The Monocle Minute
On Design

This week’s design dispatch explores Andalucía’s olive groves via a furniture exhibition in Madrid before taking in a restored modernist masterpiece outside Prague. Then we sit down with the technologically minded designers behind Future Facility and read a book celebrating the work of Shigeru Ban by the light of Vaarnii’s Hoop Table Lamp. Taking us from the top (literally) is Jessica Bridger.

Shortly after 22.00 the phone rings in my room at J Hotel. “Ms Bridger, we have a delivery of tea for you,” says the receptionist. “We will send it up.” I’m 93 floors and 444 metres above the caller in the Shanghai Tower. Designed by US architecture firm Gensler and standing at 632 metres, it is currently the world’s third-tallest building. It’s also the tallest twisted tower on Earth, a gentle helix spiralling into the clouds.

The tea delivery is a demonstration of how the horizontal city, where shopfronts abut on streets bustling with pedestrians, meets the vertical dimension. “Vertical delivery is very common in Shanghai,” says Yifeng Lin, a friend and landscape architect based in Shanghai and Singapore. It was Yifeng who ordered what he promised was “the world’s best jasmine milk tea” for me via an app. A smartly uniformed porter brings it to my door mere minutes after I speak to the receptionist – impressive, given that it takes even the fastest elevator about 60 seconds to travel so ear-poppingly high.

J Hotel, the first in a planned luxury chain, occupies the tower’s upper floors. At this extreme height, the edifice’s double-skin glass façade is designed to withstand typhoon-force winds. The 165-key establishment sits behind both skins, the city below split into prisms by the framework’s steel struts. The view reveals the guts of high-density urbanisation: rooftops with helipads, huge heating and ventilation systems, window-washing rigs and buildings housing almost 25 million people stretching to the horizon.

Looking down at it all, I realise that I’ve never felt so disconnected from the surface world – and I’ve been in the Himalayas, flown in helicopters and jetted at 40,000 feet over ice floes in the Atlantic on a clear day. The city below feels so detached that, when my jasmine milk tea arrives, it seems to have come from a different plane of existence.

And herein lies the challenge that many cities will face in the coming decades. The Shanghai Tower isn’t just a skyscraper but a “supertall” building – a structure more than 300 metres in height and one of about 240 across the globe. According to industry body the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, the coronavirus pandemic resulted in a dip in their construction but now the category is roaring back.

Shanghai Tower is the tallest of a supertall trio that now grace the city’s skyline, along with the Shanghai World Financial Center (494 metres) and the Jin Mao Tower (420 metres). The most ambitious in the global pipeline is Saudi Arabia’s Jeddah Tower, expected to become the world’s first building with a height exceeding 1km in 2028.

Such structures reflect our desire to free ourselves from spatial limitations and function as soft-power emblems for cities and nations. But if urbanism continues to trend in an upward direction, with people feeling far removed from what’s going on at ground level, how will we stay connected? The delivery of tea ordered from a shop in Shanghai via an app based in Singapore to a room that’s 93 floors above the ground is a wholly 21st-century event – but it’s one way to feel a sense of closeness to the city streets.

Jessica Bridger is a contributing editor at Monocle. For more news and analysis, subscribe today.

Located down a winding road in a small town near Prague, Vila Volman is a modern masterpiece with a chequered history. Designed by Jiri Stursa and Karel Janu, two young Marxists who typically worked on social housing rather than on private villas, it was commissioned by industrialist Josef Volman in 1937. But wars and revolutions drove the Volman family away and the villa was nationalised. It was used as a kindergarten for decades before being abandoned in the 1990s.

“The building’s next chapter started in 1996 with new owners who included my father,” says Zuzana Kadleckova. “My family is from Celakovice and, much like the Volmans, we’re entrepreneurs producing machine tools. So you could say that our company was a natural successor.” With the help of Marek Tichy, the founder of Prague-based Tak Architects, Kadleckova’s father spent the better part of 15 years renovating the home. The travertine cladding and terracotta tiles were replaced or restored and bold splashes of colour were reinstated.

The villa now functions as a house museum, open for guided tours and one-off events such as rooftop yoga or concerts. “Artists absolutely love performing here,” says Kadleckova. “After all, who else has a 170 sq m living room? Events bring fresh energy to the villa while still respecting its original character.”

For more on Vila Volman, pick up a copy of Monocle’sFebruary issue, which is on newsstands now.

Olive groves cover almost half of Andalucía’s agricultural terrain. At this year’s Madrid Design Festival, which runs until Sunday, a furniture collection called Uprooted explores the olive-oil industry’s complicated history in the region.

