New York-based Crosby Studios has piled office equipment around a long metallic table as part of a pop-up installation for fashion brand The Frankie Shop in Los Angeles.
The month-long installation titled The Office was launched to coincide with LA Art Week and the Sag-Aftra film festival and marked the New York label The Frankie Shop‘s first presence in the Californian city.
A long, metallic conference table formed part of The Office installation created by Crosby Studios
The brand’s founder Gaëlle Drevet and Crosby Studios creative director Harry Nuriev met at his studio, talked for 2.5 hours and decided to work together.
The resulting installation occupies a trapezoidal building on Sunset Boulevard wrapped in metallic film on all sides.
Equipment like printers, office chairs and water coolers were arranged around the perimeter of the space
Inside, the warehouse-like space features a long table also covered in a reflective material, with matching cube-shaped stools set along either side.
Articulated desk lamps, microphones and bottles of water were arranged on the table as if set up for delegates at a convention.
The central table featured microphones and water bottles as if set up for a meeting
Around the perimeter, Nuriev placed recycled office equipment, such as a large printer, a stack of binders and a pile of plastic-wrapped office chairs.
A row of water coolers was lined up along one end of the room, encircled with glowing light boxes to create sharp silhouettes of the equipment in front.
Light boxes that encircle the space create sharp silhouettes of the office furniture placed in front
“It’s not really about the office, it’s more about what happens after the office,” Nuriev told Dezeen. “I was thinking it’s time to officially move on from the office and consider the future. However, in this project, we’re uncertain about what the future holds exactly.”
A selection of apparel by The Frankie Shop is interspersed among the vignettes, while a “storage” area in the back serves as a fitting room.
Some of the furniture is plastic-wrapped, appearing as though just installed or ready to be shipped away
Together, the industrial style of the building, the silvery materials, the lighting and the equipment served to highlight the brand’s reinterpretation of businesswear.
“The pop-up design blends a dynamic combination of fashion and nostalgia, where the power suits of the past seamlessly align with the modern attitude of The Frankie Shop,” said the team.
Metallics are commonplace in Nuriev’s interior projects, appearing prominently in a Berlin jewellery store, a Moscow restaurant and his own New York apartment amongst others.
However, he is vague about the reasons or intentionality behind this recurring theme.
The exterior of the building on Sunset Boulevard is also covered in reflective film
“I don’t really think about ‘why’; it’s just my instincts, and I prefer to follow my feelings,” said Nuriev. “For this project, I had a vision of silver, and I think it works perfectly.”
Originally from Russia, the designer founded Crosby Studios in 2014 and is now based between New York and Paris.
The month-long installation marks The Frankie Shop’s first presence in LA and was timed to coincide with the city’s art week
He recently completed the interiors for New York nightclub Silencio, based on the original location in Paris designed by film director David Lynch.
Nuriev frequently collaborates with fashion brands, on projects ranging from a virtual sofa upholstered with green Nike jackets to a transparent vinyl couch filled with old Balenciaga clothing.
The Office is on show in Los Angeles from 23 February to 24 March. For more events, talks and exhibitions in architecture and design visit Dezeen Events Guide.
Architect Yussef Agbo-Ola has created a tent-like temple informed by Sharjah’s topography and biodiversity as part of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial.
Occupying a classroom within the former school that is now the triennial’s headquarters, the temple was designed by Agbo-Ola of London environmental design practice Olaniyi Studio as a place for incense burning and reflection.
Named Jabal: 9 Ash Cleansing Temple, the structure was made from jute, hemp and cotton yarns knitted into a fabric to encourage reflection on how climate change is impacting Sharjah’s biodiversity.
Yussef Agbo-Ola created a temple for the Sharjah Architecture Triennial
“Jabal: 9 Ash Cleansing Temple is a living architectural entity for honouring non-human life and endangered species in the womb of a scared mountain,” Agbo-Ola told Dezeen.
“It honours ephemeral rituals across architecture, performance and art within Bedouin, Yoruba and Cherokee communities that respect the natural world and practice environmental consecration,” he continued.
“This sacred structure is an apparatus for collective aroma rituals of bakhoor or incense burning and invites visitors to partake in breathing ceremonies within the inner altars of the structure.”
The installation is called Jabal: 9 Ash Cleansing Temple
The tent-like structure, which is surrounded by dried mud, has a form and colour intended to evoke the Jebel Jais Mountain in Sharjah’s neighbouring emirate of Ras Al Khaimah.
