 |
|
Walking the Talk
In its new office and showroom in London, Nike makes a bold and branded statement.
By Rowan Moore
July 2003
 |
 |
Inconspicuously located in a multitenant building off Carnaby Street, Nike's
new London headquarters, designed by Jump Studios Ltd., a young English design
firm, reflects the brand's dynamic edge.
|
|
|
|
|
 |
In the lobby and corridors, the designers combined Nike iconography with
materials commonly found in sports facilities by pairing artwork from old ad
campaigns with wooden gym floors.
|
|
|
|
|
 |
Display cases of Nike memorabilia line the route to the showroom. Soccer balls
appear to hover in mid-air and utilitarian sports bags are exhibited like works
of art.
Mark York
|
|
|
|
|
Offsite:
Nike,
www.nike.com |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
Buy This Book |
In the empire of signs, Nike is the emperor. In Naomi Klein's No Logo:
Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, Nike's swoosh is exhibit A. Its history
is, she writes, the "definitive story of the nineties transcendent
superbrand...It seems fitting that Nike's branding strategy involves an icon
that looks like a check mark. Nike is checking off spaces as it swallows them:
Superstores? Check. Hockey? Baseball? Soccer? Check. Check. Check. T-shirts?
Check. Hats? Check. Underwear? Check. Schools? Bathrooms? Shaved into brush
cuts? Check. Check. Check."
So it comes as a surprise to find that the one space the mighty swoosh has until
now left unchecked is their own corporate environment. The public face of Nike
has been meticulously constructed by a series of Niketowns (each one, according
to Klein, "a shrine, a place set apart for the faithful, a mausoleum"), but the
offices where deals are done and campaigns planned have often been ordinary.
"That's a very good question," says Rod Connor, Nike's U.K. marketing director,
when I ask him why, and he laughs.
The reason why I am asking Connor is that he has done something about this
strange deficiency. Under his direction, Nike's London headquarters and
showrooms have moved from a place in Oxford Street to new premises off Carnaby
Street, the district once famous as the retail epicenter of the "swinging
sixties." The old place, to quote the designers of the new one, was "cramped
and archaic"; its replacement at last echoes Nike's ethos of athleticism. "We
wanted a place that would reflect what we stand for as a brand," Connor says, "a
place that is creative, pretty useful, and about sport. A lot of athletes come
in here--Olympic gold medallists, soccer players, rugby players--and we wanted
the place to help them feel proud to be associated with Nike. We bring style
leaders and key influencers here, and they have to think it's cool." The
location in London's retail heartland is also significant. "We wanted to be in
an area close to our consumers, and which they would see as cool and trendy.
It's about understanding the brands that connect with them. It's about walking
the talk."
With the aid of advice from Nike's design center in Hilversum, Holland, Connor
turned to a two year-old design company, whose very name--the
basketball-suggestive Jump Studios Ltd.--would seem to predestine them for the
commission. Jump, whose members have variously worked in Ron Arad's hyperactive
London studio and in the high-tech offices of Wilkinson Eyre and Michael
Hopkins, say they "want to work across the scales--product design, interiors,
packaging, exhibition design." With these new offices, the firm's declared aim is
to "romance the product."
The casual visitor would not know this. The showrooms are aimed at the
retailers who sell Nike's products and not at the general public, so there is
no external sign of what Jump's Shaun Fernandes calls "Nike-ness." The office is
in a multitenant building and is reached through a narrow shared hallway and
elevators of a kind that in other buildings might lead to a dental practice.
One of the best-known brands in the world is notable here for its absence. Only
when you cross the threshold into Nike's space does the brand reveal itself,
but when it does you instantly know you're in the high-energy world of the
swoosh.
The generic beige of the common areas immediately gives way to a powerful pale
blue, and a sloping-walled reception console that, like the swoosh, seems to be
leaning into the slipstream created by its own aerodynamic. A plasma screen
displays a sports channel (which happens to be talking at the moment about
soccer's less-than-glamorous Scottish League division two--but then, as Nike
likes to point out, they're not only interested in the big names). A tabletop
soccer game is visible to the left, for staff energy release. Fit-looking
personnel flit past; one has his hand in a sling, due to a sports injury. Such
an injury, one imagines, can do his standing no harm in this particular
company.
