Step inside the Zuo Corp. pop-up shop in Warsaw and you’ll feel as if you’ve just been transported to a different space altogether. Designed by Polish architects Super Super and Inside/Outside, this clothing store seems to go on forever, a frighteningly vast warehouse of a retailer that requires you to navigate daunting mazes in order to make your way back out again.
Gaze down the aisles of the showroom and you’ll see rack after rack of jackets, shirts and pants. There’s a fitting room, a storage room, and staff waiting to help you at various intervals. But wander too far and you’ll soon hit a wall – literally. Mirrors line the entire cube, and the edges are illuminated with LED strips that create an endless grid of light.
The effect is all the more disorienting when you consider what the outside of this shop looks like: it’s a tiny cube, consisting of two portable containers, sitting lightly upon a city square.
“Small, inconspicuous object, as it seemed from the outside, was creating an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ effect, to introduce the viewer to another world,” says Super Super.
