By stripping away a conventional retail interior, Herzog & de Meuron reveal the functional beauty and simplicity of a building’s original concrete skeleton for the new Uniqlo Tokyo flagship store, while also improving connections to the surrounding city context.
Located in the Ginza district of Tokyo, the existing Marronnier Gate building is situated with dense urban fabric on one side and an open expanse of wide avenues and elevated roadways on the other, giving the building two different spatial qualities on either side. First constructed in 1984, the building was modeled on a large-scale Parisian-style department store, with multiple stores within the same structure. Suspended ceilings of a single consistent height and interior fit-out create an insular environment with limited views both within the space and towards the exterior, which was not in keeping with Uniqlo’s aspiration for a customer-friendly flagship store.
The architects began their design process with a study of original structural drawings and an early site visit revealed the practical beauty of the building’s original concrete frame. Aiming to open the building up, extraneous elements such as cladding, suspended ceilings, and other additions were removed, leaving a muted concrete grid to display Uniqlo’s colourful products.
An open network of beams and columns is now visible throughout the store’s interior, with mirrors applied to undersides of beams to fragment spatial perceptions. A precise surgery in parts of each floor slab creates visual and spatial interconnections including double-height entrances and an interior quadruple-story plaza which extends the vitality and voyeurism of Ginza street life into the heart of the store. Where a slab is cut away, raw edges of concrete and steel are left exposed as a reminder of the construction process.
Where the building meets the street, the exposed concrete frame becomes a type of ‘arcade’ that welcomes shoppers off the street. The structure is left open at two corner entrances, anticipating the tall plaza inside.
