Architects have since been spinning this notion to suit their own purpose, as well as that of their clients—especially in terms of interior layouts, which arguably provide a considerable degree of creative freedom. To that end, elevating the mundane through an artful interior is a specialty of architect Ryuji Nakamura. In the case of Jin’s Garden Square, a Nagoya, Japan, shop selling eyewear and accessories, he worked metaphorically, creating structural “plants” to display the goods. These truncated, inverted pyramids, faced in walnut veneer and white melamine resin, are piled and configured with the randomness of the aloe plant that inspired them—each with a slightly variegated shape and positioning. They are at once substantial yet delicate, providing a strong, homogeneous backdrop. This, explains Nakamura, is due in part to the surprise and repetition of form and material. “I didn’t want to make a place composed of the [usual] displays, but to create the atmosphere of a ‘botanical garden’ in a shop.”
Working within a structural context, the Berlin-based Barkow Leibinger Architects referred to the faceted-glass curtain wall they created for the 2008 AIA Award–winning Trutec building in Seoul—offices and showrooms for European enterprises—when designing the triangular stair connecting both levels of the two-story lobby. According to Martina Bauer, the project architect, “The building was designed with a dimensional, geometric facade, and we wanted the interior to echo that so people would have a sense of the building’s geometry from within, as well.” The stair also had to be fragile, she notes, “So everything would be light and transparent.” The solution—a suspended stair of 15-mm-thick welded steel supported by slender rods, 8 mm in diameter, with one seemingly free corner—appears to waft like a huge Calder mobile.
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