Global Graphica

The ceiling lights in the Virgin America departure lounge at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). The interior architectural design is the same as it was in the 1970s.

Here’s the latest post to our ongoing What’s Outside the Window? photo project series: The view of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, a stunning piece of architecture by Frank Gehry, as seen through the windshield of E’s truck in downtown Los Angeles.

Public art incorporated into the modern-contemporary (MoCo) architectural design of multi-level parking lot in Santa Monica, in Los Angeles.

Picture of the eco-friendly and beautifully designed Casa Camper hotel in Berlin at night. The room numbers are displayed on the windows of each unit. The hotel has another location in Barcelona, Spain, and was developed by the Spanish shoe company Camper. The hotel aesthetic and ethos are aligned with the Camper brand.

Image de l’éco-amical et magnifiquement conçu hôtel Casa Camper à Berlin dans la nuit. Les numéros de pièce sont affichés sur les vitres de chaque unité. L’hôtel a un autre endroit à Barcelone, en Espagne, et a été développé par la société espagnole de chaussures Camper. L’esthétique et l’éthique hôtel sont alignés avec la marque Camper.

夜にベルリンで環境に優しく、美しくデザインされたホテルカーサカンペールの写真。部屋番号は、各ユニットの窓に表示されます。ホテルは、バルセロナ、スペインの別の場所を持っており、スペインの靴の会社のキャンピングカーによって開発されました。ホテルの美学と精神は、カンペールのブランドに整列している。

The original AT&T Building in TriBeCa in downtown Manhattan. Ironically AT&T cell phone coverage in the blocks surrounding the building, especially to the immediate east and south of the building is terrible.

The recently opened Uniqlo “Global Flagship” store on Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan’s prime stretch of shopping is a massive statement by the giant Japanese retail clothing brand. (See pix below.)

To walk through the store can be a vertigo-inducing experience for some. The cavernous and, in some areas, maze-like warrens of clothes racks and shelves are mediated by large video panels of various sizes and alignments, neon and fluorescent lights playing off layers and walls of glass, and the clothing sections broken up by open areas with massive stairs dipping between deep floors at every turn in the multi-colored, multi-floor space. It’s fun, but can feel overwhelming.

At the front of the store, twin banks of elevators based in the display windows along Fifth Avenue are filled with mannequins and arrays of flashing neon rods that ride up and down the vertical face of the store.

Uniqlo is a case study in how a once ho-hum, intelligently no-nonsense and popular discount clothing chain can up its game in a big way internationally with great design, product, pop-culture savvy and “cool Japan” imagery and then export back the cachet of the successfully enhanced, hipster-certified brand back into its own country of origin, Japan. And, of course, then, eventually, how it can further leverage the new and improved domestic brand cachet in an even bigger way into the global space in places like Shanghai, China. (We visited the Shanghai flagship store on its opening day in 2010, and while it’s epic and nice, it’s tamer than 5th Ave.)

The global flagship store is a cacophony of visual noise and an interior retail design concept and brand experience on the grandest commercial scale available in Manhattan. We like the Uniqlo store in SoHo better. It was the first United States flagship, though not the first store in the US, and not the first in the city. But the Fifth Ave. Uniqlo is worth a visit to see the design aesthetic firsthand, sit in the lounge area, do some people watching, and buy some of those great socks they make and sell at three-pair for $12.00.

The architectural design of J. Crew’s concept store for men’s clothing in Tribeca, in New York City, preserves the old-school exterior signage and structure of the former liquor store (which for many years was also a bar called Liquor Store) that did business on the premises.

Another look at the Uniqlo mobile pop-up store that was set-up at the recent DUMBO Arts Festival in Brooklyn, in New York City. This time we view it in the light of day, rather than at night.

The previous post has photos of the shop as it appeared at night in its full luminescent glory. Below we see the shop in daylight across the plaza under the Manhattan Bridge at Plymouth Street.

The last image below shows the Uniqlo structure through the stairwell window of a massive warehouse of residential lofts and artists studios, where Global Graphica was temporarily headquartered for a few weeks this past Spring.

A white line runs along the middle of the floor in the halls and stairs on MoMA P.S.1 art museum in New York. Is this way-finding system and example of  information design to guide visitors or a work of art in and of itself?

Japanese fashion design and retailing brand Uniqlo opened a luminescent mobile pop-up store in New York City for the DUMBO Arts Festival in Dumbo, Brooklyn. The store was set up at the based of the Manhattan Bridge near Plymouth Street. Its exterior walls were translucent sliding panels.

The massive, spacious, glass-sheathed central train station or hauptbahnhof in Berlin.

The wonderful modern-contemporary architectural design of the towering GSW Hochhaus building in north end of Kreuzberg, near Mitte, in central Berlin.

The sexy architectural design of the Otto Bock building in Potsdamerplatz in Berlin. The structure was built to  house the company’s Science Center Medizintechnik and to mark Otto Bock’s 90-year anniversary.

We’ve been visiting and re-visiting the BMW Guggenheim Lab, which opened in the Lower East Side / East Village of New York City earlier this month.The space is an experimental, temporary events venue that will be opened until October 16, 2011.

The space is being called a “mobile laboratory.” In the next six years, BMW Guggenheim Lab will be taken on a global tour to nine cities. The events at the Lab relate to issues of contemporary urban life and is a semi-public forum for discussing emerging ideas on sustainability and technology.

The view skywards from the sidewalk in front of the entrance to the New Museum on the Bowery in the Lower East Side of New York City. The building was designed by Tokyo-based firm Sejima + Nishizawa/SANAA and the New York-based firm Gensler. In the picture is the sculptural installation “Rose II” by artist Isa Genzken.

Beautiful lighting-art installation in the lobby of a cast-iron loft building in SoHo, in downtown New York City.

Below is New York Magazine photo with computer-generated rendering of the building that will be the new home to the Whitney Museum. The influential Upper East Side art institution is moving downtown to the Meat Packing District and closer to one of Manhattan’s newer, grander hubs of creative influence and culture. The NY Mag article was a critical and harsh review of the building’s architecture.

The beautiful floor lit from below at Chelsea Market in New York City.  The market is an early, successful and massive example of the re-purposing of old industrial space on Manhattan’s West Side for mixed use office and retail space. Many original industrial artifacts have been integrated into the new architectural design of the interior space. Other design elements are new, such as the light-floor. The market is a shopping mecca for foodies. Fittingly the cable TV channel Food Network is located in the building’s upper floors.

The capital city of Costa Rica doesn’t have much of a high-rise skyline to speak of. But one unmissable architectural landmark on San Jose’s urban landscape is a massive brutalist skyscraper that’s home to the Instituto Nacional de Seguros.

Depending on your point of view, the building is either an ugly eyesore, an oddly ambitious and out of place gesture of modernist architecture, or it’s an architectural gem, a shining, living example of brutalism.

In any case, the structure is one of the largest in  San Jose and it’s architecturally significant. The brutalist style was an influential architectural  movement that came of age in the 1950s and was in vogue for a time in the  ’60s and ’70s, a time when many large cities in Latin America were experiencing a building boom.

Some more pictures of vintage-modern architectural style in the Costa Rica capital of San Jose. Pictured here is the School of the Republic of Peru across from Morazan Park in downtown San Jose.