“It is my core belief that mountains are the mothers that hold an environment’s wisdom and DNA within them,” said Agbo-Ola.
“They can speak to us and are seen as elements in a landscape that humble us in relation to their scale and presence. The truth is, they are also extruded from the land by the unseen tensions and movements of the tectonic layers under the surface.”
“The colours of the knit skins are inspired by the colour pallet of the mountains and rock formations in the landscape as well as light patterns that depict fractal fossilised micro-crustaceans,” he continued.
“When these organisms, which are symbolically represented in the knits, are linked together in the temple, they create a new visual ecosystem as a symbolic form of their dependence on each other for ecological balance.”
The temple is made from jute, hemp and cotton
According to Agbo-Ola, the structure was also designed to celebrate fertility and the natural process of transformation.
“I believe it is the things that we cannot hold on to, that we cannot possess or claim, that become meaningful and hold an essence of amazement or reverence within us,” he explained.
“Jabala: 9 Ash Cleansing Temple is designed in a similar way in the sense that each fabric skin in the design should be seen from the perspective of the single thread that holds it together,” he continued. “The decay that occurs when one microscopic organism eats the temple’s fibres or lays eggs on it is just as important as the overall form and shape of the temple from the macro scale.”
It was designed as a space for incense burning and reflection
Overall, Agbo-Ola hopes that the temple will act as a space for contemplation.
“As visitors walk through the temple they are invited to experience the perspectives and beauty of non-human entities while slowing down to reverence the presence of the sacred mountains,” he said.
“This element of contemplation is induced by the burning of bakhoor and incense in the temple as a collective ritual.”
The tent-like structure is surrounded by dried mud
“There is also a sound work that is connected to the piece, which acts as the voice of the temple,” he continued. “The sonic work draws from research into ritual, shamanism and the practices of healers, that can bring new and deeper connections to our ecological environments.”
“The experimental composition of orchestral and spatial gradients aims to mimic the multi-layered atmospheric acoustic conversations between botanical, geological and unseen environmental elements.”
The second edition of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial was curated by Nigerian architect Tosin Oshinowo, who explained the triennial’s theme of scarcity in a recent interview with Dezeen.
Elsewhere, we rounded up 12 intriguing pavilions and installations from the event.
Sharjah Architecture Triennial 2023 takes place from 11 November 2023 to 10 March 2024 at various locations across Sharjah. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.
A disaster-proof chandelier from Lebanon and a towering sand dune-style stone installation feature in Arab Design Now, the main exhibition at the inaugural Design Doha biennial.
Arab Design Now was curated by Rana Beiruti to capture the spirit of contemporary design across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), the curator told Dezeen ahead of the opening of the first Design Doha.
Set within the Qatari capital’s M7 building, the design biennial draws together a range of collectible design and installations.
Selected works from 74 participants paid homage to the MENA region’s “extremely harsh and unique geography” and investigated the “use of materials as a guiding principle,” explained Beiruti.
Here are 10 of Dezeen’s highlights from Arab Design Now, which is on display in Doha until early August.
Sites – New Sites by Studio Anne Holtrop
Bahrain- and Amsterdam-based architect Anne Holtrop has designed a cluster of large-scale mobiles made from vast slabs of lumpy resin.
Holtrop took casts of a series of manmade and natural sites that he found across Qatar to create the textured pieces, which hang from bearing mechanisms and can be manually rotated by visitors to produce continuously moving formations.
Constellations 2.0: Object. Light. Consciousness by Abeer Seikaly
Over 5,000 pieces of Murano glass were woven together by Jordanian-Palestinian designer Abeer Seikaly to create this chandelier, which combines Bedouin weaving practices from Jordan with traditional Venetian glassmaking techniques.
Brass and stainless steel were also integrated into the lighting, made flexible by the glass mesh.
Once illuminated, the sculptural piece creates dramatic light patterns that nod to a starry night sky seen from the Badia desert, according to Seikaly.
House Between a Jujube Tree and a Palm Tree by Civil Architecture
Kuwait and Bahrain-based office Civil Architecture has designed a looming fibreglass roof proposal for a majlis – the traditional term for an Arabic gathering space.
“It’s a 1:1 model of a roof of an actual house that we designed in Bahrain,” studio co-founder Hamed Bukhamseen told Deezen.
