Chanel building stands for elegance & permanence.

The most important fashion news in New York - this summer and for all of 1996 - is not the length of skirts, or who is the latest industry star to abandon the runway-in-a-tent showings in Bryant Park. It is that the formidable house of Chanel has moved into a high-rise building custom designed and built on the most important retail block in New York City: 57th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues.

"Architecture for couture" is rare in the United States, even in New York, where a surprising number of established and emerging designers are opening boutiques. Thus for many reasons, 15 East 57th Street is a highly visible structure: 17 stories, 65,000 sq. ft. of granite, steel, and glass designed for Chanel, Inc. President Arie Kopelman's growing USA fashion empire by the prestigious office of Platt Byard Dovell Architects.

According to Charles Platt, the' building houses the Chanel Fashion Division's greatly expanded boutique, salon, showrooms, runway, collections, and offices. While 15 East 57th's architectural style is entirely modem, it also recalls the Art Deco skyscraper buildings of New York City in the 20s and 30s, a time when Coco Chanel's classic clothing was having a parallel international impact.

"The building looks as if it has always been there," said Arlette Thebault, Chanel spokesperson. "Yet the challenge was also to make it look new, too. We in the fashion industry continually face the same peril."

Zoning

The narrow site - nominally 43 ft. by 100 ft. - carried onerous zoning constraints, including a setback at the 12th floor. To maximize floor area, Platt Byard Dovell placed the elevator and service core tight against the eastern wall; created a basically columnless floor; and framed the building with a very-high strength steel superstructure that requires less steel to support the floors.

Materials and details

Its diminutive footprint notwithstanding, the building is designed on a powerful scale across its southern (street side) and western facades. [The eastern side is "windowless"; that neighboring site has been cleared for Louis Vuitton's new building.] Horizontal and vertical building elements are carefully crafted into a tight geometry that balances great blocks of speckled Georgia granite in honed and flamed textures, bands of black Canadian granite, expanses of glass butt-jointed with a nearly invisible black silicone, and narrow strips of highly polished stainless steel in channels between the stone as an accent.

Color palette

Deeply mindful of the image of its packaging, Chanel has, since time immemorial, used only the color code of its Rue Cambon salon and original perfume box - black, white, and beige, with a restricted range of textures and shades - in all its installations. Platt Byard Dovell has already innovated around this design constraint, having worked as the architects for a five-year-long project at Chanel's industrial complex in Piscataway, NJ, whose half-million sq. ft., low-rise structure now stretches out over a quarter-mile.

On 57th Street, the Chanel palette is clearly in force. PBD added vertical, polished black granite strips into the facade to recall the Chanel package, in this case also to emphasize the slender silhouette of the building. Inside No. 15, where PBD has also been responsible for the lobbies, buyers' showrooms, corporate offices, and core, there are black accents in stone and steel, a prevalent pale-buff Combrun (French) limestone, and a constant counterpoint of matte and glossy textures that are most noticeable and effective in the showrooms and dressing room&. (The watts in the startlingly elegant changing room on the 7th Floor are an entire stretch of opaque, white-glass doors, a stainless steel hanging rod, and mirror.)

Facade features

Chanel wanted the lower floors to be entirely devoted to retail, particularly for its new line of fine jewelry, to be finished by its salon designer, Christian Gallion. Platt Byard Dovell provided for a grand double-height space at the third floor, where fashion shows will occur and where the couture line will be privately modeled. While 57th Street has any number of generously-sized windows that overlook the broad street, the third floor's double-height window is a noticeably extravagant gesture by Chanel and its architects, permitting the usually unseen, glamorous activities within to be seen from the outside.

The building's lighting is another special feature. Like the celebrated Seagrams Building, all of the ceiling lighting is in the grid of the building. And at night, the stainless steel grill at the summit, which interlocks like fingers on two hands, has been backlit.

Urban issues

"The polished retail distinction of 57th Street of the last decades has been encroached upon by a west-to-east movement of Hollywood-style restaurants and shops. But Chanel's new building emphatically draws the line," Platt indicates. "Always the fashion arbiter, our client has now also become an urban custodian, emphasizing permanence against trendiness. We think that Coco Chanel would be pleased."

Design and building team

PBD has used as consultants for the building Tor Smolen Calini & Associates (structural engineers), Goldman Copeland Associates (mechanical engineers), and Johnson Schwinghammer (lighting design). Pavarini Construction Company is the construction manager.