Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Eduard Sancho Pou
Money is not interested in architects’ names, but rather the profitability oftheir works.Building projects are no longer based on aesthetic criteria, but on meetingusers’ or the market’s needs. This maxim, evident in the case of the mall,extends to architecture as a whole. A project defined by its formalism willbe displaced by a project defined by its strategy.Thus, we no longer design buildings but strategies. Designing strategiesmeans designing spaces and their relationships. These spaces may be realor not, but the connections between them will always be real. Architectsmust be able to enter fully into this world, which at times is built and othertimes is not. We no longer speak of new shapes or bubbles, creases or blobs,since strategies have no shapes; instead we speak of purposes and goals.To test so much theory, we shall start by considering retail as the idealplace for analyzing strategies. As “living” spaces that need to be updatedto sell, their cost effectiveness is frequently under review. They are also thedeparture point for tactics that spread out to encompass architecture in allits breadth.Who is number one in retail? Who sells the most? The Apple StoreLooking at the numbers, the record for revenue corresponds to Apple Stores,which managed to reach the magic number of one billion dollars in annualsales in its first three years.“Apple’s store were the fastest retail operation to ever reach$1 billion in annual revenues, taking just three years to reachthe mark, beating out the previous record-holder, clothing retailerThe Gap.” Apple has a list of 100 Potential Store Sites(ifoAppleStore, April 2004)Designed on the basis of strategies, the first consideration for Apple Storeswas what they would contribute, since their products were already beingsold through authorized distributors and the Internet. If the only goal wasto boost sales, the investment was too high. Changing the manner of sellingwas the order of the day. The idea was to make a store where everythingcould be touched, where everything was dynamic, where employees couldlend customers a hand. To materialize the idea, Apple decided to hire aperson capable of leading the change, so as to give him management powers.The choice was Ron Johnson, an economist at Stanford University withan MBA from Harvard (1984). He had been working for 16 years as head ofmerchandising at Target, a large American chain of low-cost supermarkets.Johnson revolutionized Target by scrutinizing how Gap, a clothing manufacturerand retailer – the American Zara – had achieved growth.
Volume Editors
Martha Thorne & Xavier Costa
ISBN
978-0-935502-83-1
