OMA’s sculptures enrich Louis Vuitton’s new temporary store in New York

Louis Vuitton has opened a temporary store at 6 E. 57th Street in New York City, ahead of a multi-year renovation of its Fifth Avenue flagship location. To celebrate the Hous’s heritage and longstanding connection to the city of New York, dating back to 1898, this store will be Louis Vuitton’s largest one in the U.S. and will include the brand’s first American café and chocolate shop, along with an exclusive keepsake collection and new global culinary concept.

The five-floor store is housed in a landmark Art Deco building with a vast window plan arched across a brick facade that backdrops a towering grand giraffe and an ostrich, and whose interior has been transformed in collaboration with designer Shohei Shigematsu of studio OMA, who was already responsible for an immersive exhibition on Louis Vuitton in Bangkok this year. 

The interior’s grand atrium features a composition of four free-standing, 16 meters tower sculptures made of the brand’s Courrier Lozine 90 trunks to evoke New Tork’s skyline, and a visual installation, a wall built of mirrored bags stacked like bricks that reflect the store and the activities within, adding rhythm and movement to the store’s design. This stage is also enriched by oversized photo murals of patterns developed by Louis Vuitton’s collaborators – from Richard Prince and Yayoi Kusama to Takashi Murakami – to highlight the brand’s history of reinvention and reinterpretation of its iconographies.