It has been 19 years since Japanese-born Shohei Shigematsu was named the director of the New York outpost of the famed worldwide agency Workplace for Metropolitan Structure (OMA). Since then, the designer has managed to rework the already storied studio—launched in Rotterdam in 1975 by the eminent architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas—right into a protean, streamlined supply system for its founder’s imaginative and prescient: a prodigious maker not merely of buildings, however of tradition, with a commanding place on the intersection of commerce, artwork and the worldwide design discourse.
However in a single space specifically, the Manhattan-based crew has carved out a singular area of interest—and it’s a revealing one, talking each to Shigematsu’s particular person strategy in addition to to the still-evolving cultural technique of the apply. Producing distinctive showplaces for the luxurious sector has occupied a considerable a part of OMA New York’s time not too long ago, an expertise that, as Shigematsu places it, “actually trains a special a part of your mind than doing regular structure”.
Shohei Shigematsu grew to become director of OMA’s New York outpost in 2006 Julian Cassady Images
Comprising travelling museum reveals, hybrid exhibition-retail interiors, and glittering flagship shops, the workplace’s portfolio now consists of initiatives for a number of the greatest model names within the enterprise: Dior, LVMH and Tiffany. Removed from fleeting one-offs, these commissions have changed into a critical mental fixation for Shigematsu and firm, altering the way in which they take a look at their ever-expanding oeuvre of high-profile institutional and civic commissions. “There’s a hyperlink,” says Shigematsu, who’s now 52. “We’re creating cultural platforms that aren’t nearly style, however about structure, design, artwork, even meals. It’s all in there.”
The present wave of luxury-adjacent initiatives started in earnest in 2016, with OMA’s much-lauded design for the exhibition Manus x Machina on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in New York. Below the aegis of the museum’s Costume Institute, the present—a intelligent act of curation by Andrew Bolton, the institute’s chief curator—explored the fraught terrain between conventional, handcrafted clothes manufacturing and cutting-edge computer-aided methods. For the architects, the exhibition introduced issues of each plan and atmospherics. Occupying the museum’s Kevin Roche-designed Lehman Wing, the present needed to sit inside an all-concrete, subterranean house that felt at odds with the fragile work on show. To provide the items room to breathe, Shigematsu designed “a constructing inside a constructing—a ghost cathedral”, as he phrases it, with a diaphanous cover that swathed the entire inside and lent it a privileged, sanctuary-like high quality.
A rendering of the architect’s extension (at proper) for the New Museum Courtesy of OMA/bloomimages.de
“That was a pivotal second for us,” Shigematsu remembers. The optimistic reception that greeted the Met present was not missed by fashion-industry gamers, who’ve subsequently introduced OMA New York on board for an array of big-budget initiatives—at occasions centring these initiatives on the agency’s architectural pondering. “Our spatial design contributes to the storytelling,” Shigematsu says. “Typically the house comes first, not the theme.”
Such was the case currently with OMA’s design for Christian Dior: Designer of Goals, a banner exhibition devoted to the legendary French couturier that opened in April on the Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul. Marking solely the most recent in a collection of collaborations between the agency and the style home (OMA additionally supplied the scheme for one more Dior present, which premiered on the Denver Artwork Museum in 2018 earlier than travelling to Dallas), the Seoul venture elaborated the Met idea into one thing nonetheless extra spectacular: an inside panorama of garden-like enclosures centred on a large egg-shaped rotunda that remembers the form of conventional Korean moon jars. Not content material to supply a suitably elegant setting for the clothes, the venture demonstrated OMA’s willingness to create sensorial encounters that highlight their shoppers’ identities somewhat than merely showcasing their wares. “Our course is predicated on the concept of scenography,” Shigematsu says, “somewhat than simply exhibit design.”
With Dior’s chief government officer Pietro Beccari switching roles throughout the LVMH empire in 2023, OMA has adopted, partnering with him once more in his new submit at Louis Vuitton, the place he’s the chairman and chief government. “They requested us to speak their historical past,” Shigematsu says, “and naturally we began with the enduring core of their model, which is the trunk.” From that ubiquitous monogram-emblazoned type, the designers helped formulate a nonetheless headier combination of structure and style: as a part of the corporate’s Bangkok retail location, OMA produced an set up that extends from the shop itself; objects, machines, and pictures from the home’s previous are introduced inside beguiling bodily and digital environments that includes the trunk motif.
