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York’s Broadway in 2000; three years on,
fashionistas
and architecture pilgrims have a
new reference point on their global
compasses with the completion of the
biggest Prada flagship store to date in Tokyo,
designed by Herzog & de Meuron. At a cost
of £52 million, budget, it seems, is no object,
despite falls in company profits (down from
£36 million in 2001 to £19 million last year,
though the Asian market is still apparently
buoyant). The Swiss partnership has also
been charged with converting a piano factory
for the house’s New York head office and
designing a new production centre in
Tuscany. Such creative interaction
represents an intriguing shift in the cultural
landscape of architecture. Whereas a
generation ago architects’ imaginations were
exercised by helicopters and yachting wire,
now it is high fashion and modern art.
Prada Tokyo is in Harajuku, an area famous
for both its couture and street fashion,
manifest by the parades of exotically attired
young Japanese who cruise up and down the
broad main drag of Otomosando, which,
with its trees and cafés, is Tokyo’s closest
approximation to a Parisian boulevard. At its
east end it tapers and morphs into the city’s
Bond Street, an elegant ghetto of deluxe
flagships clinging staidly together, like first
class passengers in the Titanic’s lifeboats, for
succour against the blare and dislocation of
modern Tokyo. In a city with virtually no
public space in the European sense (land is
far too precious a commodity to remain
empty), Herzog & de Meuron’s first move is a
bold and urbanistically generous one,
stacking up the shop and office
accommodation into a stumpy five-sided
block to create a small piazza at its base. The
piazza is enclosed by an angular wall covered
in soft green moss that will gradually flourish,
a reminder of the slow beauty of organic life
in the midst of artifice. Hemmed in on all
sides by low-rise buildings, the forecourt
provides a breathing space for meeting,
socializing and window shopping. It also
makes the tower more of a distinguishable
object in its own right, like a chunky bubble-
wrapped bauble on a tray.
1
The Prada tower draws back from
the edge of its site to create a small
public piazza.
2
Detail of the rhomboidal grid with its
glass infill panels that envelops the
building like a huge net or piece of
bubble wrap.
1
Like a modern Medici with matching
accessories, Miuccia Prada and her
eponymous fashion house have become
synonymous with a shrewdly intrepid
approach to architectural patronage. Since
1999, Prada has embarked on a programme
of new store designs and brand expansion
through a select stellar cabal of the avant-
garde (Rem Koolhaas, Kazuyo Sejima, and
Herzog & de Meuron). Though the worlds of
architecture and fashion have a fertile and
often colourful reciprocity, this goes beyond
the periodic tasteful fit-out into a more
serious (and big budget) exploration of the
radical that aims to reinvent the simple act of
clothes shopping into a singular experience –
consumerism as culture or religion and
shops as carefully choreographed
environments or temples. (Perhaps not so
different from the Medicis after all.)
The first so-called ‘Epicentre’ store
designed by Koolhaas was unveiled on New
F
ASHION STORE
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OMOTESANDO
SUBWAY STATION EXIT
5-2-6 Minami-Aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo
MIYUKI ST.
OMOTESANDO
SUBWAY STATION EXIT
UNDER THE NET
MIUMIU
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Wrapped in a crystalline grid, this new store in Tokyo marks
the latest step in Prada’s plans for world fashion domination.
location plan
2
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3-5
Views of Tokyo are diffused through
the tubular grid. Inside, a seamless
white landscape is articulated by the
paraphernalia of display.
shop
office
first floor
fourth floor
shop
shop
3
4
5
N
5
5
10
m
third floor
ground floor plan (scale approx 1:250)
shop
shop
counter
B
storage
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5
10
m
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basement plan
second floor
Though it might appear capricious, the
irregular geometry of the tower is in fact
dictated by Tokyo’s complex zoning and
planning laws that have shaped and eroded
the basic six-storey block. Herzog & de
Meuron’s early exploratory models
resembled roughly carved pieces of ice, now
evolved into a more streamlined and tautly
chamfered form. This is wrapped in a
rhomboidal grid, like a giant fishing net (or
string vest), infilled with a mixture of flat,
concave and convex panels of glass. Most are
clear, some, where they enclose changing
rooms, are translucent. The convex panels
billow out gently through the grid like
bubbles or puckered flesh (enhancing the
string vest analogy). Cunningly, there is no
single focal shop window; rather the entire
building is a huge display case, generating
faceted reflections and an array of changing,
almost cinematic, views from both outside
and inside. At night, light pulsates through
the crystalline lattice, tantalizingly exposing
floors of merchandise.
Tied back to the vertical cores of the
building, the tubular steel grid forms part of
the structure, so that facade and structure
are in effect a seamless entity. The grid acts
as stiffening element, bracing the structure
against seismic forces. Inside all is equally
seamless. A meandering labyrinth of cool
white space forms a suitably neutral canvas
for the carefully orchestrated display of
designer objects. At intervals, the double-
height spaces are penetrated by the diagrid
structure, bleached white like dinosaur ribs.
Changing rooms are enclosed by panels of
electropic glass that can turn opaque at the
flick of a switch. Lights and monitors wiggle
provocatively on serpentine stalks adding a
whiff of
Barbarella
campness, compounded by
the puzzling and slightly perverse presence of
an array of white fur rugs. And everywhere
there are glimpses of the Tokyo streetscape
filtered and framed by the giant net. Though
Prada is undoubtedly technically
sophisticated, you wonder, slightly
heretically, if a mere boutique merits such a
concentrated application of resources and
architectural imagination. But this is the
rarefied world of fashion, where normal
rules have never applied.
PHOEBE CHOW
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6
Inside the seamless white labyrinth.
7
At night the crystalline lattice
pulsates with light.
8
Snorkel-like fittings add a camp,
futuristic air. The untreated timber
floor is a reprise of Tate Modern.
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Architect
Herzog & de Meuron, Basel
Project team
Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, Stefan Marbach,
Reto Pedrocchi, Wolfgang Hardt, Hiroshi Kikuchi,
Yuko Himeno, Shinya Okuda, Daniel Pokora, Mathis Tinner,
Luca Andrisani, Andreas Fries, Georg Schmid
Associate architect
Takenaka Corporation
Structural engineers
Takenaka Corporation, WGG Schnetzer Puskas
Mechanical engineers
Takenaka Corporation, Waldhauser Engineering
Facade consultant
Emmer Pfenninger
Lighting consultant
Arup Lighting
Photographs
Nacasa & Partners
0
5
10 m
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cross section
cross section
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