Designs on Experience

It’s hard to believe that it has been almost three months since our last newsletter, but it has indeed, and we are in the short, grey, sometimes miserable cold days of winter. It’s natural, of course, in weather like this, to think about being somewhere else. But even that didn’t prepare us for the flurry of articles and LinkedIn posts on artificial intelligence and how this promises to revolutionise the way we design and the futures that we imagine. According to some more alarmist pieces it even threatens – at least in part – to replace designers altogether. New platforms like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion create sometimes compelling, often fantastical images generated by text prompts and machine learning. It’s a risk to be complacent about developments like this, as that is generally the first step to actually being replaced, but it’s equally important not to be swept up in them either.

As architects who work at the intersection of hospitality and experience through the design of buildings, and who use digital tools all the time, we think about this issue constantly. In the context of existing buildings, often an important aspect in our projects, there’s a quality offered by tangible heritage that is very difficult to replicate digitally. Similarly, in terms of travel, as discussed in the recent Festival of Hospitality fireside chat - Designs on Experiential Travel - there appears to be little risk of virtual reality taking the place of physical experience (at least for the moment).  It may well end up being a hybrid of both the real and the virtual which is also why it’s risky to dismiss the bots.

This newsletter takes in aspects of all of these issues – tools, heritage, experience, digital futures and analogue pasts – we hope you enjoy it!

What we’re thinking about

We started our year attending a Festival of Hospitality Fireside Chat: Designs on Experiential Travel, hosted at The Arts Club in Dover Street. The event got us thinking about our role as an architectural studio engaged by the question of what hotels could be. The Festival of Hospitality’s forward-looking panel discussed the future of hospitality and experiential travel from the perspective of luxury brands and offered invaluable insights into consumers looking for authentic and considered experiences. Panellists challenged heteronormative assumptions and marketing strategies about the identities and desires of hotel guests as these relate to gender identity and sexual preference.

They also cautioned against making assumptions about the identities and motivations of individuals seeking the more challenging aspects of experiential travel such as Black Tomato’s offering of luxury solo travel in remote locations. When we, as architects, are conceptualising a hotel in dialogue with our clients, we imagine people moving through and experiencing the spaces that we design. We pay attention to the relationship between the physicality of producing a space for a hotel and a guest’s experience of it.

The role of storytelling in the design of hospitality brands was an especially fascinating point of discussion. The relationship between storytelling and design is a fundamental conceptual underpinning of the two hotels completed for The Relais Retreats at Henley-on-Thames and Cooden Beach respectively. The waterside culture of both locations is threaded through the guest's experience of the hotel throughout their stay.

What we’re reading

We’ve been reading a beautiful book, published by Phaidon, documenting the restoration of The Fife Arms in Braemar, Scotland, a hotel which dates to the Victorian era. The book prompts us to further consider the role of storytelling in hospitality and design. It provides a multi-layered approach that links hotel guests and local communities; historical and contemporary art and design processes; history and folklore; local traditions and leisure activities and experiences. Every aspect of the hotel’s design and concept brings us back to a story that is both intimately connected to a particular landscape and sense of place as it looks outwards to the world beyond. Each room interprets an historical figure, a moment in time, an aspect of art, literature, nature or a place. Stories are woven into the architecture of a space through colours, textures, artworks and objects. Art is an essential aspect of the hotel’s character. We love artist Zhang Enli’s swirling, abstract ceiling mural Ancient Quartz (2018) inspired by Highland agates and crystals and influenced by Chinese brush painting.

What we’re listening to

We’re always listening to podcasts and have recently been dipping into Dave Sharp’s Office Talk. His conversation with Amanda Baillieu got us thinking about how we approach running our own practice and marketing in particular. Baillieu celebrates an authentic, relatable voice that doesn’t only address other architects. She poses the question of how architects communicate their value to people outside of architecture beyond the perfect image and the final product.  There is merit in communicating the struggle and complexity of realising a project, something many will have seen in the recent BBC documentary on the Claridges redevelopment. Baillieu encourages architects to tell a broader story about what it is they do and to develop a voice that people outside of architecture can relate to.

What we’re discovering

It would hardly be credible to suggest that we had discovered the metaverse or that people, companies and indeed countries are creating digital twins in this virtual other world. But it nonetheless marks an important moment where we begin to consider what this might start to mean – for us, for travel and for heritage. Alongside many other island nations, the Pacific islands of Tuvalu face the existential threat of rising sea levels. To counter this threat, Tuvalu announced a plan at COP27 to create a digital twin of itself in the metaverse – to move their country onto the cloud. Of course, this would only ever be a facsimile, a reminder of what once was, but somewhere that islanders could travel to should they be forced to leave their homes as the country starts to disappear. There is an irony, of course, that the amount of energy and carbon required to sustain the metaverse is a not insignificant contributor to our changing climate. However, it does invite us to confront the issue of what this world might look like and crucially how people might access it in perpetuity. Whether our knowledge and tools are sufficiently advanced enough for the undertaking, is another question entirely.

Architects and their tools

From art to AI, text prompts to books and the metaverse to marketing, we have considered the tools which designers and architects use to both imagine and communicate the spaces and worlds that they imagine. Even though the tools seem radically different, they are still only tools. In conclusion, we thought we would share some photographs of exquisitely fashioned drawing tools generously gifted to Nick in December. As a way of measuring, comprehending and describing real and imaginary worlds they are a reminder that however  abstract and computational the tools that we use become, it will still be the creativity, intelligence and empathy of the designer behind them that matters.