completion

1998.03

location

Shibuya-ku, Tokyo

photo

Hiroyuki Hirai

This shop is facing Meiji St. that connects Shibuya and Harajuku in Tokyo. It is different from the others in this series of shops because it is facing the urban street directly, therefore I considered a relationship with the city first.
This shop is a three storied space formed by a basement, ground, first floors. First I made the ground floor white and open to the city basically by finishing floors with marbles, walls with aluminum plates, all glass front facade. I wanted to create a space as a little gallery in the noisy city by controlling the number of display and to connect upper and lower floors that have different characters. Against the ground floor that is filled with light, I made the basement floor appear closed by finishing floors with jet burned granite and walls with galvanized steel plates. In contrast with this, I made the first floor seem immaterial than the first floor. The frost glass just like a shoji cuts off a landscape and lets in only light, and changes a noisy city landscape to a play with light and makes clothes appear in a space filled with white light.
However small a shop may be, it is natural for it to be a structural element of the city, therefore I imagined to embed an installation for feeling changes of the space in the din and bustle of a city in which people come and go, like laying a jewel box under the ground.