7/30/2019 GBD CPM-engl

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CARLO PAZOLINI Milan

For Carlo Pazolini, retailer of womens and mens shoes and accessories, this386 square meter flagship location in Milanos Piazza Cordusio will be their firstwestern European opening, with a redefinition of their store concept.

There is an ambiguous distinction between our bodies and the things we wear.Like the buildings we inhabit, we shape our clothing and it shapes us. Attempts

at accurately sculpting the shape of the human foot in Egyptian, classical, andcontemporary art imply that footwear literally shapes our feet over time.Nineteenth-century artists who wanted to recreate classical styles complainedthat the feet of contemporary shoe-wearing models had to be abstracted to moreclosely match the feet of the sandal-wearing Greek and/or Roman people. Feetcontain a quarter of the body's bones each one part of a flexible, adaptivenetwork; each node offering the potential for that network to be subtly reshaped.

As newborns, our toes quickly take on the shape of the shoes we wear, but for abrief time they are remarkably dexterous, like plaster ready to be cast by musclememory.

With this in mind, we used the shape of a newborns foot as a kind of iconic "cell"in an emergent network of display shelving and seating. Swarm Intelligencealgorithms or "Swarm Predictions" are used (and sometimes ignored) to forecastproblems in complex systems. In this case, the project site's proximity to thebanking district was noted. Swarm Intelligence is perhaps most clearly modeledin the natural world; insect swarms, schools of fish, flocks of birds, etc. illustratethe formation of loose cellular structures that negotiate an ephemeral distinction

between object and space.

The project plays out over time, on an urban stage for the piazza, or as colorcompositions shift as one moves through the space. Cells also trace out theirpaths over time, and form larger, semi-ordered compositions. These pathsmanifest as metal tubing or dashed wood slat wall panels. The cellular shelvingsystem peels away from a plaster wall, while both are reshaped by existing cast-iron columns. The plaster wall remains like a molded remnant of this activity; anover-scaled cast of some unknown sculptural detail reminiscent of the Platonichuman form. The new installations wrap into each other, but, also through the

historical found conditions, each shapes the other, just as our bodies both

reshape and are shaped by the things we wear.

Reinforcing this synthesis of old and new, natural and technological, the shelvingand seating cells use an innovative and glue-less molding process, which bondsnatural wool felt (one of the most ancient materials) with the polymer at amolecular level, thus forming a new structural composite.

GIORGIO BORRUSO