Excerpt: MVRDV designed a jewel-inspired façade for Tiffany & Co.’s Shanghai store, which is housed in the Taikoo-Li Qiantan retail complex. The façade design of the store features 6,988 glass “diamonds” resembling Tiffany’s jewelry designs. These elements create a glittering effect during the day, while LED lighting allows the store to shine in a limitless variety of colors at night.
Project Description
[Text as submitted by architect] Located in the Taikoo-Li Qiantan retail development, Tiffany & Co.’s store in Shanghai features a jewel-inspired façade designed by MVRDV. With an external screen composed of 6,988 handcrafted glass “diamonds”, the façade evokes clear associations to Tiffany’s renowned jewellery designs. During the day, these elements reflect and refract the surroundings, resulting in a glittering effect, while at night the façade’s LED lighting allows the store to shine in an infinite range of colours.
The store takes a prominent position on the central axis of Taikoo Li Qiantan, a retail centre that was completed in 2021. With the southern half of this retail zone dedicated to a wide range of luxury brands, MVRDV’s design stands out from the crowd with a bold and deceptively simple concept: a façade made of diamonds.
Despite its apparent simplicity, this idea is underpinned by a deep understanding of Tiffany’s identity and history. The project represents a continuation of MVRDV’s strategy for Tiffany façade designs, which was first implemented last year at Singapore’s Changi Airport. This approach pays homage to Tiffany’s heritage by placing an emphasis on concepts such as innovative materiality, a strong sense of three-dimensionality, and the ability to spark wonder in onlookers. In Shanghai, all of these principles find their expression on the screen of glass diamonds. These are placed to give a randomly scattered effect, thinning out for greater visibility where needed, such as alongside the first-floor balcony that accompanies the store’s café.
Each of these glass diamonds is 21 centimetres wide and 13 centimetres tall, weighing 1.5 kilograms. They are suspended on thin steel cables, which are coated in a mirrored steel finish and placed in high tension between the top and bottom frames of the structure.
Specially designed steel fixtures, designed to be as small and unobtrusive as possible, ensure the diamonds do not move or spin on their supports. Thanks to the design’s attention to detail, the façade only uses mechanical connections, allowing it to be completely dismantled and its parts reused or recycled in the future.
Like MVRDV’s previous design for Tiffany’s Singapore Airport store, the façade for the Shanghai store incorporates a characteristic element from the local surroundings – in this case, being inspired by the bright and colourful light displays of Shanghai’s skyline. Therefore, the project integrates low-energy, colour-changing LED lighting into both the top and bottom of the façade. The façade can thus be lit in any colour, including the trademark Tiffany Blue ®, with each colour being brought to life by the refractive effects of the glass diamonds.
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