While change in stylistic trend is a continuous process, we tend to catalogue this change within a time frame defined by a calendar system. In the last century, due to the institutional and technical advances that fostered the global boom in population, the social and cultural changes that shape fashion happened with unprecedented quickness. As a result, and perhaps for the first time in history, our time frames became periods as short as decades, and fashion - like industrial design, architecture, music, and other arts - is therefore thought of in our collective conscious as belonging to the twenties, sixties, eighties, and the like. In this sense we can consider that our perception of stylistic change in fashion iterates with each new decade, as the state of style flows from one decade to the next.

True to the above, the project - located at the heart of the fashion district in Tokyo - celebrates a century of fashion evolution in Japan by showcasing a 100-meter tall atrium that represents the decennial changes in style from 1920 to 2010 and beyond.

Our atrium takes form through the connection between openings on each Exhibition Room floor, where the shape of each opening is that of a different regular convex polygon, each representing a decade. Starting with the triangle representing 1920 and adding one side to each polygon for each subsequent decade, the void’s cross-section soon transforms to become a square in the 1930’s room, and thereafter a pentagon in the 1940’s room, a hexagon in the 1950’s room, a heptagon in the 1960’s room, and so on, as its shape gradually approaches that of a circle with each iteration.

The museum visitor’s vertical passage through this ‘time tunnel’, from one Exhibition Room to the next, will thus become an abstract reflection on the evolution experienced by Japanese fashion as it iterated decade by decade, with the endemic triangle gradually becoming a universal circle, as western and other trends both inform and are informed by Japanese innovation and design in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Like a gigantic gown on display within an equally colossal display case, the museum’s atrium is visible from the city as its delimiting fabric gently cascades 80 meters to the street from the runway level. On each exhibition floor, it provides a datum about which a clockwise circulation through the exhibit is established. It also provides the main backdrop for items’ display, allowing the whole southeastern and southwestern facades to remain open to Tokyo.

Crowned by the transparent floor of the Japanese garden’s pond, the atrium allows visibility of all levels of the superstructure. The curtain’s fabric is 50% cladding and 50% empty, at once defining the space and allowing a visual connection between the different levels of the exhibition rooms. The cladding panels are thin, low-cost, plasma tube array screens. Due to their transparency, images are visible from both inside the exhibition rooms and the atrium. A video gallery of styles and events corresponding to each decade will reinforce the identity of each exhibition room, while being readable also as a continuous whole, the story of an evolution in process.

A new beacon for fashion at the heart of Tokyo, the building’s entire northeastern wall becomes an 18 by 110-meter media facade composed of 330 Plasma Tube Array display panels that stream live video of the fashion shows to the public, as well as footage of the exhibition items and images promoting the museum to the city.

3D section of building showing below grade floors and atrium running through the main exhibition spaces, as well as the upper levels containing the fashion show runways and roof garden.

I felt I needed to enrich the renderings with an image of a fashion model, but I wanted to stay away from the typical cliché fashion model or stereotype. At the same time I wanted the image to convey a refreshing feel. The image above, which I finally employed to this end, is a photo manipulation of images assumed to be part of the public domain, extracted from the internet. The base image is a picture of a model donning a “Newspaper Dress” by designer Gary Harvey, first exhibited at London Fashion Week 2007. I explicitly manipulated the image to make it less about itself and more akin to my own concept and imagery. I digitally adjusted color and contrast and added elf ears (by ‘Emmytonks’, from the Deviant Art website) to the model, a very, in my mind, attractive and feminine instance of Extreme Body Modification that I believe will become increasingly mainstream in the near future and thus – together with Harvey’s recycling idea – I think succeeds in adding a refreshing, forward-looking touch to the rendering.

For the sole purpose of enriching the building renderings, I created a logo for the proposed museum. The logo is conceived as an acronym for the name I propose for the museum, "Fashion Museum Omotesando," where the non-initial letter “A” in “fashion” becomes the first vowel of the acronym so it may be pronounced as a word. For the lowercase “f” I chose the Candara® font, since the entasis on the stem and concavities on the bar seem to me reminiscent of Japanese Kanji characters. For the “M” I chose to freehand my own version of it directly on computer with the mouse, and after around 30 tries I finally got what I was looking for. The intention was to have it also evoke Kanji, but through a completely different type of character, this time through its thick, black brushstroke quality, set against the white background. For the “A” and “O” respectively I chose two of Japan’s famous symbols: Mount Fuji, abstracted as a light grey Equilateral triangle, and the Hinomaru. At the same time, the triangle and the circle embody my project’s architectural parti explained above: the presence of the triangle, representing the endemic, and the circle representing the universal, reflect the history of Japanese fashion.