Issue 160 – 2025 Special: The State and Future of Spatial Design
FRAME’s 2025 Special Issue is all about reflection and projection. We showcase the winners of the 2024 FRAME Awards – the projects and people that represent the best of the spatial design industry over the past year – and explore the key themes set to shape the future of retail, hospitality and workspaces. Here, we dive deeper into what’s inside.
Meet the recipients of the FRAME Honorary Awards: innovative people and players in the spatial design industry.
Get the key takeaways from our award-winning projects across the broad spectrum of spatial design – retail, hospitality, work, shows, living, institutions and interior products – including essential industry insights from our grand jury.
Delve into the evolving dynamics of consumer behaviour and retail design. Learn how brands can address the often-contradictory demands of different generations, why retail spaces must evolve into platforms for connection and learning, and how technology-enhanced experiences will further reshape sellingscapes, both on- and offline.
Explore the factors propelling hospitality forward amid rapid expansion. Read about the rise of niche interest travel, the contradiction at the heart of sustainable hospitality design, AI’s potential influence on travel experiences, and more.
Find out why the workplace of the future won’t be designed by (only) designers. Discover the importance of integrating diverse work settings, prioritizing flexibility and wellbeing, and striking a balance between community and individuality.
FRAME’s 2025 Special Issue analyses the present and future of spatial design
In her editorial for our newly released 2025 Special Issue, our editor in chief Floor Kuitert shares some of the key takeaways from last year’s FRAME Awards winners and jury deliberations.
In October last year, I travelled to Hong Kong for the FRAME Awards Grand Finale, which took place at the Herzog & de Meuron and Studio Farrells-designed M+ Museum in the city’s still-developing cultural quarter, West Kowloon. One of my first observations of the location was that this seems to be one of those institutional buildings that are truly accessible to the public, even if you’re not there to visit the exhibitions. During our first site visit in the afternoon, children on scooters enjoyed the shielded areas that are an integrated yet open part of the museum, while early the next morning, a group of women used the ‘grand stair plaza’ for a tai chi session.
The value of such public functions was a central theme in the grand jury session for the Institutional Awards, the winners of which – alongside those from our Spatial, Executional, Product and Honorary categories – are featured in this special issue. Jury member Sneha Divias, founder of Sneha Divias Atelier, emphasized that institutions must reflect their context, both in terms of place and people. ‘Usually, these buildings come at a large scale,’ she pointed out. ‘So, thinking about the human scale when you are creating these buildings is very important.’
That human-centric approach emerged as a recurring answer from our jurors when asked where spatial design across sectors should be heading. Their discussions extended to addressing what Yan Pan, cofounder and chief architect of SpActrum, referred to as the ‘social state around projects’: the societal, cultural, economic and political conditions that surround and influence, and should inform, architectural endeavours.
