Masturbating Statue
Originally uploaded by Blisterman.
The building has no sign, just a small “Abercrombie and Fitch” screen printed on the front door. A girl, with an insincere, but pretty smile opens the door for you.
The second you walk in, three things hit you: First the darkness. The store is much darker than your typical clothes shop. Second, the loud thumping techno music played over the speakers, and thirdly the smell. Every half an hour, the employees spray Abercrombie and Fitch's signature cologne- Fierce, over the clothes in the store. Abercrombie's website describes it as having a “warm musky subtleness that will naturally draw her curiosity because of its seductive nature.”
The impact is powerful, hitting all the senses. It completely immerses you in the store's environment.
Your eyes adjust to the light, and you walk around the corner to enter the store properly. The interior design is impressive. Wooden shelves reaching ten feet high display the goods, and divide up the store. The few bare walls and columns are painted black. The store's main light source is the diffused light from the clothes, which are down lit inside the shelves. Their bright colours, contrast with the neutral dark colours of the interior. It's a strange experience. Almost dream-like. The 18th century architecture, the hunting lodge like finishes, homoerotic imagery, bright clothes, as well as the cologne and techno music conflict, and yet work together to create a fully immersive environment.
As you explore the store, each turn unveils something new. A stuffed moose head, a painting of guys carrying a canoe, a statue of a guy that looks suspiciously like he's masturbating. All the time, there's perfectly folded clothes for sale everywhere. It's bizzare, and you want to keep exploring.
When, you've eventually made your purchase and left, walking outside to the street, gives the same feeling as you had when you first walked in; that of entering a different world.
The Abercrombie and Fitch London flagship store is an example of the type of store, that this essay is about. It's a fully immersive environment, a dream world. It's more than just a place for selling clothes. It's selling an experience.
This essay will explore the history of these sort of retail environments, why people want to visit them, why they are becoming more and more popular, and how architects can successfully create them.
Why create these sort of Spaces?
Information overload
In the last century, there has been a huge increase in the amount of information we receive in our day to day lives. Now, we receive information through our TVs, radios, computers, mobile phones, magazines, newspapers, etc. 24 hours a day. Everywhere we go, we see screens, signs and ads with different messages. We receive far more information, than our brains can process, a condition that has been dubbed 'information overload'.
However, shopping environments can be designed to overcome this, so that when visitors enter the store, they are only given one message; “You will be a better person, if you buy our stuff”. This is an easy message for our brains to process, and as a result, we follow it.
However. shops can't be explicit about this message, or it won't work. Very few people are that easily led. Instead stores convey it through the architecture, the music, the interior design; through the retail environment. The more the retail environment can engage people, the more effective, it will be at getting this message across. This is where immersive environments, which shut out the rest of the world, are most successful.
Immersive environments block out nearly every outside message. They catch people's undivided attention, and sell them their message. They help customers develop a fascination with the company's brand, and an identification with the brand.
Take Niketown on Oxford street, as an example. Nike's brand image is one of athletic excellence and self belief- “Just Do It”. The architecture of Niketown, their London flagship store, reflects this. Visitors enter a world of athleticism. The walls are covered with powerful pictures of all sorts of successful athletes from the playground level to top class professional players. It associates Nike with success in each sport, leaving a lasting impression in visitors minds. The store is not even designed to make money on sales directly, It's designed to increase the value of the Nike brand.
Niketown Entrance
There is nothing particularly immoral about creating immersive environments. They aren't forcing people to do anything, only persuading. For it to be successful, people must willingly surrender themselves to the experience. In a way, it is similar to seeing a play or a movie, where one willingly suspends their disbelief, and allows themselves to get sucked into the story, with the hope that, as a result they will be entertained.
