Fashion show.

The scheme for a new clothes shop in Milan translates the spirit governing design of the merchandise into architecture, and by exaggeration transforms the plan's weakness into strength.

The narrow elegant street of St Andrea, running between those of Montenapoleone and Spiga at the heart of Milan's most fashionable shopping district, harbours the new Giorgio Armani store by Claudio Silvestrin.

Giorgio Armani, which is distinct from other branches of the international chain (Armani Collezione, Emporium Armani), is its most expensive label, the prima ligna with clothes being made of fabrics unobtainable elsewhere. Underlying design of the merchandise is a spirit of understated, unembellished luxury; a spirit in accord with Silvestrin's architecture and which inspired the client's agreeing to his opulent use of empty - and commercially inactive - space. His manipulation of volume and light is dramatic and, as usual, heightened by a restricted palette. He uses only ttwo materials: pale stone (for cladding walls and floors) and ebony (for furniture).

The shop occupies ground and lower ground floors of a 1940s building, the entire face of which was clad in stone. On the ground floor, Silvestrin has cut into it and set the shop window back from the pavement to create the suggestion of an arcade. A sheer glass wall, appearing frameless and running the width of the building, incorporates entrance (to a stone-lined lobby with no merchandise visible) and, to the right of it, a window into interior depths. Standing here, you look down a long stone ramp into a narrow chasm cut down the right side of the shop and rising the full height of the two floors. On the far side, you can glimpse an opposing stone flight, but this time of linking steps.

Silvestrin's strategy, when confronted by an awkward plan, is to employ exaggeration to transform weakness into strength. Since the plan here is long and very narrow, it was audacious to chop a slice off the width and make it thinner still. But the chasm, unadorned except for the play of light on stone and in which the ramp has visual, but no practical, function, has dramatic sculptural power; his exaggeration of linearity paradoxically makes sense of the place.

Throughout the interior, linearity is emphasized by lines of ebony shelving, black against the creamy stone. The longest shelf lining the outside of the chasm wall is 40m long. Corridors of empty space, from one end of the building to the other, are counterpoised to more intimate enclosures in which clothes are simply displayed, hung from brass rails, oxidized to look like bronze. All fittings and furniture -- tall backed chairs, display counters and monolithic reception desk -- were designed by the practice. Other details impinge by degrees: the plain rectangle of water at the entrance, the severe design of changing cubicles with ebony bench and washroom with stone basin, the figures seen from the inside of the shop peering into the chasm from outside and silhouetted against the light, and the discreet lighting that brings out the texture and colour of stone.

Architect

Claudio Silvestrin Architects, London

Photographs

Matteo Piazza