WHERE SHOES ARRIVING at URBAN OUTFITTERS USA
Recently at WHERE we traveled to Philadelphia to visit URBAN OUTFITTERS’s head quarters (WHERE was completely amazed by how cool their offices are).
They are based inside a 132-year-old navy base.
Working with Minneapolis architect Jeffrey Scherer, UO has re-purposed the Navy’s war-making factories into a creative commune, made by 600 of Philadelphia’s most creative and fashionable people.
It is Urban Outfitter’s style to display the products they sell in their stores amongst antiques and vintage relics, and in their head quarters you can experience exactly the same, but on a much larger scale.
Apparently, the first time Hayne – the founder and owner – visited the Navy Yard, he realized he had found “a mother lode of industrial artifacts“.
The Navy simply locked the doors and walked away in 1996, leaving behind such treasures as Egyptian-style cast-iron columns, 2,000-pound overhead cranes, and walls decorated with the graffiti musings and naive paintings of Navy carpenters. Hayne picked it all up for $1–5 per building. His first impulse wasn’t to clean up the buildings but to keep them exactly as they were.
By mytoenailcameoff
More than 100 bases around the country have been decommissioned since the U.S. military began its post–Cold War contraction, but Philadelphia’s Navy Yard is among the most architecturally significant. Starting around 1874 with a single Georgian-style house, the Navy constructed a miniature city on a marshy spit of Delaware waterfront. It picked up the street grid that began in the Center City District (CCD), located 3.5 miles north on Broad Street. At the peak of World War II the yard employed 60,000 people and included almost 300 buildings.
It’s a nice irony that UO’s designers now manufacture frilly clothing in the same rooms where the Navy turned out implements of war. They even store their patterns in the same cubbies where Navy engineers kept their blueprints.
Were happy to say that our current winter collection will be stocked by Urban Outfitters USA. And also the upcoming S/S 2010. Very cool.
In this galerie bellow you can see the products that you will be able to find in selected URBAN OUTFITTERS stores in USA, including our multifunctional CADI boot.
Tags: Philadelphia Navy Base, shoes, URBAN OUTFITTERS
One Response to “WHERE SHOES ARRIVING at URBAN OUTFITTERS USA”
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December 13th, 2009 at 10:43 pm
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