Índex per May - June 2015 a Frame

You’ve called yourself a ‘materials freak’ (Frame 102, p. 071). What kinds of materials did you choose for the cover? STÉPHANIE BAECHLER: I had just started a residency at the Centre for Experimentation and Realisation in Contemporary Ceramics in Geneva, and I wanted to use ceramics and body parts, which I was working with there. I incorporated LEDs and technological fabrics into the design to enhance and illustrate the ‘physical versus digital’ aspect. I collected many high-tech materials and fabrics, particularly iridescent ones, as I am attracted to the effect they have. I bought LED shoelaces, earrings and bracelets from a crazy website called Blinkyman and used all of them at the photo shoot. Did your new surroundings influence your work? Conceptually no, but practically yes. In Switzerland, technological fabrics were…

Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London has hosted some pretty spectacular installations over the years. Olafur Eliasson brought the sun inside for The Weather Project (2003), and Ai Weiwei’s ceramic sea of Sunflower Seeds took the stage – or rather the floor – in 2010. A new series of annual site-specific commissions begins in October, and Abraham Cruzvillegas is first in line. The Mexican artist’s oeuvre centres on autoconstrucción (‘self-construction’), which is also the title of his ongoing series. Inspired by his childhood in Mexico, sculptures made with found objects recall the cut-and-paste way in which his parents’ generation constructed dwellings from foraged material. Abraham Cruzvillegas: The Hyundai Commission 2015 is on show at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall from 13 October 2015 to 20 March 2016…

In Frame 101’s hospitality-themed Frame Lab, we explored new ‘fad or future’ dining concepts. It’s no coincidence that the bulk of them referenced ways to eat in a more sustainable way, or that 2014 was declared by the European Union as the ‘year against food waste’. Jumping on board the wastenot-want-not train is Paul Gong with Human Hyenas. Inspired by scavenging doglike mammals, the designer – who was born in the US, raised in Taiwan and is currently studying Design Interactions at London’s RCA – imagines a scenario in which humans can consume and digest rotten food. To help the process, a set of tools would allow diners to modify their senses of taste and smell. Gong says his project ‘tackles the increasingly serious problem of food wastage and raises…

From representations to modifications, the human body is an omnipresent leitmotif in art and design. We have seen biotechnological processes lead to provocative work that is as repulsive and shameless as it is extraordinary (Frame 101, p. 47), while young body-conscious designers push the boundaries of their imaginations and give themselves titles like ‘body architect’ (Frame 100, p. 180). A fresh crop of designers looks at such examples and reappraises the body in its most pristine state, choosing skin as inspiration. Their work – haptic, hirsute, anthropomorphic and titillating – is, however, no more than surface deep. Literally.…

Trawling through the vast halls of Maison&Objet makes for tired eyes, so organizers endeavoured to give visitors an added dash of visual stimulus. At Nature Made, an exhibition curated by François Bernard, nanotechnology researcher Wim Noorduin presented Self-Assembled Micro-Structures 1, an investigation into the potential of chemically sculpted objects. Noorduin made his minute landscapes – smaller than the width of a human hair – visible to the naked eye with enlarged 3D-printed models and a slightly retro wall of anaglyph images that allowed visitors wearing 3D glasses to see what the nanotechnologist examines with his electron microscope. The Retroscope 2, by visual-communications agency Amana, invited visitors to look at seemingly ‘normal’ landscape photography. Holding their complimentary smartphones in front of the photographs, however, they saw, for instance, flocks of birds…

A MSTERDAM— Who says department stores look too much like airport shops? Well, you can read those very words in Frame 98 (p. 161), where 50 per cent of the contributors to our Frame Retail Survey seemed to feel that retail environments were often cold and impersonal. Does the statement still hold water a year later? Although we haven’t noticed a complete reversal – turning cold to hot takes time – De Bijenkorf, Amsterdam’s high-end department store, now has an undeniably cosy apartment-cum-atelier on the roof, above its multiple retail floors. In the words of i29 (the team responsible for this project, as well as for the interiors of both Frame Stores in Amsterdam), the interior design ‘brings together two worlds and plays with scale and perception, as in the…

