Table of contents for November - December 2019 in Frame

Is co-living having its WeWork moment – will the phenomenon go mainstream? Today, co-working spaces are part and parcel of working life in the average city. Having started out as cheap and flexible alternatives for tech start-ups, they now also accommodate established corporations that face growing pains and, on the other end of the spectrum, the ever-proliferating ranks of the self-employed. WeWork, rebranded The We Company, is the household name on the lips of everybody considering co-working. That the very same company launched WeLive some time ago may signify the boom co-living is experiencing. Of course the phenomenon is hardly new. Thirty years ago I myself shared a spacious apartment with nine others. Each of us had our own bedroom/study/living space and we shared two bathrooms and a kitchen. There…

‘The design industry is not representative of the world it serves,’ say the organizers of Design Can, a UK-based campaign launched in August that seeks to address this problem. ‘It’s 78 per cent male, only 13 per cent of employees are from BAME backgrounds and women still struggle to make it to the top, filling just 17 per cent of senior design roles.’ Spearheaded by the PR firm Zetteler, alongside a steering committee of industry figures, it comes at a time when ‘diversity’ is a hot topic, as year after year studies shine a light on the homogeneity of creative sectors in the West and the upper ranks of multinational design businesses. Firms and institutions now explicitly position themselves as champions of diversity in all its forms – whether of…

Lionel Dinis Salazar (31) and Jonathan Omar (30) founded multidisciplinary outfit Döppel Studio two years ago in Paris. Both hail from the town of Nevers in central France, where they studied product design together. Further education ensued: Dinis Salazar’s achievements include graduating from the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, while Omar earned a degree from HEAR, an art and design school in Strasbourg. Omar then returned to Paris, where the two friends began collaborating, united by their similar interests and multifaceted approaches. In the last few years, they’ve designed everything from furniture and eyewear to exhibition scenography. So what drives this duo? For starters, they extrapolate techniques from other sectors to create narratives that twist ideas and toy with the absurd. The name Döppel Studio embodies the…

1967 Born in Chennai, India 1985 Moves to the US 1991 Graduates from University of Detroit-Mercy with a degree in architecture 1997 Moves to New York City 2002 Founds own architecture and design practice, Reddymade 2016 Shortlisted for a competition entry for the conversion of a former women’s prison into a centre for the global women’s and girls’ rights movement 2018 Receives certification in the field of Neuroscience for Architecture from the New School of Architecture and Design 2019 Presents ‘A Space for Being’ at Salone del Mobile, a Google Design Studio exhibition in collaboration with Reddymade Architecture, Muuto and the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University, Brain Science Institute 2019 Appointed The Plym Distinguished Visiting Professor in Architecture at the Illinois School of Architecture…

China’s emergence as the world’s first truly digital society is written into its built environment. The skylines of top-tier cities like Shenzhen or Chongqing flicker like jungles of electrified circuit boards. Meanwhile, down at ‘user level’, each glowing smartphone screen is an invitation to augment our experience of the physical world with an adjacent digital one. In thematizing the vectors of this ‘mixed reality’, Sino-Surrealism reveals the shifting expectations of leisure and freedom in China. Throughout Sino-Surrealist spaces, particular objects or structures function as gateways, describing the user’s transition from routine physics into the disorienting territories of the digital. Unlocking a new sense of optimism, Escher-style staircases defy the conventions of geometry while infinity mirrors warp and multiply the user’s depth of field. Outsize vault doors, gratuitously positioned slides or…

CHENGDU In the age of e-commerce, retailers looking to draw passers-by into their shops are in for a challenge. And in recent years, that challenge has certainly been accepted. We have seen several successful examples of storefronts bringing shoppers to a stop. Aēsop turned the windows of a Melbourne department store into a 50-m-long theatre stage with live performances, while retail tech company Ombori partnered with Microsoft to develop screens that allowed for actual window shopping at a Swedish home and hardware shop. Architecture firm MVRDV even tore down the entire front of an 1890 Amsterdam house to replace it with a transparent glass-brick façade for the then-Chanel-now-Hermès store. Brick is a recurring element in the design of The Republique Store in Chengdu, China, too. Transparency, however, is not. Here,…

Two topics dominated the conversation at London Design Festival (LDF) 2019, the same two as have done for the past three years. In the official programme, across talks and installations, the climate crisis and design's role within it remained central. In informal discussions: the ongoing Brexit saga, its impact upon business and its implications for the UK’s social harmony were foremost. What wasn’t so frequently noted was their relation to each another. This changed when design leaders from around Europe gathered at the House of Commons for the LDF awards dinner. The building, shrouded in scaffolding and – thanks to its much publicized and politicized closure – largely devoid of life, made an ironic backdrop against which to celebrate another year of creative collaboration. At the finale of the evening,…

‘PERHAPS ROCA’S GARNERED INSIGHT CAN PROVIDE STIMULATING QUESTIONS FOR EACH OF US TO ASK OURSELVES’ The more climate change shakes, floods, burns and scours the planet, the more humans will have to face the fact that everything around us is designed – and that, for better or worse, we designed it. But while browsing through the year-old web platform published by Spanish bathroom design brand Roca, the more one begins to suspect that this may be the good news. On rocagallery.com, readers find themselves among movers and shakers of a less mineral kind, who are turning architecture into an environmental profit instead of a loss, building refugee camps out of disused soda bottles and sand, or designing the next-gen zoo or spaceship. They find a diverse creative community with big,…

