Colour Wonder Environmental Design

Monki store design by Electric Dream

Monki is a Swedish retail concept aimed at teenage girls, one that embraces a magical fantasy story about ‘little black creatures with dual personas’ that live in a derelict City of Oil and Steel. Sound strange? Well it is, this isn’t your typical high street teen clothing outlet, this is a conceptual world which is represented in massive detail throughout the store interiors, graphics, accessories, printed garments, shopping bags and even down to price tags and receipts. This is a retail vision like no other, and having recently been bought by fellow Swedes and giants of high street fashion H&M, it’s a concept which could well be coming your way in the near future.

The Monki World is a story about a parallel universe inhabited by little black creatures with dual personas, born in the derelict City of Oil and Steel. Monkis are cute and friendly, but also evil and deceptive. Their world is made up of places as surprising and ambiguous as themselves; part magical and part ghastly; stunning beauty alongside revolting ugliness.

The Monki saga is plucked from the Peacock Fields, fished from the Everlasting, and woven along the shores of the Rosehip River. Their story is a wild hotchpotch of wondrous adventures among leeches, butterfly choirs, turbine flowers, bow trees and mysterious chemicals. Nothing is impossible in the Monki World!

This story is the foundation for Monki’s all-embracing retail concept. The story is not only communicated as printed patterns on garments, graphics, websites, and store designs; the Monki World is represented even in the smallest details, such as accessories, shopping bags, price tags, and receipts.

Monki has several interior concepts running simultaneously. Every concept is inspired by a different part of the Monki World. So far, the secluded Forgotten Forest and the powerful City of Oil and Steel have been launched. Future concepts will portray other areas of the vast Monki landscape. We did 11 stores with the first concept and after next week, we’ll have six stores with the second concept. Ultimately, all the stores together form an entity that combines recognition, repetition and variation or surprise.

There are three main reasons: One is purely conceptual. The Monki World consists of several places, not just the Swamp and the City of Oil and Steel. It will eventually grow into maybe six different concepts, each inspired by a different part of the Monki World. The different store concepts will belong to the same form family, but each with its own strong individual characteristics. As Monki’s range of products grow, there might be one interior concept devoted simply to selling stationery for example: a refined Monki Stationery Shop inspired by the Peacock Fields or a refined Monki Make-Up Store with an interior inspired by the Sound Farm. The Monki brand will be an umbrella for a multitude of different products, similar to concepts like Hello Kitty or even Muji. Large multi-level shops might also feature more than one concept.

The second reason has to do with scale. The first eleven stores were a huge success in Sweden. Monki wanted to establish new stores faster than they had originally planned. None of us knew in 2006 that H&M would purchase Monki after two years, with the pronounced intent to expand and establish the brand globally. When you have three Monki shops on one street, it’s nice if they are not identical. And, after several years when one Monki concept needs refurbishment, we’re faced with the redesign of, say, 11 shops instead of 200.

The third reason is to keep satisfying the expectations of our zap-happy, easily distracted, quickly bored target group: teenage girls.

Miami Art Museum's Environment Design

"Galaxies Forming along Filaments,
Like Droplets along the Strands of a Spiders Web"

by Tomás Saraceno

Miami Art Museum's installation team assembles "Galaxies Forming along Filaments, Like Droplets along the Strands of a Spiders Web" by Tomás Saraceno. The two-week installation process concluded on February 28, 2010, when Miami Art Museum opened "BETWEEN HERE AND THERE: Modern and Contemporary Art from the Permanent Collection," the museum's first, long-term installation of the Permanent Collection. This remarkable artwork is the initial offering in the new Anchor Gallery, a space dedicated to regularly changing presentations of large-scale works from the collection. In this piece, Saraceno takes spiders webs as a starting point, investigating how these intricate meshes gain immense strength, despite their lightness and thinness, by means of their inherent structural properties. "Galaxies Forming along Filaments, Like Droplets along the Strands of a Spiders Web" can be seen at Miami Art Museum during the first presentation of BETWEEN HERE AND THERE, and again at the new Miami Art Museum at Museum Park, scheduled to open in 2013.

Video Sharing : Miami Art Museum Installation of Large-Scale Work
by Tomás Saraceno

Video by Mark Diamond, Diamondimages.com
Music by Mel Morley, MidiMel.com

Nicola Formichetti Pop Up Store

Gage/Clemenceau Architects collaborate on the design and production of the pop-up with Nicola Formichetti, Fashion Director for Lady Gaga, Creative Director for Mugler as well as fashion stylist to Uniqlo, MAC and V Magazine (talk about a resume!). The concept of the store is the fusion between architecture and fashion manifested into a physical environment.

The pop up will be housing the latest of Formichetti’s work but will also include several original ensambles he has designed for Lady Gaga who has worn them in her performances and various red-carpet events. The team at Gage says they are “attempting to produce a new genre of experimental space that not only showcases, but magnifies the impact of his fashion designs into a new form of immersive environment that fuses the very genetics of architecture and fashion.” The space will take on a sculptural and artistic approach just like the garments.

The team explained that “the installation is comprised of hundreds of robotically cut, mirrored facets, mounted to lightweight composite structural backing. These individual reflective facets are hung from the ceilings and walls, and attached to the flooring. Each facet is attached to its neighbors using a system of precisely bent aluminum clips. Large sheets of mirrored, abrasion-resistant, plastic sheets cover the floor and help to produce an endlessly reflective environment that refracts the clothing so that it can be viewed from a variety of unexpected perspectives. In this installation fashion is no longer an object that sits within a minimal architectural box. Instead, clothing becomes an active participant in a new type of environment that combines the spatial and optical aspects of architectural design with the temporary, ephemeral and fluidly beautiful forms found only in the worlds of high fashion.”

