When Gordon Kipping heard the Issey Miyake flagship in Tribeca was closing on Friday after 24 years on Hudson Street, he remembered when even the first lease renewal had felt like a shock. “I was like, What? You’re keeping it? ” he told me this week. “Fashion boutiques don’t last that long.” But it had lasted that long with its thin titanium panels flitting over the ceiling and pouring down the cast-iron columns: a conceptual “tornado” dreamed up by Miyake, sketched out by Frank Gehry, and made real by Kipping, then Gehry’s protegé and now a professor at Columbia. The design outlived Gehry by a week and Miyake by three years — a small miracle by today’s cycles of retail turnover.

Kipping was Gehry’s teaching assistant before he was tapped for the unusual project. “Gehry called and sai

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