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“Prada Aoyama…sets out to redefine the traditional distinction between glass curtain wall, structure and façade, in the process eliminating the traditional differentiation between architecture, shop window and display. Everything is a display; everything is architecture. In fact, everything is a spectacle,” says Studio International’s Kwah Meng Ching.

Before Prada, Herzog and de Meuron employed printed, translucent walls to filter light to a factory and storage building in Mulhouse, France; employed twisted copper strips in an exterior cladding system to admit daylight to a railway utility building in their hometown of Basel, Switzerland; and at a library for the Technical University in Eberswalde, Germany, created a mind-bending visual, using 17 horizontal bands of iconographic images silk-screen-printed on glass and concrete.

 

Polished porcelain tile. Courtesy Portobello.

Los Angeles architect Giorgio Borruso similarly turned retail architecture upside down with West Coast projects for boutique retailer Miss Sixty and Italian clothier Fornarina.

What is successful in retail, U.S. designers generally agree, eventually makes its way into other markets, first into corporate and hospitality, eventually into institutional projects. At least portions of what Borruso is doing today at Fornarina, they say, will creep into U.S. General Services Administration RFPs 10 years down the road.

“In terms of surfaces in general, whether we are talking color, texture, light transmittance—whatever characteristics, we are becoming much more interested in the complexity in surfaces, not just in the aesthetics, but in the structure,” says Elva Rubio, who heads the Chicago design studio for San Francisco-based Gensler.

“For quite a while,” says Rubio, “say, from the emergence of the post-modernist era through the end of the 20th century, we were interested in surface color and texture only in a superficial way. Now,” she says, “everybody is thinking more deeply about the ‘structure’ of color. You can see it in retail; you can see it in architecture; you can see it in industrial design.”

In their search for new visual imagery, today’s designers have at their disposal an array of new products, a huge new palette of engineered colors and an almost incessant stream of new technology.