一种新型的星巴克 (Starbucks) 店铺可能很快会在您附近登陆，它是更加小巧的持有LEED认证的绿色建筑，是这家连锁咖啡巨头拓展商机的计划的其中一步。
本周在科罗拉多州开张了一家前无古人的星巴克店面，没有真皮座椅，也没有免费提供的电源插座，事实上它根本就没有供顾客使用的店堂。星巴克的这个咖啡小棚的全新构想是一种“现代的模块”，一种持有绿色LEED认证的为汽车和行人服务的外卖店。建筑物由工厂预制，经运输车辆运抵基地，而其漂亮的外表面则是以怀俄明州废旧的挡雪板覆盖而成。尽管店铺小到不能再小，设计师的目标却是让路过的人们想知道：“那是什么？”而随即意识到：“那是艺术。”
1990年代穿绒布衬衫的星巴克会怎么说？
真的很难再去回想那个福爵 (Folgers) 咖啡[2]的年代，那个年代西雅图的垃圾摇滚和咖啡文化还没有席卷全美。现在看来，那个转变似乎是必然的。自从工业革命使咖啡广受欢迎以来，互联网革命的开始又让这股热潮继续升温。如今我们都知道，如果没有一个网络接口和一杯热乎乎的咖啡因饮料，你的手提电脑几乎就是一件废物。然而星巴克的亚瑟·卢宾菲尔德 (Arthur Rubinfeld) 所记得的是一个不一样故事。建筑师出身的卢宾菲尔德（曾被《快公司》评为50位对未来设计最有影响力的人物之一）是星巴克的现任环球发展主席，他所记得的星巴克不是超大杯容量的巨型机器，而是一个有着长远目标的饮料公司，计划着向全美销售它的精品咖啡。“92年我加入的时候，我们还不到100家店。我们知道基于艾斯普利索浓咖啡 (espresso) 的饮料正在越来越流行，这一点从我们当时顾客群的忠诚度能看出来。然而我们所在的特殊饮料这一行业类别本身却仍然缺乏足够的业务驱动力。”卢宾菲尔德告诉我说，“当时我们要做的是在美国建立起咖啡屋的概念。这是个在欧洲有着几百年历史的概念，它基本上就意味着社区。”
于是星巴克构建了这个社区咖啡屋的原型，也就是我们今天所熟知的，散布着皮质软椅，深色原木装修的星巴克咖啡店（这个从欧洲克隆而来的原型居然卓有成效地把欧洲本土的咖啡市场给吃掉了一大块）。不过星巴克占领美国每一个城市的过程都是一场策略性的领土战役。意识到咖啡是一种便利性的即兴购买行为，通常与逛超市或上邮局同时发生，于是他们便进驻购物广场和商业中心。每一个地区的策略都必须以城市为基础因地制宜，不过一切都以便捷作为出发点。“芝加哥是星巴克最早进军的地点之一，”卢宾菲尔德说，“那时候我们的理想店铺最开始是办公楼的中心区，在上班的必经之路上；后来变成“你居住、工作和娱乐”的地方；再到后来变成了“家与办公室之间的第三点”——总之，是社区的枢纽，人与人交流至关重要的地方。”
卢宾菲尔德曾离开公司一段时间，当他在2008年回归并接受新的职务时，整个世界都改变了。再没有人认为星巴克是个冒险的商业模式，也没有人敢说咖啡的风潮是一时之热了。美国成年人中每天消费高档含咖啡饮料的达到17%。今天，咖啡的市场已经超过软饮料——相对于碳酸汽水类饮料来说，咖啡所领先的市场份额已有两位数之多。
如今高端咖啡已经成为人们生活中的一个嗜好型的习惯，使得星巴克不再需要依靠逛杂货超市或商业中心时多出的那一丁点儿时间了。为了一杯法布奇诺 (frappuccino) 就值得单独跑一趟。而与此同时，支持本地食品消费的杂食者运动[3]也开始起步。手提电脑不再仅限于浏览互联网，它也开始创造互联网。文化的焦点转向内容的创造和原创的声音。关于酷的定义已经改变。穿绒布衬衫的落榜生不再时髦，而各类极客怪杰[4]成为新宠。十几岁的年轻人又把背包端正地背在双肩上，并开始意识到环境问题的重要性。
从2008年开始，卢宾菲尔德把所有的新店设计与公司“共同的星球”活动联系起来，这项活动正影响着星巴克在各方面的业务操作，包括与农民的合作，以及各店铺如何处理废料和如何拒绝某些供应商等等。“一旦与我们的使命宣言联系起来，它便成为了我们未来所有的设计的基础。这个使命宣言也可以说是我们的灵魂。同时还有一个非常重要的元素，就是要与本地息息相关。”然而，还有一个很大的问题存在。
“如何在做到这点的同时继续在全球开店？”
这是卢宾菲尔德向星巴克全球的14家建筑事务所提出的问题。要知道，星巴克在建筑设计上并不雇佣他人，他们所有店铺的设计方案都从公司内部进行。这种方式成就了一系列绝对惊艳，高度个性化，和田园诗一般的可持续性特色旗舰店（参见日本太宰府店和阿姆斯特丹林布兰店的设计，以及星巴克的绿色建筑标准），这些店铺在纯审美上完全可以轻而易举地挑战苹果公司最好的店面设计。
在公司总部西雅图就有这么一家旗舰店，利用星巴克回收的货运集装箱和预制构件建造而成。尽管卢宾菲尔德承认，这样对运输材料回收再利用的成本要比简单地丢弃来得高，但他喜欢这种无声的声明。这个设计是实验性的，绿色的，也是极美的。它的华丽与它对环境负责的态度是并存的。
当然，星巴克也无法支付纯粹理想主义的代价。他们仍有自己的市场挑战，建造大型咖啡店并期望盈利总是有限度的。卢宾菲尔德把这个问题解释为社区层面的需求问题。星巴克能够发掘到无数的潜在市场，但这些市场的尺度都不足以支撑传统的大面积店铺。
他们的全新建筑模式——正式命名为“试点计划”——是一个综合所有这些脉动的方案：环境问题、本地主义、市场发展、以及低成本低风险的可扩展性。把这些理念融合到一起的人物是安东尼·佩雷兹 (Anthony Perez)，高级概念设计经理，是他最早提出了星巴克的预制装配式店铺的设想。“既要成规模地建造，又要达到本地化适合度，这是一个设计上的问题，”佩雷兹说。“是个相当有难度的问题。”但这并非不可能实现。星巴克每一个这样的微型店铺都将以一系列预制的模数化房间单元为核心。500平方英尺（约46.5平方米）刚好可以容纳三到五个员工外加足够的咖啡烹调制作设备，用以支持星巴克的完整菜单。
但佩雷兹设想，在这个大规模复制的结构之外，将由本地材料构建一层高端的外立面（这里的“本地”一词不是意义含糊的术语，而是一项有利于星巴克的LEED认证标准，其定义是源自于500英里范围内的材料）。佩雷兹告诉我，这样的外立面可以用回收利用的木材，也可以用瓦楞金属板或其他材质，但都将体现出精细的工艺水准。关键是这种情况下的设计不需要有固定的方向，模数化的框架加之以一个高端的立面可以塑造成任何形式。（另外值得注意的是如果星巴克用标识注明外立面材料的来源的话，LEED还会在认证过程中为其加分。）
