REFFRESHED
There was a kerfuffle last year when Canadian fashion retailer Joe Fresh took the Manufacturers Hanover Trust building as its New York City flagship. The trim, five-story glass box on the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street, completed in 1954 by SOM, is a beloved modern icon. It’s two street-facing sides are dressed in glass panels that drop straight down to the sidewalk, without any frame below. This stunning skin exposes, at day and night, every corner of the building’s glowing, open insides. The interior and exterior are both landmarked, and thus protected from substantial alteration. Nontheless architecture historians, preservationists, and enthusiasts wondered what the brand was up to.
There was no need to worry. The shop, designed by Burdifilek, heightens the building’s original transparency. It leaves the exterior glass skin untouched, so that both ground and second floors remain radically open to the outside. Rather than perimeter cabinets, the clothing is set out on clusters of low white tables and shelves – moveable islands of merchandise. And two key original ornamental features on the second floor, an immense cloud-like wire sculpture hovering from the ceiling in front, and a seventy-foot-long freestanding screen in back, both by Harry Bertoia, have been restored and reinstated. In the bright wide-open interior these pieces, shaped from a hammered, burnished, gold metal, are magnificent grace notes.
The result is a shopping experience that’s a complete bliss-out. Stepping off the escalator onto the second floor is like arriving in mid-century modern heaven. Unlike other stores, that conceal windows and pack floors densely with product to keep shoppers focused on shopping, Joe Fresh keeps things clear. The audacious stretches of free space (along the perimeter glass walls, below the high ceilings, between the merchandise displays) is deeply luxurious. Shopping there, on a polished white marble floor beneath glowing ceiling tiles, one feels suspended from the city and its rhythms. Fifth Avenue appears, through the windows, as a hazy dream below. It’s a celestial experience of modernism and midtown.