MOMA OPENS TOKYO DESIGN SHOP; BLUM & POE PREPARE NEW BUILDING

The design blog Dezeen reports that last night the Museum of Modern Art opened its first store outside of the United States, in the Ometesando district of Tokyo. The boutique, which has approximately forty-five hundred square feet of retail space and was designed by New York architect Richard Gluckman of Gluckman Mayner Architects, is on the third floor of GYRE, a new commercial building designed by Dutch architecture firm MVRDV that also contains an organic deli and a Maison Martin Margiela boutique. More information is available (in Japanese) at the design blog dodolife, the blog of the Tokyo office of advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy, and in this press release (warning: PDF link) from the museum’s press office.

Elsewhere, Carol Vogel reports in the New York Times that Los Angeles gallery Blum & Poe, a pioneer in the burgeoning Culver City gallery district, has purchased a twenty-seven-thousand-square-foot building across La Cienaga Boulevard from its original rented location, which opened in 2003. The two-story concrete structure, a former light manufacturing factory, will be renovated by Escher GuneWarden Architecture of Los Angeles.