Photos: Noah Kalina
Calvin Klein Collection special holiday installation by Snarkitecture is now on view in the windows of the brand’s Madison Avenue flagship store in New York City. The engaging, imaginative installation will entertain holiday shoppers along 60th Street and Madison Avenue through the holiday season.
Invited by Art Production Fund (APF) and Calvin Klein Collection to design this year’s holiday windows, Snarkitecture created an abstract, all-white winter scene, featuring custom model trains traveling the store. Made from hundreds of freestanding white rods, the landscape is visible from a distance and resembles a snow drift infilling the interior of the store. Upon closer view, shoppers and pedestrians discover several all-black model trains that weave in and out of view in a mesmerizing interplay. The landscape and trains play on familiar holiday memories, reimagined through Snarkitecture’s unexpected and inventive approach, fitting for the Calvin Klein Collection brand aesthetic of refined luxury.
Said Snarkitecture’s Co-founder, Alex Mustonen, “We often work in a reduced and simplified palette, so creating this holiday installation for Calvin Klein Collection within their John Pawson-designed flagship store was in many ways an ideal venue for us. I think there is something familiar yet unknown about our scheme, with these customized monochromatic model train sets that are continually circulating through the all-white abstract landscape.”
Art Production Fund Co-Founders Doreen Remen and Yvonne Force Villareal added, “The spare beauty and matte texture of Snarkitecture’s work pairs well with Calvin Klein Collection’s minimalist aesthetic. The installation evokes the youthful innocence of the holiday season and inspires a sense of wonder and whimsy.”
Snarkitecture is a collaborative and experimental practice operating in territories between art and architecture. Snarkitecture was established by Alex Mustonen and Daniel Arsham. The name is drawn from Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of The Snark, a poem describing an “impossible voyage of an improbable crew to find an inconceivable creature.” Snarkitecture investigates the unknown within architecture – the indefinable moments created by manipulating and reinterpreting existing materials, structures and programs to spectacular effect. Exploring the boundaries of disciplines, the studio designs permanent, architectural scale projects and functional objects with new and imaginative purposes. Snarkitecture’s approach focuses on the viewer’s experience and memory, creating moments of wonder and interaction that allow people to engage directly with their surrounding environment. By transforming the familiar into the extraordinary, Snarkitecture makes architecture perform the unexpected.
