Inhoudsopgave van May - June 2016 - Frame

Get a feel for Issey Miyake’s oven-baked garments with the digital magazine MATERIALS — Illustrious fashion designer Issey Miyake has long been associated with innovative pleating techniques. He introduced his first pleated garments in 1989, followed that same year by Pleats Please, and 1997 saw the appearance of A-Poc, which Miyake’s website calls a ‘manufacturing method’. In the label’s S/S 2016 collection, Botanical Delights, head designer Yoshiyuki Miyamae and his team push pleats even further. The most striking pieces – a combination of traditional Japanese methods and advanced technologies – reveal a new pleated material called Baked Stretch. When glue is imprinted onto fabric and the result is baked, the glue rises – much like bread – to fill in moulded forms that give the finished product a pattern of…

TREND — As reported in Frame 108, which featured a work-themed Frame Lab, the open-plan office is winning terrain (again). But the setup – despite the fact that it stimulates communication and interaction – comes with a slew of design challenges. Within today’s bustling workplace, acoustics are key: a subject tackled by more than one company at this year’s Stockholm Furniture & Light Fair. As part of its Lab collection, Offecct presented Wind ➀, a series of natureinspired room dividers by Jin Kuramoto, who says they function spatially ‘like a kind of tuner’. Swedese extended the Gap sofa system with Gap Meeting ➁, which has high side and back panels and functions as a ‘room within a room’. Scala ➂, a design by Anya Sebton for Abstracta, takes cues from…

t TOKUJIN YOSHIOKA: ‘I was brought up in a region called Saga. It’s part of Kyushu Island, the most southwestern of Japan’s four main islands. I spent my childhood in an environment far removed from the design world and the material cultures found in metropolises. If I had a pencil in my hand, I would get swept up in drawing.’ ‘I was absorbed by the art and science classes at school. At a young age, I was thrilled to discover that when you draw on paper with citrus juice and then apply heat, colour appears on the paper – it’s like something a spy uses to send coded messages. Exploring how to manipulate such natural phenomena fascinated me. It gave me great delight to see my classmates mesmerized by what…

Explore TeamLab’s immersive installations in the digital magazine SILICON VALLEY — As reported in Frame 106, Toshiyuki Inoko, director and founder of Japanese outfit TeamLab, has been challenging the boundaries that separate the physical and the digital – and dismissing the differences between art and technology – for well over two decades now. This year Inoko is taking things a step further with the presentation of his largest exhibition to date. Sweeping across a space of more than 1,850 m2 – at Pace Gallery in Menlo Park, California, the heart of Silicon Valley – the exhibition comprises no fewer than 20 works, many of which are appearing for the first time in North America. Two highlights of Living Digital Space and Future Parks – the title of the show –…

LONDON — In this day and age, cork isn’t just for wine stoppers and kitchen floors. According to Miguel Bento, cork is the future – and not just any old future, but the best we can hope for. The set designer took part in the International Fashion Showcase, held during London Fashion Week. The theme was Utopia, specially chosen to commemorate the anniversary of Thomas More’s seminal treatise of the same name, which hit the medieval shelves 500 years ago. Countries from all around the world were invited to contribute, including Bento’s native Portugal. Bento translated More’s vision into one word for the 21st century: sustainability. Okay, two words: sustainability and cork. It turns out that cork is a wonderful material. Not only is zero waste created during production, as…

TOKYO — Mysterious bodies infiltrated the display window of a Hermès store in Tokyo’s Ginza district this spring, arousing the curiosity of commuters and flâneurs as they passed. The outlandish installation – aptly titled Incursion – was the creation of British artist and sculptor Kate MccGwire, whose admiration for the natural world is evidenced by her work: in lieu of traditional materials such as marble or stone, MccGwire works almost exclusively with bird feathers. Using plumage collected from farmers and gamekeepers, she endows the ordinary with an otherworldly character. The resulting feathery forms are at once mesmerizing and grotesque. Inspired by the Hermès 2016 campaign, Nature at Full Gallop, MccGwire’s sculptures attracted passers-by with their iridescent gleam and sensuous curves. The undulating forms engulfed the windows with an oozing lifelike…

ISTANBUL — When hired to design the six-storey Istanbul headquarters for the Turkish distributor of international footwear giant Skechers, Zemberek Design was tasked with realizing heterogeneity within a homogenous brand space. The resulting interiors reinforce brand identity while accommodating a rotating range of Skechers’ 3,500 seasonal products across three dedicated footwear showrooms: Performance, Casual and Kids. ‘We thought that a single showroom concept containing all products would be boring,’ says Zemberek partner Başak Emrence. ‘We didn’t want customers to have a tiresome, time-consuming experience.’ The team established distinct ecosystems within a larger biosphere. All spaces share some materials – such as metals, black fabrics and concrete-like plaster – as well as curvilinear forms. In each functional zone (reception, offices and discrete showrooms), however, metals and plaster have diverse finishes, fabrics…

