Frame, Issue 158 – Autumn 2024

Frame magazine is the world’s leading interior-design publication. The bimonthly magazine is filled with inspiring projects and stunning photography from all sectors of the international interiors industry. Since 1997, Frame has remained faithful to its vision: putting interior design on the map as a creative profession that’s on a par with product design and architecture.

In this issue:

Agility-themed Autumn issue

Enter the Unknown – How to design for a future you can’t predict

FRAME’s Autumn issue is all about designing in the age of uncertainty. How can creatives – and their projects – be receptive and resilient to (continual) change? Here, we outline what you’ll find inside.

Discover the latest flexibility-focused product releases, from a foldable sofa inspired by camping furniture to objects with double – or even quadruple – functions to an entire seating system created from just one module.

Meet three designers characterized by their commitment to adaptability. Read how products can prioritize evolution over obsolescence, how a multidimensional understanding of flexibility can lead to eco-social sustainable design, and how human-centric architecture can respond to fast-changing circumstances.

Dive deep into three angles on agility: How ‘flexible education’ can translate to ‘fixed classrooms’, how vacant offices could offer affordable housing opportunities and how flexibility can add an interactive element to event design.

Learn from global industry leaders how the hospitality and tourism industries can weather the climate-crisis era.

See our curated overview of adaptable and open-ended designs responsive to evolving needs and changing conditions, whether functional, social or environmental.

Find out how a project set for demolition at the time of its design embedded flexibility into its multifunctional yet temporary interior.

Facing Variables
As I write this editorial in mid-July, the summer holidays have just begun for schoolchildren in the Netherlands. When I was growing up, that meant most of my classmates’ families were packing up their cars and/or suitcases to head south. But with temperatures on the rise across Europe – and the heatwaves and water shortages to match – that’s no longer a given. Or is it? Judging by the Black Saturday headlines, the holiday traffic is still largely pointed in that same southward direction. Old habits die hard, especially when intertwined with people’s life experiences and memories, and school holiday schedules are restrictive in terms of timing.

But that doesn’t change the fact that there is a real and urgent need for adaptation, both when it comes to the (travel) behaviour and expectations of tourists, and to the operation – and architecture – of the hospitality and tourism sector as a whole. On a socioenvironmental level it’s important to reduce pressure on the land and local communities, while on a business level operators need to learn how to manage their climate-related vulnerabilities. In other words: the things that can’t be predicted. As our editor at large Tracey Ingram writes in her intro to The Conversation on page 56: ‘In the climate-crisis era, the only thing we can be certain of is uncertainty,’ meaning that tourism and hospitality businesses have to assess their resilience to climate change and severe weather and adopt a more flexible mindset when it comes to what they do.

This idea of designing for uncertainty, of being receptive to change, isn’t limited to these sectors alone. On the contrary, it became the common thread of this agility-themed issue, which goes beyond the climate crisis to address other emergencies and circumstances that are generating a need for continuous change and a desire to build resilience into our environments.

For the designers featured on the pages you’re about to read, uncertainty comes in many forms. On page 46, for example, Ivan Protasov explains how flexibility is crucial when dealing with the cultural and physical damage in his war-torn homeland, Ukraine. Not least because no one can be sure that a project will even be finished. Turning to page 26, you can read about the ways in which Johanna Seelemann is conceptualizing adaptive alternatives to the exploitative systems of production and consumption that render products technically and aesthetically obsolete at an ever-increasing rate. And further on, starting on page 103, our Insights section takes a deep dive into how learning environments can prepare for the unpredictable shifts in schooling. It also asks whether the surplus of commercial workspace could meet the urgent need for affordable housing, as rising resource costs make new building plans increasingly tenuous.

While the term ‘tenuous’ doesn’t sound positive, perhaps it could be in the context of futureproofing space. Finnish architect Kivi Sotamaa, for example, says he’s long been aware that it’s not wise to design for a specific typology. Instead, he believes the best strategy is to design what he calls ‘affordances, a very loose fit to function’. ‘You build rich atmospheric spaces that are full of opportunities, using an architectural language that avoids prescriptive instructions and typological cues,’ he says. ‘Function is as much a possibility of form as form is ever a result of function.’

For creatives working in today’s complex world, being able to design for a future they can’t
predict – being receptive of and reactive to change – might be the most important skill of all.

Floor Kuitert
Editor in chief