Before you, you see the new 24- story flagship store for design firm Louis Vuitton, designed by Japanese architect Jun Aoki. To be called L’Avenue Shanghai, the new store will be the largest LV flagship in the world.
The form is subtly organic. A tower form rises from a sweeping skirt of a podium. It has been suggested that this building is in some way bringing femininity to the tower form. It is difficult to see how this could be so. The fashion industry is itself quite a masculine field. Fashion may seem a feminine interest, but it is filled with men designing clothes for women to be seen in. There is no judgement here- do not misunderstand me- but the fact that a phallic tower holds inside it one of the headlines of the fashion industry, does not feminize it.
The building has already achieved LEED Gold accreditation. Covered in a reinforced concrete skin, itself clad with glazed ceramic tiles, the facade systems are designed to both lend thermal resistance as well as create a reflective heat shield using the tiles. The store will re-use rainwater for irrigation of greenscaping which occurs inside and out.
Courtesy of Jun Aoki
