As part of Nike’s overhaul of their flagship store on Union Square, our two-story lobby installation is a dynamic array of over 600 reclaimed bleachers which cantilever out over the escalator leading into the store.

The well-worn bleacher board, a material Nike has used in numerous stores to convey familiarity and use, is organized here as a set of vectors that flow through the lobby. Ideally, the anomalies of the material are enough to disrupt the smoothness of the geometry, while the unstable, precarious array disrupts a purely nostalgia reading of the bleachers yielding a wider range of associations.

The installation was conveyed to the contractor through a spreadsheet of widths, lengths and angles, fabricated offsite and installed in 36 hours before the store’s opening.

Project Team: David Freeland, Brennan Buck, Connor Gravelle

fabricated by MC2