01 IMPROVED OUTPUT According to research by the Employee Ownership Association, between 2017 and 2018 productivity at employee-owned firms went up by 7.3%, while general UK productivity fell by 0.1%. 02 GREATER PROFIT Macinnes is right, businesses that adopt an employee-ownership model tend to see financial rewards, with studies by Rutgers University showing that profit can be boosted by up to 14%. 03 A SECURE FUTURE One of the key reasons businesses choose employee ownership is that it allows founders to retire in the knowledge that their practice will be protected from aggressive takeovers by rivals, conglomerates or private equity firms. 04 RETAIN STAFF A major pro of having a more engaged and empowered workforce is that it improves employee retention, especially useful in industries such as design that rely…

TOKYO Taizo Son isn’t your average client. As founder of venture capital firm Mistletoe, he’s invested hundreds of millions of dollars in early-stage start-ups looking to transform a broad spectrum of contemporary challenges, from how we use the bathroom to how we collect space debris. The one constant is that they are all aggressively future-facing, upturning established thinking in their respective sectors. Little wonder then that when DDAA was asked to work on a new Mistletoe incubator in Tokyo, Son’s brief didn’t correlate with the standard office concept. Rather than provisioning desk space, he wanted the practice to instead engineer an environment that would foster ‘serendipitous’ connections among the VC’s resident innovators. Of course, serendipity has long been an aspiration of modern office design, especially for those working for tech-inflected businesses.…

HYBRID FOOD RETAIL Rethinking Design For The Experiential Turn Discover emerging trends in the food retail industry – one of the most creative fields for designers, architects and other professionals. This handbook prescribes hybridization – a fusion of gastronomy, co-working, hospitality and performative formats – as a powerful remedy against digital disruption. €29 MOMENT Redefining the Brand Experience Tokyo-based design rm MOMENT’s book of the same name highlights a versatile and skillful visual approach, focusing on detail-oriented spatial branding and lighting design for interior solutions that are both functionally and emotionally driven. €39 store.frameweb.com…

Conscious Co-Living is based in Berlin and London: two hotspots in the co-living scene. Cofounder Matt Lesniak and his team assess new or existing co-living enterprises – every aspect from spatial design to public engagement – helping them to better cultivate communities, boost the wellbeing of residents, and increase environmental sustainability. Or, as Lesniak puts it: ‘We focus on the connection to oneself, to others and to nature.’ But so far, says Lesniak, he’s seeing the opposite. ‘Larger brands are communicating these ideals but the reality doesn’t match up. We want to ensure that developers and operators that enter the scene have a quality standard or framework in mind.’ Conscious Co-Living works in a few different ways. It might help existing operators to develop improvement strategies. At other times, the…

DESIGN FOR DEMOGRAPHICS As the co-living market expands, new entrants are finding success by tailoring the shared-space principles to target groups who have common needs – and attendant amenities – such as new families or the retired. DON’T TAKE COMMUNITY FOR GRANTED With an epidemic of loneliness affecting many major economies, co-living can act as vital tool for creating community. But don’t expect a shared address to automatically mean a shared connection – programmes need to be carefully designed to encourage various levels of interaction. INTEGRATE INTROVERTS Being introverted doesn’t preclude someone from wanting to live communally, but they may need a greater gradation of private-to-social spaces and a shift away from the brash interior treatments many co-living ventures borrow from the student accommodation market. WELCOME EVERYONE IN Co-living developments…

89 years old is the age of the oldest referenced moquette design, named Pullman, that was originally used on London County Council trams 108 hours is the amount of time it took to clean, paint and refit a tube carriage with Underground Vol. II textiles for a LDF 2019 installation 55 metres of fabric were used to upholster the carriage, which was installed at 100% Design 2013 was the year that Kirkby Design and TfL launched their first collaboration, to mark London Underground’s centennial 18 months were spent designing, developing and producing the collection 40 vivid colours make up the collective palette of the patterns 7 designs from the London Transport Museum’s archive have been reimagined in velvet kirkbydesign.com tfl.gov.uk…

It’s a hot and humid Tuesday evening in August when I make my usual evening run along the Huangpu river. While cargo ships slowly move their loads of sand and coal downstream, I pass a violinist playing a Paganini solo on the double-deck bridge. Welcome to the Westbund, Shanghai’s cultural hotspot. This waterfront area was originally set up as a manufacturing and logistical hub during the industrialization of China. Only a few years ago the area was full of factories, hangars, warehouses and oil tanks. During the World Expo of 2010, the zone was transformed at lightning speed and the industry moved to the outskirts of the city. The district was appointed as an arts cluster, and many museums and galleries were set up there in the past decade. The…

