Projects for Prada

Unique view of architecture and design

With his inimitable style and unique view of architecture and design in the international urban milieu, Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas presents his theories and designs for Prada stores in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Tokyo.

Architectural plans

After musing over ideas about branding, expansion, tourism, and workspace, Koolhaas launches into the specifics of his plans for the stores, including an exploration of the expanded and architecturally integrated role of information technology.

Maps, photographs, digital imaging, collages, and models

With each store presented in a discrete section full of maps, photographs, digital imaging, collages, and models, Koolhaas's complex working methods and thought processes are revealed layer by layer. Indefinite expansion represents a crisis . . . it spells the end of the brand as a creative enterprise. But expansion can also be used for a strategy of permanent redefinition of the brand. By introducing two kinds of stores - the typical and the unique - the epicenter store becomes a device that renews the brand by counteracting and destabilizing any received notion of what Prada is, does, or will become. - Rem Koolhaas Museums, libraires, airports, hospitals, and schools are becoming increasingly indistinguishable from shopping. Their adoption of retail for survival has unleashed an enormous wave of commercial entrapment that has transformed museumgoers, researchers, travellers, patients, and students into customers. What if the strategy were to reverse the equation, so that customers were no longer identified as consumers, but recognized as researchers, students, patients, museum goers? What if the shopping experience were not one of impoverishment, but of enrichment?

Rem Koolhaas

Rem Koolhaas was born in Rotterdam in 1944. In 1975 he founded the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), which has become one of today's most renowned and radical architecture firms. Koolhaas is the winner of several international awards, including the Pritzker Architecture Prize 2000.
Rem Koolhaas is the author of "Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Mahattan" and "S,M,L,XL". As a professor of architecture and urban design at Harvard University, Rem Koolhaas has been an instrumental director of "Project on the City", an ongoing analysis of contemporary urban landscapes, part of which was published in the recent book "Mutations".

Projects for Prada Part 1 by Rem Koolhaas

Publisher: Fondazione Prada
ISBN: 8887029180

More information

Architecture Main Page
Mutations by Rem Koolhaas