Xintiandi Gateway Installation – A Kaleidoscopic Catwalk

Compiled by TeamIAnD

Photography: Seth Powers; courtesy UNStudio

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Architect firm UNStudio highlights the colossal role of ‘display’ in retail design with Gateway Installation - a responsive singular architectural gesture, being exhibited as part of “RIBA Shanghai Windows Project 2014”.

The RIBA Shanghai Windows Project 2014 from 28^th March to 5^th May, 2014, in its second year in China, brings to life the pulsating integration of architecture and fashion, giving a chance to professionals from both fields to understand and exploit their synergies to the hilt.

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Invited by China Xintiandi to create an installation that explores the symbiotic relationship of cultural reflections that occur between the city’s occupants and the urban landscape and on a deeper note, explore the role of display in retail, UNStudio’s Ben Van Berkal has staged a 30 m x 3m x 2.7m long corridor archway that frames the entrance of the Xintiandi Style Retail Mall in Shanghai.

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The project uses a single architectural gesture that transitions from wall to ceiling to wall, not only tracing pedestrians’ movements along its trajectory, but translating them into a reflection that revolves and inverts around the visitors as they walk through the installation.

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The pedestrians’ reflections move between a sequence of three ‘phases’ of context: retail, ground, and urban landscape. The large scale mirrors mounted at each end of the installation act as concentration points, capturing the whole lapse of the effect, combining it into one moving image. The result is a reinterpretation of the relationship between urban context and the viewer, binding these together in a cultural setting of the retail, the city, and its inhabitants.

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“The installation is related to the culture of consuming, not with respect only to shopping, but to consuming images: images of our surroundings, of our city, of the buildings and the people around us and, of course, of ourselves”, informs Ben van Berkel.

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“We wanted to ‘dress up’ the public space as it were and to capture the public in this environment, almost in a kaleidoscopic catwalk – a place where you can see and be seen, but in surprising ways and within new perspectives of your surroundings,” he concludes.