Outlets peddling frozen yogurt are a familiar sight in the US, so much so that ‘froyo’ wars are breaking out, with competing brands such as Pinkberry and RedMango battling it out for high street and – more importantly – mall domination.
Snog, I always saw it as being a key element in creating the “perpetual summer” environment,’ he says. He pulled this off with more than 3000 individually controllable LEDs behind a Barrisol stretched plastic ceiling. Onto this lightbox video surface appear digitally captured and manipulated clouds, whose colour and speed are determined by the time of day.
Harris believes it’s the first digital ceiling to be installed in the UK, adding: ‘LEDmedia surfaces are slowly becoming more popular in retail environments, but are still the preserve of expensive brands, such as the Armani store on Oxford Street, where they are used as a feature display.
‘With the Snog store, the digital sky has been fully integrated with the design from the earliest stages, and as such feels an intrinsic part of the store rather than a “promotional feature bolt-on”,’ he adds.
Harris’s interest in lighting was fostered during his studies. At the Bartlett School of Architecture, he was encouraged to look at things that run parallel with architecture, rather than ‘just forming spaces through physical objects’.
The upshot is that Harris is big on lighting.
Snog, 32 Thurloe Place, South Kensington, London SW7 2HQ
www.ifancyasnog.com
Taken from the article "Chain Reaction", FX magazine, Sepetmeber 2008.
Words by Claire Dowdry
