If you are ever in Madrid and looking for a bite to eat, you could do worse than to head to Sobrino de Botín. At the world’s oldest restaurant – it opened in 1725 – you can experience a well-reviewed suckling pig supper, while soaking up the atmosphere. It was once frequented by Ernest Hemingway and is still hugely popular, but that has not stopped TripAdvisor reviewers describing it as “cramped” with “narrow stairs”. In the 18th century, lighting and ambience would have come secondary to the food and some good booze (as Hemingway himself said: “My only regret in life is that I did not drink more wine”), but in 2018 the customer demands much more. In this digital age, the places we choose to visit, eat and stay at increasingly need to be Instagrammable. Design has become, if not all, then at least the starter and the dessert.
This new priority doesn’t just mean creating food that can be photographed for social media, although plenty of eateries already cater to that need with the likes of grey ice cream and multicoloured bagels. Instead, the challenge for businesses is to make their premises attractive to social media influencers, so they pose up a storm in front of your store or hotel, luring in followers hungry for the perfect photo opportunity.
Evelyn’s Cafe Bar, in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, has capitalised on the modern customer’s desire for a photogenic backdrop. Angus Pride, the manager, says he was inspired by cafe culture in Los Angeles, “as that felt most aligned to the concept of Eastern and Middle Eastern small and large plates we deliver”. Social media imagery was never part of the bar’s original plan, but “when we realised we were so ‘Instafriendly’, we adapted our approach and it’s now key to everything we do.” The cafe uses a mixture of textures and materials and is full of the obligatory hanging plants, but, says Pride, it puts a premium on design that has “longevity over something more contrived for the purposes of social media”. It is not just interiors that are being reshaped. Renowned architect Richard Rogers considers the Tuscan town of Pienza, now a world heritage site, as the first great attempt at a humanist urban design. Under Pope Pius II, the town was remodelled in 1459 around a main square that feels like an outdoor room - encouraging visitors to linger and revel in its beauty. When I lived in Shoreditch in London, I often wondered what the Pius would make of the way it does the same, but in a very different way.
Shoreditch, often prefixed with the word “trendy”, works hard to seduce anyone with a smartphone. Its cafes and restaurants are stuffed with hanging plants, rose gold and inspirational signs, details designed to be featured online. Because of the murals, pop-up shops and famous flower market, this often means a quick dash to the shop for milk is hampered by tourists’ impromptu photoshoots, thanks to the endless opportunities for stylised social media posts. A day spent in Shoreditch, a place where everyone’s gaze is filtered through a lens, can begin to feel almost unreal.
The spectacular regeneration of King’s Cross in London in recent years has gone further. Glittering glass buildings have shot up alongside plant-covered walls, colour-changing fountains and kitsch billboards. Every part of the area now features something that looks like a prop - from steps covered in fake grass where people eat lunch to a giant neon swing that cries out to be photographed. Then, at King’s Cross station, there is the fictional platform 9¾ that featured in the Harry Potter books, where fans queue to “crash” through the barrier. There is even a professional photographer to mark your moment.
Kate Beavis, an expert in vintage interiors, thinks this kind of pop-up urbanism is becoming the norm. “The things you see on Instagram, such as pastel-coloured houses and walls, seem to be becoming more visible in cities and suburbs. Instagram selfie-wall opportunities are cropping up everywhere, even at events. This is now the norm, so it makes sense for architects to plan them in. What will happen is that all our communal areas will take on a new look and feel to match the Insta need, but, in reality, this is what a trend is: something popular that works into our spaces and life. In 10 years, it will be something else.”
London is not alone when it comes to installations that pander to our need for visual entertainment on our streets. In statistics released by Instagram for 2017, New York was the most photographed city, followed by Moscow and London. But, perhaps more than anywhere else, Los Angeles has realised and harnessed the power of social media when it comes to design. A city nestled below the famous Hollywood sign, it should not be much of a surprise that the demands of the lens are important to residents. Alexandra Lange, the architecture critic for the interiors site Curbed, points out that it it is home to one of the first cafes to catch on to social media. “Intelligentsia’s Silver Lake Coffeebar (designed by Bestor Architecure) is one of the first examples – everyone took a “shoe-fie” on its tile floor.” A search on social media shows the venue is a riot of colour, where the deep blue tiles command the most attention; the cafe now has 20,000 tagged photos by customers on Instagram.
Amelia Perrin, a writer and Instagrammer with more than 10,000 followers, is keen to visit places that will provide her with a good photo. Some restaurants, such as the Dirty Bones chain, offer a “kit” to help you get the best shot. “I’m definitely swayed to go somewhere by amazing looking food, but places that make amazing-looking food know it will be captured, and tend to make the interiors match the food in terms of ’gramability, which makes sense when social media is a sort of currency nowadays.” While Perrin says she wouldn’t go to places just for nice decor, she believes venues know that food and decor “definitely go hand in hand” in importance. “I’m more than happy to go to a crappy-looking cafe if I’m told the food is incredible, but who wouldn’t want to sit in beautiful surroundings instead?”
Perrin admits that she is swayed by venues that look great in photos. “I wanted to go to a beautiful cafe for my birthday afternoon tea, so we went to Mad Dogs and Englishmen because I’d heard the interiors were stunning. They do rotating afternoon tea themes and I didn’t even bother to check the menu or what we would be eating because I was so excited about how the interiors looked, whereas usually I meticulously check menus. The food was amazing in the end, but I definitely chose to go there based on photos I’d seen of the decor.”
