In 1999 Prada launched a strategy to transform shopping into a completely new experience. Central to the strategy are buildings by modern, pioneering architects. Prada Tokyo ‘epicenter’ in Aoyama district (an area known for both couture and street fashion) is the company’s second radical approach to fashion-store architecture, following Rem Koolhaas’ flagship store in New York. The intent is “to reshape both the concept and function of shopping, pleasure and communication, to encourage the meshing of consumption and culture”.

Prada Tokyo is an exotic prism in chaotic Tokyo landscape. Shopping is a diffuse, hybrid experience in which retail and culture fuse in a building with a kaleidoscopic structure. Herzog decided early on to focus on vertical volume containing the maximum permitted gross floor area so that part of the lot acreage can remain undeveloped. This area will form a kind of plaza, comparable to the public spaces of a European city. In a usual approach to the typically small Tokyo site, the architects stacked the 6-storey shop and office accommodation into a five-sided block in order to create a small piazza which is enclosed by an angular wall covered in soft green moss.

The Prada building placed in a corner of its site, creating a small entrance plaza. Herzog comments on his decision, “Tokyo is a city where not a single building relates to its neighborhood, and every building fills its whole site. We took a chance in creating a little space outdoors, like in European cities. We also reversed the typical Japanese emphasis on looking inward by giving importance to the view.”

The apparently irregular geometry shape of the building is substantially influenced by the angle of incidence of the local profile, though in fact dictated by Tokyo’s complex planning laws. Depending on where the viewer is standing, the body of the building will look more like a crystal or like an archaic type of building with a saddle roof. The ambivalent, always changing and oscillating character of the building’s identity is heightened by the sculptural effect of its mixture of flat, concave and convex glass panels, most of which are clear except where they cover changing-rooms, in which case they are translucent.

Jacques Herzog describes these glass panels, “an interactive optical device. Because some of the glass is curved, it seems to move as you walk around it. That creates awareness of both the merchandise and the city, there’s an intense dialogue between actors. Also, the grid brings a human scale to the architecture, like display windows. It’s almost old-fashioned.”

The fittings with lamps and furniture for the presentation of Prada products and for visitors are described contradiction. The materials are either hyper-artificial, like resin, silicon and fiberglass, or hyper-natural, like leather, moss or porous planks of wood. Such contrasting materials prevent fixed stylistic classifications of the site, allowing both traditional and radically contemporary aspects to appear as equal components.

The tubular steel grid that forms the basis of the cladding also works as the primary structure for the entire building, and is tied back to the vertical cores to brace the structure against seismic forces. The irregular lines of the Prada flagship store in Tokyo results in unexpected ceiling shapes inside the shop. The grid of windows floods the retail floor with natural light, while also offering views of the Tokyo cityscape. The windows also offer passersby with sights of the goods for sale within Herzog & de Meuron’s curious, graceful Prada Tokyo.

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