Aug 13, 06:02 pm
A SHOPPING BLUEPRINT: 1990s SHOPS
Once, shopping was a laborious task. Now, it’s the quintessential Good Day Out. Shopping has become an event. An event, which needs to be designed…
Designing a shop is more than just a placement of shelves. Success or failure of the retail space depends on information about behavioral patterns related to shopping, which need to be translated into architectural form. In essence, the designer must predict or reflect patterns of desire that are continuously changing, both globally and locally, along with lifestyle perceptions and choices.
On the whole, men and women shop very differently. Men usually know what they’re looking for, and shops group their goods according to type, so they may be found quickly and easily. Women’s clothes, on the other hand, are grouped on the basis of color or fabric (the “color or linen story”), to suggest possible combinations.
Men tend to go for visual stimuli. They have a shorter attention span, and respond to things sharply and quickly. Women are more difficult to impress. If you want to attract men, you put in a giant TV screen, make the fittings gadget-like, fill the place with things they can covet. Women are more interested in ambience, on first impressions. The contemporary shop has no shop front, just a sheet of glass, so you can stand on the street and see exactly what’s inside. This is very welcoming. There’s no big, stress-inducing entrance to be made, you just flow in and out as if by osmosis. There’s no ostentatious shop sign, merely a logo at the back, to which you unconsciously gravitate. You float back out feeling that no one’s been messing with you, that design is something to forget about, even if it isn’t. Store design is a soft science. Stores are trying to look more like their customers’ homes, places where they feel safe and in control. A building that screamed “design” at passers-by was like wearing a suit with “Armani” stenciled on the back. It said “look at me, baby, I’m rich!” This is the last thing most people want to say.
Department stores have subtle ways of guiding you round. They know how far into the shop a woman will go to buy a pair of sunglasses or a needle before turning back. They know which impulse-buys to put next to which essential goods and use color and smell – a flower stall! an espresso bar! bread! – to urge you on. Chain shops have their own scent, which is sprayed in the shops every day, so they all smell comfortingly similar. They know this, but they also now know that you do too. So they’re trying not to shout it at you any more.
Shopping and shopping malls have become recreation. High streets are suffering from the shift towards out-of-town complexes. But what happens when we’re all doing the bulk of our shopping by computer? Record companies, for instance, are already coming to terms with the fact that, in the very near future, their sales could be carried out over the Internet. Stores will then inevitably become less about directly flogging gear, and more about selling identities and lifestyles. The leisure and retail industries will merge. Niketown in Portland, Oregon, is an example of what may be coming our way. You walk off the street into a “decompression chamber,” where the door shuts behind you and you’re left in darkness for 20 seconds or so, while words Nike wants to be associated with flash rapidly in front of you. By the time the door on the other side opens, you’ve forgotten the street you left behind. In the tennis room, dozens of broken rackets lie beneath the glass floor. They’re the ones John McEnroe broke at Wimbledon, with labels indicating dates and opponents. In the aqua room, video screens below your feet run continuous loops of the surface of a swimming pool – you’re walking on water. Life-size casts of endorsees like Michael Jordan are everywhere. Nike wouldn’t care if it never sold a single pair of trainers in Niketown.
Climate control has made interiors into purely consumption spaces. A description from 1938 of a windowless store describes a retail space “free from daylight or natural ventilation, thereby eliminating dust and at the same time creating better, air-washed, mechanical ventilation and more uniform, pleasing artificial lighting results. In many ways the elimination of windows adds to the beauty and to the selling efficiency of the store.” Making these interior spaces more large and comfortable (air-conditioning) and dressing them in domesticity (soft furnishings and ambiance) is the best recipe for trapping and seducing fashion victims.
Projects by GEORGE KATODRYTIS / STUDIONOVA: BOUTIQUE and BOOKSHOP:
Filed under: BUILT-PROJECTS+ Texts-CITY