Starbucks is a leader in the creation of the warm and inviting environment. Taking clues from coffee bars in Italy, it established a pallet and a style that asked people to dwell and enjoy themselves. It is enormously effective and is now everywhere.
All is good, right? Well, it is, if you don't mind the notion that it is only a stage set, that it is ubiquitous – everywhere yet anywhere – independent and separate from its immediate surroundings. No matter where I am on the street, when I enter into an environment like this, I have severed my relationship with how I got there. I have arrived in Shangri-La. Now the Shangri-La I've just stepped into, I can find in any place many times over. One Shangri-La is not any different than any other. One place could be in any place.
If the goal is, as I think it should be, to remind you of who you are and where you are, and how that strengthens your identity; if it is to help you recognize that the unfolding of spaces is just as important as the arrival; if it is to deepen your understanding and relationship with space, then events like this, suffocate that. The corporate identity is now more important then your unique personal experience. You enter into a corporate environment and you become of that corporate buyer. You are meant to be amused. How it relates to who you are is only momentary, independent of how you got there and indifferent to its place within the city fabric.