Year: 2023
Medium: Virtual Environment
Client: City of K
Status: Incomplete

Typology: Retail
Program: Gathering, Commerce, 
Scope: 3D Design, Atmosphere
Surface: N/A

Developmental studies for an online 3D space where visitors could walk, explore, and speak to others in real time. Designed as a virtual hub to display work and celebrate new projects with a global audience.

Designing for a virtual space meant questioning the fundamentals of materiality, site, even structure. The format demands reconsidering everything from a fresh perspective, to explore things that couldn’t exist in the physical world.

At its heart is the colossal floating mass. Heavy, silent, and unknowable. Stanley Kubrick’s monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey provided conceptual inspiration with its imposing, unreadable geometry. From first glance, it’s obvious that this structure is impossible to understand. The project pushes architectural minimalism to an extreme. The mass floats unsupported, creating a colossal illuminated space below it. The ceiling hovers unsettlingly close creating a palpable tension emphasized by the bright, sterile, lighting, reminiscent of oppressive corporate environments which could crush you at any moment.

This pairing of the intense fluorescent light and the impossible floating mass above you, which feels like there is no way it should be supported and at any second could collapse, became a sharp architectural metaphor for operating as an artist within capitalism. There’s no better place to put a retail store for an independent artist. Like everything else it exists in contradiction, held in place by something invisible and uncertain.

The idea to return to a virtual store came after showing the SS23 Collection and wanting to create a space for a global audience. Rather than starting from a standard retail breif, the goal was to design a space to display five items: a shirt, a mask, a pair of gloves, a bag, and an incense holder.

This shift in approach narrowed the scope, turning attention inward. The result is not a universal misc. showroom, but a custom enviroment designed as a spatial extension of the collection’s themes.

The architecture functions as a metaphor. Instead of walls or racks, the space relies on tension, distance, and isolation. Objects are placed in front of you, never behind. The path is linear, with no reason to turn around.

The clothing displays draw from Michelangelo’s unfinished Slaves. They look like they’re stuck, trying to break free. That tension runs through the whole collection. 

The other reference is the biblical story of Lot’s wife. She was turned into a pillar of salt for looking back towards Sodom while fleeing its destruction. In a dystopian future destroyed by our own actions, looking back becomes the only sin. Holding onto the past is what got us here. Moving forward is the only way out.