MUNICH — ‘I feel that most retail environments are very asexual,’ says Karim Rashid. Naming ‘banal rectilinear geometry’ as the main culprit, he reckons that what makes a space sexy is its ability to ‘flow’ – a principle he certainly put into practice in his interior for Munich sex store Fun Factory. In design terms, sex shops have been notable mainly for channelling erotic clichés: boudoir, bordello or dungeon. Rashid opts for a sleek, glossy space with a rich palette and curved lines. ‘Strong, clean, pure but sensual organic forms are incredibly erotic to me,’ he says. Flow was a major goal in the project, not just for its erotic quality, but because circulation was a potential nightmare in what Rashid calls ‘an extremely narrow and difficult 1950s building’. Sinuous…

ROTTERDAM—What site is more sacred than the family home? Or more profane? Maybe ‘overloaded’ is the correct term for this modest arrangement of parts that functions as a locus of social control and training. Home is the place where we grow from undisciplined, useless infants to become effective consumers and citizens. The family home is our school, our hospice, our prison, our church and our grave. All the intelligence and design of the culture we’re born into is trained on this intimate site, housing a deceptively simple social formation of a few or even a dozen people. It is here that parents model what they want their children to become. Some exemplary family homes are preserved as ‘house museums’. Like period rooms, the house museum is a distilled fiction, preserved…

NEW YORK CITY—In the morning, the SoHo sun slips over sheets of plywood and mirrored boxes and filters through skeleton walls made of four-by-twos in a filigreed geometry. Neither construction site nor art gallery, Feit is a 54-m2 footwear flagship across from New York City’s Sanaa-designed New Museum, which is reflected in the rear wall of the store. Jordana Maisie (with Feit founder Tull Price of Rag & Bone and Royal Elastics fame) built Feit largely from matte-polyurethaned birch plywood shorn into clean angles and planes. Price calls Feit a ‘luxury modern-day cobbler’, because it uses age-old shoemaking techniques to produce a contemporary product. Maisie expressed hand-making by opting for one-off furnishings built by two carpenters on site – and by pushing the materials. ‘The geometries of the displays,’ she…

ATHENS—As I haven’t yet mustered the courage to pop the question to my girlfriend, my experience of jewellery shops is restricted to the silver screen. If Stelios Kois of Kois Associated Architects has his way, that’s where the image of a stuffy man in a tight suit standing guard over imposing display cabinets overflowing with faux velvet will remain. The ‘usual architectural and service stereotypes’ simply weren’t good enough for the Athens flagship store of pre-eminent Greek jeweller Ileana Makri. While the grey sedimentary rock and raw concrete that dominates the interior is perhaps the most eye-catching divergence from tradition, it’s the way the space is used that is noteworthy. Treasure hunters can stroll wherever their fancy takes them to admire gems displayed on trees made of black metal, bronze…

LONDON —Since 2011, London department store Selfridges has run its annual Bright Young Things campaign, which hands a series of Oxford Street windows to a group of up-and-coming artists and designers. This year, however, Selfridges decided to mix things up a little by concentrating on a group of creatives who have undergone what it describes as a ‘retirement renaissance’. Bright Old Things includes 14 artists, designers, musicians and even a vlogger, ranging in age from the late-40s (arguably not very old) to the mid-80s. One or two names are familiar. Molly Parkin, for instance, was a renowned fashion journalist, commentator and TV personality in the UK before returning to her first love, painting. Readers of Frame are likely to recognize Tim Bushe, a 61-year-old architect who is showing his topiary.…

LONDON—It’s easy to get lost in Tom Price’s spellbinding Synthesis sculptures. Through a sophisticated manipulation of exothermic processes, Price captures the chemical interaction between tar and resin as the materials jockey for position, ultimately submitting to the spatial confines that force them to become a single entity. Upon meeting, the intrusive dollops of tar bully their way through the clear resin mixture, creating cracks and fissures that swell and expand as the two elements battle for space. Changing from dense black to rich emerald green, the amorphous invader advances through the liquid resin, leaving behind a trail of streaks and veins that seem to drift weightlessly amid the conflict. Exposure to heat causes the tar to gush into cavities, forming golden specks and corallaceous structures. Seen from a distance, the…

