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