People already familiar with other Fornarina retail spaces are accustomed to a surreal environment, where they themselves are on display, observed by strange, oversized organisms. Now, in London’s legendary Carnaby Street, Fornarina makes a new statement. In this unique environment, customers are swallowed up and enter the interior of the organism. From the inside, visitors lose their logical left-brain perception of their surroundings, and have to find their way using the creative right side of the brain.
Once inside the strange organism, visitors forget they are in a regular building with traditional walls and ceilings and more stories above them. Central to the ideas of fluidity, transparency, and openness that enhance the store’s overall feeling of spaciousness as well as product visibility, is the clever use of materials, shapes, and light. Walls and ceilings are covered by a luminous membrane composed of more than 1,000 asymmetric molded elements, backlit by over 1,300 feet of natural spectrum LEDs. As visitors move through the two different levels of the store, a single polycarbonate, convex element becomes the starting point of a pattern that moves across the ceiling, propagates to the wall, and from the wall, pushes forward into organic individual supports for the merchandise. Sometimes clusters of these elements separate from the wall and ceiling surfaces to become seats or pedestals. Along the walls, even to the exterior surface of the dressing rooms and across the ceiling, what looks like a gliding, apparently weightless membranous liquid surrounds the visitor. Infused with light, this fluid, surrogate sky becomes a vertigo-inducing game of refractions that confuses the senses; as soon as the mind accepts one point of view, the eyes are surprised by yet another perspective.
Walking through the space is a spellbinding sensory adventure, in which visitors can escape into a radiant oasis of light and open skies rarely found on the old streets of London. The tactile attraction of organic shapes and smooth surfaces, combined with invigorating ambient light, and the vivacity of the merchandise, create a hypnotic and fun shopping experience.
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