Rethinking Tradition B&B Italia’s Canasta sofas unite old and new at ME London B&B Italia’s Canasta sofas, designed by Patricia Urquiola, combine traditional craftsmanship and contemporary manufacturing. With Canasta, Urquiola has given Vienna straw and traditional wickerwork a modern spin with the use of polyethylene for ‘reeds’ woven around an aluminium frame: materials chosen for their ability to withstand the elements. The pieces fit in perfectly at ME London, a Foster + Partners-designed hotel that also mixes venerable heritage with modern design. The luxury lodgings are nextdoor to Marconi House, the original London home of BBC Radio, now an apartment building. B&B Italia was enlisted to furnish all 157 rooms and a suite at ME, as well as Radio, the hotel’s tenth-floor rooftop bar. Panoramic views of the London skyline…

I ’ M at Looiersgracht 60, an Amsterdam gallery that’s hosting Generation 15, an exhibition initiated and curated by Martijn Nekoui. The multidisciplinary show revolves around the work of 26 young creatives, identified by the letters of the alphabet. I’ve reached the letter ‘M’ when I meet Nekoui, who tells me that Isaac Monté isn’t in the gallery. Strange, because the exhibition is scheduled to last exactly three hours, a ‘time span that reflects a new generation that’s used to speed’, according to Nekoui. Belgian-born designer Monté is in Colombo, Sri Lanka, helping the local branch of a British university set up a product-design department. Colombo, he says, when we meet on Skype, has meant an even harder confrontation with the subject of his Meat Marble project, which consists of…

Although most design companies keep their wares under wraps in anticipation of the big fairs in Paris and Milan, we spotted some surprising novelties at IMM, the annual interiors show in Cologne, Germany. Glass was again omnipresent, but iridescence, decisive for the 2014 aesthetic, has given way to uniform-hued transparency. The glass base of Sebastian Herkner’s successful Bell Table for Classicon is now available in Montana Blue and Quartz Grey 1 . The geometric CNC-cut panels of Sebastian Scherer’s Isom tables for Neo/Craft 2 – winner of an Interior Innovation Award 2015 – have undergone a surface treatment. Models included in the Frosted Edition of Isom feature obscure glass, but the shapes of the tables remain the same: a combination of hexagonal tops and rectangles that resemble isometric cubes when…

What was the brief? TANYA REYNOLDS: Having undertaken realistic sculpts for Rick Owens stores and exhibitions in the past, we were approached to transform his body shape into two styles of furniture to be used in the Milan and Los Angeles stores – and ultimately in other shops worldwide. Drawing inspiration from the work of ’70s pop-art sculptor Allen Jones, we had to come up with table and chair designs that would be robust enough to function as furniture and not just as art. The figures were to be a detailed and realistic representation of Rick, dressed in his ‘fashion uniform’ and finished with textured skin, real hair, glass eyes – even hairy legs. Did you use any new techniques for the collection? It was our first time working on…

Work and play are one and the same for Montrealbased studio Vallée Duhamel. With joint backgrounds in art direction and design, partners Julien Vallée and Eve Duhamel produce whimsical scenes for the likes of Hermès, Reebok and Lacoste. Their recent project, A very short film, exemplifies the playful style that defines their work. Lewis Carroll and Salvador Dalí would have applauded the curious dreamlike landscape in which a young girl in a bright yellow dress carries a buoyant balloon in the form of a jagged grey boulder. She walks undisturbed through a pink desert, past floating cubes and mirrors, black holes, and autonomous Slinky toys that slither like creepy crawlies up and down a stairway to nowhere. A woman seated on a ledge – the Cheshire Cat? – jumps off…

Visitors to the Soho gallery of Hauser & Wirth London were treated to an evocative and sensorial experience conjured by video artist Pipilotti Rist. Inspired by German psychiatrist Johannes Heinrich Schultz’s theory of self-generated relaxation, Worry Will Vanish Horizon explored the human condition through a sequence of close-up filmic images in which bodily organs and natural phenomena appeared as ‘patterns’ or ethereal landscapes. At an intersection where art meets biology and psychology, Rist guided her guests on a stimulating yet introspective journey through body and mind. pipilottirist.net “There is a fascinating scar tissue that exists between design and art. There are many designers who would like to be considered artists, but not many artists who would like to be considered designers” DEYAN SUDJIC pentagram.com…

