Shopping is fun... Shopping is cool... Shopping is hip… let’s face it… Shopping is essential!!!

This urban mantra reverberates through the numerous urban stores and malls in every city around the world today. The retail chant is growing louder in India as well. Paco Underhill, founder, CEO and president of Envirosell, a New York based research and consulting firm specialising in studying retail and service environments, has this to say, “Retail is the dipstick of our changing culture. As merchants scramble to sell stuff, what and how stuff is sold is as good an indicator of cultural change as any white paper.”

Whether retail is a boon for the nouveau riche or a therapy for the stressed professional, or the sustenance drive for a robust economy, retail industry is an arrived reality and architecture is responding to this with a flavour that is hard to ignore. 

    Aaron Betsky, one of the most important critics and proponents of architectural discourse today, in an essay titled ‘A Machine for Living in Desire’, sums up the current pursuit in the retail industry as, “How to catch people’s attention in a world suffused with advertising and information, which they have less and less time to absorb? How, moreover, to get customers not only to purchase one’s products, but to buy them at a price that is high enough to justify the whole economic machinery the company has erected? The answer is to offer not just a product among many, but a whole world, packaged and ready for purchase. If one can get customers through the door of such an alternative reality, one can convince them that they can be part of that world without having to fly to an exclusive resort or live in a palace.”

Retail and architecture

      The liaison between architecture and retail is nothing new. The idea of architecture as a setting for selling products has an extensive trace. Time capsule buildings with minimal or no expression, allowing for engulfment of the consumer by-products, has been the time-tested by-line in retail design. However, with a plethora of products and informed customers, the equation in retail architecture is changing. New imageries are fast replacing the long held iconography of a store.

      Retail architecture is no more a mere prop for display. It is now a branding tool as much as it is a stage for the product. Spatial experience is a key aid in product selling today. Factors of popularity and newness are not limited only to products but extend to retail architectural expression as well. Although the products remain central in retail design, designers are exploring connections between the exteriors and interiors of stores, the temporality, flexibility and the permanence of the various components that make up a retail space across all levels of brands.

    Brand building exercises that existed mainly through advertisements, would later extend to the architectural ambience of the store. Now designers are boldly questioning this practice ... does brand building start from the store’s architecture and spatial experience, amalgamating finally in the product? Should the store design override the products or should products direct the architectural expression? Or can the two remain as separate yet complimentary entities, this being the latest design exploration.

 Exclusivity expressed through its architecture is most often associated with luxury brand labels. Prada’s stores designed by renowned architects like Rem Khoolaas, Herzog and de Meuron, are unique architectural ensembles. Louis Vuitton stores claim conceptual architecture as an integral part of their expression. This attitude is percolating into lower rung brands as well. Unique architecture for a store lends in an aura of exclusivity to the products housed in it, making them seem high end and fashionable as well.

A local expression

The Petals showroom on Race Course Road in Bangalore designed by Cadence, is an attempt in this new direction. In this store, the development of a new retail dialect is obvious. The innate language of architecture is correlated with the grammar of retail business resulting in dynamic retail architecture. The design team of Smaran Mallesh, Narendra Pirgal and Vikram Rajashekhar elaborate on the store’s concept – “The premise was to create a space that is analogous to an art museum. Typically in a museum, the paintings are mounted on the wall and the spectator ambulates around the art. Looking at this relationship between the spectator and the spectacle, the walls of the existing shell were used to house all the merchandise, the circulation path was conceived as a fluid form that wraps around the inside of the shell. The mezzanine is also profiled into a sinuous form to accentuate the fluidity of form and space. The design process involved studying a fluid insertion in the existing shell, both in digital and physical models. This iterative process helped us carve out a fluid space within the generic volume.” Narendra Pirgal was conferred a special mention as ‘The Young Enthused Architect’ in the A+D Spectrum Awards 2007 for this project.

      The architectural expression of this store is not influenced by the product per se but in the way it will be displayed. The built syntax evolves on the manner in which the product shall be perceived. While providing a backdrop for the retail of the merchandise, the store architecture overpowers to establish as the brand identity more than its products.

Here, the products and retail design exist mutually exclusive in identity yet feed in together into the brand image in a unique way. Although it is a remarkable advent in retail design, it evokes an argument too. Can the design of a store overshadow the product itself? Can the architecture of a store be an expression by itself, exclusive of its housed products? Where does one create a balance between exclusivity and the prevalent notions of a retail store? ... … The questions linger on.

      Tasks that are pertinent to designers in Retail Architecture today are, “How to develop the WOW factor as an experience in ‘Space Design’? How to integrate Communicational Graphics, Signage systems and Informational Systems with ‘Space Design’? How to factor in Consumer Behaviour to augment retail sales and ‘space design’? ”
  Retail architecture is surely changing......Eric Carlson and David McNulty in their essay ‘Calculating the edge of the present’ in Logique / Visuelle : Recent LV Architecture, say, “Repetition as an architectural tool for defining identity has been replaced by the individual interpretation of common architectural themes. Instead of resisting the underlying tendency for ‘change’ that is intrinsic to retail and fashion, there is a potential to embrace it architecturally.”

The author is a practising architect and architectural reviewer. She can be reached at nandita.srinivas@gmail.com