American fashion brand Kith has returned to the location of its first Manhattan flagship to open a women-dedicated store, in which olive trees grow up through display podiums.
The inaugural Kith Women Flagship in Soho opened last December at 644 Broadway, the same historic landmark building where the brand debuted its Manhattan retail offering in 2011.
Custom-built podiums run through the middle of the Kith Women flagship store in Soho
Previously the Manhattan Savings Institute Bank, the red sandstone and brick structure’s exterior features wrought iron gates at the entrance and set the tone for the materials palette inside.
Kith founder and creative director Ronnie Fieg designed the interiors to include signature elements of the brand’s retail concepts, but with adjustments to acknowledge its context.
The main room displays apparel and accessories in walnut and brass-trimmed niches
“The ambiance exudes modern elegance with its warm and calming aura, constructed with materials like Venetian plaster, travertine, and rosa aurora [marble],” said the Kith team.
The spacious main room benefits from tall ceilings and an open floor plan, and presents Kith Women in-house and multi-brand ready-to-wear apparel against Venetian plaster and Kith monogrammed suede wallpaper.
In a room dedicated to footwear, shoes are presented on travertine shelves
Clothing is displayed on rails installed in walnut and brass-trimmed niches around the perimeter, with accessories like hats and bags placed on shelves above.
A row of square walnut podiums runs through the middle of the room, each with an olive tree growing up through the centre of its pink marble surface.
A cafe and flower shop is run in partnership with PlantShed, and features mosaic floors and a fluted marble service counter
Custom-built by Brooklyn-based woodworker Mark Jupiter, these units contain drawers for product storage, and alternating ones are topped with glass vitrines for showcasing jewellery and other small accessories.
Oak flooring is laid in a grid pattern transversed by walnut strips, and the darker wood also lines the fitting rooms.
Footwear has a dedicated room, in which shoes are displayed on shelves with integrated lighting that run from one end to the other.
“Entering the footwear space, you will find a grand arched plaster ceiling, travertine shelves, and a custom chandelier from Italy by Viabizzuno,” the team said.
The cafe leads out to a courtyard behind the historic building’s wrought iron gates
In the final room is a cafe run in partnership with New York-based flower and plant shop PlantShed, which serves light bites and drinks and offers custom floral arrangements.
The space features a mosaic tiled floor, walnut wall panelling, a service counter with a fluted pink marble front and floral displays on stepped stone plinths.
The cafe leads out to a courtyard area behind the building’s impressive iron gates, which furnished with cafe tables and chairs in between topiary plants shaped into spirals.
Kith Women is located at 644 Broadway, the same building where the brand opened its original flagship retail space in 2011
Feig also designed Kith’s recently opened Williamsburg store, located in the 25 Kent Plaza office building where the brand also has its corporate offices.
The company had previously worked with design studio Snarkitecture on its retail spaces around the world, including outposts in Miami, Los Angeles and Paris.
The first materials designed by AI could be less than 18 months away, according to Orbital Materials CEO Jonathan Godwin, who aims to harness the technology to create materials to help with carbon capture.
Formerly an engineer at Google’s AI research laboratory DeepMind, Godwin founded Orbital Materials in 2022 with a vision to bring to market “transformational materials” that could “improve our ability to have sustainable and healthy lifestyles”.
The company’s first target is materials relating to carbon capture, sustainable aviation fuel and the removal of harmful chemicals from the environment.
Material science AI a blend of ChatGPT and physics
But in the long-term Godwin also plans to work on materials for architecture and design, such as lightweight alloys for cars and smart concrete.
“If we can improve our ability to design new materials, like the chips in a computer or the screens that we look at, the metals and the alloys that we use, the active materials in carbon capture systems, then we have an ability to improve human life without having to pollute the world,” he told Dezeen.
“That’s something that drives us as an organisation.”
The model Orbital Materials uses is not dissimilar to familiar AI applications such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, says Godwin.
Whereas in an image generator such as Stable Diffusion, you would input natural language as a prompt and then generate an image from it, Orbital Materials inputs an instruction along the lines of “a material that has a good absorption capacity for carbon dioxide” and the algorithm generates a 3D structure that meets the criteria.
