How A Building In Paris Inspired A Best-Selling Nike Shoe
“Design is the silent ambassador of your brand.”
If you look hard enough, there are some fantastic things to watch on Netflix.
And we’re not talking about ‘Love Is Blind’ or ‘The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’. No, we’re much more highfalutin here at 42courses.
One of our favourite series is Abstract: The Art of Design.
Filmed over two series and fourteen episodes, it gives you remarkable insight into the minds of the world’s most innovative designers and shows how their work impacts every aspect of our lives.
In season one, which featured the renowned graphic designer Paula Scher and the ‘starchitect’ Bjarke Ingels, we met Tinker Hatfield.
Hatfield was born on April 30th 1952, in Hillsboro, Oregon.
He was a gifted athlete in high school and continued pursuing his running career under Bill Bowerman at the University of Oregon.
For those who haven’t read the page-turner Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike, Bowerman co-founded the eponymous sportswear company with Phil Knight.
After graduating, Hatfield initially practised as an architect before he joined Nike in 1981.
It’s hard to imagine today, given its global reach and multibillion-dollar annual revenues, the struggles the company endured in its early days.
As Shoe Dog reveals, there were multiple occasions when Nike almost went out of business.
Each time, like a master magician, it managed to pull a rabbit from a hat.
A big part of its success is undoubtedly due to its emphasis on great design.
And Hatfield has been instrumental in this.
Over four decades, he has designed some of the world's most iconic sporting footwear.
One of his most famous creations is the Air Max 1 shoe, first introduced in 1987.
Like all accomplished designers, he is constantly looking for inspiration, knowing it can come from the most unexpected places.
In the case of the original Air Max, a building in Paris was the spark.
That building was the Georges Pompidou Centre, a striking piece of architecture designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers.
Completed in 1977, it houses a vast public library and the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Europe’s largest museum of modern art.
But it wasn’t the Picassos hanging in the gallery that caught Hatfield’s attention.
He was more interested in the distinctive feature of the building, an exoskeleton of brightly coloured tubes and pipes that gave the impression of it being turned inside out.
Indeed, this pipework houses the building's infrastructure, including the heating, ventilation and water.
Typically, architects hide these features within the structure, but Piano and Rogers wanted to do something different.
When Hatfield was sketching out his idea for what became the Air Max, he thought a similar approach would be a novel design feature.
The company had been working on cushioning technology since the late 70s, but Hatfield’s initial drawings showcased the air bubbles within the foam.
Like Piano and Rogers, Hatfield made a virtue of the inner workings rather than hiding them within the shoe’s sole.
The Air Max has since become a design icon, and these days Hatfield is Nike’s Vice President for Design and Special Projects, overseeing the brand’s ‘Innovation Kitchen’.
Like all great creative minds, he never stops paying attention to the world around him, knowing that the seeds for his next brilliant idea lie somewhere out there.
If you enjoyed this post, you would almost certainly value our Creative Thinking course, made in collaboration with some of the world’s greatest creative minds.
