The boutique during its last week.
Photo: Adriane Quinlan
When Gordon Kipping heard the Issey Miyake flagship in Tribeca was closing on Friday after 24 years on Hudson Street, he remembered when even the first lease renewal had felt like a shock. “I was like, What? You’re keeping it?” he told me this week. “Fashion boutiques don’t last that long.” But it had lasted that long with its thin titanium panels flitting over the ceiling and pouring down the cast-iron columns: a conceptual “tornado” dreamed up by Miyake, sketched out by Frank Gehry, and made real by Kipping, then Gehry’s protegé and now a professor at Columbia. The design outlived Gehry by a week and Miyake by three years — a small miracle by today’s cycles of retail turnover.
Kipping was Gehry’s teaching assistant before he was tapped for the unusual project. “Gehry called and said, ‘I’m sitting in my office with Issey Miyake,’” Kipping said. “Two days later, I was standing in front of the space we’d leased.” The store was taking over the corner retail space of an 1888 brick warehouse with thick stone lintels and terra-cotta flourishes. It was 15,000 square feet across two floors. Miyake told the press that the neighborhood seemed like a place where “the skies are still open and wide,” which might have been true in 2000, though Nobu was already around the corner. The designer, who died in 2022, had a reputation for hiring architects with visions that could stand up to his clothes and later said he chose Gehry because he “not only understood my sense of fun and adventure but also reciprocated it and translated that feeling into his work.”
The 1888 building on Hudson, looking toward the World Trade Center.
Photo: Adriane Quinlan
Gehry served as the “artistic director” of the flagship, according to Kipping, coming up with the concept of the titanium panels but empowering Kipping to make other, hugely ambitious decisions — like opening up the floor with sections of glass, which created unusual views of clothing racks in the basement and back passageways for the staff. A central stair was walled in steel panels that were later nicknamed “the ears” for how they bulged. The sales desk was a sleek rectangle of metal, like a shiny Donald Judd, and backed by a wall where the staff wanted a counter to display smaller items: perfumes, wallets. Kipping had envisioned a recessed rectangle — which irked Gehry. As Kipping told it, Gehry joked, “You Herzog & de Meuron–ed it,” pronouncing Meuron as moron. Gehry then pulled out a pair of scissors, cutting up a pricklier shape, like a strange crown. Kipping scanned the form, blew it up, and put in an illuminated cove that exactly mirrored the bit of paper that Gehry had shaped.
The cove that Gehry designed with scissors.
Photo: Adriane Quinlan
“I had to figure out how to get this tornado done,” said Kipping. Gehry worked regularly with Zahner, the foremost expert in architectural metals, where the fabricator Paul Martin worked at the time. The titanium panels made sense to Martin from a design perspective with their lovely “specular finish” that made them shiny without being overtly reflective. They were also relatively light, making them easier to move. But they were sensitive to pressure, or “finicky,” Martin said. “Usually, we touch them with kid gloves.”
Kipping and Gehry had the idea to arrange the panels in real time, in the space, so the bends responded to the actual ceiling and to the system they would use to hang them. The effect might be more organic, but it would be a challenge. “It was a small project but important,” said Martin. “It was a novel way of using the metal.” And it was typical of Gehry as a client, he said. “He was on the forefront of not just thinking about a design but developing new tools to be able to do it.” Kipping had conceived of putting up a long pipe with branching stems that could each grip a panel from behind; Martin went over it with an engineer and came up with what he called “a new language”: a system of “knuckles” that could be bent and pads that held the panels with Velcro.
Martin and Kipping worked out a system of adjustable “knuckles” with pads that adhered to the panels with Velcro and industrial tape.
Photo: Adriane Quinlan
Only there wasn’t the budget to actually build all of this stuff. Gehry considered cutting the sculpture itself. Kipping wouldn’t let that happen. “The only way I could get it done was by taking my friends to dinner,” Kipping said. A crew of architecture buddies would show up at the site after work, in the summer of 2001, after the construction crew left. They all used their feet to bend the thin, light sheets — stepping on the panels, then putting them up one by one “fearlessly,” Kipping remembered, “with our hands in the air holding big sheets of titanium.” It worked. Kipping was paid $50,000 for the project. Gehry tried to demure when it came to his fee, Kipping recalled. He told Miyake’s staff, “Well, okay, fine. I want $1 million or 12 black shirts and 12 white shirts.” Miyake’s team said it would send a tailor out to Los Angeles the next day, per Kipping. An official opening party was set for September 12, 2001.
The titanium panels cascade overhead against the raw wood beams of the 1888 building. The space was a former health food store.
Photo: Adriane Quinlan
There was a celebratory dinner at Nobu with Gehry on September 10. Kipping remembered stepping out for a smoke with the critic Herbert Muschamp. “We were looking up at the World Trade Center at, basically, a 45-degree angle,” he said. Later, Muschamp wrote about the view as “a good last look … through tumbling, gray Wagnerian clouds.” The store had been Gehry’s first public-facing project in New York City, but for a while the public couldn’t come. Downtown was closed after the attacks on September 11, the opening obviously delayed. But even as the neighborhood came back, “architecture fans were unsettled by the resemblance between the wreckage at ground zero and some Frank Gehry projects,” wrote Muschamp, referring to the store in a column. As time passed, the boutique aged, and a series of trend pieces started grouping the project among other starchitect boutiques: Rem Koolhaas’s Prada flagship in Soho had opened in December 2001, and the Future Systems entryway to the Comme des Garçons boutique in Chelsea went up in 1999. Only the Gehry boutique made Comme des Garçons “seem like the Little House on the Prairie,” wrote Patricia Marx in The New Yorker.
The odd stair design got pushback, which Kipping told Gehry. “He just smiled, and it did not get changed,” he said.
Photo: Adriane Quinlan
Kipping now has his own protegés. The $50,000 check allowed him to hire his first staff members, rent his first office, and get his first press — launching his career. When he learned the store would close, he had been set to visit Gehry, whose family said he was being moved into hospice care. Gehry died on December 5.
Martin, who fabricated the panels, had been the one to share the news of the closing with Kipping. He found out by chance after a visit to Hudson Street over the week of Thanksgiving — his first trip to New York in a decade. “I wanted to see if it was still around,” he said. He got to talking with a sales associate, which is how he learned about a move to Madison Avenue and that some of the panels, he said, would follow. Others, he was told, were getting shipped to Japan. (The brand offered to leave the panels there for the next retail tenant, according to William G. Fleischer, who owns the building. But Fleischer declined: “It narrows down the people who want to be a tenant. Not everyone will embrace that.”) When I reached Miyake’s office to confirm what Martin had heard, the official response was “The future of the sculpture is still yet to be fully determined.”
The idea of moving the panels seems, to Martin, like a conundrum. On the one hand, “you don’t use these materials unless you want them to last a very long time,” he said. On the other, Gehry’s design was very much for 119 Hudson — the panels were shaped in that shop, against that ceiling. Would they look at home in the new store? Or anywhere else? It was hard to know, Martin said: “It’s very specific to that place.”
During its last week, most of the stock was on sale.
Photo: Adriane Quinlan