High-End Homes for the Objects of Our Desire

A question: Are museums starting to resemble retail outlets or are retail outlets starting to resemble museums? The fact is, name architects increasingly are designing both, and so it is only natural that there should be a confluence of inspiration.I will not bore you with yet another elucubration on the “commodification” of the art world, nor with another attack on the artistic pretensions of high-end design and haute couture. But I may just bore you with the observation that both museums and shops exist in order to isolate and display their cherished wares in as flattering a way as possible. This, if nothing else, unites the two enterprises.The glamorizing of modern retail outlets preceded that of the museum by almost 100 years. Whereas museums once were fiercely conservative in their fealty to classical architecture and despised the fluctuations of fashion, retail outlets have always been far more adaptive entities that lived to exemplify each trend as it passed.For that very reason, few old shops in New York survive in their original form. Scribner’s on Fifth Avenue (most recently reinvented as the Sephora cosmetics chain’s flagship) is as close as we are apt to come to a great 19th-century shop in Manhattan. Even the fabulous showrooms Morris Lapidus designed in mid-century to serve as stage sets survive only in fading photographs.As it happens, we are living in a time of remarkable fermentation for museums and shops. The museum boom has often been noted, but the evolution of boutiques somewhat less so. Now, however, they are the subject of a pleasant coffee-table book, Ian Luna’s “Retail: Architecture and Shopping” (Rizzoli, 288 pages, $60). Mr. Luna has circled the globe, from Tokyo to London to New York, in search of the newest and most provocative examples of retail design. Among the architects he includes are Herzog & De Meuron, whose de Young Museum recently opened in San Francisco; Renzo Piano, whose extension of the Morgan Library should be completed this spring; Tadao Ando; and Rem Koolhaas.In books of this sort, there is always the question of how far the site is enhanced by skillful and flattering photography. Mr. Koolhaas’s Prada store in SoHo and Lindy Roy’s Vitra Showcase in the meatpacking district, despite all the publicity that has surrounded them, look far better here than in real life. But some sites, especially the resplendent glass brick tower Mr. Piano designed for Hermes in Tokyo’s Ginza district, look lovely enough to seem worth an entire journey just to see them.No one would say the same of two stores that have opened in Gotham over the past week: the Abercrombie & Fitch flagship at Fifth Avenue and 56th Street and the Wired Store at Houston and Wooster. But although you wouldn’t cross an ocean to see them, you may just want to cross the street.The first is, in all likelihood, the gayest store you will ever enter. As you pass through its darksome, wooded vestibule, a cloying whiff of musk overwhelms the senses and your movements are immediately halted by an expansive photograph of a bare-chested young man revealing what I believe are known as “chiseled abs.” If you like this sort of thing, you’ve come to the right place.Once you enter the store itself, you see, rising from the basement to the third floor, a massive mural in which similarly bare-chested men do muscular things with and to one another all the way up to the ceiling overhead. There are a few primly attired women here and there, and even a child or two. But they seem no less out of place than they would in a Peruvian coal mine, given the two or three hundred buff muscle-men who surround them, paying them scant attention.Some readers may recall the scaffolds that concealed the site while it was being built over the past year. They were covered with two images, each the size of a townhouse, of the same semi naked man. These were so obviously homoerotic as to draw complaints from the parade participants who passed by in the spring. Abercrombie & Fitch obligingly replaced those images with others that, although toned down, were, by universal estimation, quite gay enough.The exterior is unremarkable. It merely respects the contours of the building it inhabits, except that it occludes the windows with dark wooden slats that are intended, I believe, to engender a sense of mystery. Their main effect, however, is on the interior, where the dark, cramped, and dizzying spaces are as suffocating as a fever dream that goes on forever and is always the same. There is little discernible difference among the various levels, except for the fact that, as you ascend, the ceilings are lower to the floor.The best thing about the design is the central stairway, whose illuminated glass-brick steps and landings provide the only dash of light in the entire store. The massive moose head facing the cash registers is also a dramatic, if illogical touch. Other than that, there is little to recommend this new store, except that it has the virtue of consistency, and that it is clearly the essence of something or other that the company was after.The Wired Store is more interesting, mostly because it is a pop-up store that came into existence 10 days ago and soon will vanish without a trace. The concept here was to create a “synergy,” if I may revive last season’s buzzword, between Wired, that journal for geeks and gear-heads, and the products it advertises and reviews: laptops, gadgets, cameras, even an automobile.The design is relatively simple. The windows are fritted with those crosshatchings, suggestive of pixilation, that are the magazine’s signature. The walls are arrayed in oranges and reds that recall the day-glo gaudiness of the publication itself, now owned by Conde Nast. Finally, the ceiling is covered by dozens of amoeboid lengths of sheer white Lycra, whose very insubstantiality is intended to invoke a digital world so immaterial as to transcend the dross of matter.Already this diminutive space is something of a downtown sensation, drawing more than 1,000 visitors a day, according to one sales clerk I spoke to. Such has been its unanticipated success that there is now talk of creating a permanent store. As for this one, however, it will close for good on Christmas Eve, by which time, doubtless, most of the wares themselves will be hopelessly out of date.

High-End Homes for the Objects of Our Desire

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