Peter Marino, the Architect Behind the Luxury Flagship
From Chanel's towers in Ginza to Louis Vuitton in Seoul, Osaka and Singapore and Dior in Cheongdam, Peter Marino has drawn many of Asia's most visible luxury stores.
Peter Marino took his degree at Cornell in 1971, trained at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with George Nelson and with I. M. Pei, and in 1978 founded his own firm in New York. He is best known for the stores he has designed for the great fashion houses, and Asia has some of the most visible.
Ginza and Seoul
His Chanel tower in Ginza dates from 2004, and a second Chanel building in the district followed in 2018; we compare the two in Chanel’s two buildings in Ginza. In Seoul he designed the Boontheshop flagship in 2014, the interior of Maison Dior, whose exterior is by Christian de Portzamparc, and the interior of Louis Vuitton Maison Seoul, which has a Frank Gehry exterior.
Osaka and Singapore
He also did the interior of Louis Vuitton’s Osaka Midosuji maison, with Jun Aoki as architect, and that of the island maison at Marina Bay Sands, in Moshe Safdie’s pavilion.
Method and collection
Marino works as a collaborator with other architects as much as a builder of façades, and his interiors are often presented as galleries, with commissioned art and furniture. He is also a major collector: his bronzes were shown at the Wallace Collection in London in 2010, and his own Peter Marino Art Foundation opened in Southampton, New York, in June 2021. His books include The Architecture of Chanel (2021).