Fantastique Canopée

For their new department store Dover street Market Ginza in Tokyo, the brand Comme des Garçons asked us to imagine a new version of a wooden cave. Rey Kawabuko’s vision puts forward a sharp contrast between a very neutral architecture : white walls, concrete and embedded lighting with a wild and invasive sculpture, which transforms the space. Her choice of organizing the room around two separate pillars makes this complementary project unique, where two giant trees crash on the ceiling.
Fantastique Canopee accidentally and randomly scatters across the space to break the stands’ limits.
The watery energy of this wooden sea, composed of thousands of wooden planks fit together to form a harmonious and imperfect scaly skin, whose jagged curves spread and grow on the ceiling in an uncertain explosion.
The 9715 planks, laid one by one from the two vertical pillars’ basis were fixed one by one randomly. Without knowing where it would go and eventually end, the sculpture forms a structure which becomes wider to spread horizontally and overhang space in every direction. United, the two entities are striving to meet, through the glass panels of the escalator in the middle of the building, to form a one and only body. Smooth circulation are formed around the two spaces, the wooden masses break the corners’ limits whose implantation is unknown. The pieces of wood create irregular curves which are modified depending on the point of view, looking thin here and massive there. As they were built randomly on the spot, Fantastique Canopee’s vague and free curves make the sculpture look like an object verging on chaos and plant world in accordance with the brand Comme des Garçons’ spirit.