Located near the Melrose shopping neighborhood, the new 3.1 Phillip Lim store and showroom announces the designer’s west coast debut with the transformation of 5000 square foot auto body shop into a flowing interior. The experience is a curious indulgence taking clients from the sunny LA sky into the intimate ambiance of Phillip Lim.

An Undulating Wall: Amoeba, Niches and Nooks

By introducing a thick curving wall within the existing building envelope one large main space unfolds into four smaller niches. Mirrors along the walls enhance the spatiality of the store and create visual continuity between adjacent spaces.
The curving geometry and thickness of the wall allows for the conventional methods of lighting and display to be rethought. With most of the spotlights within the thickness of the wall, the ceiling is free of the clutter of typical track lighting. A single, continuous light-diffusing membrane floats above the space adding to the intimate atmosphere while giving the space a sense of lightness.

Liners: Atmospheres + Ambiances

Like the construction of a garment, the curving wall has an inner ‘lining’ and outer ‘lining.’ The pyramidal texture on the walls is actually soft to the touch creating a sensation of being both hard and soft. The smaller niche spaces are each lined with different materials; wallpaper, Spanish cork, leather herringbone, and bamboo creating a variety of tactile vignettes for the clothing to be displayed in.

A Blank Facade

As an alternative to the typical window display, the exterior façade has no openings except the entrance. Instead of windows, the façade is surfaced in a stark yet supple pattern of concrete tiles shaped like pillows. The emphasis of the blank façade acts like a ‘palette cleanser’ as one transitions from the hustle and bustle of the street-scape to the intimate interior.

Project description © PARA-Project, LLC.

In Collaboration with: Office/Giancarlo Valle

FACT SHEET:
Location: 631 N. Robertson Blvd, West Hollywood, CA
Program: Fashion Boutique Flagship Store, Office, Showroom
Area: 5000 sf. interior, 2000 sf. exterior
Completion: 2007-2008; 8 months
Design Team: Dominic Leong, Jonathan Lott, Brian Price, Giancarlo Valle
Staff: Andrew Seiger, intern
Executive Architect: Leong Architects, Inc.
Consultants: MKM Associates, Structural Engineer
Client: 3.1 Phillip Lim
Contractor: Hinerfeld-Ward Inc.

All Images © Iwan Baan

As an enduring American symbol the Pentagon has unparalleled cultural currency. Its value is both global and timeless, evoking the power, strength, and nobility of the United States Joint Armed Forces.

The Pentagon is transplanted to Times Square as an icon from which a new image of the military can be constructed. The mass of the Pentagon is lifted from the ground as if a cloud, allowing the street and the public into its courtyard. Clad in highly reflective inflated-ETFE cushions, the floating cloud is camouflaged by its context, reflecting at various points either the purity of the sky or the vibrant street life of Times Square.

The Rorschach Test is a method of psychological evaluation, not so much for seeking objective meaning, but to interpret the psychosis of both the patient and observer. The Rorschach test is used as a device to challenge “inherited” predicaments within the discipline of architecture — questioning modes of practice, techniques of production, code of values, and public perceptions.

The inkblot is neither formal nor formless. It is a formless-form, so empty of inherent meaning that it is brimming with potential content. It is a shape that acquires significance according to how it is perceived or used. Can “empty formalism” make more “meaningful” architecture?

Is Architecture’s only means to establish relevance on a global scale through its own iconography?

Wandering through the city or a city wandering?

The Roosevelt Island Universal Arts Center is conceived of as a network of floating barges. Inheriting the island’s history of landfill, the barges gather together to form a Mobile Art Park, filling the site with a vibrant community of artists and art enthusiasts.

A Performative Graphic Landscape= ART+Leisure+Nature

The barges form a migrating network that extends throughout the regional waters of New York’s five boroughs and beyond. Linking together in multiple combinations, the barges accommodate different events at the scale of the entire Southpoint site. Dispersed throughout the city, the barges bridge culturally disparate enclaves with the vibrant communities of artists already thriving in the city.

