Etam Paris Retailer / MVRDV
Textual content description offered by the architects. The challenge occupies a nook web site on Boulevard Haussmann immediately throughout from the Galeries Lafayette division retailer, in one of many prime procuring places in Paris close to the Opera Garnier. MVRDV’s design takes benefit of the constructing’s wedge-shaped ground plan by stripping again the outside as a lot as potential – highlighting the constructing’s clear classical look, permitting loads of gentle to enter the Etam retailer from each side, and creating massive home windows for show.
This “stripped down” method continues to the inside, the place the design reveals the unique stone construction in an elegantly easy method – eradicating part of the entresol ground above and a lot of the inside partitions. Probably the most hanging alteration is a glass ground at floor stage, which permits gentle to penetrate to the basement stage and makes a go to to Etam’s retailer a fascinating expertise as guests see merchandise and other people on the extent above or beneath. This ground is handled with a particular movie that makes it clear when considered at an angle however clouded when considered from immediately above or beneath, offering privateness and stopping vertigo for these standing on the glass ground. This creates a direct reference to the lingerie on show; without delay revealing and but respectfully modest.
The basement is accessed by a grand central staircase. These stairs, in addition to the flooring of the basement stage and the again of the bottom stage, are completed with a light-colored wooden laid on its finish, impressed by the “pavé en bois debout” cobbled streets that had been extensively utilized in Paris within the nineteenth century. The sample created by this flooring was additionally developed into the non-slip sample utilized to the glass ground, unifying the 2 flooring sorts right into a single complete.
The preservation and modernization of current buildings function a key sustainability technique for MVRDV. Renovating buildings avoids the embodied carbon incurred in constructing a brand new construction. The method can also be culturally sustainable: preserving heritage ensures cultural continuity whereas being open to fastidiously thought-about but daring modifications that permit a constructing to evolve with the instances.
One component stands out as a chief instance of the challenge’s simultaneous dedication to preservation and renewal. Throughout the demolition of the constructing’s interiors, a piece of an authentic wall inside the constructing was uncovered. Though there was no query that this historic component deserved preservation, it additionally introduced a major impediment inside MVRDV’s open floorplan idea. Taking inspiration from the work of artist Gordon Matta-Clark, the design group labored with stone consultants to rework the wall part right into a five-tonne pivoting “doorway”, preserving the openness of the shop’s floorplan, however at all times with the choice for the historic wall to be merely rotated again into place.
The peninsular city setting of the shop has already been taken benefit of for an occasion throughout Paris Vogue Week, during which the shop turned a stage set and the encompassing sidewalk a runway for the style present. For such occasions, the Haussmannian façade gives a classical backdrop but it surely additionally affords a recent feeling with its sober and nearly invisible additions.