“我们已经完成了店铺内部的标准化设计，”他解释说，“而我们的目标是使这样的预制装配式建筑通过其外表面的材质，让周围的人们感受到它与本地环境的密不可分。”
佩雷兹把店铺的外表面看作是建筑的一个具体而又不失象征意味的层面，它可以把一件大规模复制的商业产品转化为社区中具有实质性意义的场所。这一构想还预留了“艺术装饰板”的空间。类似于咖啡店里经常在墙上陈列的本地艺术家的作品，这些室外镶板可以利用从背后打照明灯光的方式呈现，佩里兹希望它们的存在既能凸现建筑的个性，也能兴许为当地艺术家提供展示的平台。
“我们正在尝试许多不同的方法来创造一些设计样板，类似于我们以前在咖啡店内部的设计，而现在我们我们则把它们用在室外，”他说，“我们不想要所有的店面都大同小异。基于这种制作概念，这些店铺的形象会非常丰富多彩。”
不过从佩雷兹用词，诸如“艺术的瞬间”和“愉悦”等等，你可以看出一个亿万身价的商业大公司运营手法的痕迹。有一点，这些现代模数建筑不会随便放置在任何地点，他们的选址会定在当地最多居民开车上班经过的那条路上。星巴克明白无论这20年带来了多少其他变化，他们的咖啡仍旧是一种由便利性驱动的商品。
“我们的建筑应该成为一盏明灯，某种意义上的指路明灯，”佩雷兹说，“我们与黑暗对话。在我们绝大部分的市场一年的大部分日子里，每天外卖窗口汽车通道的生意一大半是在清晨完成的。是否能有一种照明方法，比起几个发光灯牌加上一盏走廊灯的传统方式更加有趣呢？是否可以利用灯光把整个建筑调动起来呢？”佩雷兹描述他们的照明设计的同时也谨慎地说明，他们的操作会采取“一种对环境有感知的方式”。
有人也许会把这样的解释看作是口头文章，但在我和他紧接着的对话中一系列小小的尴尬和追加的问题之后，我可以推断佩雷兹刚才已经不小心把什么更大的计划给说漏嘴了。如果你回想一下他们全新店面设计：微型模数化的经销网点、LEED的绿色建筑认证、全外卖模式所节省的手提电脑全天供电消耗量——星巴克可能并不仅仅是针对普通的消费者网络进行现代模数式店面设计，他们很可能在设计一种低能耗的网点，最终将服务于一个完全不同的消费群体网络。
This week in Colorado, Starbucks opened a store unlike any before it. There are no leather chairs or free power outlets. In fact, there’s no space for the customer at all. Starbucks has reimagined the coffee hut as a “modern modular,” LEED-certified drive-thru and walk-up shop. The building was constructed in a factory and delivered from a truck, but its facade is clad in gorgeous old Wyoming snow fencing. As diminutive as the shop may be, its designer wants drivers to pass by and ask “What is that?” only to conclude that, oh, “it’s art.”
What would the flannel-wearing 1990s Starbucks say?
It’s hard to remember the Folgers era, before Seattle’s grunge scene and coffee culture invaded the U.S. In retrospect, the shift seems inevitable. Coffee, popularized during the industrial revolution, just got bigger as the Internet revolution began. Today we all know that a laptop is near-useless without an Internet connection and a warm cup of caffeine by its side. Yet Starbucks’s Arthur Rubinfeld, the now president of global development but architect by trade (and Co.Design 50), remembers a different story--one where Starbucks wasn’t a trenta-sized juggernaut, but a longshot beverage company hoping to sell America on frou-frou coffee. “When I joined in ‘92, we were under 100 stores. And we had an understanding that espresso-based beverages were on trend. We knew this from the loyalty of our customer base at the time, but our category--speciality beverages--was not in itself a business driver,” Rubinfeld tells me. “At that point it was about establishing the American idea of the coffee house. Hundreds and hundreds of years old in Europe, it was mostly about community.”
