Alsop Sparchs Crystaline Chanel Shop

Alsop Sparchs Crystaline Chanel Shop

These days, just like ageing eighties supermodels, luxury shopping malls don't go out of fashion, they merely get facelifts. The extremely posh Starhill Gallery in Kuala Lumpur looks like being the latest of these to adopt a new exterior and kill the decade that gave us Boy George and Flashdance stone dead.

The existing building is an unwieldy mix of post modernist stone cladding that rips of neo-classicism and a projecting glass rotunda which are set to be replaced by a new crystalline façade that bounds the street of Bukit Bintang that sees this section renamed Sephora.

One of the problems of the existing shopping centre isn't just the design is no longer fashionable, something that occupiers such as Chanel cannot be happy with, but also that the current retail frontage is separated from the passing pedestrian traffic despite being in a major commercial area.

The new design opens up the site with its prismic mass that's worthy of a national pavilion at a world exposition. Glazed facades running the height of the project are revealed between textured stainless steel cladding with Chanel set to get a new triple-height shop replacing the current glass rotunda with 2,000 square metres of space in total.

Maxmising the commercial space, the plans build out past the existing boundaries with a skybridge linking the two sections together. This sees the project expand into the restaurant/café site that stands nearby, although a passage between the two sections helps retain pedestrian permeability.

The designs, which are phase one of the regeneration of the Starhill Gallery, are from Alsop Sparch, the former practise of Will Alsop that's now part of the Archial Group.

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