Reputation is extremely important to me. When we are talking to prospective clients, I urge them to speak to my clients of projects that we have finished. Not only so they can hear how we, van der Architects work, but also to understand our process.
Today, I had the pleasure to take this even further a making a presentation together with the client to an audience at JLL’s Executive Exchange seminar. Not just sales talk, but a real, case study.
Thank you Enomoto-san for this!
I will be presenting a case study at the Executive Exchange on Friday 20th at the Conrad Hotel in Tokyo. This will be the first time that I will make a presentation of a project together with the client.
Contact me for further information.
Today, I had a great lunch with my friend Ryo Nakagawa . He took a book from Cahan as a present for me, and pointed me to the their webiste which shows their offices as well. It is a Flash site so you have to click first on “Company” to see it.
I like what is written at “Work”: “In the corporate environment our clients inhabit, anonymous corridors and windowless confernce rooms are the norm. Yet, very often, what’s going on in this world is some new form of business that may revolutionize the way in which the world lives and works. So how do you communicate this excitement of that to a company’s audience?”
I could not agree more, if as a company you want to express your widget through your widget only? Or should you express this through the attitude of your employees and the space all of this takes place in? Damn YES!
Design is emotion. It talks to our senses, and sometime in its most extreme form it does not make sense any more. When Stendhal went to Italy, he suffered a case of temporary madness or, in his own words:
“I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty … I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations … Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Ah, if I could only forget. I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call ‘nerves.’ Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling.”
This reaction to the overwhelming amount of art, architecture and history is called Stendhal’s syndrome, tourist disease or Jerusalem syndrome.
Gaziella Magherini wrote a book about the Stendhal syndrome, in it she observed that
during the mirroring between the art and the subject a sublime, aesthetic, and uncanny event occurs. The art experience hooks a repressed trauma beneath the conscious sea of the subject rapidly pulling the trauma to the surface. The subject acts much like a distressed fish out of water.
Kevin Roberts of Saatchi and Saatchi wrote a book called Lovemarks which looks at people’s emotional relation with products, or “loyalty beyond reason” as Roberts calls it. We buy products not only out of necessity, but as a way to express ourselves. The clothes we wear, the car we drive, the vodka we drink, are all becoming part of our extended selves. Isn’t it normal that we start to feel emotional when we go shopping, overwhelmed with the variety of products and choices?
Early modern architects and designers tried to remove the emotional aspect from the design of cities, architecture and products. Le Corbusier spoke of the house as a machine for living, and wanted to start from zero, tabula rasa, a purist and fuctionalist design. However, I believe that we leave this all behind us and will see the emotional, humanistic aspect of design becoming dominant. (again)
An interesting article in this month’s HBR on sleep and performance. Professor Dr Charles Czeisler , an expert on the biology of sleep talks about the fundamental biological issue of sleep.
He points out the importance of employees that are well rested as crucial to their performance.
“…our ability to sustain attention and maintain peak cognitive performance has to do with the total amount of sleep you manage to get over several days”.
Lack of sleep over prolonged periods of time not only leads to reduced performace, but is similar to cognitive impairment levels equivalent to drunkness.
“It amazes me that contemporary work and social culture glorifies sleeplessness in a way we once glorified people who could hold their liquor… The analogy to drunkenness is real because, like a drunk, a person who is sleep deprived has no idea how functionally impaired he or she truly is.”
Studies have shown that the 20 minute power nap in the afternoon is really a way to regain power and a booster for productivity.
A recipe for a cool office:
bean bags,
dogs,
Free lunch,
Bikes,
Lunch learn Fridays
Average meeting 8 seconds.
Take a look at these video clips of Skype’s cool offices.
Their chair problem is quite funny.
Le Tigre: Deceptacon (DFA Remix)
The Rapture: Sister saviour (DFA Remix)
Soulwax: e talking
Cassandra Complex: Moscow Idaho
Tuxedomoon: No tears
Snowy red: Don’t lose control
Two Lone Swordsman: Faux
Rockers hifi: Going under
That Petrol Emotion: Big Decision (Extended version)
Shriekback: Lined up
I stumbled upon this in Marunouchi today. An interesting idea that when taken further than the few patches on the walls of this construction site, could yield a very interesting office tower indeed…
Beaux arts-modernism-post-modernism- minimalism-graphicism (as this is how I see the latest trend to add graphics in interiors and on exteriors.) “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” is Newton’s third law of motion and seems to work equally well for the waves of which design moves. Monetary value for the designer thus is in being able to surf these waves, like Philip Johnson did during his long career. (According to Johnson architects are high-class whores.)
Others seem to have to be patient like the self proclaimed “architect of the American dream” Morris Lapidus, who in the 50’s and 60’s designed hotels that were described as “the nation’s grossest national product”, “superschlock” or “pornography of architecture”. Despite the flaming words of the critics Lapidus had many large commissions, mainly hotels. Like Johnson, Lapidus lived long, he died in 2001 at the age of 98. In the final years of his life, during the post-modern period, his eclectic buildings started to get a lot of attention, finally Lapidus’s momentum came. A lesson in the value of design: Morris Lapidus made a fortune designing hotels for the glamorous, but he seemed to long for peer recognition for which he had to wait very long indeed.
Jeffrey Kipnis asked in “In the Manor of Nietzsche” why architects felt excluded from the stage of history when they had the opportunity to design the stage itself.
I believe that the emphasis on the sentence above should be on the opportunity that lies within architecture to be able, through its built form, to formulate a programme to create a setting for unlimited experiences.
I have earlier identified in a book called eBusiness and Workplace Redesign that the creation of spaces has gone through three distinct phases, each changing the hierarchical process that forms the creation of these spaces. First there are Sequential Spaces, these spaces are deeply imbedded in their context, the construction and the activities that take place within this space are all dependent on the dominant factor of the context. An example of a Sequential Space are Igloo’s; the context provides the only source for construction namely snow and ice. The activities are very much limited by the sequential character of the context. Next, are Parallel Spaces, their main objective has been to free construction from the limitations of the context. In Parallel Spaces, construction becomes the main element in order to be able to build anything anywhere in exact the same way. Examples of Parallel Spaces are the glazed, boxed Central Business Centres one can find in any city in the world. The third space are Transitional Spaces where we see a shift towards the emphasis on the activities, as construction and context are become one. The characteristics of Transitional Spaces is that they are interior orientated, operate 24 hours (or whatever time they feel appropriate) and have secure access control. Think of Disneyland, casinos or shopping malls, the construction creates its own context and the emphasis is on the activities that are taking place inside.
Venturi and Scott Brown have written about the architectural implementations of transitional space in “Learning from Las Vegas.” Joseph Pine and James Gilmore focus on the activities when they write in “The experience economy” that –ing is the thing: within the Transitional Spaces “work is theatre and every business [is] stage”. The emphasis is on what is happening inside these spaces, the activities that are taking place within. The well-know marketing concept such as Third Place has been coined by Ray Oldenburg. A Third Place is a location between home and work (first and second places according to Oldenburg) where people can relax in good company. Austrian guru and trend scout Christian Mikunda has written a book of recipes for “New Experience Worlds” and identifies in “Brand Lands, Hot Spots and Cool Spaces” that experience design should aim for spaces that become landmarks, emphasizing the circulation through the space, providing a leitmotif, or a strong concept that holds the place together and finally the design should aim to contain a magnetic attraction for visitors.
Examples in the book are Selfridges in Birmingham by Future Systems and Volkswagen Autostadt.
This should, I am convinced, not be limited to shopping, but be part of the experience in the workplace as well.