APL SoHo: does the amphitheatre hold as architecture?

Stand on Prince Street and look through the storefront glass at 75 Prince. What you see is a curving plaster wall that forms a near-circular volume inside the SoHo street grid. The form is a basketball arena at 3,900 square feet.

The project

The question this case study tests is whether that form is architecture or illustration — whether the amphitheatre is a legible argument about sneaker retail, or whether it is a brand story rendered in plaster and travertine. Every publication covering the project has accepted the basketball reading at face value. None has asked whether it holds.

APL SoHo opened on Thursday 9 November 2023, the second flagship globally for Athletic Propulsion Labs — the Los Angeles performance-sneaker brand founded in 2009 by twin brothers Adam and Ryan Goldston. APL’s origin story is technology: the Load N Launch midsole that gave wearers measurable vertical lift was banned from the NBA in 2010 for providing an unfair performance advantage. The ban became marketing. The company has since built a devoted customer base for performance sneakers at luxury price points, and this SoHo shop is the brand’s visible architectural statement.

Credits, fully disclosed — and this is editorially relevant to Issue 01. Where Kith, LOEWE and Ferrari across the other case studies withhold some or all of their execution trades, APL names everyone. Designer of Record: Al-Jawad Pike (London; founded 2014 by Jessam Al-Jawad and Dean Pike, both previously at David Chipperfield Architects). Architect of Record: Tricarico Architecture and Design PC (New York). Photography: Ståle Eriksen. Trophy box supplier: Viabuzzano (Italy). Stone species named; fabrication processes described. Al-Jawad Pike publishes the project on their own site with a studio project code (090 APL). This is architectural transparency as standard, and it places APL SoHo alongside Tiffany Sanlitun and Hermès Sanlitun as the third fully-disclosed project in Issue 01, against a three-project opacity cluster. Three against three — evenly split, and the split has a geography. APAC and NYC disclose; UK and Shanghai don’t. That’s Issue 01’s second editorial pattern.

Context

SoHo retail architecture in 2023 was dominated by two logics. One is technology-forward — Nike’s House of Innovation (Prince and Mercer, 2018) as the template, with digital screens, product-maximalism, and heavily gamified experiences. The other is fashion-flagship — leather goods and contemporary luxury tenants (Prada, Chanel, Acne Studios, Our Legacy) operating on neutral-cladding restraint. APL SoHo fits neither logic. It is a performance-sneaker brand executing at material registers — artisan plaster, Roman travertine, Italian marble, custom gold — that read as contemporary-fashion flagship rather than sneaker retail. The category crossover is deliberate.

The site search is worth naming. Adam Goldston to WWD: “We looked for two and a half years. We looked at over 23 locations until we found this one. We needed scale and breadth to create something architecturally significant. When we walked in, we knew immediately that this was it.” The commercial logic is that APL’s product positioning — performance sneakers at £600-plus retail — cannot scale through suburban retail. The customer is a particular kind of New York buyer, and SoHo is where that customer walks. The flagship is therefore a single-site capital event rather than a rollout store.

The commissioning narrative is equally specific. Al-Jawad Pike is a London practice — its founders left David Chipperfield Architects in 2014 to set up their own studio. The Goldstons approached them with a brief articulated as “simple yet severe.” That brief is the design argument’s starting condition. The architects built the amphitheatre in response to it. Whether the amphitheatre is what “simple yet severe” actually required, or whether it’s an elaboration of the brief into a narrative vehicle, is the question.

The design

The space reads as a basketball arena. That is not a neutral description; it is the architectural argument the project is making. Which means the assessment has to be whether the form does arena-work or decorative-work.

The amphitheatre geometry. The curving perimeter plaster wall forms a near-circular volume inside a rectangular Prince Street shell. The geometry is genuinely worked — SoHo’s street-grid rectangles give way to a rounded interior that reads as deliberately other. Al-Jawad Pike to Dezeen: “We approached this by creating an architectural form that displays the product in a pan-optical array to provide visibility in completeness from almost any part of the store; whilst maintaining a seamless link between staff back-of-house functions at the basement level with the main retail space.” The panopticon reading is the design-intent statement, and structurally it holds — you stand anywhere in the space and the whole retail volume is visible. That’s a legitimate retail-architecture move and it works.

