Seizure - Blue Crystal Interior Installation

Just a stones throw away from my campus at Elephant and Castle I had heard of that a new Art Installation called ‘Seizure’ that had opened just around the corner. Being curious I wanted to see what all the excitement was about I made my way to Harper Road, just along the New Kent Road to see Roger Hiorns latest project. The day was a typical grey London Autumn / Winter day which added to the feeling of desolation to the area that is surrounded with post-war housing estates, a secondary school and a park.
Walking into a type of Cour d'Honneur that was surrounded with boarded up low rise apartments we arrived on site. At one end of the block a queue had formed. After waiting for a few minutes in an opposite derelict empty apartment with metal grills, a smashed bath and patterned wallpaper peeling from the walls, we were issued with gloves and changed into rubber boots before making our way across the Cour d'Honneur to an opposite apartment.

The whole interior space of a couple of rooms (bedroom and bathroom) had been stripped and secured with a steel reinforced tank and liquid slow cooling copper sulphate solution poured in and left for two weeks. What was so extraordinary and such an interesting contradiction was how incredibly depressing the apartments were and then suddenly you are presented with this ‘oasis’ or artists refuge. I couldn't help wonder who had lived in the space prior to the installation and how possibly ‘loaded’ it was with emotions. Could someone have been born there? Did someone at some point die there? The emotional narratives of these spaces always creep into my mind.
The crystals had formed from floor to ceiling covering every inch of the horizontal and vertical planes. The floor was quite uneven and tidal ridges had formed and boot prints marked the floor. The remaining lighting had enormous crystals hanging from them and after squeezing through the crystal encrusted walls into the bath room the outline of the bath could be seen although I did suddenly feel that I would have liked to have seen more of these encrusted forms such as furniture that may have been left in the space, however the space was stunning.
Proceeding back to return my boots and gloves in the opposite derelict apartment, what I did find particularly interested is how the buildings reflect each other in size and space and in some way become a kind of before and after, although of course this was probably never the intention. However, how could we learn from this artist in developing our own concepts within Interior Design? What other applications could it have? How could this concept be translated into workable environment?

The images below are of the bathrooms in the 'Seizure' apartment and the reflected apartment opposite.

Why have Retail Standards?

You may well be looking forward to a Summer holiday, perhaps travelling somewhere exotic – I say this bearing in mind that although being based in London as I write this, that London can be exotic to many travellers especially if you are not experiencing such a currently cold climate and yearn for one? Anyway, with this in mind imagine you begin your journey. Bags are packed, journey to the airport was easy, flight was comfortable and then you arrive at the hotel. This ‘exotic’ place that you may have looked forward to visiting for months and travelled hours to get to is surrounded by a building site; maybe your hotel has not actually been built? OK well that’s an extreme example. Incidentally isn't it is amazing how carefully hotel rooms are photographed from very flattering angles and naturally only the best suite can be viewed on-line? Imagine the disappointment.... maybe you feel the disappointment right now? Maybe, like me you have been in this situation? I once stayed with a colleague in a Hotel room that had no windows, well it did have one window but it faced onto the communal staircase with a very short burgundy velour curtain and we slept shoulder to shoulder in a ‘double’ bed with an electric fan whirring above us having take it in turns throughout the night to burn incense sticks to keep the mosquito's coming through the holes in the ceiling and the electrics buzzing all night would have had 'Health and Safety' going mad.
Once you get over the hotel shock, deciding not to stay but then staying anyway because its such a nightmare to move, you are tired and getting your money back is more hassle than its worth.
You decide perhaps to journey to the beach, your perhaps expecting this.........

and you get this? (this is real)

Or perhaps take in some culture? You're expecting this.......

and you get this? (this is real too)

How would you feel now?
Imagine your customer. They arrive at your store. Maybe they had travelled across the country, perhaps across the world, not necessarily to shop with you but perhaps visit you are on their journey. Your customer approaches your store and sees the following?

How does your customer feel now?

Your customer may not initially see all of your faults directly. Perhaps they don’t even notice that your mannequins have their hands on the wrong arms or even think that merchandise crammed into a window is a sign of a desperate retailer etc. However, these are a ‘red rag’ and clear indicator of a retailer who doesn't care? Perhaps staff are unhelpful, or perhaps they are helpful but the environment looks untidy. This to me usually means they are desperate for your cash but the merchandise is not worth the money?

So why have retail standards and what does this include??

Store maintenance: Anything broken should be fixed or removed. Leaking ceilings and missing lights should be repaired or replaced

Replenishment of merchandise: Merchandise should be replenished but never so much that it is unshoppable.

House keeping: All areas should be kept clean and tidy, this also reduces the amount of damaged goods.

Staff appearance: Staff do not always have to wear smart uniforms however they should perhaps be clean and perhaps wearing some of the merchandise. This also shows a customer how to 'wear' something.

Health and Safety: Provides the customer and employees with a clean and safe environment in which to work or shop.

Whats wrong in the picture below?

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 period 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 exciting 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.

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 variety 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.

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.

How to book this course is detailed in the links below:

http://courses.csm.arts.ac.uk/LondonMilan.asp?ct=&ma=8&cat=132&ci=5223

http://courses.csm.arts.ac.uk/summer.asp?CI=6584&MA=8&CAT=132&CSM=yes

http://www.domusacademy.it/ita/3/index.php?id=47&cat3id=266&mod=1