OMA has shared with Archinect photos from a new Shohei Shigematsu-led temporary installation and retail space for Louis Vuitton in Midtown Manhattan that has captured the critical attention of New Yorkers in the buildup to the holiday shopping season.

This is OMA's second collaboration with the global luxury brand. Louis Vuitton covered the facade of its currently under-renovation flagship store on 57th Street and Fifth Avenue with a set of faux Trianon Grey canvas trunks while opening a five-story pop-up space next door, filled with Shigematsu’s four freestanding sculptural interventions and featuring the first branded café and American location for the French chocolatier Maxime Frédéric.

The temporary facade built for the flagship location weighs over 5,000 pounds and was designed in-house by LVMH's architects as the American follow-up to a somewhat contentious first apparition on the Champs-Elysées in Paris last summer.

This is meant to conceal a multi-year interior overhaul that will yield twice the amount of space that had previously existed in the building from 1980 on while operations are shifted next door to the OMA-designed refuge at 6 E. 57th Street. Before entering that adjacent Art Deco building, customers are greeted by large standing giraffe and ostrich sentinels covering an arched window. 

He describes the work: "The four trunk towers are part structural and part sculptural, familiar in materiality yet foreign in shape, height, and slenderness created by their distinctly stacked forms. Together, they become a spatial amplifier that feels surreal yet rooted to Louis Vuitton’s origins."

Put together, his team says, these sculptures form as a testament to the tensile strength and durability of Louis Vuitton's products. Further south in Manhattan, OMA recently celebrated the topping out of its forthcoming New Museum extension on the Bowery ahead of the project's 2025 premiere.