A BRAND NEW UGLY

There’s lots of talk about beauty, but what about ugly? That which doesn’t possess beauty can be simply insipid, unimpressive, unimportant, while something truly ugly possesses its own power. It agitates, upsets expectations.

OMA’s new building for luxury retailer Galleria in Seoul is ugly. Popping up in my twitter stream among prettily groomed interiors and houses, the masonry behemoth had a beastly presence. The structure’s dark outer skin is split by a run of faceted glass windows that swells like a cancerous growth at an outer corner. Its facade has no grid, no consistent measure except for its small stone triangular tiles, which blend like pixels into mud-colored strata. Its palette of dark stone and garish sea-green glass is unharmonic. The volume is rich in associations, none particularly flattering, and none architectural. This building reminds one of a geographical specimen, a molten chocolate desert, a subterranean mammal.

But one can’t mistake this for bad architecture. It’s complex, vivid and deliberate. It makes no attempt to look like a building, veering courageously from convention, particularly in the service of a luxury retailer peddling established European brands. This building is admirably ugly; it might even be deeply ugly. Is it arriving ahead of a larger wave, forecasting a new normal? And is it quietly dismantling some flaw in our thinking, pushing us towards a new beauty?

Photograph courtesy of OMA.

April 07, 2020 by Nalina Moses

WHEN LESS IS MORE IS NO LONGER ENOUGH

I wonder how English architect John Pawson feels about the transformation of his most iconic project, the Calvin Klein flagship on Madison Avenue, at the hands of brand creative director Raf Simons and artist Sterling Ruby. The city’s most admired minimalist interior has become a riotous retail playhouse. Grids of construction scaffolding and stage lights have been inserted into the wide-open sales floors, beige wall-to-wall carpeting has been laid over the polished concrete floors, and brightly-colored formica blocks and cylinders have replaced the low, altar-like stone and wood plinths. Most dramatically, the interiors throughout have been painted a screaming canary yellow. When seen from across Madison Avenue at dusk, the stately limestone building’s windows gleam demonically.

It’s an audacious rebranding, an attempt to lure a younger, hipper customer and to bring the store’s architecture in step with Simons’ fevered pop culture imagination. This season’s clothes, separates with clean silhouettes executed in vernacular fabrics (denim, houndstooth, plastic, lace) with bold graphic details (racing stripes, appliques, feathers), and paired with structured accessories (cowboy boots, boxy clutches, doctors bags), have a fresh, funky feeling, like costumes for space age hippies. The new stores gives them a suitable stageset.

But I can’t help but remember the old store. It takes a lot of skill, in both design and construction, to execute a convincing minimalist interior, and Pawson’s was thrillingly austere. The floors seemed endless and seamless, light fittings and hardware were brilliantly concealed, the store’s narrow staircase was tucked between two full-height piers, and daylight washed over everything, highlighting the soft finishes. This was a Madison Avenue flagship store that didn’t try to entertain an off-the-sidewalk customer; it was a temple to restraint.

The cultural pendulum is swinging now from principle to feeling, from monochrome to color, from luxury to vulgarity. But I wonder if defacing every surface of the old store was the best strategy. The connecting stair, whose treads have been covered in black enamel, still surprises with its narrow proportions and mysteriously slow reveal of the second floor. Its slender square steel handrail, painted yellow, remains singularly elegant. The bright colors and street savvy of the new design catch the eye but don’t hold the imagination for long. When viewed from the mezzanine, the web of scaffolding, strings of lights, and toy-like props on the ground floor feel like party decorations. The architecture of the old store – its high walls, open floors and slowly unfolding views – quietly reasserts itself.

Image courtesy of Calvin Klein.

November 11, 2017 by Nalina Moses

There’s a big black bear on Madison Avenue, presiding over the private school kids, museum-goers, ladies who lunch, and stroller-pushing nannies who pack the sidewalks there. He’s perched twenty feet above street level, on the giant, L-shaped billboard at the northeast corner of 84th Street, and he’s in town to announce the new outpost of LA-based designer James Perse. The sign, about twenty-five feet tall, wraps the top three floors of a small four-story building. It’s constructed from translucent white fabric that’s pulled tight over a steel frame. And it's entirely blank except for the stark black profiles of a grizzly bear and a five-point star, both icons lifted directly from the California state flag. The bear is about twenty feet high and lumbers left, on all fours, across the corner of the billboard, from the side street onto Madison Avenue. The star, five feet high, floats in front of him, right off the top of the sign.

There are trendy new boutiques popping up all over this neighborhood, just above and below 86th Street, but the sidewalk experience here remains stubbornly uninspired. The small storefronts, tucked along the bottom of limestone apartment blocks, have ladylike window displays and hand-painted signboards that cultivate a cloying, small-town feeling. So this bear lights up the place like an explosion. The immense black-on-white sign is graphically arresting, visible from over two blocks away, and builds excitement for the brand without flashing lights, bright colors or sexed-up imagery. The sign also makes an alluring dress for its building, a slim, postmodern steel and glass block. In daylight, from across the street, both the building and the screen’s delicate metal skeleton are visible behind the graphic in ghostly profile, and the tarp shimmers as if it’s taking breaths. It’s an eruption of life into the streetscape.

Photograph by Nalina Moses.

October 24, 2013 by Nalina Moses