look beyond the fenceposts and enter a world and and it’s opposite, like an Escher-designed staircase. Facing the other. A store is the exact opposite of the home. In the home everything is intimate, even the mundane is intimate, in contrast, retail is open to the public, even the intimate part. It is precisely this emotional, contrasting dimension, which has overturned stores like a tidal wave.
The world of retail is a place where the cold universal brand comes into your war, personal, inner life. It is no longer merely a place for goods, it is a space where one can experience the invisible, not a place for the commerce of the material, rather it is the place for the non-commerce of the immaterial. The private public, the public private. No longer stores, but places, no longer places, but symbols.
