Organic Romance
By Jean • Aug 18th, 2009 • Category: Travel & Hotspots
Chinese label Romanticism’s second shop in Hangzhou has an organic net going through the whole space.
Romanticism is a women’s clothing brand with over 500 stores in China. Japanese architects Keiichiro Sako and Takeshi Ishizaka of SAKO Architects created the second shop by expressing ‘clothes like space’ and ’space like clothes’.
As described by the Contemporist,
“Clothes are what being cut and made of two-dimensional fabric and wrap up three-dimensional body. It started with the idea of adjusting temperature and later grew up into the second skin. Spaces also wrap up body, adjusting temperature. However being different from clothes, space cannot move.
Furthermore, instead of space defining elements such as floor, wall or ceiling, there still have the third skin between space and clothes, they are partition, furniture and so on. ‘Clothes like space’ or ‘Space like clothes’ is what we tried to express.
The organic net is going through the whole space. Just like being absorbed from the facade into inner room and then changing the shape smoothly till 1F, wrapping the floor up. Close one side at stairs, the same net goes to basement, and made out various parts as it did at 1F in strong form.
The net change its shape into partition, counter, chair, furniture as well as railing. Act as the third skin, net comprise of bone, flesh as well as skin. Bone is ordinary reinforcing steel, flesh is form insulation and glass fiber, and skin is epoxy resin as well as oil paint.
Some display holes were made into three-dimensional white wall. It is enlarged motif of body and clothes.
Meanwhile, mirror-finished stainless was used in the ceiling of 1F. This is for vision impact, illumination and overcoming of the low ceiling. Objects reflected from curved stainless look like those in the water. In other words, water should be below us in usual go up over us, then a fantastic view show up.”
