United Arrows Harajuku Main Shop

Located in the heart of the Shibuya shopping district, this small luxury fashion centre includes shops that are distributed over five floors, a bar, and a restaurant.

An interior street divides the building into two volumes that link up on the top floor via a linear staircase, providing the public with a flowing, varied itinerary. The internal street also allows people to traverse the building from one side to the other, allowing for greater freedom of movement, and thus the building can also be apprehended from two parallel streets. Exploiting this transparency and the fragmented form, the strip shops engage visitors as they circulate through the shopping centre. The building, its activity, and its occupants thus interact with the external public space, as the façade does not constitute a visual limit. From the street, the internal passageway and vertical traffic are also legible, as they run diagonally to the main curved façade.

With a unique, industrial sense of order and a regular, well-defined interior, the building contrasts with the surrounding urban fabric, a neighbourhood in which no other building compares in height, form, scale, or material. The intimate, inner sense of space relates to the Japanese tradition of tsuboniwa, or formal Japanese courtyard gardens.