CARLOS MIELE - SAO PAULO - “THE STORE IS A DANCE BETWEEN ARCHITECTURE AND THE FEMALE BODY”

CARLOS MIELE - “THE STORE IS A DANCE BETWEEN ARCHITECTURE AND THE FEMALE BODY”  The interesting thing about this store is to see how Carlos Miele has built the label’s identity through the sensuality of the space, full of sinuous curves. It is like we are getting inside a women’s body. Luxury, today, needs to invent. Labels cannot simply make products. They also need to construct ambiances that create the label’s experience. That integrates architecture, art, design, commerce and nature”. - Gilles Lipovetsky (French philosopher, author of The Empire of the Ephemeral and Hiper-Modern Times) – Folha de São Paulo, 2008. The architecture created by Carlos Miele for his flagship Sao Paulo store is directly related to the proportions of the human body. “The idea was to create a sensorial experience for those who enter the space, to give the sensation of being enveloped by a woman’s body. All the project lines are sinuous curves. I worked as if I was constructing an haute-couture dress. Fashion is skin, a form of micro-architecture for the body. Architecture is also skin, a shelter that mediates the environment through various layers”, explains Carlos Miele. The designer´s work has migrated from the visual arts to the fashion and architecture. Miele has chosen an informal artistic background for his formation, living amongst critics, art theorists and carrying out projects with names like Sol Le Witt and Paulo Mendes da Rocha (winner of Pritzker prize), but principally with Hani Rashid, from the New York Architecture office, Asymptote, whom he worked on his others flagship stores, in New York and Paris. Miele designed the nearly 800-square-meter store, which was concluded in November, much like he designs his signature dresses, as a three-dimensional figure. In other words, the space was largely carved in situ, given the difficulty of representing Miele´s concepts on a plane surface. Throughout the construction process, Miele continually adjusted the design – as if he were fitting a dress-in order to achieve his goal of creating a space of constantly-shifting perspective. The result is an unpredictable space, a swirling series of warped, embracing bays and coves that pulls visitors along a meandering course, away from the repetitive, rectilinear spaces that are typical from the street.  On the floor, the both free-form Islands of peroba  wood and the flooring and softly hued carpeting, create discrete moments within the space. “Their shapes are inspired by the gardens of the great Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle-Marx”, says Miele, who also refers to the work of Oscar Niemeyer when discussing the space´s organic forms and his overall quest for fluidity. Along with a bulbous, irregular red leather bench by Zaha Hadid, the space´s naturalistic curves counter the minimalism of the surfaces, i.e., the uninterrupted expanses of the white walls and resin floors. As in his fashion design, the store reflects Miele´s passion for combining the natural and the high-tech, organicism with technology. Glossy, resin floors. One of the main challenges of the design was to “humanize” the height of the space (6 meters at its tallest) and to hide its 17 concrete columns. Dropped ceiling panels and dividers conceal light sources to give the space an ethereal glow, while fluid, narrow passages between alcoves accentuate the volume shifts while giving a churchlike feeling to the inner, lofty sanctum. Miele´s bending walls served to bury the columns while giving the store the impression of a body in motion.  This architectural project is a continuation of Miele´s career-long investigation of the relationship between the body, space and time – a topic he has explored in his ongoing video art projects, as well as his installation of a floating fiber optic dress at his solo exhibition at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Rio de Janeiro in 2001, and the multi-disciplinary dance performance he created at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 2002. “Having constructed a repertoire that consists of a conversation between video, dance and music, the artist exercises the attempt to connect different languages, bringing forth three instances of the body, which established the creation of a place with an identity; the primitive body, the digital body and the mythical body, through archetypes of the female universe”, says Daniela Bousso, the curator of Miele´s exhibition at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea. The store is Miele´s second architectural project. The first is his house in Florianopolis, completed in 2006, in which Miele created a refuge, integrated into nature. As Vinny Lee described that project in October in the London Times Magazine, “the building was constructed 1,5m above the ground to give the impression that it is floating. The glass wall means that we are not only looking out into the water and forest, but also have the maximum amount of natural light indoors – the interior lighting of the house is minimal”.