PARIS — The refurbished McDonald’s Champs-Élysées is a far cry from an eatery brandishing vinyl-covered booths and chipped laminate. Patrick Norguet’s sophisticated interior for the two-storey flagship reflects the sizable shift that McDonald’s France is making towards quality produce and sustainable agriculture. Norquet’s previous work with le McDo on concept designs for its French stores gave him the opportunity to push the new image into ‘radically modern’ territory. He approached the bespoke project by putting the customer first and drawing inspiration from new offerings and technologies – including table service, touchscreens and tablets – now available at the location. While recognizing that withstanding the site’s heavy traffic was a priority, Norguet also wanted to inject intimacy into the dining area: pendant lighting is kept at ‘nonaggressive’ levels and acoustic ceiling…

DEN BOSCH — The Fish Pond Song – a video work by Jeroen Kooijmans at the Stedelijk Museum ’s-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands – guides visitors through an imaginary world of war, propelled by narratives of fear, dreams and lust. Exhibited in its entirety for the first time, the more than 700-m2 installation unfolds over three chapters, communicating war as an abstract reality – a lurking evil and psychological madness. Kooijmans has been known to reference the often religious-themed work of medieval Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. The Fish Pond Song is no exception; here, the artist draws on The Garden of Earthly Delights. Kooijmans’ work deals with the topic of faith in relation to the 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers. He tackles such themes as fanaticism, mania and war. Video…

Nike and basketball: a slam-dunk and a glorious partnership embodied in the iconic Jordan brand. However, until 2017 it has to sit in the shadow of NBA kit sponsor Adidas, which dominates the court from the calf up by supplying every team uniform. Despite the German company’s current advantage, Nike relies on its retail ‘A’ game to ensure that it’s still heavily represented when it matters. After the success of the Pearl Pavilion last year (Frame 104, p. 207), the sportswear giant rolled up to America’s two most beloved sporting events in 2016 with a new and improved event-related pop-up strategy. Nike’s bid for MVP in San Francisco and Toronto during Super Bowl 50 and All-Star Weekend, respectively, was pretty much the same. One: hit the host city hard and…

Branded T-shirts, cigars, teddy bears – a quick summary of what’s in stock at your average hotel giftshop. And when the hotel is part of a worldwide chain, you can probably buy exactly the same items at the organization’s hotels in Cape Town or London. X Bank, the retail outlet that caters to guests of W Hotel Amsterdam, is an exception. Suitable for no other location, the emporium features the crème de la crème of Dutch fashion, art and design. It’s a shopping paradise that differentiates the identity of W Amsterdam from all other W Hotels. By focusing on the work of Dutch designers, X Bank creates a sense of place. If you’re wondering about the name, it’s because the store is in an old bank just across the road…

E-commerce is the fastest growing retail market in Europe. Full stop. It is an industry that coins terms almost daily – webrooming, showrooming, mCommerce – and, according to UK-based Centre for Retail Research, is currently growing at a steady annual rate of 18.4 per cent. Brickand-mortar stores have been tracking this thriving organism since the dawn of the web. However, the future of retail will be most powerful if online and offline join forces. A combined approach has already proved successful for heavyweights JD.com, Inc. and Alibaba – two of China’s top e-commerce companies – who are expanding their businesses beyond the internet by partnering with offline retailers, a decision analysts say demonstrates broader changes in the sector. It’s no secret that the multitude of gadgets on the market make…

MATERIALS — Marco Guazzini dives into his Mediterranean roots to find elements that represent his legacy. Woollen yarns from Prato, the Italian designer’s textile-centred hometown, and waste marble collected from Pietrasanta, his holiday haven and the starting point of Michelangelo’s David, become the main ingredients of Marwoolus, a material cocktail that solidifies his identity. A lengthy experimentation process led to the perfect binder for uniting the dyed fibres and pulverized marble blend. Once poured into moulds, the liquid concoction enables the tufts of wool to be ‘casually strewn’ before hardening. He sculpts the resulting slabs as if they were quarried stone. The only detectable difference between Mother Nature’s marble and the artisanal alternative? The tactility of Guazzini’s rainbowhued pigments coursing through variegated veins. Conceived for Gallery S. Bensimon in Paris,…