The pale blue turns out to be a consistent theme of the office's three levels,
suffusing floors in resin and sports rubber, and running up walls and built-in
furniture. It was chosen for its "freshness" and also because other colors
would have had overly specific associations. Red identifies instantly with
certain sports teams, orange with other companies, but the blue--the color of
sky on a summer morning--manages to impart alertness while avoiding these
traps. "Even though they hadn't used it before," says Fernandes, a director at
Jump, "we knew the blue was a Nike color." Nike in spirit, he means.
The color defines what Fernandes calls the "series of elements" that are "imbued
with Nike-ness, dynamic and very technological." Starting with the reception
console, these elements enclose exceptional spaces: meeting rooms and sales
suites; senior management offices; and places designated as "war-rooms," for the
confidential development of new products. The blue elements reconcile a
potentially contradictory aspect of the brief: while Nike wanted to be "very
democratic and open-plan," in practice they also need secrecy and privacy. The
elements create actual seclusion yet allow the sense of space to flow freely
around them. They're like tents in the desert for what Fernandez calls Nike's
"nomadic" working patterns. Beyond them are looser, more ordinary spaces, where
everyday paper-shuffling takes place.
The "elements" are the sites of the most intense activity, and also the places
of interaction with Nike's most valued associates, the sports stars they
sponsor and the retailers to whom they sell. With curved corners and shining
surfaces, they symbolize energy, and they are charged with Nike iconography.
Larger-than-life transparencies of Nike sports stars--Andre Agassi, Tiger
Woods, Paula Radcliffe, and some soccer players famous everywhere but the
United States--are laid onto glass walls, as are monochrome images from Nike's
history, including Bill Bowman, the Oregon track coach who famously used his
wife's waffle iron to create the first waffle sole. In among the shiny blue
surfaces are polished wooden gym floors and steel-doored lockers, more
references to Nike's past. "We started with superfuturistic imagery," Fernandes
says, "but they asked for a bit of the heritage."
At the entrance to the showrooms you're confronted with a wall of steel cages
containing glittering silver soccer balls, a reference to a TV advertising
campaign in which sports stars performed in cages. Status is also imparted by a
different kind of stardom: in the most significant spaces the works of iconic
furniture designers (Charles and Ray Eames, Antionio Citterio) lend their own
authority.
Jump's design is deeply flattering to Nike. It treats its client's history and
culture as things worthy of the utmost respect, even veneration, to be
celebrated with a panoply of techniques. Renaissance architects used to perform
similar services for the Catholic Church; recently Rem Koolhaas did it for
Prada in the New York store. The Jump approach is, Fernandes says,
"instinctive" and not particularly concerned with delivering the "tangibles
that marketing people look for." The famous swoosh is implied rather than
emblazoned in the fabric of the interior. "It has to be infinitesimal, as Nike
likes the products to carry the brand."
Jump's interior is openly dedicated to upholding the power of the brand, and
Connors calls the achievement of this interior "a crusade" (the original
Crusades were about violently upholding another kind of brand, the Christian
cross). Yet these offices do not impart the feeling of inexorable global might
that is supposedly the essence of Nike. This is a local initiative by the
London office, not part of some grand worldwide strategy, and it ultimately
lacks the awesome consistency of a Niketown. Jump's design is easily
embarrassed by the contingent--a misplaced kettle or newspaper, or the potted
plants that, despite Jump's instructions to the contrary, keep finding their way
into the space. This is a limitation of the design but also touchingly
human.
Given Nike's assertiveness (and Klein's ferocious reaction to it), it should be
impossible to take the middle ground in response to their branded space. One
would think you either buy into their vision of sport and style or you're
repulsed by their desire to appropriate and market human experience. Curiously,
however, this particular Nike space ultimately engenders neither effect. It is
enjoyable rather than great design, and you can see its marketing aims so
clearly that you experience no fear that you're being insidiously brainwashed.
The middle ground is usually fatal territory for a critic, but in this case
it's the only reasonable place to be.
|
|
|
BACK TO TOP
