Dior Omotesando

Many studios today create perfectly white models and intangible visualizations from the realm of fantasy, but few can bring their visions of radiant architecture to fruition. In Sanaa, they can. I have already grown accustomed to their completely glass facades, thin steel columns, and five-centimeter thick perimeter walls, but the view of the new Dior store in Tokyo's Omotesando took my breath away. It wasn't in the internal layout or floor plans, which couldn't have been simpler. The most interesting aspects happen a few decimeters behind the double facade of flat glass, where sculpted panels made of translucent plexiglass resembling drapery are suspended. These panels are printed with fine horizontal stripes, and depending on the intensity of daylight or artificial lighting, they play the largest role in the transformations of the building. The nearly thirty-meter-high structure is divided into only four regular floors (with a clever solution for the technical spaces between the ceilings and floors). Eight irregularly spaced aluminum strips on the facade showcase the variability of the light heights in the interior spaces. The translucent and wavy facade simultaneously provides an unclear outline of what is happening inside. The Christian Dior store in Omotesando is, in many ways, synonymous with women.
The authors' words say the most about the building: “The flagship store of Christian Dior stands on Omotesando Street in Tokyo. The task was to create commercial space from the basement to the third floor and to place a multifunctional room on the fourth floor. Dior wanted to design the interiors himself. Under these conditions, we decided not to conceal the interiors behind an opaque facade, but rather to reveal the interior without breaking the coherence of the building's image.”
“The most important characteristic is the height regulation of the land in connection with the maximum floor area, which in this case was 5:1. We utilized the full 30 meters allowed by the local zoning plan as the maximum. This gave the desired area as much volume as possible, which we then divided with horizontal planes of ceilings and floors. They created extremely high, extremely low, and normally heighted rooms; the floors are stacked on top of each other, with each having its own function, whether for sales or technical purposes. This floor composition creates the illusion that the building has more than four floors, but it simply reduces the internal density for now.”
“The facade is wrapped in clear flat glass, making the building transparent. Behind the glass are semi-transparent elegantly curved acrylic partitions that evoke the elegance of the tailoring art of the Dior brand. We considered creating the image of the Dior brand through the facade, but we also wanted to explore the idea of the relationship between volume and floor.”

Some photographs could be published with the kind permission of Mr. Minoru Takeda. Domo arigato.