FURNITURE — We can pretend all we want, but nothing quite compares to the look and feel of good old-fashioned natural wood. Throughout the halls of IMM Cologne, it was hard not to notice the swell of sylvan wonders. Thonet’s 1060 dining table ➀ turned heads with its slender silhouette and provocative V-shaped legs. Made from solid bentwood, two round members on opposite ends split into three to form the table’s base and legs. A design by Dutchman Jorre van Ast, 1060 is available in oak and ash, either stained or lacquered. An additional walnut version features a contrasting frame available with a black- or whitepainted finish. Ton introduced its minimalist Moon armchair ➁. Marrying craft with comfort, Ton’s Moon has an upholstered seat and backrest accented by slender armrests…

COLOUR — ‘I can’t do it as a stylist. I’ve got to do it as a designer, as an auteur,’ was Hella Jongerius’s reply when Vitra’s Rolf Fehlbaum asked her to revisit the brand’s spectrum of colours. And the Dutch designer did just that. Following in the footsteps of notables like Alexander Girard, who also worked on vividly coloured textiles with the likes of Herman Miller and the Eameses, Jongerius set out to compile Vitra’s use of colours and materials in a ‘library’. A decade into her collaboration with the Swiss company, the library is ready to be used as a tool, and the joint venture is ready for a wrap-up. The wrapup takes the shape of a book, I Don’t Have a Favourite Colour: Creating the Vitra Colour &…

MILAN — In the heart of Milan’s renowned Quadrilatero Della Moda, N°21’s flagship store continues the partnership between the brand’s creative director, Alessandro Dell’Acqua, and spatial designer Hannes Peer. The 150-m2 shop comprises three rooms aesthetically linked by a palette of disparate materials – marble versus polycarbonate, concrete versus glass – yet separated by their distinctive interior concepts. Reflective surfaces expand the space, while custom-made furniture creatively hones in on products: the second room, for example, sports a Damien Hirstinspired Art Deco table sliced into six display cases – a feature also present at the brand’s first outpost, in Tokyo. The injection of postmodern and contemporary elements functions as a contrast to the store’s historical container. In the third room, however, ceppo di grè – a typical Milanese stone in…

BROOKLYN — Owing to budget-induced, 19th-century design flaws, the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, New York, used to stink. Its water didn’t even contain enough oxygen to sustain life. In a sharp turnabout, creative studios are now breathing new life into the neighbourhood. To wit: the opening of work-share space Coworkrs, which offers 24/7 access to offices (and a kitchen stocked with beer on tap). This is not your grandma’s conventional workspace. Over three floors and 4,330 m2, Coworkrs serves sundry creatives, not-for-profits and tech start-ups with radically diverse needs. To offset the variance of private offices, Dumbo-based Leeser Architecture designed, among other things, robust communal space. Quite dramatically, Leeser dovetailed the historical timber, concrete and brick factory with modern insertions – most notably an origami-like metal stairwell enclosure – that…

SEATTLE — San Francisco isn’t the only US city whose urban fabric is undergoing transformation thanks to the influx of tech companies. Up the coast in Seattle, professionals are arriving in droves to meet the industry’s needs, and gentrification is well afoot. The scenario has prompted entrepreneurs to realize new spaces in the city, and younger firms like Best Practice are eager to supply the demand for designers. Eye Eye, an optometrist and eyewear store in Capitol Hill, highlights Best Practice’s position in the market. The studio places its work ‘outside of the regular sphere in Seattle’, says Kailin Gregga. She explains that ‘the city once had a locally focused design aesthetic with an emphasis on natural materials and handicraft’. Let’s call it the ‘hipster look’, which was exported the…

MILAN — A few months after opening its first Milan outpost on Via Meravigli, Aēsop doubled up with a second. Located on Corso Magenta and just a ten-minute walk from the original store, the Dimore Studiodesigned space conveys the Australian skincare brand’s classic-meets-modern image. It’s a look well suited to Italy’s most fashion-conscious, forward-thinking city. The designers say the idea was to pull in materials typically used in the butler’s pantries of large 1930s Italian villas, such as linoleum floors, Formica countertops, square ceramic tiles and ribbed glass. The Milan-based firm, founded by Britt Moran and Emiliano Salci, is versed in blending antiquity with modernity. At Aēsop, the goal was to transform the selection of materials into ‘a contemporary version of the small neighbourhood bottega still so common in the…