Eye-grabbing restaurant design is nothing new: the neon-lit cafes of the US in the mid-20th-century often featured giant hot dogs or doughnuts on their roofs. But although both approaches are to attract customers, Lange says there are important differences. “The stylish roofs of the 1950s (often called Googie architecture) were specifically designed to attract the attention of drivers and be visible across lanes of traffic, serving simultaneously as billboards and working restaurants. While photos from an Instagram-bait restaurant do serve as digital billboards, I think there is a big difference when you bifurcate the experience and put a premium on attracting people who aren’t [in the area].”
Stefani Ellenbecker, the executive director at lifestyle blog Wit & Delight, echoes the need to keep design functional and evergreen in the face of huge social media trends. “For us, it is more about what feels best or looks the most cohesive rather than always striving to stay ‘on trend’. Because we are increasingly viewing life through our phone lens, I think our lives, in a way, are becoming distorted. In our designs, we always try to encourage ‘functionality’ first and foremost.”
It is not just venues and neighbourhoods that are adapting their spaces for the smartphone generation. Museums and public buildings now look to social media to raise visitor numbers. The Louvre is the most photographed museum on Instagram – unsurprising when critics have long bemoaned the daily scuffle to get a photo of the Mona Lisa. But the museum’s popularity has recently been boosted by Jay-Z and Beyonce’s decision to film the music video for Apeshit there. In response, organisers have introduced a 90-minute tour on which you can view the art featured in the video (and, naturally, take selfies to prove it).
Other venues are hosting exhibitions that go bold on scale, colour and interactivity. Rain Room, an installation at the Barbican in 2012 that made you feel as if you were caught in a torrential downpour, has now travelled around the world and been documented by hordes of people. In Venice, sculptor Lorenzo Quinn’s giant pair of hands reaching out of the canal and stretching up a building became the photograph for tourists to get as they chugged by on a waterbus. It is unclear how many of them knew that the sculpture was intended to highlight climate change and the threat it poses to the island city.
The art critic Waldemar Januszczak, in a review in the Times of the Frieze Sculpture exhibition (currently on show across Regent’s Park in London), praises the reinvention of public sculpture: “It used to be pious, repetitive, dull. Now it is inventive, varied, fun.” As you walk around the display, there are giant penguins, oversized Wendy houses and glass boxes alongside gleaming towers and even a gloomy un-inspirational quote: “Everything is lost.” But it is hard to ignore the number of people viewing the exhibits solely through their phones, using the art as a sidekick in a fun selfie, or perhaps just wanting others to know that they have imbibed some culture and not just spent time sunbathing.
The best example of the power of the new breed of online photographer was perhaps the 2017 retrospective of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama in Los Angeles. Tickets sold out within an hour. While Kusama’s paintings and objects were on show, the real draw were her “mirror rooms”. One visitor, in their quest to take a great image, damaged an installation and a 30-second time limit in each space was swiftly implemented. The popularity of these spaces, packed with kaleidoscopic lights and seemingly endless mirrors that enabled the perfect selfie, ignited a debate about whether the way we have consumed art has changed. Are we simply using it now to bolster our own image?
According to Culture Track, a 2017 report by a marketing firm that tracked more than 4,000 cultural consumers in the US, respondents said they would rather have fun than be educated by cultural offerings, and preferred experiencing new things to learning something new at exhibitions. The study also found that the majority of responders wanted digital experiences in all cultural activities.
Perhaps those surveyed should consider the US Museum of Ice Cream. Far removed from the educational school trips of your childhood, here you can jump into a pool of sprinkles, gambol in a field of gummy bears and, most importantly, document the whole experience. The venture has become a digital phenomenon, with more than 160,000 tagged posts on Instagram. Photos show giant sweets, unicorns, happy people on pink swings and others posing in the mocked-up supermarket.
Alexandra Lange points out that new attractions, such as this or the Colour Factory, another travelling exhibition, seem to have been designed almost entirely for the crowd with cameras. “What looks good in a photo is a very shallow, static backdrop with a bright colour or scintillating pattern. But that has very little to do with comfort or flow or dwell time, which require depth and choreography and, usually, places where the eye is more attracted to the people you are with than to the decor.”
Attractions such as Dreamland in Margate have even created a whole day out designed for you to snap away – signs that used to say “no photographs” increasingly now plead with you to “please take photos!” and add their hashtag for good measure.
Lange says the trend to document everything we see online has led some architects to play with scale and shape to grab attention. She points to the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) as the firm leading this trend – it has designed a hotel with a ski slope on its roof, buildings that appear to be dancing together and a theatre shaped like a bow. The same firm recently designed a building designed to look like giant colourful Lego blocks. “For architecture, [the trend] is for more outrageous shapes – BIG has played that game incredibly well, and you seen less well-known firms picking up on it.”
What does this all mean for innovation in design? The more we rely on our smartphones, the more our ability to concentrate seems to dwindle, so the shops and spaces we visit are forced to work harder to offer us new ways to experience life through our gadgets. We shouldn’t be surprised if the places we frequent begin to blur into each other. As Lange says: “Designing from Instagram for Instagram seems like a snake eating its own tail. Everywhere looks like everywhere else and the eye grows tired of bananas or concrete tiles or mirror rooms.”
So many of us seem to view our surroundings only as a backdrop to our personal portfolio. But this comes at a cost. In the myth, when Narcissus looked down into that wonderful pond, it wasn’t the beauty of nature he admired: all he saw was his own reflection. Now it seems we are all content to dismiss the beauty around us in favour of fiddling with filters.
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