The Toronto Star ran a story Saturday about Peter Freed's development project at 75 Portland. It seems that the latest market demographic is made up of those who see themselves as different than the rest of us: They understand design, at least Phillipe Starck's design. It is a large and growing market being championed by London-based development company Yoo.
Yoo, a name that lends itself to cute puns, is working on projects that total about 30,000 apartment units around the world — all presumably catering to the Smart Tribe.
Who are they?
"The Smart Tribe are the people intelligent enough to want to invent their life, invent the society — the people who have the idea of quality, who are not just trained for war," Starck said in a carefully scheduled 15-minute phone interview from Paris.
The man whose most famous design is probably the Juicy Salif — a striking, though impractical, lemon squeezer on stilts — sees his job as creating homes for the tribe. "A sort of cave. We devise shelter to help them meet and recognize themselves."
That's one of Yoo's missions, the designer says. The idea is to help people find the right style for themselves and create the appropriate living environment, thereby avoiding mistakes when they're making the biggest investment of their lives.
"To do that, when they buy an apartment, we have some tests," said Starck. "They can recognize in what family they are, if they are in culture, in nature, in classic or in minimal."
So Phillipe Starck is giving people tests to see if they fit in the uber "Smart Tribe" umbrella. What price design? Who would take this test? Does anyone out there know what this test is? Can someone send an example?
[email this story] Posted by R Ouellette on 10/09 at 11:25 AM
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The test, or so it appears from too many of the downtown condos I’ve visited or toured via MLS, seems to correlate with what I’ll call the Ikea threshold. Only prospective occupants owning a certain quantity of Ikea lamps and end-tables qualify for admission, or would want to. As Hal Niezviecki writes in his book Hello I’m Special, individuality has become the new conformity.
You know, Yoo’s tests sound like the same kind of categories that streamed hundreds of thousands of North Americans into suburban banality thirty years ago. You could choose to live in a colonial, a ranch, a tudor, or something faintly reminiscent of Spanish revival.
What’s different? Not much. Yoo’s target market defines itself by a fantasy of exclusivity offering very little scope for genuine individuality, just as the audiences of suburban developers did a couple of decades ago.
Don’t believe me? Check out the demographics, and then check out the rigid condo rules governing behaviour. Condos are the new suburbs, complete with social engineering and gatekeeping.
No wonder retro-modern furniture has had such a big comeback.
Posted by
Amy Lavender Harris on 10/09 at 02:59 PM
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I know, it sounds more than a little creepy – as if we’ve bought in to this “design can change the world as long as the world looks exactly as I say it should look and all my friends have to share that world view too or they are not part of my tribe” mentality that is the antithesis of good design practice.
Posted by on 10/09 at 03:58 PM
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Yep. But I guess telling people they’re unique is a fail-safe marketing ploy.
And I also found Starck’s comment about “people who have the idea of quality, who are not just trained for war” rather amusing. Really he’s talking about people who seek comfort in a kind of aesthetic bubble—precisely the kind of people who do not “invent the society”. They merely consume it.
But there’s an interesting thought in all this, something Starck is trying clumsily to capitalize upon, about the idea that different people may choose very different living environments; in other words, that people dwell in very different ways. And this is not just a marketing problem, but a philosophical one.
As an ecological phenomenologist, I am deeply concerned with matters of dwelling (how we live upon the earth in both general and particular ways). The term ecology, in fact, refers to the “logos (principle, reason, or source) of the dwelling.
Thinking about Starck’s marketing structure, I wonder whether we can really be said to dwell at all if our manner of living is so constrained and predetermined, if our choices of dwelling are confined to the four categories he sets out. The problem with these categories is that they offer so little room for individuality, for the acts of building (even those of choice and customization) that make dwelling possible in the first place.
In the Imagining Toronto course I teach at York, we were talking last week about narratives of homelessness. A theme throughout the discussion circled around the question of whether people who live on the streets or in tents on the waterfront are really the most ‘homeless’ in the city. A consensus that emerged seemed to be that there are many ways and places to be homeless, and that these could quite reasonably be said to include some of the more soulless downtown condominiums and some faceless suburban development tracts, places people occupy but where they do not seem to actually dwell. Without having seen much about Starck’s condominium models, I’d be tempted to include them on this list.
Posted by
Amy Lavender Harris on 10/09 at 05:36 PM
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- "Yep. But I guess telling people they’re unique is a fail-safe marketing ploy."
Sort of. As a marketer of 25 years' experience, I can tell you that while most people are afraid to be really unique, just about all of them would love to feel that they are members of a small group that is special, select and elite. That's why this "Smart Tribe" promo has legs.
Posted by Swamp Thing on {comment_date format=’%m/%d’} at {comment_date format=’%h:%i %A’}
Posted by Swamp Thing on 10/10 at 09:48 AM
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“soulless downtown condominiums and some faceless suburban development tracts, places people occupy but where they do not seem to actually dwell.”
Isn’t “dwelling” about having connections to place—social, commercial, physical habits? Why assume that those who buy into this “urban tribe” will live more alienated lives in this sense?
The people who buy in the Yoo building will probably be focused on the cultural industries (and advertising), and so work on King West, eat at Susur, have friends in the area, etc. That district is now a place.
Sure, such people may be young and mobile, pompous about their own (limited) bohemianism, and maybe not so sophisticated culturally or aesthetically. But who says they’re not dwelling?
Posted by on 10/11 at 01:10 PM
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Anon:
Living in downtown condo (even YOO-influenced) is a category that intersects but does not necessarily overlap wholly with failing to dwell. The overlap does not have to be total for the analogy to be applicable. The extent of overlap is what is of interest, not haggling about whether that overlap is total.
In my view, a marketer who thinks people can/should be lumped into four categories doesn’t understand much about individuality, and those waiting for someone else to tell them who to be don’t have much capacity for dwelling.
This same paired phenomenon is one reason suburban tracts of the past half-century are considered to reflect failed dwelling. I think it may be very aptly applied to YOO / Starck’s rather precious statements about ‘Smart Tribes’, and accordingly have done so.
Anoff.
Posted by
Amy Lavender Harris on 10/13 at 06:14 PM
