Chanel’s Two Buildings in Ginza, Both by Peter Marino

Chanel has two buildings in Ginza, and Peter Marino designed both.

The tower of 2004

The first, listed in the architect’s catalogue as Chanel Ginza Tower, dates from 2004. It has a ten-storey façade of triple-layer glass, the transparency of which changes with an electrical charge, and it is lit by LEDs at night so that it becomes a display screen.

The slender building

The second, which the architect’s catalogue dates to 2018, is a slender nine-storey tower on a footprint of about 40 by 50 feet, with some 10,500 square feet of floor space. Its façade is black and white, in matte panels and fritted glass, with windows of varying sizes that make the building read as a sculpture. For the first two months the windows were embellished by Shuji Mukai, a member of the Gutai movement, whom Marino described as making scribbles resembling Japanese calligraphy.

Retail takes the first four floors: handbags and accessories on the first, shoes on the second, and ready-to-wear on the third and fourth. Offices occupy the fifth to seventh floors. The eighth floor holds the Salon Beauté, a spa with two treatment rooms and a make-up centre, and the ninth the Salon Privé for VIP fashion appointments. The interior has more art and furniture than other Chanel stores: bronze armchairs by Laurence Montano, a gold-leaf and lacquer screen by Nancy Lorenz, lithographs by Agnes Martin in reception and a photograph of the Aegean by Hiroshi Sugimoto in a treatment room.

The two buildings stand about two blocks apart. Ginza’s other great façades are compared in Tokyo’s flagship architecture.