Shopping is more than just buying goods. Nowadays, you can buy just about anything more easily, for cheaper, on-line. Yet shopping centres, and high streets are still packed with people. The reason for this, is that, for a lot of people, shopping is a recreational activity. In this competitive market, to attract the most amount of people, store's must offer some entertainment or excitement, as well as just selling merchandise. Different stores have different ways of doing it. Tower Records in Dublin offer bands playing live in store. The Hard Rock Cafe store allows visitors to visit its 'vault' and see Jimi Hendrix's guitar.
An environment which succeeds at shutting people off from the world, and offers escapism and excitement, can be a big draw for people. When I passed Abercrombie and Fitch, a week after opening, there was a queue of people, waiting to get in, going down the street and around the corner. The clothes are half the price on the A+F website, so clearly it was more than just the products attracting them. It was the experience.
History of Immersive Environments
Since, the birth of storytelling, people have been creating new worlds, where people can be transported from reality. At least metaphorically.
In the last 100 years, or so, as city life has become more and more fast paced, people have more and more often been attracted to physically real escapist environments.
Some of the first environments to fully achieve this goal, were the nightclubs in 1920's New York. Prohibition had banned the sale of alcohol, so nightclubs owners had to make the environments, as exciting as possible to keep attracting customers. A contemporary report of a visit to one describes it, as such:
“The Nightclub disenchants New York. You pass through the portals of a guarded house, leave the throngs in the avenue, and straight away, you are transported to another clime. You are in a village street in Millen, Georgia, with wisps of cotton, blowing about. There is dancing in the village square...Old Wooden lamp posts stand round the square, with smoky kerosene lamps in the quaint lanterns above...Inside, all is unreality, sentiment, indulgence and relaxation. New York has been banished.”
Outside of the major cities, for the first half of the 20th century, cinema was the closest most people got to experiencing new worlds. In the early 50's, Walt Disney used the expertise of his writers and animators, to transfer the wonder of his cartoons, to a physical environment. This was Disneyland, a much larger scale immersive environment, which pioneered many ideas, which have since been imitated, in countless other places. It was possibly the first fully immersive land, where visitors could spend days in a fantasy world, and still not see everything there was to see.
Disneyland in 1957
Disney used his staff's experience at storytelling, and timing to craft environments, where visitors feel like they are part of an adventure, despite everything in reality, being meticulously planned and organised.
Casinos, especially in Las Vegas have also been famous for the immersive environments they create. In his book, 'Learning from Las Vegas', Robert Venturi summed up the experience of immersive environments in 1972, when he described, how the casinos of Las Vegas, as well as other “pleasure zones”, as he called them, have “the quality of being an oasis in a perhaps hostile context, heightened symbolism and the ability to engulf the visitor in a new role”.
Since then, with increased competition, Casinos in Vegas have strived to offer a more and more exciting experience, to attract visitors.
Parisian Arcade
Shopping traditionally hasn't used immersive environments, to the same extent, as casinos, theme parks and nightclubs. Walking down, Oxford street, you realise that most of the shops have wide open entrances, big windows, and very little division between inside and outside.
This makes perfect sense, for most of them. Shoppers are free to walk in, with no sense of intimidation. The shop gets a lot of passing trade. Business is good.
However, this approach hasn't always worked, and overcoming it has led to the birth of the enclosed shopping environment.
The city streets of Paris in 1800, were narrow, crowded with horse drawn traffic and dirty, with no footpaths, not a nice place to casually shop.
Some enterprising merchants realised this, and created an environment, which was clean, safe, dry and aesthetically pleasing to be in, completely different to the world outside.
This was one of the first shopping arcades, a widely imitated concept, that was the precursor to today's shopping centres. It was perhaps the first attempt at creating an artificial environment for shopping.
Department stores came, slightly later. These were like a city inside a building, with vast amounts of merchandise available for sale, with entertainment provided, to attract people inside. Department stores, were for more than just buying things. Visiting them was an event in itself. People would spend hours exploring the various departments, losing themselves among all the merchandise.