What does it mean to be truly sustainable? Well, for global heavyweights like Ikea, sustainability is a concept worth pursuing. The retail brand has been criticized for its ‘fast furniture’ approach, but incorporating longevity and environmental consciousness into its furniture range suddenly appears to be the least of its problems. At a recent Guardian Sustainable Business conference, Ikea’s head of sustainability, Steve Howard, said he believes that the appetite of Western consumers for home furnishings has reached its peak: ‘If we look on a global basis, in the West we have probably hit peak stuff. We talk about peak oil. I’d say we’ve hit peak red meat, peak sugar, peak stuff . . . peak home furnishings.’ So in the face of possible product obsolescence, what is Ikea doing? Moving…

When O2 opened a concept store on Market Street in Manchester, it was with a view to transcending the mind-sets of conventional mobile-phone shops and opening O2’s internal world of technology to involve the customer. Bridget Lea, O2’s general manager of stores, describes traditional outlets as places ‘people visit occasionally to make a purchase rather than visit frequently to learn and be inspired by the possibilities of technology’. Having recognized this behaviour, O2 moved beyond the fleeting retail models of their predecessors to take a long-term view of what mobile-phone ownership can be. In a 2016 trend briefing in Australia, The Future Laboratory spoke of the gradual move away from heritage thinking: old ways of doing things that frame (and even limit) a brand’s approach to retail design and services.…

Textile company Febrik and Dutch designer Edward van Vliet go way back, all the way back to the brand’s beginnings. The iconic Sushi Collection that Van Vliet designed for Moroso in 2008 was one of the first projects that put Febrik on the map as manufacturers of eye-catching knitted fabrics. As owner Jos Pelders proudly states: ‘The Sushi Collection was really the icing on the cake.’ Both parties have come a long way since those heady days, but when Van Vliet – the ‘pattern boy’, as Pelders fondly calls him – was asked to do the interiors of three Amsterdam buildings earmarked as venues for delegates to the Netherlands Presidency of the Council of the European Union (which comes to a close in June), he turned to Febrik once more.…

Hans Coray Born in Wald, Switzerland, Hans Coray was brought up in Zurich, where he studied Romance languages. He worked as a secondary-school teacher before entering the design world upon winning a competition for seating to be used at the 1939 Swiss National Exhibition. In his later years, he turned his attention to painting and sculpture. “The Landi Chair has a sketch-like quality and a likable personality” Eckart Maise After almost 80 years the Landi Chair, designed by Swiss artist and designer Hans Coray, has finally found a place to call home. Originally designed as the official chair of the 1939 Swiss National Exhibition, the seat was pioneering in its use of aluminium, a material whose possibilities for the furniture industry were only then becoming apparent. Made and marketed intermittently…

TREND — For those in the design business, the period between January and May – also known as trade-fair season – is something of a marathon. In the sprint to keep up with the latest trends, the occasional blast from the past can be surprisingly refreshing. Participating in the ‘new’, the ‘old’ proved to be an enduring source of inspiration at this year’s IMM Cologne, where brands revitalized classics in a pronounced celebration of times gone by. Ligne Roset brought back the 1980s with its curvaceous Plumy Collection ➀. Reissued in collaboration with designer Annie Hiéronimus, the plump seats now feature high-performance Bultex polyurethane foam padding. Raising the comfort level of another unforgettable design was Walter Knoll, with its upholstered interpretation of the Fishnet Chair ➁. The work of Sadi…

How would you describe your work? AURELIE HOEGY: My work is where the ordinary and the absurd converge. It questions reality and breaks barriers between normality and abnormality, between gesture and object. I want to draw people out of the known universe, with its customs and rituals, and into a foreign dimension. Is your work influenced by any particular styles? I am constantly trying to merge my work with different disciplines, such as film, dance, theatre and music. My Macguffin lamp, for instance, takes its cue from plot devices and other cinematographic methods used by cult directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch and Jacques Tati. I’m interested in the way in which their films shift our perception of the everyday. To me, cinema is similar to design in that…

Koleksiyon design and brand director Koray Malhan was born in 1972, the same year that his father, Turkish architect Faruk Malhan, launched the Istanbul-based furniture brand. Today the company has 23 showrooms in locations worldwide, from Dallas to Darmstadt, Lima to Baku. The latest addition opened in Manhattan last June. In conjunction with running the business, Malhan fils plays an important part as one of its designers. In this role, Malhan parses his complex philosophical meditations into graphically minimalist furnishings. And it’s no wonder: when he was a child, Malhan’s parents – his mother is a sociologist – had him poring over the likes of Friedrich Engels and Sigmund Freud. In conversations about design, he quotes Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard, James Joyce and Umberto Eco. Having recently resumed the…