Those following Moooi from the very beginning may feel a touch of déjà vu when they see one of its latest releases. Kaipo TOO – first presented during this year’s London Design Festival – is the reincarnation of Edward van Vliet’s original Kaipo lamp that dates back to 2001, the year of Moooi’s establishment. It won’t take long to notice, though, that there’s something very different at play here. Whereas its predecessor was a statement in contrasting materials – metal and glass – Kaipo TOO is made almost entirely of handblown glass. The first Kaipo has been out of production for almost a decade. Its crystal glass base included an inner layer of electroplated silver, a material that soon became impossible to apply. European regulations forbade its use, unless factories…

09:00 RAMONA BRONKAR BANNAYAN: There’s really no typical day at MoMA – that’s one thing I like so much about my job. There are a lot of recurring meetings, though, from one-on-one brainstorming sessions to large-scale seasonal programme reviews with over 100 people. Over the last three years my primary focus has been MoMA’s major overhaul [due to open 21 October at the time of printing]. Liz Diller has been a terrific partner. The process has given us literal breadth with additional space and expanded the way we think about display. We’ll now mix works of different mediums together, connected via a chronological spine. This change raised new challenges surrounding scale, reflection, lighting, film presentations and so on. By opening day, we’ll have relocated around 6,000 objects and reframed some…

SUCHI REDDY: Growing up in Chennai, India, my parents had a big garden with lots of different fruit and flower trees. I remember how as a child I would pick the little white flowers and arrange them on top of the leaves in a pattern – I think that was the first time that I realized that you could put things together to make something completely new. I recall looking at this arrangement and thinking, that’s really beautiful. To me, this idea of the collaboration between design and beauty gained importance at a young age. Our house was created by an architect friend of my father’s who was fascinated by Japanese culture. It wasn’t so common in those days to build your own home. My mother filled it with all…

What if, instead of off-gassing, your floors could capture humidity, store it and release it again when the air in the room becomes dry? What if your carpet could bind fine dust particles, was waterproof, hypoallergenic, acoustically absorbent or thermally insulating? What if it was sustainable, recyclable down to its backing layer and organic? In short, what if our floors made us feel better, instead of worse? The theme of carpet and floor coverings trade fair Domotex 2020, which takes place at the Hannover Exhibition Centre from 10 to 13 January 2020, will be Atmysphere. The architecture and design industries are increasingly shaped by their impact on health, naturalness and sustainability: salubrious trends that Domotex is set to amplify. ‘Health is synonymous with quality of life and living well, and…

Thomas Petherick loves rolling up his sleeves to work with props, space and clothes in a hands-on way. He graduated from London’s Goldsmiths University in 2011 and did a brief spell as a conceptual milliner before realizing an industry that essentially makes ‘hats for ladies at Ascot’ wasn’t his scene. After finding his way into set design through physically making small props and installations for others, he’s come to forge a view of space that is closer to a sculptor’s than a designer’s. Across fashion shows for the likes of Xander Zhou, Kiko Kostadinov and Tommy Hilfiger, and advertising campaigns for Nike, Balmain and Burberry, Petherick crafts original narratives in set design by making the surrounding space as important as the fashion itself. What was your first job in set…

Co-living has taken off as an industry in recent years, attracting legions of converts, but also its fair share of critics. As several key players go global and numerous innovators open up in every conceivable niche – from family collectives to senior communities – it’s time to take another look at a form of urban organization that trades personal space for shared amenities. It’s hard to recall now, but when Airbnb launched back in 2008, the concept of handing over your house keys to a total stranger was met with abject horror. Individualist Western society tends to put a premium on personal space, and applying a sharing-economy logic to the home was considered a step too far. Cut to a decade later and everyone from Italian nonne to urbane New…

MORE AFFORDABLE MATT LESNIAK: ‘At the moment, co-living projects are being developed according to the guidelines of planning regulations – say 20% affordable at 20% market rate, depending on the city. That’s still not affordable for lower income brackets. There needs to be more partnership with local authorities and more private-public initiatives.’ MORE ACCESSIBLE ‘Thankfully we’re starting to see co-living spaces open up for families – Kin, for one – that actually have the right facilities, such as childcare services.’ MORE FLEXIBLE ‘Can spaces be personalized to each customer? And what if the customer becomes a couple or has a family? What about intergenerational living? These questions all need further exploration.’ MORE CONSIDERED ‘Co-living needs to accommodate different needs. Think about introverts versus extroverts, or religious practitioners. Current co-living spaces…

COSENTINO MERCADO LITTLE SPAIN Capella Garcia Arquitectura has completed a restaurant space in New York City for renowned chef José Andrés. The architects appropriately turned to Spanish products to fit Mercado Little Spain: nearly 700 m2 of Cosentino material was used, including its Silestone tile in ‘Pearl Jasmine’ for the 3-cm-thick bar, and Dekton surfacing for the walls. cosentino.com PIAVAL MACARON LOUNGE Architect Laura Silvestrini worked to diversify Piaval’s collection of Macaron armchairs with a new lounge model. The chair is crafted with simple lines and made of two distinct elements, reflecting a great attention to detail. Its structure is offered in ash and walnut and can be made personal with a variety of finishes, while upholstery is available in fabric and leather. piaval.it KETTAL VDL PENTHOUSE The 1963 rebuild…