British engineer Jonathan Godwin founded Orbital Materials in 2022. Photo courtesy of Orbital Materials
Much like how image generators arrive at an image by iterating from random noise, Orbital Material’s AI starts with a random cloud of atoms that it iteratively refines until landing on a molecular structure that answers the prompt.
The difference is that when Orbital Materials trains its AI model, the system is fed extra information about physics, “adapting it” for material science, in Godwin’s words.
The datasets that the model, nicknamed Linus, has been trained on come from real experiments and quantum simulations, which work like typical simulations but on an atomic level.
“We work really hard on making sure that whatever we generate, we have a route to making,” said Godwin. “And we do that by focusing on our dataset, focusing on a number of different kinds of tools that we have to try and ensure that that is the case.”
“Big impact” on design and architecture
Godwin says he expects AI in material science to have a “big impact” on the design and architecture industries.
First, he believes it could help industries decarbonise by introducing carbon-neutral or carbon-negative materials. He gives the example of the recent development of a cement battery alternative for energy storage as a “hugely powerful” and “breakthrough” innovation of the kind that AI could generate.
Second, he believes the technology will eventually allow for the development of new materials to specification that can be manufactured at a small scale.
“Maybe you’re designing a new device, and you need a certain type of metal with a certain type of strength or certain types of characteristics,” he explained. “At the moment, it’s very difficult to design something to specification. You have a list of materials that you can use.”
“What we’re going to be able to do is create a far wider variety and actually try to bring materials to market very, very quickly.”
An area that he sees being transformed by AI-enabled developments in material science is 3D printing.
“The scale and availability and the different functional properties of things you can 3D print are going to massively improve through the use of AI-designed additive manufacturing materials,” Godwin said.
Orbit Materials to focus on creating carbon-capture solutions
However, Orbital Materials’ current focus is in sectors where Godwin believes a product can be brought to market most quickly — hence, the 18-month estimate for how long it will take the year-old start-up to launch its first product.
“You need to have early wins in order to build a company,” he says, adding that architectural and design materials can require years of testing, particularly for something structural like concrete.
Similar to how synthetic-biology labs partner with pharmaceutical companies to bring new drug discoveries to the market, Godwin envisions Orbital Materials developing a material to the proof of concept or pilot demonstration phase and then seeking an established manufacturer as a partner.
One of the areas where the start-up is focusing much of its attention now is in materials that can draw out carbon dioxide from the air and so help establish operational carbon capture and storage solutions.
“That to me is really important because we’ve got all of these exciting technologies around converting CO2 to gasoline, converting CO2 to concrete, CO2 to X, Y and Z,” he said.
“But in order for that to actually be truly carbon neutral you need a way to capture the CO2 from the environment, and at the moment we’re not doing that in sufficient scales to make those other technologies feasible or economic.”
Benefitting from AI is “a massive organisational and political challenge”
While a believer in the potential benefits of AI, Godwin is concerned that our societies are not prepared for its potential transformational impact.
Given the rate of progress in the technology, he says we need to be thinking about “what’s going to happen in the next five years” and not just the current harms in order that the potential benefits of AI — reduced working hours, a higher quality of life within planetary limits — are evenly distributed.
“When I think of technologies in the past that have hugely improved human life, the industrial revolution, it took a very long time for the benefits of that to filter down to the people affected and that’s what worries me,” Godwin said.
“To get our society to make the most of this technology in a way that brings everyone along is a massive organisational and political challenge.”
This article is part of Dezeen’s AItopia series, which explores the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on design, architecture and humanity, both now and in the future.
Architecture practice Snøhetta stuck to natural materials for the fit-out of the Holzweiler boutique in Copenhagen, incorporating subtle references to the fashion brand’s Norwegian heritage.
Snøhetta is a long-term collaborator of Holzweiler‘s, having designed the company’s flagship store and showroom in Oslo, as well as a number of its pop-up shops, runway sets and its digital identity.