"Rubinfeld remembers when Starbucks wasn’t a trenta-sized juggernaut, but a longshot beverage company."
So that community coffee house was crafted into an archetype, the plush-chaired, dark-wooded, Starbucks that we all know today (a European clone so effective that it’s taken a bite out of Europe’s own coffee market). Yet Starbucks still had to win over America city by city in a strategic land war, so they made their way into strip malls and shopping centers, recognizing coffee as an impulsive convenience purchase to complement a trip to the grocery store or post office. Each regional strategy had to be tailored at the city level, but it always started with a convenience-based link. “Chicago is one of the early Starbucks entry points,” Rubinfeld says. “When Starbucks entered in Chicago, it was at the core of office buildings on the way into work. Then it became more ‘where you live work and play,’ and then it became the third place between home and office--the community connection point, the human interaction point that’s so critical.”
Rubinfeld left the company for a bit, and when he came back in 2008 to take his new seat, the world had changed. No one would call Starbucks a risky business model anymore, nor would they dare finger coffee as a fad. 17% of U.S. adults were consuming a gourmet coffee concoction on a daily basis. Today, coffee’s grown bigger than soft drinks--and it has a two-digit market lead over those fizzy beverages.
A transparent design glows in the morning.
But other things had changed, too.
Premium coffee had become an addictive enough habit that Starbucks didn’t require the sloppy seconds of grocery stores or business complexes anymore. A frappucino alone could be worth a trip. At the same time, the local omnivore movement was taking off. Laptops no longer just browsed the Internet, they created it. Culture became about content creation and original voice. And the very definition of cool had changed. Flannel-clad rejects were out, but geeks of all types were in. Teens were wearing backpacks on two shoulders and caring about the environment.
Coming back in 2008, Rubinfeld tied all future store designs with the company’s Shared Planet Initiative, which impacted everything from Starbucks’s practices with farmers to how their stores dispose of refuse. “Once that connection to our mission statement, our soul if you will, was established, that became the go-forward design foundation for our stores, along with one additional very important element, and that is being locally relevant.” But one very big challenge remained.