LONDON — Located on Mount Street amid late 19th-century Queen Anne revival architecture, J&M Davidson’s second London boutique appears to be softy blushing: the work of Universal Design Studio, the muted interior is marked by a subdued palette of hushed white, taupe and rose, and features brushed-brass fittings and trims, radiused corners and upholstered walls. Universal Design Studio, founded in 2001 by Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby and now co-directed by Jason Holley and Hannah Carter Owers, tinted the interior to harmonize with the brand’s handbags, accessories and ready-to-wear garments. The designers framed their understated colours with crisp lines and graphic elements. Shape, material and colour make everything heavy, yet simultaneously refined. Highlights include a cantilevering staircase to the first floor with a leatherclad banister, brushed-brass display tables reminiscent of…

PRAGUE — It can be difficult to distinguish the guest room from the garage sometimes. The standard repository for spare mattresses, unloved works of art and other rejected objects deemed unfit to display elsewhere, spare rooms are generally not all that inspiring. Hospitality stakes have been raised considerably in Prague, however, where a homeowner tapped Daniel Baudis and Daniel Rohan of Ddaann to design a stylish extension for hosting family and friends. Located on the same floor as the client’s household, the compact apartment suite was designed with both comfort and privacy in mind. Close, as it were, but not overly chummy. An important consideration was to make the annexe entirely selfsufficient. On a practical level, this involved installing a kitchen and bathroom; on a design level, it meant working…

PARIS — Alexandre de Betak has done everyone in the fashion industry, from Hussein Chalayan to Sies Marjan. And by ‘done’ we mean he designed their catwalks. For more than one Christian Dior défilé, Bureau Betak used bushels and bushels of flowers (Frame 108, p. 82). This January, however, to showcase the House of Dior’s S/S 2016 couture collection, the team opted for 1,500 m2 of mirror panels, each made from a light, highly reflective, technically specified film stretched over an aluminium frame. Planted in the garden of Paris’s recently renovated Musée Rodin, the exterior of the circular looking-glass pavilion was dressed in 12-m-high pleated panels that reflected the museum’s aristocratic rear façade, the colourful arrival of guests and the shifting skies above. Inside, images of wooden floors appeared in…

PARIS — Over a decade has passed since Paco Rabanne opened its first and only Parisian flagship store. It was with great anticipation, therefore, that the brand announced the inauguration of its second location – a stone’s throw from Place Vendôme and Coco Chanel’s legendary hat boutique and apartment – in the capital’s 1st arrondissement. Its gleaming façade of glass and perforated metal greets visitors to the shop at Rue Cambon 12. A design by Belgian architecture firm Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen, the shop’s striking aluminium metalwork – which is carried through to the interior – is softened by a constellation of nude leather floor tiles. Occupying 65 m2, the retail space is dictated by a juxtaposition of ‘intimate and exhibitionist interventions’: a hybrid display-cum-storage unit and a…

SOFIA — Many spatial designers have invoked the whimsy of Alice in Wonderland, but Svetoslav Todorov of Studio Mode set out to ‘find out how deep the rabbit hole goes’ at Club Mascara. In the Bulgarian city of Sofia, Mode devised what it refers to as the ‘missing chapter’ of the book. ‘Everyone is both actor and spectator, the DJ is the director, Mode is the composer, and Mascara is the grand scene.’ Mode’s monochromatic approach plays with the perception of black and white, light and dark – a theme extracted from Lewis Carroll’s book. Contrast, therefore, takes the lead. The fluid lines of curved white wainscoting meet sharp angles on floor and ceiling, where triangular tiles below are mimicked in the structure above. Separated from the general area by…

Hear more on Target Open House with the digital magazine The numbers projected are huge. The so-called Internet of Things – smart devices that connect us to networks of objects and information – is expected to swell into a $1.7-trillion market by 2020. Target, one of the biggest big-box retailers in North America, wanted a retail space that would let the company itself, and its customers, enter a store without getting lost. With that thought in mind, Target asked media-design firm Local Projects to translate its deep background in exhibition design – for clients like the 9/11 Memorial and Smithsonian Museum – into a commercial project. Exploiting everything it knows about exhibition design, history and storytelling, Local Projects made a retail space in San Francisco that tells tales of the…

6 is the number of product certifications awarded to Front for its safe, ecofriendly wall coverings 3 unique colourways provide interior designers with even more options for customization 100 or more sketches by design group Front studio preceded the final selection 8 is the number of patterns available in the Front collection 4 is the approximate percentage of organic pigments used to make the wall coverings 12 months is the estimated amount of time it took to develop the series…