fashion headquarters // goyard

beginnings

Maison E. Goyard was founded and established in 1853 out of Paris, France. The family-owned business has sprawled it’s creativity and most of all, quality, from generation to generation, influencing high fashion brands surrounding it and continues to do so, albeit even dating further than Louis Vuitton. Primarily known for their craft in design and specificities in assemblage of luxury luggage and custom made trunks, they have continued through smaller handheld goods for day-to-day usage. For being a brand based on functionality and aesthetic brilliance, Goyard remains to thrive for its technical and mysterious appeal within the built environment we occupy.

site

The site for this project is located at 39 Little West 12th Street within the Meatpacking District of New York City. An area of Manhattan known for its historical roots in butchery, high-end fashion boutiques and spirited nightlife, the addition of a Fashion Headquarters for a brand such as Goyard only seemed deemable because of its architectural couture. Furthermore, with the site’s adjacency to The High Line Park, the severity to design a coherent and accessible project whilst being tasked as an addition to social culture and infrastructure grows exponentially.

program

1// Retail
2// Showroom & Runway
3// Design Studio
4// Production Studio
5// Administrative
6// Café
7// Egress & Circulation

approach

The approach for both site and brand was inherently a relationship founded on luxury and pragmatism. In order to begin laying the framework for design of the headquarters, it was imperative to understand the architecture of the brand. It goes without say that the design of their trunks and luggage cases is in fact a piece of architecture. Each with it’s own distinct personality, created by hand, designed in a way to cater to the user of the piece with components capable of sliding out, popping upwards, detaching and reattaching; Goyard luggage is architecture in itself serving its owner’s needs and wants in the most specific and definitive ways. By means of program, an overlay in plan and section was produced to create primary and secondary levels of each floor plate therefore one floor became a compartments of the floor below it. This created a language of multi-spaced levels, similarly to the luggage itself, where one component would be the counter component of the other and so on and so forth. 

showroom runway

Because the program called for a Showroom and Runway to be integrated into the project, the idea was to take the idea of the Runway and how can one best relate it to luggage. The most rational explanation for this was to understand exactly where luggage is showcased the most - an airport carousel. So rather than having the luggage modeled down a runway, what if the luggage modeled itself? - on a conveyor belt that would span the distance of the Showroom space.

presentation works