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Wednesday, 10 September 2008

Creating Visually Stimulating Environments

The sense of journey from private spaces to public places and on to private / public retail spaces has always held a fascination for me. Where do people meet before they go shopping? Why do we go to a particular store and not another? What makes things sell? What first attracts us to a brand? Of course a whole plethora of research, theories, theories of the theories, research of the theories and so on exists to answer these questions and indeed many more. There does however remain an emotional response to these journeys, a kind of there-are-some-emotions-which-have-no-words scenario that particularly interests me.

When designing, producing commercial spaces or installing a visual merchandising concept, for example it can be particularly easy to apply motifs or plagiarise by lifting from already established and published imagery, however I encourage my students to look beyond these and apply a much deeper level of research and thinking through unravelling their initial ideas before applying them into the commercial spaces that they design.

During a pe

riod of research of public art in 1992 I first came across the Rock Garden in Chandigarh, India. This of course was pre-internet days where ease of access to such information took hours pouring over documents and publications in libraries. It was a another 11 years before my first visit to Chandigarh at the foot of the Himalayas on a round trip from New Delhi, taking several hours by car driving on the bumpy roads of Rajasthan and the Punjab. Indians are particularly proud of Chandigarh, which is probably the greenest city – in the sense of landscape rather than recycling – in the whole of India and the Rock Garden the most visited place in India after the Taj Mahal.
Built by Nek Chand beginning in the early 1950’s in a clearing of the woods on the edge of 'Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh' and new vision of urban planning. Chand created an ‘illegal’

oasis from found objects that include broken crockery, bangles, light sockets and stones, creating an inspirational and fascinating environment. Paths of polished rounded stones and walls completely covered in broken cups and plates guide you through the spaces. Rounded doorways so low that you have to bend down to pass through – apparently to ensure that you bow to the ever present ‘Gods’ to then be greeted by ‘Sculptured terraces’ of strangely shaped animals covered with coloured bangles, an abstract concrete forms applied to surfaces.
What does the all have to do with commercial space design you may well be asking yourself? Certainly Chand was uneducated and influences of the great masters of Art and Design were completely unknown to him and therefore perhaps he was in that respect ‘untainted’ by these influences. However what he seems to have done is to create a visually stimulating environment from an emotional response in its purest form and from which we can learn a great deal when working in a retail environment and creating our ex

citing commercial spaces. While I do not suggest that everyone cover the walls of their 'spaces' in broken electrical sockets or crockery from the home ware department or create mystical creatures from found objects – these kind of things only really work well in the environments in which they were discovered and of course that would be plagiarism and applying the motif, for me at least, this should be avoided at all cost. We could therefore look perhaps holistically at how Chand created such a variety of different environments through the use of different materials, water, shapes, spaces, forms and repetition of these. Of course there is no electrical lighting deftly creating highlights in this environment, no obvious focal points or hovering sales assistants and no obvious attempt to sell you a product (after all there are none, but that is an interesting concept in itself) What he does do is take you on a journey through spaces each one completely different and yet seamlessly joined. What would be interesting to see is how we can use the essence of what he achieved as inspiration not through the obvious routes of merely covering objects in mosaics and planting them a store window but perhaps scratch a little deeper and take our customers on a journey of experience and excitement.
There are of course plenty of examples of retailers already doing this out there, else where or at least somewhere, but as standardisation of retail environments, mega superstructured shopping malls becomes ever more prevalent I do fear for the future of these exciting journeys to and through retail spaces and the creation of visually stimulating environments within them.

Wednesday, 20 August 2008

Siegal & Stockman Archives found

Receiving an archive is always such an exciting event. Very recently I was sent several photographs and reams of papers detailing one or two small periods of time in the history of Siegal & Stockman. The catalogues and photographs came from a small shop in the middle of France. How the owner came to have these of course remains a mystery, at least to me, but needless to say they probably or at least one hopes that they had some influence over how the product of this retailer was displayed.
The majority of the archive is not conveniently ordered, dated nor indeed numbered. There are page numbers on some of the documents but unfortunately the majority are missing. One key date is stamped on one sheet with 18th June 1952, however there are also some photographs which were included with the archive and look a lot older.
The very nature of their use of these catalogues of course was probably for the stores grand opening and then maybe remained forever forgotten and tucked away in a draw for nearly 60 years. There are a wide variety of different display ‘vehicles’ which makes it quite difficult to precisely decipher what type of small retailer would be attracted to the wide variet

y of these options available to them, although that was not my main focus, I am interested as this would clarify their direction a little. There is a clear sway towards women’s wear, although the archive also contains images of Vitrines, menswear, tubular steel furniture (Bauhaus influence), lighting and children’s wear which adds to the mystery.
The largest part of the archive contains a series of catalogue pages with individual images of fixtures with descriptions of how to use headlining the pages. Names such as ‘Nouveau Presente Soutien-Gorge’ and ‘Composez vous-memes vos Fonds d’Etalages avec les Grilles Mobiles ….offering 50 different positions. Somehow I could not help feeling that they do resemble so kind of Medieval torture implements.

Of course it is easy to poke fun at our display forefathers and mothers, and I have to remind myself that these were produced during very early post war Europe and were probably extremely innovative and appealing to the masses as perhaps a cheaper option to enable retailers to display merchandise to its maximum effect, particularly independents.
It is difficult to image that these female forms with impossibly thin waists and startled child mannequins were ever appealing in our sanitised, excessive, environmentally aware, Western 21st Century however it would be interesting to see some original photographs of stores using these items should I happened upon them.
The photographs of the children seem somehow much older than the rest of the archive, some are labelled Siegal as in the one below, but not all.

The piece de resistance of the archive is a photograph of Marquisette in Amplepuis in Rhone. I have very little information about this store at this stage in my research however it is clearly a women’s wear store and probably quite notable as photographs of historic European store windows seem very difficult to come by.

Tuesday, 1 July 2008

Central St. Martins Summer School

The Interior Design Course for Retail environments at Central St. Martins at the The University of the Arts, London, in collaboration with the Domus Academy in Milan has run successfully for two consecutive years.
Students enrolled on the previous two courses have had an in-depth knowledge of their individual industry. A typical student profile indicates that they are already practicing Architects and Interior designers, particularly from South America, India, Russia, Asia and North America and various European countries.
The nine-day course is aimed at designers who wish to work in, or who are new to, the retail sector and who need to improve their knowledge and creativity in their approach to store layout, Interior Design and point of sale. Students complete a realistic brief based on some key concepts and develop these through one to one tuition.

Students have the opportunity to improve their drawing, model-making and presentation skills and develop their critical awareness to Commercial spaces as they experience them on visits to places of interest.

Upon conclusion of the course students have a keen understanding of Commercial Design in London and a portfolio of research, concepts and finished design work that will become a valuable tool in future work or studies.

Topics Covered include:
Creating Visually Stimulating Environments, Graphics and Signage, Model-making, Product handling, History of Mannequins, Lighting, Graphics and dressing and product handling.

Site visits have included Adel Rootsteins factory and showroom (Image below left) Proportion London's factory and showroon, Concorde Graphics, iGuzzini, Materials Lab and Madame Tussauds design studio.

Previous students have also had the opportunity to develop their own ‘individual’ concept for their home market within the course with support in developing design concepts from initial idea through to reality via specialist resources which give a basic understanding in how to look at Commercial Interiors and store layout which mirrors industry practice.

The tailored Lecture programme which introduces students to a wide body of information from a Global perspective and research methodology within the University of the Arts, London.