Andalucía-born designer Jorge Penadés has spent a decade working on the project, transforming discarded olive-tree roots into sleek objects that make a feature of their natural whorls and gnarly imperfections. Accompanied by a visual essay by Max Creasy and curated by London-based researcher Seetal Solanki, the pieces will be on display in Madrid’s Espacio Gaviota until 22 February.

Uprooted offers a compelling case for a design philosophy that values meaningful engagement with materials over industrial standardisation. The raw beauty of the furniture attests to Penadés’ commitment to conscious design and helps us to understand, as he puts it, the “reciprocal relationship of the material’s characteristics [and how they] inform and guide the design process” towards beauty.
madriddesignfestival.lafabrica.com; penades.xyz

In 2002, Sam Hecht and Kim Colin (pictured, centre and on right) co-founded Industrial Facility, a studio specialising in furniture and product design whose clients have included Mattiazzi, Muji and Emeco. Sensing an opportunity to bring their expertise to the “internet of things” (IoT) – networks in which physical devices are linked together online – they established Future Facility in 2016. Leo Leitner (pictured, on left) joined as creative director in 2024. We visit the team in its London studio to hear about how design and technology can work better together.

Why did you create Future Facility, despite already having a well-established design studio?
Sam Hecht: When products linked to the IoT came out in the 2010s, we thought that things were starting to get a bit loopy in terms of design. You could have your washing machine send you a notification when the cycle was finished, for example. It wasn’t that these were bad products; it was more that they weren’t maximising the potential of the technology. That’s where Future Facility came in. We decided that if we were going to have a conversation about these new products, we couldn’t do that as Industrial Facility. We needed a new way to articulate our thoughts.

What kind of thoughts?
Kim Colin: The strength of Future Facility is its ability to combine product design and technology. There’s often a lack of integration between the two. But we now live in a connected world. We don’t think of chairs as any different to phones. Both are part of our environment and the way that we live.

How do technology companies typically approach design?
Leo Leitner: There’s usually a lot of talk about specs. Big companies often want to make something that sounds innovative, even though their products might not really benefit the user. We want to question what technology brings to an object.

KC: We need to imagine the potential for products in terms of how we actually live with things. Then we can find out how the technological possibilities can be integrated.

For more from the team behind Future Facility, tune in to‘Monocle on Design’.

If you’re flying from London to New York today, you can expect to spend about eight hours above the Atlantic with your journey punctuated only by reheated food served in unappealing plastic packaging. In the early 2000s, however, you still had the option of a speedy hop over the pond aboard a Concorde. Up in the sky, there was just enough time for a cocktail and a meal, served to passengers on custom-made Christofle tableware. The interiors came courtesy of French designer Andrée Putman, who considered every detail – down to these thumb-sized ceramics for salt and pepper.

Commissioned to renew the Concorde’s interiors in 1995, Putman chose a sober colour palette accented by the supersonic jet’s trademark blue. Together, these triangular shakers weren’t much larger than a sugar cube. They were designed not to spill their contents even when the aircraft broke the sound barrier with a bang. Alas, Concordes were retired only eight years after the revamp, with transatlantic travel reverting to ordinary jet engines and seasoning in paper packets.

Finnish furniture company Vaarnii was founded in 2021 with the aim of creating sophisticated design objects from natural pine. The company’s latest release is a sculptural table lamp featuring a robust wooden base and a thin veneer shade. “So much of lighting design is about reflection,” says Antti Hirvonen, Vaarnii’s CEO. “When we discovered that pine veneer creates beautifully soft diffusion, it was clear that we had to use it.”

Designed by London-based John Tree, the lamp comes in two sizes and is a great showcase of the Finns’ ability to produce gentle, atmospheric lighting – a skill that perhaps stems from the Nordic country’s long, dark winters. The Hoop Table Lamp’s use of pine will add a touch of cosy charm to any space, with the warm, delicate illumination contrasting with the monolithic shape of the thick base.
vaarnii.com

Taschen’s new large-format monograph Shigeru Ban: Complete Works 1985 – Today celebrates the work of one of Japan’s best-known contemporary architects. Ban studied in the US in the 1970s and 1980s, where he was influenced by American modernism. His first large-scale international work was the Centre Pompidou-Metz in northeastern France, which opened in 2010 and was modelled on a Chinese bamboo-woven hat. His later projects – such as a two-storey penthouse on top of a 140-year-old cast-iron house in New York and the timber-clad Swatch and Omega Campus in Switzerland – can also be admired in these pages.

“Ban’s design vocabulary revolves around finding unique solutions to problems,” says the book’s Lausanne-based author, Philip Jodidio. “Designing temporary housing for disaster relief has become as integral and meaningful to my work as creating museums or high-end residential projects,” Ban tells The Monocle Minute on Design. His innovations were recognised with a Pritzker Prize in 2014. This hefty monograph is appropriately sized for one of the world’s most important living architects.
taschen.com