Snøhetta has designed Holzweiler’s Copenhagen outpost
For Holzweiler’s first international outpost in Copenhagen, Snøhetta followed the concept of “tracing” – devising an interior scheme that shows traces of the brand’s Norwegian roots alongside the minimalist aesthetic found in its previous retail spaces.
“Reminiscent of a memory or feeling that remains, the idea of ‘traces’ evokes an emotional sense of the brand’s beloved heritage as it travels to a new city,” the practice said.
A clay sculpture by Ingeborg Riseng sits at the heart of the store
At the centre of the 100-square-metre store is a tall, hollow sculpture by Norwegian artist Ingeborg Riseng, which shoppers can step into. Its undulating outer walls are fitted with display shelves and coated in a smooth layer of clay, while the inside has a rough, craggy surface.
An oakwood display plinth winds its way around the periphery of the store, eventually connecting to a curved timber partition at the rear of the floor plan.
Around the edge of the store is an oak display plinth
Behind the wall lies a changing area with cubicles and curtains created by Danish textile design studio Tronhjem Rømer.
The fabric is digitally printed with subtle yellow and pale blue stripes, designed to evoke the shifting shades of the Norwegian sky.
To contrast the store’s largely natural material palette, Snøhetta added some industrial-style finishing touches like metal clothing rails and custom strip lighting, developed by Swedish brand Ateljé Lyktan.
Both the floors and ceilings were preserved from the store’s previous fit-out.
Garments hang from steel rails
Other recent projects by Snøhetta include Bolder Star Lodges, a quartet of wooden cabins that overlook a fjord in Norway.
Meanwhile in Denmark, the practice employed boat construction techniques to create a timber community centre in Esbjerg.
The photography is by Magnus Nordstrand, courtesy of Snøhetta and Holzweiler.
Fashion brand Acne Studios has opened its latest store in China, which was designed by Stockholm studio Halleroed and is located in the submerged SKP department store designed by Sybarite in Chengdu, China.
The 338-square-metre store has a discrete sandstone exterior marked by a red LED sign displaying the brand’s logo.
Inside, grey sandstone walls contrast against sculptural tie-dye furniture in earthy tan hues by British designer Max Lamb.
The store is located inside Chengdu’s SKP department store
“Our inspiration was aesthetically playing with design from the 1980s and 90s, and how that period looked at the future,” Halleroed founder Christian Halleroed told Dezeen.
“The inclined stone clad walls, the futuristic lighting together with the Daniel Silver mannequins – we thought of a futuristic space/computer age feel, but in a contemporary way of putting it together,” he added.
“We clashed this with the Max Lamb sculpture-like furniture that has a more primitive, earthy feeling.”
It features tactile, soft seating by Max Lamb
As well as the furniture, Lamb designed four fabric-clad touchscreens that are mounted on slim poles throughout the store and provide an overview of the brand’s current collection and stock availability.
Expressive mannequins by artist Daniel Silver and a light installation by designer Benoit Lalloz help to add a futuristic feel to the space.
Lighting was designed to feel “like a spaceship”
Halleored, which has designed a number of Acne Studios‘ stores, normally works with Lalloz on the lighting but said the Chengdu store lights have a different feel to those in other stores.
“These were done a bit differently than previous since they are recessed in the ceiling, but still has the typical look of Benoit Lalloz,” Halleroed said.
“We wanted the lighting to feel like a spaceship,” he added.
A large mirrored column in the middle of the store reflects its pared-down interior, which features a colour palette informed by the grey hues used for early computer designs.
A large mirrored column sits in the centre of the sandstone room
“We used a very restrained palette with the grey, monochrome sandstone on the floor and angled walls, high gloss white walls and ceiling, the black coves in the ceiling, and for the fixtures brushed stainless steel,” Halleroed said.
“The Max Lamb and Daniel Silver pieces contrast this, with their brown batik fabric and the white with patina and silver mannequins.”
Previous Acne Studios store designs featured on Dezeen include a “monolithic” store in Paris and a pink-ceiling flagship store in Milan’s Brera district.
