MAX MARA

Flagship Store

Soho, New York

 

2000 -  270 sqm

 

This MaxMara retail shop in New York City is located in SoHo at 450 West Broadway between Houston and Prince Streets. The 6105 sqf (567 sqm) building it consists of two levels of retail space with a main staircase: 3500 sqf (325,20 sqm) for retail space and 872 sqf (81 sqm) for stockroom and service areas.

 

The main forms and planes that give shape to the building are highlighted in walnut wood. Two are vertical planes and two are volumes. One of these two planes is the wood-slat wall that composes the inward-shifted. The second is the so-called "T-wall" which unifies the two retail levels and also creates individual spaces within the shop .

The wood volumes enclose display and service areas thus creating a composition of elements of different materials which play an important role in the overall composition of the project's spaces.

 

The other main elements in the project are the several skylights that permit natural light to wash walls, emphasize volumes and the grid where these bidimentional and tridimentional geometries arise from.

Besides the daylight that will create a constant moving pattern in the shop's interior walls, the lighting layout has been incorporated within the structural elements and follow up the same original grid of the structure.

The facade is composed of a 20 degree rotated wall covered in wood slats gradually separated as they gain height with glass in between. This wall provides an open window display where the main entrance is and a closed triangular one with a glass roof.

 

The rotation of the facade's main wall also make up a triangular skylight above the entrance with white framing.

The ground floor is made up of two retail areas. The first one accessed immediately from the entrance and it has a 10-foot high ceiling

 

The central atrium is covered up with a flat skylight held up from underneath by white-painted steel beams and perpendicular opaline glass ribs that provide both shade and give structural support to the skylight.

On the south side of this atrium a wood-covered volume makes up the cash-wrap area which seems to be held from above and ties itself to the ground-floor slab.

To the north the second retail area is higher and is made up of multiple-sloped triangular cedar roof slabs defined by three laminated walnut wood trusses and covered up with a copper roof in the exterior.

 

Currently the National Geographic Gallery, Soho.

 

This project was designed before 2007 together with Duccio Grassi as a collaboration with his Studio.

 

 

 

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