MVRDV

Gyre etail center . Tokyo

MVRDV . Photos: © Rob’ t Hart . + WAF

The Gyre is a multi-tenant retail center in the fashionable Omotesando district in Tokyo, containing very luxurious shops.

Besides the big names and ground floor tenants Chanel and Bulgari, the building houses the first Asian branch of the MoMA Design Store and a large shop for Martin Margiela. Higher up there are smaller shops like a hair dress salon, an exclusive watch shop etc. The top levels contain a series of different restaurants.

Underlying Design Thinking:
Recent developments in the Omotesando district can be characterized as a spectacular creation of a series of new buildings, each of them box-shaped with a magnificent façade and with a mostly modest neutral interior. Most of these buildings are flagship stores for major fashion brands. They seem to concentrate on the development of the skin, the façade, regarding themselves as giant advertisements. They can be seen as the architectural equivalent of supermodels. But like supermodels they can also be intimidating because of their beauty. The challenge was to design a building that could compete with these developments, to comment on them and to try and create a building that was more than merely decoration.
Why not pick up a line of earlier development that started with the Spiral Building by Maki in 1985 and continued with the YM Square building around the corner form Omotesando, in Harajuku in 2001? These buildings focus on the vertical movement of the visitors and are more public, less exclusive or intimidating than fashionable flagship stores. However, the real qualities of these buildings are not directly visible from the street and they lack the iconic exterior qualities of more recent Omotesando stores. Is it possible to combine an open character with an iconic exterior and get the best of both typologies?

Spatial Concept:
The program described in the brief is focusing on a building that can serve one as well as several users or companies. It should therefore communicate on both scale levels, on the level of the building as a whole and on the level of the independent shops inside the building.
The building's shape is based on a concept of five boxes rotating on a vertical axis, both as a symbol of the flow of shopping people and as a gesture towards other building of the area, like Fumihico Maki's original Spiral Building or Tadao Ando's spiral in Omotesando Hills.
By rotating the floors gradually around a central core, a series of terraces emerge connected by stairs and elevators that are placed outside the volumes. They create a twin pair of two vertical stepped terraced streets, on each side of the core. One is for going up and the other for going down. The route spirals upwards from Omotesando Street and then descends towards Cat Street, thus activating both streets. These two routes are connected at every level through the block, by passing or crossing a shop or a series of shops around a short corridor.
The cantilevers- created by the rotated floors - generate roof terraces, accessible by spiraling stairs. The long staircases along the façade make it possible to climb in a fluent motion from the street level to the top storey. This creates an attractive spectacle from outside. It produces a highly iconic and sculptural figure – a building that attracts and invites people, not only at the street level, but also towards companies and destinations higher up. It allows equal access to all floors. Combining a public route with a new iconic silhouette in Omotesando Street, it offers spectacular views on the surrounding district.
Internally, the retail spaces are built around a central atrium which is roofed with glass, allowing sunlight to penetrate to the lower levels. The building contains a central core for transport and a bigger structural core, the zone where all floors overlap, from where floor-high, truss-like beams are cantilevered to support the connecting floors. The floors span between the trusses, resulting in flexible shopping and retail areas.

Use Of Materials:
As the silhouette of the building is already unique, the façade concept has been kept relatively modest, allowing expressionist possibilities for the users of the building. A series of shop window-sized openings are applied at every level. They can serve as a door, window or shop window or sign.
Instead of focusing on material, like so many of the façades in Omotesando, the building goes for color, movement of people and sculpture. In contrast with the white pure Dior building next door, the building has black, rough edges. The building is clad in 160 X 800 mm glossy ceramic tiles, with 18 different patterns (including those placed inverted in the façade), thus avoiding repetition. The closed façade, the ceilings and the terraces are made of blue polyurethane-treated concrete. The terraces contain seating elements and small trees.