The Mobile Art Park addresses the issue of accessibility as cultural inclusion — aiming to maximize access to the world of art and facilitate the incorporation of art into everyday life.

In February 2006 PARA organized Paratheses, a symposium held at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture. Paratheses addressed the emerging shift in architectural pedagogy on collaborative forms of research. While the independent thesis project exemplifies the image and model of the heroic independent architect, this symposium examined the implications of collective research initiatives and think-tanks which are quickly taking its place. Architectural research has taken on a polemic dimension, extending into strategies for revitalizing and repositioning architectural practice. What is at stake in embracing these collective models of research? What new direction is offered to the unstable constitution of architectural knowledge through this ideological shift? Gathering together the educators at the forefront of this development, the event discussed what is offered by the trope of architectural research.

Speakers:
Denise Scott Brown
Brendan Moran
Mark Jarzombek
Sarah Whiting
Bernard Tschumi
Roemer van Toorn
Jeffrey Inaba
Brett Steele
Sylvia Lavin
Keller Easterling
Mark Wigley
Reinhold Martin

Paratheses was made possible through generous support from the Columbia GSAPP and Dean Mark Wigley

It is said that Architecture moves too slowly. Perhaps the lagging profession has something to learn from the overnight identity transforming procedures of plastic surgery. Mies van der Rohe’s Seagrams Building, epitomising late Modernism’s embrace of Fordist repetition, is taken as a case study. Could a strategy of modification, a post-Fordist nip-and-tuck, rejuvinate this aging trophy to let it stand alongside Manhattans newest starlet towers?

‘Lifting Mies is a catalog of such surgical procedures that operate directly on Mies’ canonical decorative I-beam. The techniques eschew the addition of unecessary material, the conventional approach to ornamentation, and instead rely on the alteration of what exists — as a facelifts would. No longer identifiable as something dispensable and separate from the restructured body, surgery allows ornamentation to evade easy recognition, just as the ideal facelift transforms one’s identity without revealing the work of the surgeon. By cutting, reshaping, and stitching, surgical techniques make ornament essential to the body, and the pace of New York image-making.

‘Lifting Mies was recently published in its entirety in 306090 v10: Decoration. A copy can be purchased here.

Loopholes: within Discourse and Practice was held at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design over two days in April 2005 and was organized in collaboration with Ashley Schafer.

The loophole is a model of opportunistic deviance. Like lawyers exploiting contract ambiguities, financiers engaging in arbitrage, or accountants seeking tax shelters, the loophole is an opening for the dexterous professional. Borrowing this concept as provocation for architecture, the loopholes introduces an opportunistic use of architectures disciplinary constraints.

As architecture operates according to certain rules, codes, and standards internal to the discipline, the loophole is proposed as a strategy for constructive intervention enabled by, rather than restrained by, such autonomous laws. Loopholes do not arise from the negation of law, but instead are found and formed within its center. They are sites of potential within an otherwise closed system. Avoiding the naive call to abandon theory, the loophole can be understood as a reconsideration of the critical/projective divide. To this end we propose the the loophole, which depends on institutionalized laws in order to elude them, presents and advanced mode of practice, hyper-aware of the disciplines periphery as well as its hard-core.

The two-day symposium proposes four potential loopholes for architecture: geometry, geography, imaging, and effect. Through a mix of writers and practitioners, established and emerging voices, and critical as well as projective approaches, we hope to discover what it means to practice within the loophole.

Farshid Moussavi
Preston Scott Cohen
François Roche
Philippe Morel
Jeffrey Kipnis
Dave Hickey
K. Michael Hays
Sarah Whiting
J. Meejin Yoon
Helene Furjan
Yusuke Obuchi
George Baird
Mark Wigley
Antoine Picon
Ashley Schafer
John McMorrough
Amanda Reeser Lawrence
Sylvia Lavin
Mark Goulthorpe
Jeffrey Inaba
John May
Keller Easterling
Benjamin Aranda
Saskia Sassen
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

“Loopholes” was made possible through generous support from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Toshiko Mori.