Nike Town USA

Architectural Review, The, May, 1997

Nike, the American manufacturer of sports and fitness equipment, has managed the difficult marketing feat of making its filmically flight-provoking and air-cushioned shoes desirable to all ages throughout the world. The company's firm grasp of the idea that entertainment sells is in the Disney tradition and, in circumstances calculated to be entertaining, it sells diverting products that do in fact perform well - and in doing so are redolent in their design of youth, athleticism, fame, and so on. The attitude can be seen to effect in the firm's own stores called NikeTowns that have opened up in various cities throughout the United States. These stores, like Donna Karan's chain of clothing establishments, have a particularly American cast, and once again the adjectives roll. They are brash, optimistic, good fun and thoroughly professional. There is nothing remotely halfhearted here.

The latest NikeTown to have opened is in Fifth Avenue in New York, on a site formerly occupied by the Bonwit Teller department store and later, after its demise, by Galeries Lafayette. The existing building was demolished to make way for a five-storey building pierced in good old French department store fashion by a central lightwell.

For no particular reason that you can see, other than entertainment, the new building with its brick shell and arched windows deliberately resembles an old-fashioned school gymnasium of the kind once common in Manhattan. But surely no school gym of worthy purpose would have had this entrance, for it refers in exuberant Art Deco style to the early heady days of cinematic design.

Within the shell, like a ship within a bottle, is a gleaming glass and steel structure that revolves around and opens to the lightwell. Entertainment being the struts of the business, this central space is darkened every 20 minutes to broadcast a Nike-related sporting film on a video screen three storeys high. Only half of the nearly 70 000 sq ft of retail space in the store is occupied by things for sale. The remaining parts are designed to reinforce Nike's involvement with sporting life, celebrities and new technology. Progress around the store is interrupted by broadcasts of sporting events, memorabilia and sports related novelties like punching bags or roulette wheels that can tell about the industry's heroes. Particularly intriguing is Nike's new Ngage digital system, which in less than a second gives you the exact length, width, arch length and height and heel width of your foot.

But in the end, it is the shop fittings throughout the store, designed by Nike's own design team and dramatically illuminated, that are endlessly intriguing for the sportively unfanatical. They include illuminated shelving, revolving columnar display cases and the 26 shoe tubes that visibly transport Nike shoes from the basement stockroom to the five retail floors. And of course, the mercurially inspired design of the shoes themselves.