Britt Berden, a student at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, uses candle wax to produce experimental structures and surfaces. ‘We’re surrounded by technology and smooth, cold materials every day. I want to break out of that pattern and unlock emotions by using an unconventional material that we all associate with warmth.’ Berden melted candle wax and added branches, leaves and plastic carrier bags to achieve a whimsical result. Captured in Time gives rise to a more intuitive interaction between people and objects. As a first step, Berden integrated the material into tabletops. brittberden.com…

BEAUTY and technology do not always travel the same path. It takes vision to bring them together. In the 19th century, when Michael Thonet introduced his trailblazing chair designs, achieved by bending wood with hot steam, his impressive innovation drew the attention of the imperial family in Vienna. A seemingly effortless manipulation of materials that exceeds expectations continues to elicit a sense of wonderment, even today. Case in point: moulded wooden wall panelling from Moko Interior. With appearances at international events like ISE in Amsterdam and 100% Design in London – where Moko’s surprising Volga corner panel caught our eye (Frame 102, p. 44) – the Hungarian brand is winning clients who fall for the sculptural quality of its deluxe wall coverings. The firm was founded only three years ago…

PARIS—According to a Chinese proverb, spring is sooner recognized by plants than by men. This year, however, Karl Lagerfeld seems to have knocked the bottom out of the old adage. He forced Paris into bloom in late January, staging Chanel’s S/S 2015 haute couture show in a botanical hothouse at the Grand Palais. An intimate setting in a hushed landscape, the scene appeared to be covered with a dusting of snow. The conceptual hothouse – its centrepiece a veritable jungle of pop-up paper flowers – enhanced the building’s rich interior, famed for its vaulted glass ceiling. After four male gardeners had watered the folded flora, buds burst into blossoms more colourful than nature ever intended. Models strolling through the lush garden wore ensembles that blended bohemian allure with lady-in-waiting airs.…

PARIS—In his designs for Dior’s S/S 2015 haute couture collection, Raf Simons reverted to the past, adopting symbolic silhouettes of days gone by and bringing them up to date. His fashions boldly united past and present without being nostalgic or emphatically now. The theatre for Simons’ psychedelic designs was the silver, mirror-clad interior of a spacious white pavilion in the gardens of the Musée Rodin. A dazzling double-height maze of metal scaffolding contrasted with the bubble-gum pink, deep-pile carpet used on floor and stairs. It may be that absolutely everything – in art, in fashion – has been done before, but that’s precisely the strength of a collection in which Simons successfully incorporated the memory of iconic designs into clothing suffused with a distinctly modern mood. The pulsating house of…

MILAN — The symmetry of the architectural enfilade was summoned to Milan by OMA’s conceptual branch, AMO, for Prada’s A/W 2015 fashion show. The ‘catwalk’ ran through a segmented sequence of rooms – dubbed the ‘infinite palace’ – that divided the audience into smaller groups and created an intimate atmosphere. Inside the former industrial warehouse, ‘the classic enfilade of rooms was literally built around the original pillars of the building’, according to OMA partner Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli. The effects of forced perspective combined with the repetitive use of a minimal material palette produced an endless sense of depth. Floors and curved walls featured marbling tinged with a faux mixture of midnight-blue and black. Thresholds wrapped in aluminium screens punctuated the beginning and end of each room, and metal inserts disrupted…

KOŠICE—In a quiet corner of the former Eastern Bloc, Paris-based artist Elise Morin has conjured a multimedia event out of piles of old CDs and inflatable domes. The installation plays to the strengths of a barrel-vaulted ‘indoor swimming pool turned culture centre’ in Košice, Slovakia. Morin is no stranger to CD installations. In fact, she has developed an entire ecosystem around them, harvesting the raw materials from municipal dumps and music companies, and financing the projects through a mix of sponsorship and sales of recyclable CD materials. Using local volunteers to painstakingly assemble the scaly CD-scapes makes each installation ‘a social event’, she says. For Waste Landscape #4, volunteers were recruited from the local jail to attach the 180,000 CDs to the inflatable domes by hand. The installation can be…

