Puma Social Club by EDIT! and Tereza Komárková
Bags and clothing hang from steel chains at the Prague store for sports brand Puma by Czech architects EDIT! and architecture student Tereza Komarkova (+ slideshow).
Komarkova's design concept for the Puma Social Club references the cloakrooms of coal miners in the Czech city of Ostrava, who would air their overalls by attaching them to suspended chains rigged up to the ceiling.
Located in the centre of the city, the store occupies the ground floor of a building that replaced the house where influential author Franz Kafka was born.
The chains and pulleys also integrate lighting and hang over both a shop floor and a cafe.
Pre-weathered steel was used to create the cafe counter, as well as the perforated walls that hold the product display shelves.
Designers Nendo have also designed a store for Puma, which you can see here.
Photography is by Saša Dobrovodský.
Here's some more information from the architects:
PUMA social club Prague
The Puma company came to us with a specific brief - to make a multifunctional meeting point combining a shop with their social club concept and a cafe.
The store is oriented especially towards young people who may discover Puma street wear products in a more amusing way and Puma also wished to make students of architecture to participate on the interior design. Our role was therefore to organize a workshop with pre-selected students, to choose the most intriguing concept and, together with the winning student, to develop the concept to a realization.
Tereza Komarkova, a student of architecture at the Technical University in Liberec, joined the edit! team for 6 months as she was chosen after the workshop for her original concept inspired by miners' cloakrooms in coal mines of the Ostrava industrial region. Miners used suspended steel chains to hang up their clothes and pull them up to make them ventilated.
In Puma store the chains serve to present the products and to modify the inner space or even to free it up for various occasions or events.
Their height can be controlled both manually or remotely and they can be also tied together to create a sort of chain trees with products.
The building where the Puma social club store is located is the birthplace of Franz Kafka, in the very heart of the historical centre of Prague.
The approach was first to clean up the space from additional non-historic interventions and then unite all public areas by a massive wooden floor.
Besides the chains the major interior feature is a long bar cladded in rusted steel plates that also serves as a retail counter. The rusted steel is used also at specially designed walls of perforated plates where shoes and apparel are presented.
Project architect: Ivan Boroš (edit!)
Author of the winning concept: Tereza Komárková (student of Faculty of Architecture, Technical University in Liberec)
Co-authors: Ivan Boroš (edit!), Juraj Calaj (edit!), Lenka Míková (edit!), Vítězslav Danda (edit!), Tereza Komárková
Photographs of realization: Saša Dobrovodský (www.dobrovodsky.cz)
Client: Puma Czech Republic
Project managment: Martin Šourek, Didaktik-CZ (www.didaktik-cz.cz)
Estimated costs: 93 000 Euro