Flagship store Boontheshop Fashion Architecture

By Luca Maria Francesco Fabris - 1 November 2016
AGC Interpane Glas Industrie has participated in the project

Perhaps many of our readers are unaware, but Peter Marino is one of the world’s top architects in the high-end fashion and accessories retail market. His firmly consolidated reputation means he commands not only a raft of contracts with the most prestigious international brands - Dior, Armani, Chanel, Fendi, Zegna and Louis Vuitton are just some of the names on a much longer list - but also receives commissions from competing brands. The darling of them all, he succeeds in meeting their different requirements with a chameleon-like architectural flair, coupled with an obsessive attention to detail. Although the name indicates evident Italian roots, Marino is on many counts the classic New Yorker who decided early on to eschew any hint of mediocrity and harness his prodigious intelligence to acquiring a vast knowledge base on which to found his activity. After graduating from Cornell, he opened his own practice in New York in 1978. The firm now employs 160 people and has six associate partners. His first experience was with giants of architecture like Skidmore Owings & Merrill and I.M. Pei. At the same time he was an assiduous frequenter of Andy Warhol’s circle and the art world. Perhaps it is just this mixité of interests that led Marino to become a Janus of the fashion world - an architect and creator of exquisite top-end fashion retail spaces while also perfectly at ease in many worlds, his photograph often gracing the glossy magazines. I would put him on a par with another iconic figure, another outstanding professional of vast erudition, Karl Lagerfeld. Marino’s backstory is fully reflected in his recent South Korean project, having received a citation for design excellence from the AIA New York State Design Award. This seven-story building for a total surface area of more than 5,000 sq m is the flagship store of Boontheshop, a women’s fashion company with headquarters in Seoul. A quality architecture, it stands in a dense...