VENICE—For her most recent project, Who’s Afraid of Architecture, Florencia Costa literally lived in the space she was renovating: the two top storeys of the Palazzo Mora, an ancient Venetian building with which Costa has established an ongoing relationship. The architect converted the neglected floors into a beehive of artist residencies: a breeding ground for creative and social interaction. As she reshuffled the rooms of her project, Costa took care to preserve or recycle certain architectural elements, such as the cantinella, a narrow strip of wood used for walls and ceilings. The lightweight partitions with which she reorganized the interiors were made with materials (including cantinellas) found on site. As the building cradles its temporary residents, the evolution of the makeover continues. Costa’s intervention exemplifies a type of architecture that…

GUANGZHOU—While developing the architecture of an exhibition stand for his Guangzhou-based studio, C&C Design, Peng Zheng tossed out a draft and saw, in its rucks and wrinkles, the shape that he he’d been looking for. Zheng conceived Cross – a booth for Guangzhou Design Week – in the same way that Frank Gehry turned a crumpled letter into a building when guesting on The Simpsons. A giant sheet of creased paper, frozen a split second after being folded and flung – or flung and unfolded, depending on how you look at it – became C&C’s pavilion for the duration of the expo. White panels lifted and cantilevered to form angular canvases that served as projection screens, engulfing visitors in a landscape of tilted planes that merged the digital and the…

You could accuse Johannes Verwoerd of throwing everything but the kitchen sink at his photography series, Safari, but his faucet fantasy, nay, fetish, belies a steelyeyed take on the good old ‘form versus function’ debate. Despite all appearances to the contrary, Verwoerd’s relationship with taps ran distinctly cold until an encounter with an advertisement for an unspecified tap changed his perspective forever. ‘After I stared at the advert for a little longer than normal, it seemed to me that the tap came from another world – a flawless environment without dust or scratches.’ As he further contemplated this brave new world, Verwoerd realized that the image contained not one drop of water. ‘There’s no need for function here; it’s all about aesthetics and the existence of a single gleaming tap.’…

THIRTY-SIX luminaries – from artists to critics, from New York to Delhi – have come together in Akademie X: Lessons in Art + Life to share what they know about the (art) world. Based on personal experience, their lessons range from the practical and the financial to the ideological, as these tutors do their best to prepare aspiring artists for the reality of establishing and maintaining a career in art. The book’s captivating contents are more than matched by its design, which is the work of Julia Hasting, creative director at Phaidon. Her hand-drawn pencil portraits of the tutors are an added attraction. Hasting and project editor Rebecca Morrill give us a tour of the tome. Julia, you oversee 50 titles a season, including the art direction. What made you…

What happens when two designers take over the laboratories of a bioremediation research centre? Evidently, you get FU. The offspring of a recent union between Utrecht University and Austrian design outfit Livin Studio, FU is an edible fungal biomass pod grown from agar and toxic waste; the product’s complicated description is a good match for its alien appearance. Using droplets of diluted mycelium cultures, the team’s Fungi Mutarium incubator cultivates fungi above a compartment made from UV-treated plastic, transforming discarded waste material into food for the future. livinstudio.com “Designers are either merchants or pastors. Merchants want to make money. Pastors protect ethics. I am a pastor” HELLA JONGERIUS at Design Indaba 2015 Get a taste of FU with the Frame app…

Melbourne-based Amos Enders-Moje of Mo-En Design comes from generations of glass-makers. His grandfather, initially known for the bevelling and decorating of glass for mirrors and shelving, continues to work and exhibit, as does his father, who is also a glass artist. Amos, by contrast, is a scrounger. He enjoys experimenting with someone else’s rubbish – discarded glass objects – which he transforms into aesthetically pleasing functional pieces. Enders-Moje’s Nishi vessels for Hotel Hotel in Canberra (Frame 98, p. 174), for example, are made from scrap crystal, sourced (for a good price) from a German company, and his Urchin pendants were born of excess material left over from his studies at the Australian National University. He achieves his distinctive scalloping, or ‘sharding’, through meticulous grinding with a tool normally applied to…