“How do we do that when we’re opening a lot stores worldwide?”
This was a question that Rubinfeld posed to Starbucks’s 14 architectural offices around the world. You see, Starbucks doesn’t hire out their building design. They conceptualize all stores from within. And what resulted was the greenlighting of a series of coffee shops that are absolutely stunning, highly individualized, sustainably idyllic flagships that easily challenge Apple’s best stores in terms of pure chic.
One particular flagship was built right in Seattle, using Starbucks’s reclaimed shipping containers along with prefabricated components. And while Rubinfeld admits that it’d have been cheaper just to ditch those shipping materials altogether, he liked the statement. It was experimental, green, and gorgeous. It was ostentatious and responsible at the same time.
Starbucks, of course, can’t afford to be totally idealist. They still have market challenges of their own and, sooner or later, there are only so many large coffee houses you can build and expect profitability. Rubinfeld describes the issue as one of neighborhood-level demand. Starbucks sees countless markets that might exist, but each is a bit too small to sustain a traditional store with larger square footage.
Their new building paradigm--officially labeled a “pilot program”--is a confluence of all these various impulses. The environment. Localism. Market growth. Low-cost, low-risk expandability. And making it all come together is the responsibility of Anthony Perez, a senior concept design manager who envisioned Starbucks’s original prefab store.
“To both build scale while having things be locally relevant, that’s really a designer’s problem to solve,” Perez tells me. “It’s a really, really challenging problem.” But it’s not an impossible one. The core of each of these new, small Starbucks locations will be a prefabricated, modular set of rooms. At a mere 500 square feet, they have just enough space to squeeze in three to five employees along with all of the coffee making apparatuses necessary to execute a full Starbucks menu.
That core structure is likely every bit as generic as it sounds.
But around this mass-produced structure, Perez envisioned high-end facades constructed out of local materials (“local” is actually not just jargon in this case, it’s a LEED-certification point in Starbucks’s favor, meaning the material is sourced within a 500-mile radius). These facades exude “craftsmanship,” I’m told, and can be anything from reclaimed lumber to corrugated metals. The entire point is that there’s not one set go-to in this circumstance. The modular frame can become almost anything with a high-end facade tacked on top. (Also of note, LEED will give Starbucks even more points for using signage to label where parts of their facade were sourced from.)
“What we’ve done is standardize the interior,” he explains. “But what we want to be able to do is, as people are going around this prefab, we want the materials on that exterior to feel like it’s part of the local environment.”
Perez sees this facade as both a literal and metaphorical layer to the building that can make a mass-produced corporate product into a relevant place to the community. It even leaves room for “art panels.” Much like coffee shops will hang pieces from local artists on the walls, Perez wants to see these rear illuminated exterior panels serve a similar function--to push individuality and maybe even local artistic voices.
“We’re working with lots of ways to build palettes similar to what we have inside the cafes, but now we have them on the outside,” he explains. “We’re not looking for all the stores to look similar. They’re going to look very, very different around this idea of craft.”
But amidst all of Perez’s rhetoric of “moments of art” and “delight,” you can see the wheels of a multi-billion-dollar corporation spinning underneath. For one, these modern modular buildings aren’t just placed anywhere. They’re placed particularly on the side of the road on which the most locals drive to work. First and foremost, Starbucks knows that whatever else has changed in 20 years, their coffee is still a “convenience-driven product.”
These buildings will also glow, enticing the blurry-eyed consumer in.
“Our buildings need to be lanterns, beacons of light in some ways,” Perez says. “We’re responding to a palette of darkness. For a good part of the year in most of our markets, most of our business in a drive thru is done first thing in the morning. Instead of having just a few glowing signs and a light in the hallway, is there way to do this to make it a lot more interesting? Actually activating the building in such a way that’s taking advantage of light?” He’s careful to add that they’ll do it in "a very environmentally sensitive way."
Some might see that last tag-on as lip service, but from an awkward set of moments and questions that followed, I inferred that Perez had just spilled the beans on something much bigger. Consider the small, modular locations. Consider the LEED certification. Consider the power savings of a drive-up business that doesn’t need to feed electricity to laptops all day. Starbucks might not just be designing modern modular locations that are off the normal consumer grid--they could be designing low-footprint stores that eventually go off the grid altogether.
