Environment Design

Normally when we talk about Environment Design we are talking about specific places. Architecture, urban planning and landscaping are considered. There are however many forms and scales of environments, such as those created by light and sound, as well as the modification of natural spaces.

Olafur Eliasson, Room for One Color, 1997

Artist Ryoji Ikeda combined light and sound for an installation at the tunnel of the former TWA airport in New York, Spectra, 2004

Using the ground to create an iconic environment

Working with nature, Earth Artists Walter Demaria Lighting Field 1977 and Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970 use natrual elements to define environments

The mobile environment of an ice cream truck

and the simulated environment of Second Life

Brasilia is an example of total environment design

Oscar Niemeyer at Brasilia

•Brasilia is an entire city was built between 1956 to 1960 when it was designated capital of Brazil. The urban planner was Lucio Costa and the architect was Oscar Niemeyer.

•The city was designed in the shape of airplane

•The buildings were designed with a forward thinking futurist aesthetic

•Niemeyer is over 100 years old and is still designing buildings for the city

•Almost all of Niemeyer’s work is poured, reinforced concrete, a smooth colorless aesthetic that he learned from Le Corbusier

Even outside of Brasilia, Niemeyer's style is consistent.

The Niterói Contemporary Art Museum in Rio, 1996

Defensive Space

Design elements that protect private property

Territoriality is using gates and hedges to establish borders.

Surveillance is monitoring entrances and sites of regular activity

Symbolic barriers are decorative and suggestive of borders but do not protect.

Immersion

A human state of being pleasantly occupied but not stressed.

-challenges where you are

-limited distraction

-location specific goals

-feedback

-removed from the worries of life

-controlling actions

-basic needs are met

-removed from connections to time

The multi-guest luxury Why Yacht, designed by Wally Hermes, is one alternitive to mass cruises.

Vacation locations work on the principle of immersion as well as theme parks that hold guests captive for short periods.

John Heskett explains in his essay "Environments"

•Environments are connected to communications and objects because environments provide a context

•Environments balance the same formal properties – form, size, color, pattern and texture

•Like objects, environments are connected to use and must consider safety

•Environment design can be divided into 2 groups,

exterior and interior. Exterior concerns architects and engineers while interior focuses more on style and decoration.

Frank Llyod Wright's Falling Water

•Exterior environments normally involve teams but everyday people have increased their role in environment design witnessed by the increased of home improvement television

•The US has a very high percentage of home designers, 1 for every 9,000 people

•The US has more land and thus ever expanding home size which makes US appliance designers less considerate of size. Japanese appliances are typically smaller and they think vertically instead of horizontally.

•Frederick Taylor was an American Engineer in the late 1800’s who influenced US office space to size/rank. The idea of partition space, or cubicles, did not become popular until the 1960’s.

•Tokyo City Hall was designed in 1991 with smart technology that used cards for various access

•7 World Trade Center was completed in 2006 as a smart-eco building that uses power based on tenants’ presence

•“Hotelling” is a design strategy for work spaces in which employees work from home and come in occasionally to shared space

•In the early 1990’s the ad agency TBWA/Chiat/Day tried hotelling but then in 1999 created a new office space, designed by Clive Wilkinson in LA in 120,000 square feet, an adaptable space with combined private and communal space

Mass produced environments in the United States created particular architectural forms in suburban towns that were fixed in their aesthetic. In the case of Pizza Hut, many buildings were created as restaurants but the business turned to take out and delivery. When they tried to sell the buildings they had a hard time because of the fixed aesthetic. In the case below it was bought by the government and used as a police station.

American Apparel is an example of a global brand that adapts urban environments rather than creating new structures.

8 inc. are the environment designers for Apple.

Learning from Las Vegas, Venturi & Scott Brown

Las Vegas was established in 1911 and mostly built in the 1940’s. There was additional building in the 1960’s and then when the Mirage was built in 1989, a new generation of hotels began. Venturi’s book looks at the Vegas of the 1970’s.

•Venturi and Brown look at the commercial space of the strip as both space and symbol

•The actual building signs are more important than the architecture, a practice from the towns of the old west

•They are Marxist because they see the strip as a persuasion

•There is a larger order to the strip (civic order) and also an order within the casinos

•There project is a good example of primary research and extensive charts

The study revealed that environments designed for cars had large fronts and simple square backs that resemble the old towns of the west.

The interior of casinos are designed to keep people immersed.

Superstudio

•Superstudio began in 1966 in Italy after a major flood in Florence.

•The designers rejected the past of Italian architecture

•Toraldo di Francia is writing as a founder of Superstudio

•The author suggests that architects normally come along too late in the process, after social order has already been established

•Radical architecture still operates within the framework of towns, or the idea of working class versus estate. The architect supports class structure

•Modernism asked the question of the “degree zero”

•They emphasized renderings over production

•While they were interested in the future, they were not interested in technology without people

•They were also interested in the grid form as mans imposition on nature

•They proposed a “continuous monument,” which was a proposed network of expanse that contrasted tall cities

•For Superstudio architecture was a situation and it was discursive, a process that was very long

•Many of their projects were temporary and ecologically considerate

In his essay "Urban Outfitting," David Gilbert addresses the global issue of retail design, specifically flagship stores in world cities of fashion.

Barneys New York

Burberry London

Rethinking Environments

Some historic environments remain culturally relevant such as Pierre Koenig's Stahl House of 1960 shot by Steven Meisel for Valentino in 2002.

The sunken living rom first popularized in a case study house in 1957 was re-used in 2009 at the Venice Biennale.

Elmgreen & Dragset, Venice Biennial, 2009

There is also the potentional for furniture to transform an environment. Czech designer Maxim Velcovsky used the Vernor Panton chair to transofrm St. Bartholomew’s in Eastern Bohemia, Russia.