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

GOLD RUSH

I’d always loved the original Commes des Garcons (CdG) boutique in Chelsea, designed by Future Systems, from 1998. It was tucked on a quiet block of far west 22nd Street, and identified only by a little battered steel sign from the previous tenant, that read, alluringly “Heavenly Body Works." One entered through a curved aluminum tube with a giant glass door inside. That door had a huge kidney-shaped hole in the middle that one reached through to open it. A sloped aluminum ramp carried one down to the sales floor, where the artsy, pricey dresses and suits were displayed in an array of shining white cabinets that tilted this way and that, like icebergs. The architecture had a novel quality; each time I visited I felt I was discovering it once again. So when CdG closed for a remodel last year it felt like a big mistake.

CdG kept a good portion of the old store intact. The entrance sign, tunnel, door and ramp are still there, and still delightful. The new interior is similar to the original, with chunky freestanding cabinets. But they’re gold. It’s a finish that’s less garish, and less opulent, than it sounds: an aluminum veneer with a dull, mottled surface, like the inside of a tomato can. The new cases have the same eccentric, canted geometries as the old ones, but they’ve been constructed more crudely (which is, most likely, unintentional). The edges of the gold panels don’t meet neatly, exposing strips of bare construction board behind. The fluorescent lights inside them are plainly visible, and there are stray pencil marks where installers noted joints and measurements. The store’s original bare concrete floor remains, but is scarred at those points where the old cabinets had been screwed down, which have been roughly patched with epoxy and painted.

The informal spirit of the remodel breathes new life into the store. The old white cabinets had a bright, super-modern sheen. The new gold ones are gentler, earthier, and kookier. Their raw construction and dull glow warm the room. The clothing being peddled here has been conceived with architectural precision and pretension, but the store has not.

Image courtesy of Comme des Garcons.

November 01, 2014 by Nalina Moses

REFFRESHED

There was a kerfuffle last year when Canadian fashion retailer Joe Fresh took the Manufacturers Hanover Trust building as its New York City flagship. The trim, five-story glass box on the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street, completed in 1954 by SOM, is a beloved modern icon. It’s two street-facing sides are dressed in glass panels that drop straight down to the sidewalk, without any frame below. This stunning skin exposes, at day and night, every corner of the building’s glowing, open insides. The interior and exterior are both landmarked, and thus protected from substantial alteration. Nontheless architecture historians, preservationists, and enthusiasts wondered what the brand was up to.

There was no need to worry. The shop, designed by Burdifilek, heightens the building’s original transparency. It leaves the exterior glass skin untouched, so that both ground and second floors remain radically open to the outside. Rather than perimeter cabinets, the clothing is set out on clusters of low white tables and shelves – moveable islands of merchandise. And two key original ornamental features on the second floor, an immense cloud-like wire sculpture hovering from the ceiling in front, and a seventy-foot-long freestanding screen in back, both by Harry Bertoia, have been restored and reinstated. In the bright wide-open interior these pieces, shaped from a hammered, burnished, gold metal, are magnificent grace notes.

The result is a shopping experience that’s a complete bliss-out. Stepping off the escalator onto the second floor is like arriving in mid-century modern heaven. Unlike other stores, that conceal windows and pack floors densely with product to keep shoppers focused on shopping, Joe Fresh keeps things clear. The audacious stretches of free space (along the perimeter glass walls, below the high ceilings, between the merchandise displays) is deeply luxurious. Shopping there, on a polished white marble floor beneath glowing ceiling tiles, one feels suspended from the city and its rhythms. Fifth Avenue appears, through the windows, as a hazy dream below. It’s a celestial experience of modernism and midtown.

Photograph courtesy of SOM.

October 30, 2014 by Nalina Moses