CULTURE SPACES
The Design of Culture spaces often requires a special nuanced approach, and a collaborative model to approach. We tend to look at culture spaces as futureforward, allowing nascent cultures to find homes and expression within these spaces. Design directions are informed by nuance and subtext, rather than bold and loud overtures. Culture spaces tend to flower around booms in related disciplines, such as Fashion, Music and Art, where the simultaneity of cultural expressions creates an empty vessel for the space to fill.
#1 LIVE
Strangely enough, one of our most fun culture projects was a residence, where a simple two word brief, “Make Mistakes� translated into a comment on contemporary trends in luxury consumption and the shallowness of our current building paradigm. The idea with the home was to create a culture of participation, questioning and curiosity with the clients and their kids, where they take nothing for granted. We aimed to use the fit-out to create a culture of active home engagement, where the home would participate daily in the family’s activities, and not be a static backdrop to their lives.
The emergent culture of the house required us to stress interrelationships between objects and parts, so as to create a kit of parts, where objects would interact based on time of day, and to specific situations, like entertaining and watching Television. The layout idea responded to a critique of the typical Living room, where all furniture is arranged around a Television. Nothing was intended to be exposed that didn’t need to be exposed.
The spirit of the home was interestingly explored in the living room couch, where we redefined the ‘Couch’ as a surface to sit on, and tried to study all the possible surfaces one can sit on. The couch became an exploration of posture, from riding a horse, to sitting by the pool, from sliding to crawling into a cave. The idea was to create physical objects rebel against existing cliches and stereotypical formats ; and conceptual frameworks are interpreted in material and form.
The Living Room Folly, Folly house 2016
The Living Room Folly, Folly house 2016
The Study Folly, Concept sketch
Our strongest critique of modern cultural stereotypes came in form of the Study Folly, where we tried to collapse the entire Living room into a single cube. Activities like study tables, libraries, workstations, the Television cabinet, entertainment module and curio shelves all pushed into one compact object, that only hinted at it’s functionality. The idea was to stay away from cliches of luxury apartments, populated by meaningless big brands and hollow lifestyles.
The Study Folly, Folly house 2016
The Study Folly, Folly house 2016
The Study Folly, Folly house 2016
The Study Folly + Living Room Folly, Folly house 2016
Most design directions at the Folly House emerged from a detailed study of a proposed culture of the home, how singular activities require inter-relationships between objects, how people would use and interact with these objects to create interesting occurrences, and how by facilitating this culture, a larger more informed cultural shift could occur within the home.
The Pivoting Dining Table + Pantry area
The Main Door, Folly House 2016
The Kids Bedroom, Folly house 2016
The Sunken Hang-out, Folly House 2016
The Master bedroom + Night Lamp Folly House 2016
#2 WORK
Bombay is a city built on a culture of work, and design that enhances productivity, creativity and creates a culture of problem solving fits in effortlessly into the city’s ethos. We experimented with a multi-scale approach to creating this culture at the FAB Un-Rounds Office. The idea was to create a space with focus areas of creative confluence, where members of different departments could come together to solve common problems. Hierarchies were broken in favour of an open plan layout, with enough privacy built in to ensure productivity. The FAB UnRounds office allowed us to work closely with the management to effect cultural change within the organisation.
Our first object of study was the jewellers desk, the heart of the making at the FAB Un-Rounds office. We proposed detailed inserts to allow for a more efficient display of WIP pieces by each craftsman, to create pride and raise benchmarks. Efficiencies and ergonomics were mapped to propose tiny alterations that made operations easier, including shadowless lights, packaging for loose wires and equipment and dust collector aprons integrated into workstations.
The layout for the factory floor created zones of compression and rarefaction, where ornamental lamps inspired by the geometry of FAB’s diamond cuts created clusters. These clusters featured floating workstations for visiting design teams, management and even security cleared customers, to be able to interact with the craftsmen. Visual connections were opened up to different parts of the factory as well, allowing security but opened up workstation experiences.
Group Discussion cluster FAB Un-rounds Office
At an architectural scale, we created a multifunctional skin to cover the entire building, to mask some of the unsightly areas, as well as created a strong presence in the predominantly Industrial area. We used the multiple cuts of the diamond as a generator for patternmaking, to create a strong intra-organisational pride and culture. The skin modulated privacy and light throughout the facade, creating surprising experiences on the inside.
The patterned facade created smaller experiential vignettes to foster a culture of outdoor working, and to create a breakaway thinking space from the regular desks the employees were accustomed to. The idea was to create a landscape of inspiration around them, with constantly changing patterns in light and shade, so as to spark serendipitous ideas in their own work.
Other designed zones included a landscaped terrace open to the entire factory, for meetings and discussions, and team-building workshops. The idea was to create a fun congregation space, and further break down hierarchies between management and work-force, and create a culture of sharing and open-ness to potentially reflect in the company’s work and output.
#3 PLAY
Our regular engagement with Hospitality spaces has afforded us a unique opportunity to create cultural spaces of high visibility, and to play out social experiments through each new inquiry. Cultural engagements play out interestingly with Hospitality space in that we are afforded multiple touch-points, from valet experiences to food and plating, from decor elements to names on the menu. We believe each space talks to a distinct group, not necessarily divided by age or gender, rather by mind-space, mood and interests. We believe in designing young spaces for the young at heart, for 60 year old skateboarders, and mature spaces for when one is in that space, both creating unique and divergent cultures around them.
A. SHROOM Opened in 2011 in Delhi, Smoke House Room & SHRoom, created a home for the psychedelically inclined, with high standards across all guest experiences in breaking stereotypes and playing with the mind. Shroom explored the mind-melting effects of psychedelic drugs like Psilocybin and LSD, to create a progressive exploration of the limits of the mind, and this influence played out across genres and touch-points.
B. BLUEFROG The BlueFROG Pune and Bangalore both aimed to harness and create cultures around emerging music and performing arts, to provide a state-of-the-art acoustic experience for both artists and guests, and create a home for the next generation of Indian performers. We worked closely with acoustic designers Munro & Co to design both venues, to provide a serious soundscape and increased audience interaction for artists.
C. PRITHVI CAFE The Prithvi Cafe, an inseparable part of the iconic Prithvi Theatre enjoys a patronage and clientele completely of it’s own. Here the challenge for us as a design team was to effect an invisible fit-out, to upgrade it’s infrastructure and clean up it’s services, yet appear to leave nothing unchanged. We added a space frame, leaving the original cafe layout unchanged, yet created a whole new space within the old storage area using up-cycled theatre props that we found at the site itself.
FIN