Prevailing scepticism towards wearable technology doesn’t seem to stop proponents from developing concepts that go beyond the smartwatch. Monitoring only heart rate and body temperature is so 20th century according to today’s innovators, whose latest target is the brain. At the 2015 International Consumer Electronics Show, Paris-based MyBrain Technologies presented Melomind 1. The head-worn display uses Bluetooth to send brain waves, measured by electrodes, to a smartphone app that responds with stress-reducing ‘audio environments’. Taking a similar approach, artist Lia Chavez joined forces with Rehabstudio for her eighthour live performance, The Octave of Visible Light: A Meditation Nightclub 2. Their digital-neurology system, which requires an electroencephalography (EEG) headset, translates brain waves into light and sound during meditation. Integrated into designer Behnaz Farahi’s multi-material 3D-printed helmet Synapse 3 is an EEG chip…

It’s not easy to put the dynamic spirit of Adidas – Germany’s iconic three-striped sports brand – into a single building. Claiming second place in an international competition for the design of the firm’s new headquarters in Herzogenaurach is Caramel, an Austrian practice whose proposal is both striking and spatially efficient. The project revolves around a multilevel ‘garden’ that brings the outdoorsy image of Adidas right into the building. The highly versatile spaces that border this green void accommodate a staff of 1,600 and satisfy a diversity of requirements. Thanks to a great deal of transparency, the building looks light and airy, an impression enhanced by its geometrically faceted blue-tinted exterior. caramel.at…

STOCKHOLM— On And On, a one-man show at the Carl Kostyál Gallery in Stockholm, represented Dutch-Brazilian artist Rafaël Rozendaal’s attempt to deconstruct the digital. Now living and working in New York, the artist uses the internet as a canvas on which to create the weird and wonderful websites – he refers to them as ‘Web pieces’ – for which he is best known. Generally speaking, you need a device that links to the internet if you want to see his colourful, interactive, mostly minimalist works, but for the Swedish exhibition he allowed his art to escape the virtual and enter the physical, where it led a life beyond the pixel. On display were iridescent ‘paintings’ and fluorescent projections that offered visitors the opportunity to experience his work offscreen. Even his…

ROTTERDAM—Zeroing in on the period room as an effective exhibition device for today’s museum, architect-cum-artist Andreas Angelidakis throws new light on an exhibition model popular in the late 19th century. His installation, 1:1 Period Rooms, recently appeared at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. During their heyday, these panelled rooms-in-rooms were decorated in a style that was intended to capture the zeitgeist of a certain era. When the novelty wore off, however, museums introduced the sterile ‘white cube’ – often associated with the 1950s – in which items on display stand out clearly from their pristine surroundings. Angelidakis, who claims that art no longer depends on context, explores the range of possibilities between the two contrasting exhibition models. In five timber-framed structures, which include pieces once used in historical period rooms…

LONDON—What can design do? Every once in a while, the question pops into my head. At times, the answer’s right there – in a summary that includes functionality, upcycling and progress. Design offers a way to a smarter, better, more fun-filled life. There’s nothing wrong with that, but obviously it’s just one practical answer. At other times – like when I look at Osmo – my brain starts buzzing with serious sparkles. Called ‘a beginner’s guide to constructing the cosmos’, Osmo is a project by London-based Loop.pH, an outfit that uses design to conjure magical experiences. In this case, the studio pulled outer space into a dense, urban environment – a major metropolis no less. The team used reflective silver Mylar – a plastic foil developed by NASA – to…

MANCHESTER—Thanks to Liz West’s lightart installation, one winter weekend in Manchester was anything but grey. Your Colour Perception turned the fourth floor of Castlefield Gallery’s New Art Spaces Federation House into a light-filled landscape whose vibrant hues wrapped the interior in a chromatic cloak. Using the space as a laboratory, West tested the influence and perception of luminous colour both within the installation, as its designer, and on visitors. The project formed part of a series of spatial light works based on research into colour theory and light fields. To create a sensory visceral experience, West covered existing fluorescent light panels in the ceiling with tinted cellulose acetate and saturated the space with artificial chromatic light. ‘I am interested in creating illusions,’ she says, ‘and in making people question what…