After World War 2, as, more and more people moved into new suburbs, the suburban shopping centre, or 'mall' was developed. This was typically, even more so, than a department store, a completely self contained environment, designed to be a safe, enjoyable alternative to high street shopping, so as to attract shoppers. Shortly after Victor Grue's Southdale Center, one of the very first shopping centres, opened, Time Magazine described it as “a pleasure dome with parking”. It was an immediate success, and spawned thousands of imitators.
Southdale Centre shortly after opening
The growth of the shopping centre, from the arcades to the latest shopping malls, has helped develop the idea of “Destination Shopping”, where people would go out of their way, to shop at a certain location, for the lower price or, for the experience. This is often, an important principle in attracting people to visit an retail environment, especially one, which is not as easily accessible to passing trade, as the shops on Oxford Street.
It's difficult to work out what the first individual shop to offer an immersive experience was. Most shops have offered it to a certain degree. Books on retail design prior to the 1990s make very little mention of creating an exciting experience as a way of attracting people to a certain shop, but I'd say it would be a good guess, to say that it emerged out of retail designers and marketers looking at casinos, theme parks and nightclubs for inspiration.
How to design a good Immersive experience
It was my first visit to the Abercrombie and Fitch store, which stimulated my interest in immersive environments. It fascinated me, how much entering it felt like entering a different world and it inspired me to write this essay.
Shortly after I started research, I realised that, to the best I could discover, no one has written a book on how to use architecture to create an immersive environment. I realised that I would have to do some primary research to truly discover what makes an effective one.
I visited as many shops, that I could find, which I felt offered somewhat of the same feeling as the Abercrombie and Fitch store. I took down all my observations; how people enter the store, what the first thing they see is, the circulation, the sights, the sounds and the smells.
I looked at books on casino and theme park design, and also visited as many nightclubs as I could for research. While other people were drinking, dancing and flirting, I was standing there with a notepad, estimating the ceiling heights, and mapping circulation.
I discovered, that the key elements for creating a good immersive experience were: isolation, variety and to encourage exploration. Eventually, inspired by Bill Friedman's 13 principles for casino design, I was able to boil all my research down into eight solid principles, for using architecture to create an immersive experience. They are not only for retail design, and can also be applied to any immersive environment, be it nightclub, theme park or museum, provided it is over a minimum size. It's hard to create a new world, in a thirty square metre box.
They are all architectural principles. Of course architecture only plays a small part in creating the overall experience. Music, interior design, employees, marketing and countless other aspects also contribute to the success. Nonetheless, I feel, if architects employ these eight principles, they have a much better chance of their environment being successful.
First Principle
Isolate it from the outside world
This is the most important principle. We want to transport visitors to another world. You don't want people looking out a window at the traffic. This applies to all scales, from Walt Disney World, where Walt Disney bought all the land around his park, so that he could control what happens there, to the small windowless, underground club, where people can no longer tell whether it's day or night.
This works best, if you shy away from making it like the outside world, or at least the reality of the outside world. Use different materials, have different spatial qualities. Theming can help achieve this too.
Second Principle.
The Entrance Should have an Element of Transition and Spectacle
The entrance is the link between the outside world and the created world. Walking through it should have a feeling of event, building suspense as you enter or just slamming you in the face with a completely new environment, like the Abercrombie and Fitch Store.
Disco entrance corridor
The club, 'Disco' in Sao Paulo, Brazil achieves the former perfectly. Visitors walk down a long, narrow corridor, lit with hundreds of fibre optics in the walls, ceiling and floor, almost like a starry sky. As you walk down the corridor, all you can see ahead of you is a neon sign at the end with the club's name in red letters, reflecting off the walls, floor and ceiling. You feel yourself drawn to it, like a moth to a flame. It is only when you reach the end of the corridor, that you can turn, and walk through the door and discover the new environment. It's almost like being born into this new world.
Third Principle
Don't enable too much to be seen from one spot. Encourage Exploration.
