Back in business

摘要

Remarkable if only for its sheer ubiquity, the warehouse typology has spent decades in the design desert. Foster, Rogers and Grim-shaw saw fit to celebrate them 30 years ago, using high-tech language to glorify their demanded long spans and appropriating cheap industrial cladding systems to sublimate them to new aesthetic heights; and we began to see the likes of Reliance Controls, the Renault Centre and Herman Miller dotting our urban fringes. But the 1980s spawned other things too; more relaxed, market orientated planning policies, Sunday opening and the birth of out-of-town retail parks. Everyone wanted warehouses and seemed prepared to accept anything to pander to new markets, so the design of our DIY sheds became more laissez-faire.