Louis: Vuitton: Visionary Journeys exhibition at Osaka’s Nakanoshima Museum of Artwork Jeremie Souteyrat
A type of hypertrophied museum store, the emporium-cum-exhibit thought is presently being exported, with one other OMA-designed outlet opening in Shanghai this summer time—even because the agency unveiled a Vuitton present, Visionary Journeys, at Osaka’s Nakanoshima Museum of Artwork in July. (This in flip follows on the heels of one other equally themed present throughout city, on the French pavilion of the town’s 2025 World Expo.) In Japan’s second metropolis, as in all their different initiatives with the model, the designers succeeded in creating “a universe-like house”, as Shigematsu describes it, the customer drifting via a seemingly limitless cloud of archival artefacts and knowledge.
We’re creating cultural platforms that aren’t nearly style, however about structure, design, artwork, even meals. It’s all in there
Shohei Shigematsu
Mixed with standard retail initiatives (notably the glittering rooftop extension of the Manhattan jeweller Tiffany, accomplished in 2023), OMA New York’s flurry of surprising couture-adjacent initiatives isn’t altogether with out precedent. The studio has by no means been averse to a fashionista clientele. Its relationship with Prada goes again to 2001, when OMA designed the Italian model’s Soho retailer. A landmark of early 2000s structure in Manhattan, it confirmed Koolhaas at his provocative greatest, that includes an entrance that swooped down like a skate ramp, and notably few garments. The venture elicited one of many OMA progenitor’s most well-known diktats—“Luxurious,” Koolhaas stated on the time, “isn’t buying”—and opened the floodgates for architects to discover the inside workings of the high-style world market. The Prada-OMA axis stays very a lot intact, the agency’s European department designing areas for and with the corporate in Italy and past.
The “fruiting room” in a mushroom-shaped constructing that Shigematsu not too long ago designed for the Casa Wabi campus in Mexico Courtesy of OMA
However the course of the New York crew is one thing completely different once more. With the fashion-world reveals specifically, Shigematsu says, “What you’re requested is to create one thing that’s dreamy, immersive, disruptive, that tells a narrative.” With out letting go of the research-heavy, analytical technique that has lengthy been key to the agency’s philosophy, such a narrative-focused view of structure is one thing new for OMA, and it units up an attention-grabbing technique to view a number of the forthcoming initiatives from the workplace outdoors the luxurious realm.
On Mexico’s west coast Shigematsu and his colleagues at the moment are wrapping up work on an addition to artist Bosco Sodi’s Casa Wabi campus, a “Mushroom Pavilion” that may be a part of experimental, social- and ecological-oriented works by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma and others. Named not for its ovoid form however for its delectable programme, the constructing will function a mycological growhouse, furnishing the close by Resort Escondido (boutique bare-foot stylish from the Habita Group) with a provide of recent edible fungi.
OMA’s glowing glass rooftop extension at Tiffany in New York Floto + Warner
On the identical time, the New Yorkers are getting ready for the opening of certainly one of their most anticipated initiatives to this point, the extension of the New Museum on the Bowery, which can give the celebrated 2010 SANAA-designed construction subsequent door a glassy, jagged twin sister. The seven-storey constructing—anticipated to begin welcoming guests this autumn—illustrates the total vary of OMA New York’s technical competency, offering the almost 50-year-old establishment with double the exhibition house, in addition to its personal restaurant, public-event areas and outside terraces framed in vibrant partitions, some in concrete suffused with blush pink pigment, that recede into the sharp planar surfaces of the façade. “It’s not a typical museum extension, with one expressive and one subservient construction,” Shigematsu says. “We needed some form of stability.”
Although they predate many of the agency’s work for the LVMH manufacturers, the venture, and the agency’s different palaces of tradition, would possibly now be learn as “dreamy, immersive” areas of their very own, albeit with nature and artwork as their topics somewhat than luggage and attire; furthermore, Shigematsu seems eager to see extra cross-germination in future. “I’d like to have this sort of reflection of what we’re doing for the manufacturers into structure,” the designer says. “I’m actually hoping that by doing these exhibitions, I could be a bit extra free.”