A successful immersive environment immerses people even further, by engaging them, and making them want to explore deeper.
The best way to achieve this, is to not give too much away at once. Block off spaces. Hint at what's behind them. Tease people.
The Abercrombie and Fitch store is mostly contained in one big room. It doesn't feel like that at all, because the architects have strategically placed tall shelves, dividing the spaces up, in such a way, that in order to find what you're looking for, you have to explore and walk into many different spaces. This has the effect of both, immersing you in the environment, and in showcasing all the different products they sell, as you discover them.
Fourth Principle
Make the Layout slightly confusing requiring twists and turns
This should be done carefully. In a survey 59% of consumers felt that the most important aspect of shop atmosphere was the layout. A layout that's too confusing can alienate and annoy customers. But, a layout that has just the right amount of confusion, will engage people, make the experience more interesting, and give them a constant feeling that there is still more to discover.
Ground Floor Plan of Abercrombie and Fitch Store, showing how the space is laid out, so that to get from the entrance to the checkout requires several turns.
Fifth Principle
There should be varying open and cosy spaces
A variety of spaces helps make the environment feel less like just a series of rooms, and more like a new world.
Even more interesting, and more likely to engage the visitors, is to have a large room, which is not immediately visible, and which surprises people, when they walk into it, from a smaller space. Disney use this, in a lot of their attractions, and the sudden change in scale is quite jarring, and makes the environment more exciting for visitors, improving the quality of the experience.
Sixth Principle
There should be varying heights of ceiling
For similar reasons to the previous principle. Also, different height ceilings make the environment more three dimensional, and more real.
Niketown do this to great effect, with every room having a different height ceiling, ranging from around two metres height, to the height of the building, and with various heights in between. The changing heights constantly stimulate your awareness of your environment, and keep you engaged in this world.
Seventh Principle
Have spaces where people can look up and down at each other
They can be windows, mezzanines, balconies etc., as long as you can see other people. This, even more so, than the previous principle, makes the building feel more three dimensional, and more like a different world.
It is even more effective, if the stairs to the other level, aren't immediately visible, and people have to search for them, as it helps engage them more, in the building, further increasing the immersive feeling.
A nightclub which follows the seventh principle
This is used to good effect in Brown Thomas in Dublin, where there is a circular hole in one floor, in the middle of the store. You can look down at the people walking underneath, and they can look up at the people looking down. The stairs are at the other side of the store, out of sight. It makes the otherwise, quite plain environment, much more interesting.
Eight Principle
Involve Tactility
A good immersive environment will try and stimulate as many senses as possible to make it truly immersive. Sony Centres add a specific scent to the air to complement the sights and sounds of their equipment. Most stores play music of some description.
Architects are only responsible for 2 of the senses: Sight, which architects, should be trying to stimulate anyway, by making aesthetically pleasing environments, and touch.
They can achieve touch, by making surfaces that people want to feel. Certain materials lend themselves to touch more than others, and it is the architects job to choose ones that are appropriate for the environment.
The Ministry of Sound nightclub, has a rough, industrial unrefined atmosphere. The atmosphere engages you even further, when you touch the materials: Steel and bare concrete. The tactile sensations of touching them, makes the whole experience seem more real.
Conclusion
I have discussed the history, the reasoning, and how to create fully immersive environments, but what does the future hold for them?
I believe that, as internet shopping becomes more and more appealing for people, shops will be under increasing pressure to create attractive and exciting shopping environments, and consumers expectations will rise more and more.
Shops will look for new ways to offer a unique shopping opportunity, and I believe that fully immersing people, and offering an exciting experience will become more and more popular, with retailers.
People, as the have always done, will still seek escapism and excitement in their day to day lives, be it shopping, theme parks, casinos, or new ideas, that will come along in the future. Architects will still have an important part to play, in helping create these new worlds, and the importance of this is only going to get more and more, as the real world becomes more surreal.
But, at least now they'll know how to do it.