PARIS—For Maison&Objet, Nendo dipped 2000 8-mm-thick aluminium rods in cocoacoloured paint to create a whimsical Mikadoinspired world that would have made Willy Wonka proud. (Mikado is the name of chocolate-coated biscuit sticks known as Pocky in Japan, where they were invented.) The installation – a lounge celebrating Nendo as the Maison&Objet 2015 Designer of the Year and a sales point for limited-edition sets of miniature laser-cut chocolate sculptures – showcased some of the company’s designs for manufacturers such as Cappellini, Offecct and Moroso. Each piece of furniture sported a luscious brown finish that blended with the surroundings. Visitors to the Chocolatexture Lounge savoured the rich delicacies against the undulating backdrop of reedlike rods, whose varying heights evoked a sea of gentle waves. Although Nendo wanted the space to stimulate all…

COLOGNE—Chairs, chairs, and more chairs. Browse any design fair, and sooner or later you’re asking yourself whether we really need all this stuff. At IMM Cologne, Neri&Hu’s Das Haus – the fourth in a fascinating series, each by a different designer or studio – set us to wondering whether an inundation of new products actually makes the world a better place. At first glance, the Shanghai-based design firm’s homelike installation resembled a showcase of new and old designs, but those willing to look twice perceived an ‘unsettling, and hopefully subversive commentary on excessive and obsessive consumerism’. Salient detail: Das Haus was furnished in part by prototypes that Neri&Hu would be happy to see manufactured and marketed. ‘Our goal was to communicate on different levels,’ says Rossana Hu. ‘As we are…

Shell with in a Shell Coloured drawings made by hand show the interplay between the concrete shell, created by architect Emre Arolat, and Autoban’s intervention. By placing a warm wooden structure (the ‘inner shell’) inside Arolat’s cool glass-and-concrete structure (the ‘outer shell), Autoban cleverly fleshed out the building. Wood Panelling IN a city where modern design is still in its adolescence, Istanbul studio Autoban has thrown down the gauntlet to progressive Turkish designers. Autoban’s aesthetic influence on the interiors of this morphing metropolis’s restaurants, nightclubs, hotels and boutiques has become significant since partners and former classmates Seyhan Özdemir and Sefer Çağlar founded the studio in 2003 (partner Efe Aydar joined in 2007). Known for creating materially lush spaces, the practice is seeing its work increase in scale and sophistication, as…

49% 49% of European consumers would like to see biometric payment technology emerge as an alternative method of payment. Biometric systems use fingerprinting, voice recognition and iris scanning to allow people to pay for their purchases. pymnts.com 35% 35% of consumers say they would shop more online if they were able to try on a garment virtually using a product like Oculus Rift. walkersands.com 60% TECHNOLOGY 60% of US customers consider themselves ‘phygital’ shoppers, equally comfortable shopping online or in-store. retailcustomerexperience.com 71% 53% of US, European and Australian executives involved in retail business technology expect to implement a unified commerce platform in the near future; another 86% plan to do the same over the next 10 years. nrf.com -22% In 2015, up to 71% of all physical retail sales will…

1 ON THE RADAR Checkland Kindleysides for Hunter LONDON—Checkland Kindleysides’ founder, Jeff Kindleysides, believes that it takes more than a few iPads on a pedestal to usher a store into the digital realm. ‘It’s content that delivers insight and service. The screen and the hardware simply deliver the message.’ Hunter’s first global flagship store, located in London, boasts a 5-m-tall LED screen that earns its keep by imparting information of genuine use and interest to customers: weather updates. As those familiar with London can attest, any advance warning of an upcoming shower is welcome – and if the heavens open, it might well lead to the purchase of a pair of Hunter wellies to wear on the way home. We’ll leave it to Kindleysides to stick the boot into retailers…

Check out Offecct’s process for creating Notes in the Frame App 6 pieces comprise the Notes collection, including a recycledaluminium rail from which to hang the panels or slide them as desired 5 different shaped Notes panels are currently available 100 per cent of Offecct’s production waste is recycled and used for Notes and other Offecct products 3 paper mock-ups were made at the Nichetto Studio prior to the first Notes prototype 10 prototypes preceded Offecct’s approval of the definitive design…