Polaroid Pop-up Store

As a retail outlet focused on analogue photographic equipment, LoOneCommune is committed to celebrating the culture of analogue photography and instant imaging. The "Toy Box", a spatial form that implies both imagination and expectation, was utilized as a concept to create a highly energetic space that inspires child-like wonder and curiosity.

Using colors as a paint brush, the design team at inkmason delineated this compact space of 24 sqm into an assortment of playful configurations. The colors of the spectrum, conceptualised as building elements, are treated as toy blocks and are utilised as three-dimensional components in this pop-up store. Through combining them in a flexible and imaginative manner, the intangible quality of colors become concretized in the space, moving from the plane of flat surfaces to the realm of three dimensions. At the same time, the perception of color creates a richly layered space – conjuring a spatial experience that triggers an emotional response of joie de vivre.

To break out of the restrictive compactness of the site, the display windows which face two different directions were mobilized to create an extroverted, inviting space that creates an appearance of a distinctive large-scale "installation" when seen from the street. The atmosphere of the space's interior opens and expands outwards, bringing visual drama and attracting passersby with its exuberant presence.

The lines of the scaffold shelves and solid forms of concrete blocks are visually transformed into a scale of lightness and simplicity, balanced between the virtual and the real. The boundary of the space is transformed into an open and exchangeable interface, allowing the dynamic nature of the interior to extend and refract outwards like a multi-faceted mirror.

The shaping of this small pop-up store, through the use of frames and blocks, color and light, subtly strengthens the atmosphere of the internal space, while also incorporating the surrounding exterior environment into its design approach: thus a new urban spatial relationship is created, and new architectural spatial scales along with it.‍‍‍