The extent to which interior architecture can enrich our lives depends amongst other things on whether we are willing to question things that we usually take for granted. The kitchen, for instance, has undergone two transformations: from live-in kitchen to the infamous standard of the “Frankfurt Kitchen” – a much-celebrated advancement in its day – and back to the mutual interpenetration of the functional zones that were previously dedicated solely to cooking, eating or living.
Mobility and urbanity are two of the big issues of our century: Accelerated by the rapid development of mobile devices, we have to be mobile like never before. Nowadays we are able to work from virtually any location in the world; At the same time we migrate to the big cities, which causes narrowness and increasing costs in urban living. This development, in addition to the ever growing online business has a major impact on the market situation: Traditional voluminous furniture such as bookshelves or desks will disappear from the market and are replaced by new typologies adapted to our digital and nomadic life. In his lecture, the designer Michael Hilgers describes this trends and shown practicable solutions.
The contemporary bathroom is increasingly liberating itself from its sole function as a wet room and being transformed into living space, into a feel-good zone and relaxation area within one’s own four walls. In public areas too, the importance of the bathroom is steadily increasing – along with its status within the architecture as a whole.