2012 - Enter the Dragon

2011 has ended rather busy and hectic. Consequently the blog has been fairly quiet also. As our operations are running on the East Asian Calendar, we wish a Happy New Year to all our readers, friends, colleagues and clients.

We are closing on an extremely successful year with a lot of groundbreaking developments.

Foremost we have hit 30,000 readers of this blog within the first two years of posting. Thank you so much for all the support and encouragement in our work.

Additionally we won the five star AsiaPacific Property Award this year, beating other peers of the profession. Currently we are designing the latest high rise in Hanoi, working on several master plans in Vietnam, a groundbreaking high rise in Hong Kong and multiple large scale interior projects for multinational companies in China. And on top of it we diversified into product design with a revamp of COATS product displays worldwide.

We are proud to do all this with an extremely flexible, yet small task force, defining the agenda for the office in 2012: Small is successful!

Coming Soon!

Coming soon will be an architectural extension with an interior fit-out for a penthouse unit in Shenzhen, China and a large scale office fit-out (in Shenzhen as well). Tender is out and we expect construction to start soon. It has been hard three months for the design team which hopefully will pay off with a clean and qualitative construction. While other projects are in early stages of planning, we are excited and look forward to make our hands dirty ourselves again.

Team: Ulrich Kirchhoff, Claudia Wigger, Louise Low, Juliana Kei, Betty Kum, Sandy Lee, Olgierd Nitka, Jackey Yp

© 2011, ice - ideas for contemporary environments

Urban Retail

We have been invited by our friend a collaborator William Griffith II of Region 3 Design: http://www.region3design.com, to join him on a panel discussion at the Hong Kong Retail Expo 2010 last week. As we are not "specialized" retail designers, our initial reaction to the request was as simple and as simplistic as defining, how can our core expertise can contribute to the discussion about retail: As all our projects are investigating, based on research on current user groups for our designs and potential future target users, how to increase the performance of each project, we chose the two extreme approaches, which cross influence each other in the office: Urban Planning and Interior Design. Both are very closely defined by program as well as organization of space (and in that sense they are much more spatial than architecture, which has retreated into the realm of shape and facade) and have taught us a lot about the logic and sequence of how to create a place: We believe, that the value experience of a place has to be based on a stronger understanding of the context and the very local habits. Other than the universal brand identity, which pours its habits onto anywhere, we think, identity comes from a local understanding of habits, user groups and aesthetics. The projects we were talking about were conveying these strategies of thinking: 3LT, which was creating an outdoor shopping mall for Beijing (where shopping malls have been failing all the time), combining the village with the one operator policy: and W-Spa, the largest spa in Asia (in 2004) inside the W-Hotel in Seoul, which was based on diversity and complexity of spatial sequence.

Team: Louise Low, Ulrich Kirchhoff

© 2010, ice - ideas for contemporary environments