PULP FACT

futureofdesign

JO NAGASAKA

pulp fact

Designers have a natural tendency to imagine their work enduring far into the future. But for a 3,000-square-foot Camper store in Shanghai, Jo Nagasaka took the opposite approach. The Schemata Architects founder acknowledged that someday the shoe shop, which itself is in a redeveloped French settlement from the early 20th century, would be dismantled and replaced with something else. So, Nagasaka envisioned a space that would itself be “recyclable.”

It’s Schemata’s second store for Camper, following one in Tokyo in 2017 that used imported cork and urethane rubber. But this three-level location embraces locally available plywood and cardboard made of repurposed Camper shoeboxes originally made with plant-based glue. Nagasaka was struck by the ease of recycling cardboard, which requires simply dissolving it in water and reshaping the pulp. “Something that we take for granted in our daily lives turned out to be an ideal material” he says. Turns out cardboard is anything but boring. —Wilson Barlow

Clockwise from top right: Boxes of locally sourced plywood form the point-of-sale area at Camper Shanghai by Schemata Architects. The store opens to the street level of Hengshanfang, a former French settlement turned cultural center. Camper shoeboxes were soaked and dissolved into a paste and reshaped using molds. Display shelves are made from locally crafted steel mesh backed with recycled cardboard.

BEHNAZ FARAHI

futureofdesign

here’s looking at you

The concept ofthe male gaze, not simply as a look but as an internalized cultural point of view, has been a crucial topic in feminist film theory from John Berger’s 1972 book Ways of Seeing to Laura Mulvey’s seminal article Visual Pleasure three years later. It’s particularly applicable to fashion, too: The audience stares at the catwalk, while the model herself is typically required to avert her gaze. Architect and computational designer Behnaz Farah mulled on that dichotomy. “I keep thinking whether it might be possible for women to be truly liberated from the objectification. Could we use technology to ‘return the gaze’?”

Farahi, who last month gave a talk on her work creating highly technical, intelligent, and responsive materials at Interior Design’s three-day Giants of Design event in Palm Springs, California, subverts the audience in her Return the Gaze performance piece that foregrounds a model returning her own challenging stare. Tiny cameras on a model’s space-age helmet captures her eyes in extreme close-up video, imagery that is then beamed to monitors mounted on moving robotic arms. The result is a clever investigation of the fashion industry’s history of complicity with objectification. —Georgina McWhirter

Clockwise from top left: In Returning the Gaze, a model wore an acrylic bubble headpiece fitted with two miniature cameras that captured her eye movements. Screens enlarged and displayed the model’s eyes. The four screens were mounted on moving arms by Universal Robots. The performance piece, commissioned by Poly Global Advisory, occurred during an Annakiki runway show at Milan Fashion Week with cyborgthemed garments from founder Anna Yang’s autumn/winter 2022 collection.

Nans by Joana Bover