FASHION STORE, TOKYO, JAPAN

architect
Herzog & De Meuron

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 avantgarde (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 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 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 bubblewrapped bauble on a tray.