LVMH Tower (New York City, New York)

 store / shop, office building, cosmetics shop

328-foot, 25-story postmodern-Art-Deco office building completed in 1999. Designed by Christian de Portzamparc and Hillier Architecture for LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, it is clad in pale-green glass and grey metal. The opalescent facade angles and folds into itself, creating an exercise in layering.

The 11-story base includes a tall ground-level store space for Christian Dior, designed by Peter Marino, with a metal strip above it that acts as a unifying element. The ground floor has glass with a purplish hue and a stippled pattern of small dots. The main entrance is in the center, with recessed glass double-doors, and is flanked by storefronts occupied by Christian Dior.

The tower itself has a complex, angular facade divided into two sections on the diagonal, with the right (east) side projecting and bent in the middle, producing a geometry that has been described as feminine, like the fall of a skirt over a bent knee.A blue glass cube at the center of the fold on the 10th floor resembles a gem. The glass on the left (west) side is green, with fritted dots; on the right side, it is milky white, with each window divided at an angle into a sandblasted half and a clear half with sandblasted lines across it that grow wider on higher floors. At night, the white section of the building is lighted in pale green and violet and the other half recedes; neon tubes under the front fold provide a slash of changing colored light.

The folded facade with its protrusion is an innovative interpretation of the requirement for setbacks in the New York City building code, with a void in the lower section and with the upper section folding back outward in a prismatic rather than a "wedding-cake" shape. Having the building touch the mandated setback line at the minimum two points and folding it inwards from the base to the top made it possible for it to be taller than the neighboring Chanel Building. There is a glass-enclosed cubic reception space on the top floor, three floors or thirty feet high, which is entered in dramatic fashion down a curving stairway from a mezzanine floor.

Christian Dior S.A. (more commonly known as Dior) is a French luxury goods company controlled and chaired by businessman Bernard Arnault who also heads LVMH Moët Hennessy • Louis Vuitton - the world's largest luxury group. Dior itself holds 42.36% shares of and 59.01% voting rights within LVMH. Founded in 1946 by the eponymous designer Christian Dior, today the company designs and retails ready-to-wear, leather goods, fashion accessories, footwear, jewelry, timepieces, fragrance, make-up, and skincare products while also maintaining its tradition as a creator of recognized haute-couture (under the Christian Dior Couture division).

www.dior.com/prehomeFlash.htm