The project concerns a new concept store for Fifth Avenue Shoe Repair. The Swedish fashion brand Fifth Avenue Shoe Repair works with traditional typologies of clothes but deconstructs them and create new hybrid garments. The assignment was to design an entirely new concept store that meets the commercial aspects of a retail space, but foremost to design the spatial encounter with the brand Fifth Avenue Shoe Repair.
The retail concept is d on Fifth Avenue Shoe Repair design methods, but transferred into architecture. Existing architectural typologies have been deformed in order to meet both the functional and the commercial requirements for a store interior. The visual presences of the furniture are designed to be ambivalent; they should resemble a stair although clearly having another purpose.
The stairs has become the main spatial carriers of the retail concept Fifth Avenue Shoe Repair, but in addition to the stairs a shelving system was designed to meet the flexible needs of the store. The exposure has to adapt to the changing needs of a retail shop. Each shelf is designed and tailored specially for each placement in the store. The shelves consist of a rigorous work of steel rods, which together create a matrix of small cubic space in the structure, all with dimensions of 360x360x360 mm. By using the cubic dimensions of the structure, the clothes that hung in its bottom exposed in two directions, either along a wall, or by turning 90 degrees to allow for a frontal exposure from a wall.
To the shelf, hundreds of thin black steel plates were designed in order to make the shelf to become rearrangeable by changing the position of the plates. Both the visual aesthetics and the functionality of the shelves are radically changed by shifting the position of the plates.
