Sl» Autumn Intrusion How can a shop window display relate to the architecture of its shop? HARVEY NICHOLS IS A DEPARTMENT sToRE in London famous for its special window displays. The studio was asked to design the windows that would cele brate Autumn 1997 Fashion Week. As we started to think about the project, it seemed to us that in the world of fashion retail, you could choose almost any theme for the windows ~ Mickey Mouse or giant Airfix kits ~ as long as it attracted attention. But we had never seen a window display that made a connection with the architecture of the building. We felt that there was seldom a logical link between the design of a shop. and the architecture of the building that sits on top of it. London is full of ornate Victorian buildings that appear to have had their ground floors pulled out from underneath them and replaced with a modernist slice of retail. Harvey Nichols, though, is unusual because it has stone columns that come all the way down between its windows and attach it to the pavement. It is a detached, free- standing building, rather than part of a street of shops, and occupies an. important corner. ‘We wanted to create a design that was specific to the architecture of the Harvey Nichols building, something that could not be done with any other shop, Instead of treating its twelve windows as twelve separate display cabinets, wwe began looking for a single idea that could bring them together. Although glass is associated with the idea of transparency, the contents of shop windows are often veiled or even obscured by the light that reflects off these large panes. Rather than putting objects in the boxes behind the glass and. allowing the glass in these windows to be their jailer, we began to think about finding a way to escape the confines of the shop window. We started to imagine ‘that there was no glass and that our installation was allowed to burst out into —~ AL S AS t SEI Yi i 99ye a we RAMEN RA YS Bowe ee ey FPRRRREERAE ES 8 Bn magn eh wee 4s rr 53 dethe street and steal space from the pavement, as well as making a connection with the fagade of the building and drawing atten- tion from around the corners, ‘The idea that we developed was to stitch all twelve window spaces and the facade into a single composition using an clement that wove in and out of the stone pillars, extending beyond the boundaries of the shop, rising up the front of the building and protruding beyond its corners. Rather than the flowing, passive language of a snake or ribbon form, we wanted this clement to feel ‘muscular and unpredictable, a dynamic, wriggling and struggling form that is deliberately awkward and stubborn, consciously changing and contorting as it goes where it wants to go. ‘The only way to design such a dynamic form was for me to carve it in polystyrene, using a sharp kitchen knife. The process was to0 intui- tive for me to be able to instruct somebody else and the piece evolved as I carved, and experimented. Unless the knife was razor sharp, the polystyrene pieces would rip into bobbles. We had six months and six people to build this huge object. It had to be strong enough to withstand the particularly strong winds in this part of the city. but light enough for us to build and suspend it. We could have made it from fibre- glass and painted it, but we didn’t want it to give the impression of a painted simulation of something else; it needed materiality and craftsmanship. Instead, ‘we created a special composite material consisting of an expanded polystyrene core and a veneer of aeroply, the extremely thin birch plywood that was originally developed for constructing aeroplane wings. Like the cross-section af a bone, this combination had great structural efficiency: tensile and compressive strength on, its outer surfaces and a lightweight, aerated structure in the middle. The aeroply also had warmth and silkiness. I carved two identical models of the project at 1:20 scale: one stayed in the studio and the other went to a warchouse in east London, where our team was building the project. Today, we might use three-dimensional digital technology to scale up this form, but this was not available to us then, so we had to divide the sculptural form into sections and scale up each complicated shape by hand. 102We placed the miniature pieces on graph paper and made plan and elevation drawings for each one, which we scaled up on to a giant grid marked on the floor and walls of the workshop. Once we understood the geometry of each piece, we bonded and carved vast blocks of polystyrene with hot wires until we had the right form. Each piece was then veneered with aeroply, which was a highly skilled job to do cleanly on such a scale and required a craftsman- ship that was closer to cabinet making than set building, One by one, as they were completed, the pieces were stored in the neighbouring building, which happened to be London’s last surviving lighthouse. Finally, working with a rigging company over a series of ten nights, the pieces were put in place, where they remained for two months. 103104