But the amphitheatre reading goes further than panoptic. Archpaper read the form as basketball specifically: “performance, visualized literally in the amphitheater-like main floor via curving, artisan-plastered walls; and basketball, symbolized by the stadium-like bench seating that curves around a column by the fitting rooms.” The stadium seating is the literal claim. A bench that wraps a column, positioned near the fitting rooms, reading as arena seating. The narrative lock is tight — APL’s brand heritage is a banned-from-the-NBA performance sneaker; the retail floor is a basketball arena; customers sit in arena seating; shoes are displayed as trophies.

Where it holds. The panoptic logic is real retail-architectural thinking. Standing anywhere in the space, you see every product — that’s a specific merchandising argument delivered through form, and it justifies the curving wall on its own terms. The teardrop columns reach floor to ceiling and are genuinely structural; they’re not applied decoration. The back-lit stretched-fabric ceiling diffuses light evenly across the plaster surfaces, which makes the space read as gallery-adjacent even though the product is athletic footwear. The Roman travertine base runs as a continuous material strata from point-of-sale through seating to low walls — that’s material discipline of the kind the David Chipperfield school is known for, and it gives the project its register. Al-Jawad Pike are not being sloppy.

Where it risks tipping over. The five vanity rooms are the test case. Radially arranged, each clad in a different onyx or marble, they’re intended to represent the five boroughs of New York. Jessam Al-Jawad to Specifier Source: “We wanted to reflect the diversity and vibrancy of New York City through the stone selection.” The five-borough framing is load-bearing — five rooms equal Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island, each with its characteristic stone colour. Whether the narrative actually reads from the space is unclear. The stones would be distinct with any number of rooms; the five-borough lock is the story the space cannot quite tell on its own. It requires the press release to close the loop.

The golden Viabuzzano trophy boxes are the second test. Ryan Goldston to WWD: the brushed-finish golden display boxes are intended as a nod to the Audemars Piguet watches both brothers wear. That’s a luxury-watch reference transposed onto a sneaker display. The aesthetic reading is consistent — elevated, illuminated, gold-cased trophies. The brand-narrative reading depends on the observer knowing what the Goldstons wear on their wrists. If you don’t, the boxes are just well-made display cases. The narrative doesn’t read without the caption.

The resolution. The amphitheatre form delivers a legitimate retail-architectural argument (panoptic product visibility, material discipline, spatial coherence) and an overlaid brand narrative (basketball arena, borough symbolism, watch references). The form does both. But the two layers aren’t equally load-bearing. The architecture holds without the narrative. The narrative needs the architecture to read. That’s the order of dependence: the amphitheatre works first as retail-gallery-store, second as basketball-arena-metaphor. Remove the metaphor and the shop still functions as distinctive, well-specified sneaker retail. Remove the form and the metaphor has nowhere to live.

Which means the amphitheatre test resolves approximately as follows: the architecture is doing genuine work, the metaphor is doing branded elaboration, and Al-Jawad Pike have built a project that works on both layers — but more completely on the first. That is a more useful reading than the brand-story acceptance every other publication has offered.

The build and the cost read

No primary-source cost figures. Estimation with reasoning shown, kept tight.

Shell and envelope. Standard SoHo retail fitout with minor façade signage — unlisted building, no heritage constraints. Likely £100k–£250k on shell alterations, storefront glazing, and signage.

Interior fit-out. The money is here. 3,900 sq ft of curving artisan plaster walls, Roman travertine base across all floor functions, five bespoke onyx/marble vanity rooms (selected by the Goldstons from separate quarries), tear-drop plaster columns, custom Viabuzzano golden trophy boxes with brushed finish, back-lit stretched fabric ceiling, boulder plinths, stadium-bench seating and fitting-room zone. Likely range: £3m–£5m for the interior fit-out alone. The five vanity rooms could run £300k–£500k in bespoke stone and installation at this specification; the Viabuzzano trophy boxes plausibly £100k–£200k across the full set; the back-lit stretched-fabric ceiling system is a specialist scope plausibly £200k–£400k at this area.

Programme. Two-and-a-half-year site search per Adam Goldston. Opening November 2023 implies design running from late 2021 through 2022 and construction through most of 2023. Al-Jawad Pike and Tricarico on the project together for approximately 18–24 months. No indicators of value-engineering in the coverage. The project reads as executed to intent.