This installation project is being organized through a non-profit organization, Boffo, that has a mission to inform the public about design and architecture through innovative exhibitions, installations and events. The store will open to the public September 8th, but only for a short time, so don’t put it off New Yorkers!

(Photo Credits: Gage / Clemenceau Architects)

Directions Finding

Having problem finding directions or ways in a car park ?
Here an example of a clever design.
Playful use of perspective, space and angle .
Colours and lines are used to break up the otherwise mundane space.

The Billboard Earthbag Project

Each year the Society for Environmental Graphic Design sponsors a contest to recognize the best in environmental graphic design. This year’s Juror’s Award went to Norman Lee and Charles Houser for their Billboard Earthbag Project.

The designers say: “Because most conventional sandbags are fabricated from polypropylene, they are very vulnerable to UV rays and quickly begin to deteriorate when exposed to the sun. Consequently, earthbag shelters need to be plastered to maintain their durability during extended use.The Billboard Earthbag Project envisions using billboard vinyl as an alternative material for earthbags. Polyvinylchloride (PVC) or vinyl, a virtually indestructible, UV-resistant material that cannot be incinerated because of the toxic gases it would emit, represents a substantial portion of the PVC in the world’s overburdened landfills. Because of its durability and imperviousness to the sun and other elements, billboard PVC is an ideal material for reuse.” “The reuse of billboard vinyl in earthbag construction mitigates the impact of global warming in two ways. Transforming this landfill-bound material into another useful product helps lessen landfill overflow worldwide. It also eliminates the need to protect earthbags from UV rays, resulting in more robust emergency shelters that can be used longer to lessen the human suffering caused by natural disasters.”

“As a visual concept, each billboard shelter stands as a symbolic gesture of sustainability. Beyond its environmental benefits, the strategy of reusing billboard vinyl visually recontextualizes the nature of billboards, which are symbols of mass consumerism and a pervasive form of visual pollution in our world. This concept does not seek to generate imagery, but instead appropriates existing commercial imagery as a metaphor for global recycling and reuse. Assembled together into a shelter, the earthbags create a dynamic and vibrant pattern of collaged images and text from around the world, dramatically suggesting a unified, international gesture of sustainability, hope, and humanitarianism.”

According to the jurors, they "were intrigued by this project as an example of ‘cradle-to-cradle’ design pertinent to the signage industry. Utilizing intrinsic qualities of billboard PVC—UV resistant and near indestructible—this concept proposes the creation of dwellings from recycled material and imagery. The idea takes the recycling of billboards, street banners, and print graphics—already employed by art museums in the creation of second-use products—to another level. Truly inventive!"

This all sounds pretty good, and might well work if the billboard material were cut and sewn into bags. One obvious disadvantage of the idea is that since PVC is toxic when burned, this would present a potential hazard to the occupants, but of course this is true of many modern building materials. PVC poses a great risk in building fires, as it releases deadly gases long before it ignites, such as hydrogen chloride which turns to hydrochloric acid when inhaled. As it burns it releases yet more toxic dioxins. Additionally, vinyl does outgas highly toxic VOCs over time. Fortunately most of this danger would have passed with the use of recycled signs, but this could also be an issue.

Eyewear Store Environment

Kirk Originals eyewear company opened its London flagship store on Conduit Street in the West End in early February this year, and I have only just seen the clever in-store design for their launch. London-based Campaign designed the simple, dramatic retail environment for the 66 square-metre boutique, and it looks incredible, and so focused on what the company does. The black-and-white color palette, with only one eyewear wall with 187 “heads” for frames, and practically no furnishings ensure that customers will focus on the eyewear. Eye examinations and fitting take place in the basement, away from the main display space, showing the focus on consumer engagement, but still giving them the privacy to have an eye test and create a personal connection. Large graphics of winking eyes in the window speak clear language, whilst exciting the consumer in a way that would make them go into the store just to check it out, even if they don’t need glasses! Really like this in-store experience, and think more brands should put a focus on making their store’s stand out from the rest as seen in Mary Portas’ new series, of which I particularly liked the programme focused on revitalising the mobile phone market.

Green Art Retail

Replay Store by Vertical Garden Design, Barcelona

Indoor vertical garden in Replay’s flagship store in Barcelona.
Replay’s store on Passeig de Gràcia in Barcelona now hosts a vertical garden of just above 100m2. In the storefront location, the two storey wall is set in a dramatic and playful environment with waterfalls, sculptures and contrasting materials.

As a great place to study nature’s own vertical gardens, the waterfalls were a natural starting point for the plant design. Looking closer to the environment around a waterfall, growing conditions change with linear patterns of fissures and cracks in the underlying exposed rock, or the rapidly decreasing moisture already small steps away from the immediate vicinity of the falling water. In such a manner, like the erratic and geometric cracking of an eroding rock, groups and strings of plants were laid out in an organic pattern.

The generous surface allow for many kinds of plants. Larger groups of begonias, different ferns, small (but long) aroids like the common Philodendron scandens or Scindapsus pictus, sets the background for more dramatic effects of cascading fronds of Nephrolepis exaltata and Polypodium subauriculatum or he larger aroids like Philodendron giganteum and P. erubescens.
This outdoor vertical garden in Barcelona is located in a patio in the back of Replay’s store. Partially shadowed by surrounding buildings, the southwest facing wall has the upper area well exposed to the hot Mediterranean sun, whereas the lower part is mostly in shadow.

This difference in sun exposure gave way for more typical mediterranean plants in the top – such as Lavandula, Rosmarinus and Artemisia – and more shadow preferring plants like Chlorophytum and Fatsia in the lower area. In between there are a few plants that will gain some more size, the idea being to create a strong and wild growing surface, contrasting the metal grid from which it extends.

Designed by Vertical Garden Design