Fashion brands are increasingly turning to architects to shape their identities for the future. Whether it's Camper enlisting Shigeru Ban to create its pavilion in Miami, or G-Star Raw calling on OMA to design its new HQ in Amsterdam, these collaborations are growing in scope and ambition - as documented in our September issue.
And if there's one practice that never falls out of fashion it's OMA. The Rotterdam-based group - known for its ongoing partnership with Prada - has now been signed up by American leather brand Coach, which has challenged the team to design a revolutionary retail display prototype for its New York and Tokyo stores.
'We wanted [to create] a system that could tell the story of any of Coach's wide repertoire of products, whilst projecting the legibility of its original stores,' says OMA partner and project leader Shohei Shigematsu. To this end, the practice has devised a new concept that restores Coach's original, library-like organisational display systems, diluted in recent years, with a modular translucent grid, which can be adjusted to any interior. 'These units can also enclose spaces for program or curation and, by creating enclosures, they can also act as façade,' the architect explains.
Coach's creative director Reed Krakoff, whose own Manhattan atelier is a veritable gallery filled with inspirational design (see W*156), commissioned the 'logical system', to debut at Coach's concession at the newly renovated Macy's at Herald Square in September. Next Spring he will take it to Coach's new multi-level flagship in Tokyo's Omotesando, designed by - who else? - OMA.
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Tour Aflalo’s first retail space, a gallery-like studio in New YorkLight-filled and elegant, Aflalo has opened its first retail space in a classic Soho loft, reimagined by Nordic Knots Studio
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This Toronto pizzeria hides a sultry bar with serious biteNorth of Brooklyn unveils a fresh, two-level outpost where crisp, light-filled minimalism gives way to a warmer, neon-lit upstairs area
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A Lagos exhibition celebrates Fela Kuti's defining soundAn exhibition, Afrobeat Rebellion, currently showing at the Ecobank PanAfrican Centre in Lagos, explores the life of Afrobeat father Fela Anikulapo-Kuti
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Spice up the weekly shop at Mallorca’s brutalist supermarketIn this brutalist supermarket, through the use of raw concrete, monolithic forms and modular elements, designer Minimal Studio hints at a critique of consumer culture
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A love letter to the panache and beauty of diagrams: OMA/AMO at the Prada Foundation in Venice‘Diagrams’, an exhibition by AMO/OMA, celebrates the powerful visual communication of data as a valuable tool of investigation; we toured the newly opened show in Venice’s Prada Foundation
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NYC's The New Museum announces an OMA-designed extensionOMA partners including Rem Koolhas and Shohei Shigematsu are designing a new building for Manhattan's only dedicated contemporary art museum
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Turin’s Museo Egizio gets an OMA makeover for its bicentenaryThe Gallery of the Kings at Turin’s Museo Egizio has been inaugurated after being remodelled by OMA, in collaboration with Andrea Tabocchini Architecture
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Raw, refined and dynamic: A-Cold-Wall*’s new Shanghai store is a fresh take on the industrial lookA-Cold-Wall* has a new flagship store in Shanghai, designed by architecture practice Hesselbrand to highlight positive spatial and material tensions
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The Lantern cultural hub in Detroit by OMA balances ‘light touch’ and ‘dramatic impact’Library Street Collective’s Lantern, a new cultural hub in Detroit, was designed by OMA New York and is a signature rebuild that makes the most of the site’s existing structures
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Christian de Portzamparc’s Dior Geneva flagship store dazzles and flowsDior’s Geneva flagship by French architect Christian de Portzamparc has a brand new, wavy façade that references the fashion designer's original processes using curves, cuts and light
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Buffalo AKG Art Museum opens, inviting us into its OMA-designed homeBuffalo AKG Art Museum opens its new, OMA-designed home in the USA
