DRESS | Archiring Studio

Tokyo is a touristic town. As a tourist, maps and plans are used to locate in the city. and it changes our relationship to the urban. Tokyo’s urban grid is orthogonal and has regular lots, the idea is to create a flexible and free form easily distinguished and identifiable on a map. The conceptual approach was made by taking in consideration on one hand the immediate and distant urban environment and on the other one the functional affectation of the project.

Due to the difference of height between the tower and its surrounding, already established by the program, the architectural party had to follow the sense of this opposition and make it stressed. The tower of the fashion museum is, according to our conception, an air building, in to the wind, escapee of a compact and dense city.

The project adorns itself then with a double skin that stops before the first floor, to better stress this aspect of lightness and give the impression, that in this point of the city, there is an weightlessness. Challenging the law of gravity, both skins give the illusion to float slowly under the breeze. The first one, making the project naked and penetrable, lets us discover, by the transparency of the glass, all the life that takes place there. And so invites the city and its people to go there. The second skin, by the nobility of the wood, very present in japanese architecture, confers to the project a certain sensuality and bashfulness; such a dress dresses the body of a woman by emphasizing all the subtlety of its curves. At a pedestrian scale, wood’s filaments do not touch the ground, but deviate and draw attention on the project. The alliance of both skins creates unusual spaces, such as the terraces of the skybar and the alcoves of interior spaces. The marriage of the wood and glass sublimes the light, channels it and allows to tame it according to the need of every spaces.