The power of curating places for people

What people want from their buildings is changing. And that means, increasingly, space creators must also be space curators. We talked with Tony Byrne, Mark Landini and David Caffery, three space curators.

Today’s commercial building – whether an office or a retail centre – is no longer just bricks and mortar. It’s also a platform for engagement, collaboration and cultural exchange.

A host of influences, from travel and technology to sustainability and the health and wellbeing movement, have expanded consumer expectations, while also enabling landlords to customise their spaces like never before. In this environment, the attractiveness of an asset is dependent on the richness of the experience it offers.

As the general manager for International Towers, Tower Two and Tower Three at Barangaroo South, Tony Byrne is taking a curated approach to tenancy, selecting diverse organisations with aligned views around innovation, sustainability, collaboration and community.

Byrne doesn’t see the International Towers team as curators, but custodians of the space. They are cultivators of a new business ‘ecology’ – an enterprise community model that aims to inspire innovation, interaction and to blur boundaries between teams and even other organisations.

The “psychology of the space” is an important driver of collaboration and community, not to mention innovation, Byrne says. At International Towers, this means visible gathering places, transparent meeting rooms and shared stairways between floors and tenancies.

“We are doing glass perimeter walls in between some tenancies, something previously unheard of, to foster a sense of community. It means additional natural light and better shared views, but it also gives people a greater respect for their neighbours.”

Among the tenants currently on Byrne’s books are: KPMG and its recently-opened Innovation Lab; law firm Gilbert + Tobin; global reinsurer Swiss Re; Westpac; and Lendlease. Other tenants under the new curated tenancy model include the Green Building Council of Australia and world leading indigenous dance company, Bangarra.Curating this community is about more than open plan offices. Byrne says sustainability is a shared value of all the tenants, with each committing to achieve a 6 Star Green Star rating for interior fitouts.

“The mere culture of a 6 Star rating means our tenants are thinking about their footprint, the world they want to be in, their neighbours and the people they want working for them,” he says.

Curation also means bringing together unlikely groups, and helping them to forge new connections.

Bangarra, will move into temporary space in International Towers in 2018 while its permanent premises are refurbished. An empty room set aside for future generators is being transformed into a dance studio with five-metre height clearance. Some clever, creative thinking was required to make the tenancy work, but Byrne says “it’s great to be able to adaptively reuse the space, and to bring another layer of culture into Barangaroo.”

International Towers has introduced a strong service culture with a year-round calendar of events for the whole community. But curation is more than simply running events, Byrne adds.

Curating is also about building a “culture of thoughtfulness, teamwork” he explains. “It’s not just real estate – you are coming to a place.”

 

Curating the customer experience

Retail design specialist Mark Landini says curation is something of a buzzword, but the concept has been around forever. “Really, it’s just about understanding and then helping people”.

Landini points to Selfridges, which customised its product offerings more than a century ago, and Aldi, which “curates everything they sell”.

“The quality of the product that Aldi curates is really high, but because they have a limited range, they can buy more and sell more cheaply. Curation has a financial benefit, to the customer and the retailer too. It simplifies the shopping experience in a chaotic world,” Landini explains.

“Post GFC, people are more interested in the ‘value/quality’ equation than they’ve ever been. To deliver that, as a retailer, you have to make decisions about what you are selling, and provide soundbites about why you are selling it.”

Landini says that ironically the online experience is also influencing people’s expectations in the real-world retail environment.

“An algorithm can anticipate what we are looking for in nano-seconds. We expect that offline too.”

“Today we are drowning in so much information, that anyone who edits this gets our attention. We need people to explain to us what’s good and what’s not.”

For example, the Kitchens at Robina Town Centre on the Gold Coast, which Landini conceived and worked on with QIC, is “not just a place where you buy and sell food; it has an opinion about what that food and that experience should be”.

QIC spent $160 million on this two-storey “town of food”, Landini says, with open kitchens that present a “new take on the traditional market”.

“There are buskers, live demonstrations, film and music. It’s not run by centre management, but by someone called the ‘curator’, with a background in markets. His job is not just running the space, but choosing the retailers that operate there.”

 

Turning spaces into places

“There is a big difference between places and spaces”, says David Caffery.

Caffery leads Dionysus, a place-making company based in Canberra. He’s also the cultural curator for the Molonglo Group, and the mastermind of the Art Not Apart festival.

“People love to be in buildings that speak to them, but not enough developers think about that,” Caffery says.

“Without curation, we don’t have colour. Places become corridors rather than lounge rooms, and people will never be encouraged to stop, think or enjoy a place.”

Plonking an artwork in a building is not curation, Caffery warns.

“In the arts realm, curation is about having a given space and coordinating a series of artworks to achieve something greater than the sum of its parts. The opportunity at the development level is to build the gallery and curate the artwork.”

While the epitome of curation remains the large-scale art institutions “who always have something cool happening around them because they have art at their disposal”, precincts can adopt this philosophy too.

The development industry “creates the physical rooms where activity can happen”. Caffery points to the spectacular staircase in Canberra’s Nishi building, in NewActon, as an example. His team recently hosted a kids’ “cushion concert” on the staircase. “By putting the event in an unexpected environment, we can put the audiences’ heads in a new frame,” he says.

It may sound arty, but the outcomes are not intangible. Caffery points to the Cultural Development Network’s five measurement criteria for cultural activity: creative stimulation; aesthetic enrichment; new insights; appreciation of cultural diversity; and shared sense of belonging.

“These criteria are the result of a decade of peer reviewed, academic research and are now being used all over the world. I expect them to become industry standard measurements for cultural development and place making in the next five years,” Caffery says.

“Cities are competing to attract the creative classes, and this puts a new emphasis on the quality of experience in a city. The most obvious way to change a city is through its development.”

“And when places are valued by the community, they are more financially valuable,” he adds.