Luxury Without Formality
Derek Lam Store New York, SANAA
interieur magazine 04/20/09
The fashion world was still a party when Derek Lam selected Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the Tokyo based firm SANAA to design his store in the trendy neighborhood of SoHo’s lower Crosby Street. Lam, although not yet a household name, is considered one of the rising stars in high-end fashion. Sejima had been his friend for several years and also one his first customers when he started his label in 2003. Both firms share more than a passing similarity in their design sensibility. What Lam envisions as “luxury without formality”, a design that is “modern but never cold, fantastical but always rational”, would also be a fitting description of SANAA’s delicate minimalism.
Lam had given little directive for the concept of the store, other than the desire to separately highlight each collection, and SANAA translated this idea into a layout of incredible simplicity; literally an extruded bubble diagram. The design strips the enclosing loft space of the original warehouse to a white gallery-like box, occupied only by 4 organically shaped transparent rooms, housing the different collections and changing rooms. Add some sparsely distributed pieces of custom-built furniture, mannequins, potted plants, and woven gold lamé curtains, and the store is complete.
And yet the result is everything but plain. Walking through, or between the curved walls is an intensely physical and slightly disorienting experience. The space feels ambiguous, simultaneously limitless and constrained, and the difficulty to merge visual and physical perception compels the visitor to a somewhat measured, probing stance. One becomes keenly aware of objects and people in the room, their proximity and movement, and the fact that the space serves to exhibit clothes as well as and their buyers.
Although an endless amount of study models had been produced, project architect Toshihiro Oki explains that the actual effect of the acrylic walls was difficult to test in advance: “ We learned in the Toledo project, that it is not possible to completely simulate or even imagine the effect of a space made entirely from transparent walls”.
The construction of the acrylic wall posed it’s own difficulties. The architects had chosen the material over glass for it’s completely clear optical properties, and the comparable ease of manufacturing, as well as safety concerns, but to give the partitions their immaterial quality, they would ideally have to be seamless and structurally independent. The architects engaged a company in Las Vegas specialized in large scale aquariums to bond narrow sheets into 7 meter long section, and bend them into shape. The completed sections were inserted into the space after all other construction work was done. With only minimal remaining clearance between floor and ceiling, they were rolled into position on thin steel tubes, and finally joined together with small metal brackets.
What makes the design so compelling is that non of this logistical and physical weight lifting is visible. It all looks simple and effortless. The prevailing experience is a sense of refinement, not based on precious materials or elaborate details, but rather the very absence of materiality: A space enveloping the body, like a well-cut dress.