Supported by steel and suspended from tension cables, the majlis features openings designed to accommodate tall trees and was created to explore the “symbiotic but blurred” relationship between indoor and outdoor settings.
Photo courtesy of Design Doha
Nubia, Hathor and Gros Guillaume Stool by Omar Chakil
French-Egyptian-Lebanese designer Omar Chakil was informed by his father’s homeland of Egypt when he chose alabaster onyx to create this monolithic shelving, a bulbous coffee table and a stool that glides across the floor on wheels.
Taking cues from ancient practices, Chakil carved the rounded furniture from raw blocks of the material, which was sanded down over time using water rather than covered in varnish – something that the designer said had became common in Egypt, especially when making “cheap” souvenirs.
“The whole idea of the collection was to use Egyptian alabaster, which was a healing stone,” Chakil told Dezeen.
“The pharaohs used [the material], then it transformed it over time. It lost its soul. So I tried to put it in the contemporary context by using the shapes that healing emotions would take – so they are round and soft, even though they are very heavy,” he added.
“I see that people are afraid to, but I want them to touch the furniture.”
Tiamat by AAU Anastas
Palestinian architecture office AAU Anastas is presenting Tiamat, a dune-shaped installation that forms part of the studio’s ongoing project, Stone Matters, which explores the potential of combining historical stone building techniques with modern technologies to encourage the use of structural stone.
Positioned for visitors to walk through, the installation is a towering structure made of stone sourced from Bethlehem and informed by the Gothic-style architecture found across Palestine, Syria and Lebanon.
According to AAU Anastas, the light, sound reverberations and climate control within Tiamat’s internal space is unique to stone construction.
Clay in Context by Sama El Saket
Jordan-born architect and ceramicist Sama El Saket took cues from her native landscape when creating this “taxonomy of Jordanian clays”.
The result is a set of spindle bottle-style vessels, each made of a different natural clay found across Jordan. This gives the pieces their distinctive colours, textures and character.
“These are all natural clays with no pigments added,” El Saket told Dezeen. “The colours are attributed to the different minerals that are found within the region. Some are sandier, some are rockier.”
The designer noted that while Jordan features an abundance of clay deposits and a rich history of ceramic production, today most Jordanian clay is imported.
Photo by Sabine Saadeh
Light Impact by Fabraca Studios
Lebanese industrial design brand Fabraca Studios has created Light Impact, a solid aluminium lighting fixture that was designed as an alternative chandelier, resembling durable ropes.
The piece was made to replace a glass chandelier that shattered in the aftermath of the 2020 Beiruit explosion, which destroyed a large part of Lebanon’s capital city.
Light Impact is defined by “flexible characteristics designed to withstand another disaster,” studio founder Samer Saadeh told Dezeen. He added that the piece, which includes internal brass components, was designed as an ode to Beirut’s adaptability and resilience.
Eleven by Sahel Alhiyari
Eleven is a cluster of tall fluted terracotta columns by Jordanian architect Sahel Alhiyari that were made through moulding and forming rather than traditional cutting and carving.
The architect handcrafted the segments, which are vertically stacked, using a similar technique to pottery-making,
“As you twist and turn the material, it creates all of this stuff,” Alhiyari told Dezeen. The designer explained that the columns were deliberately created to celebrate imperfections, despite referencing classical architecture.
Sediments by Talin Hazbar
UAE-based Syrian designer Talin Hazbar is featuring her Sediments project, which previously gained recognition at Dubai Design Week.
The work consists of blocky seating made from fishing ropes and fishing cage ropes extracted from the Persian Gulf with the assistance of the Dubai Voluntary Diving Team.
Also made up of recycled rubber grains, the heavily textured seating was created to serve as a reminder of how we might attempt to clean up damaged coastlines, according to Hazbar.
Whispers from the Deep by T Sakhi
Lebanese-Polish sisters Tessa and Tara El Sakhi of the studio T Sakhi combined discarded metal salvaged from factories in Veneto, Italy, with Murano glass to create amorphous glassware that takes cues from underwater sea creatures.
These pieces were arranged atop dramatic shelving inside the elevator connecting the first and second floors of the Arab Design Now exhibition.
The result is a playful installation that draws together the Venetian lagoon and Lebanese glassblowing traditions.
The photography is by Edmund Sumner unless stated otherwise.
Arab Design Now takes place at Design Doha from 24 February to 5 August 2024 at M7 in Doha, Qatar. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.
