P.198 Plans / P. 326 Images
No.178
Aoyama has become the fashionable heart of Tokyo, teeming with designer outlets and the flagship stores of international labels, where every building ekes out the maximum floor space the site can provide, with scant regard for the surrounding area. When Herzog & de Meuron were commissioned to design an “epicenter” store for Prada, they defied this almost autistic approach to development by creating a building whose gesture of openness is more in keeping with the European urban tradition. They organized the required floor space of 2800 sqm into a six-story tower that is considerably higher and more visible than the predominantly two- and three-story buildings of the neighborhood. Significantly, this also allowed them to leave half the site unbuilt, so that over the underground storage and infrastructure facility, there is a public plaza with benches where passers-by can relax. Herzog & de Meuron have structured the narrow, sloping site on an intersection as a landscape and have separated the plaza from the adjacent buildings with a steel boundary wall that frames the entrances to the administrative offices and the basement showroom. Faced with stitched-on areas of living moss that are irrigated from the back and form a pattern reminiscent of both European minimal art and traditional Japanese gardens, the boundary wall thus melds the culture of the company with that of the host country. The polygonal steel-and-glass tower set in a corner of this landscaped site continues this interaction with the city. For one thing, its angled profile makes the glass-skinned building change its appearance from every viewpoint, looking at times like a crystal, at others like a traditional house and sometimes even like a shopping bag. The eave heights differ from corner to corner. The facade, with a kink on one side, adds a new dimension to the tradition of modernism. Mies van der Rohe used glass in his Farnsworth House as a membrane that made the boundary between interior and exterior practically invisible, allowing for an entirely unobstructed view and creating the illusion of an uninterrupted spatial flow. Herzog & de Meuron, on the other hand, have treated the facade of the Prada store as a space in its own right, wresting new compositional potential from the material. The glazing elements, set in a diamond-shaped grid, differ individually. On the lower area of the ground floor, they are concave, allowing passers-by to see the products on display in the basement as though through lenses. Higher up, flat and convex panes make the facade appear as an independent space that seems to breathe in and out like a living creature. The glass tower is at once a huge window display and triggers a wide variety of associations from an aquarium or a jewelry display cabinet to the bulbous glass of old Parisian arcades, or even a huge lantern lighting the street by night. What the architects have achieved with their imprinted glass facades for the Spitalapotheke Basel, their tilted window elements for the Helvetia Patria Versicherungen headquarters in St. Gallen, or their undulating glass walls for the Kramlich Residence in California, to name but a few of their projects, culminates here in a transparency that is accomplished not by negating the material, but by designing and structuring it in three dimensions. The topographical concept of the exterior also applies inside, to the space that unfolds behind this glass facade. Each floor has its own distinctive character. The ceiling of the ground floor curves into a balustrade, opening up a view of the area below. The space flows freely through all the floors of the building, inviting visitors to stroll through a landscape of diverse materials and sceneries. The individual elements of the display system, in the form of low-level tables that provide an easy overview of the products, the
seating, the snorkels for various IT gizmos showing catwalk défilés and films, and networking the company’s stores worldwide, have all been designed by the architects themselves. Amid all this openness, the three horizontal steel tubes that reinforce the structure create intimate zones while their outer surfaces serve as projection screens. Inside the tubes, there are changing rooms and waiting areas for shoppers’ companions that have all the comfort and spaciousness of private boudoirs, individualized by selected background soundtracks. At the same time, the tubes act as periscopes through which the city of Tokyo can be viewed from different directions, complemented by private glimpses of the outside world from the changing rooms. This building, which opens up to its surroundings like no other in the neighborhood, focuses the gaze as precisely as an optical instrument. Fashion and shopping are all about looking, presentation, choosing, trying on and buying. Herzog & de Meuron have given these activities a spatial structure and have integrated a variety of sensual experiences into their architectural concept. The gaze drifts uninterrupted from product range to cityscape and back again, so that the process of selecting and viewing that is involved in shopping merges with the casual, drifting observation of the surroundings that is the mark of the flaneur. Perception becomes the mode within which the individual can oscillate between thoughtful reflection and consumer behavior. The sense of openness that characterizes this building is created by its extreme structural density, its lightness of form by a steel frame that melds space, structure and facade into a single entity in a way that the architects have perhaps achieved before only in their private museum for the Goetz Collection in Munich. The ceilings, the four vertical access cores with two scissor stairs attached, the three horizontal tubes and the facade all form a seamlessly interconnected load-bearing system. With the exception of the glazing, there is no element that is not part of the loadbearing structure. Perhaps it is this enormous concentration of elements that has allowed the architects to conjure an underlying sense of instability as well. The lozengeshaped steel mesh that encases the building, filled with panes of glass, is in itself structurally instable, gaining its rigidity only from the fact that the ceilings are integrated into a system of large triangles that cannot be seen at first glance. This heightens the feeling that the building is somehow “unreal” and creates, especially in earthquake-prone Japan, a sense of unease, the more so since the protective base isolation, which supports the weight of the building and the plaza, is visible only to the expert eye. Once inside the building, this vague sense of unease is quickly dissipated by a distinctly tactile use of material. From the hand-applied velvety pale beige covering that adorns the walls and load-bearing elements to floors of oak, concrete and velour, from the fiberglass display tables and seating to the suspended resin registers and the rubber-clad adjustable arms of the lamps and snorkels, from the silicon door handles and clothes hangers to the bonelike steel beams in the VIP area under the roof, the architects have consistently opted for a syntax that ranges from the overtly synthetic to the profoundly natural, hyperbolically expressed in the ponyskin-covered clothes rails. Strikingly different as its presence may be, this building relates to the human senses in a way that makes it seem pleasantly familiar. It is as unpretentious and perfectly cut as an exquisitely tailored garment and, just like such a garment, it provides both protection and freedom of movement.
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Prada Aoyama