Product Description

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. 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. 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
Edited by Rem Koolhaas, Jens Hommert & Michael Kubo. Foreword by Miuccia Prada & Patrizio Bertelli.

6.5 x 8.25 in.
575 color illustrations

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1337427 in Books
• Published on: 2001-07
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .3 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 600 pages

From Amazon.com
Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas's firm, OMA, and Italian fashion house Prada have a lot in common: They both existed for years before they became the pets of the American moneyed elite in the mid to late 1990s. They both eschew conventional notions of what's elegant or pleasing to the eye--Koolhaas's designs often look like post-industrial origami, and Prada's like uniforms for a really chic neo-Fascist army. Most of all, they're both poised for a transition from designerati darlings to global household words.

For all of these reasons, one supposes it's fitting that Miuccia Prada sought out Koolhaas and associates to design three new "epicenter" stores for the company--in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco--and to create Prada's Web site. They've documented that collaboration in this hefty, molto stile paperback that illustrates how they've rethought the shopping experience in ways both high-flown (in NYC, a shoe section that converts to a theater for performances and other "non-shopping events"; an electronic customer-identification/service system that either promises or threatens to track shoppers and their "needs" more closely than the FBI's) and cleverly common-sensical (dressing rooms with simultaneous, digitally-produced front, back and side-views, phones for requesting another size, and walls you can shift from translucent--so you can model for your friends--to frosted, for privacy).

Design-wise, the stores say "Koolhaas" as we know him so far--the facade of the San Francisco one, for example, is all perforated-looking metallic grids, and elsewhere there are shiny, swooping ceilings and walls, plus glass elevators that hover among glass floors like huge floating rooms. But most of what we see in this book is funky, moody photography of the sites' models, thickly populated by white figurines with the same unsmiling hauteur of Prada's sexy real-life runway models (not enough of which are featured here, by the way). The book's minimal text, though boldly designed, strikes a strange note somewhere between the usual half-cryptic semio-speak of Koolhaas's other books, and the oppressive language of corporate self-promotion ("Our ambition is to capture attention and then, once we have it, to hand it back to the customer."). But then, isn't that as it should be? With both Koolhaas and Prada, you often suspect that their recent stranglehold over American fashionistas and theory-queens alike is of great amusement to them. Between these pages, the joke once again might be on us, but who can't take a little joke when it's as stylishly presented as it is here?--Timothy Murphy

From the Inside Flap
Indefinite expansion represents a crisis: in the typical case it spells the end of the brand as a creative enterprise and the beginning of the brand as purely financial enterprise.

Expansion can be measured on two levels: quantity and quality.

On the level of numbers, there are simply more and more Prada stores; on the level of scale, Prada is about tot launch a number of special epicenter stores.

The danger of the large number is repetition: each additional store reduces aura and contributes to a sense of familiarity. The danger of the larger scale is the Flagship syndrome: a megalomaniac accumulation of the obvious that eliminates the last elements of surprise and mystery that cling to the brand, imprisoning it in a 'definitive' identity.

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. The epicenter store functions as a conceptual window: a medium to broadcast future directions that positively charges the larger mass of typical stores. (REM KOOLHAUS)

About the Author
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, and the winner of several international awards, including the Pritzker Architecture Prize 2000. He 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, 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".