Projects for Prada Part 1

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, and San Francisco in this new book, "Projects for Prada Part 1." Beginning with the idea that "Indefinite expansion represents a crisis...it spells the end of the brand as a creative enterprise," Koolhaas suggests as an alternative to this dreary result that "...expansion can also be used for a permanent redefinition of the brand...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." From this introduction, Koolhaas proceeds to consider general ideas of brand, expansion, tourism, and workspace, before launching into the specifics of his plans and designs for the three locations, each of which are presented in distinct sections. The book concludes with the plans he developed for the use of technology in the stores; expanding the usual definitions of architecture and design to include information technology. This volume is chock full of images: photographs, drawings, graphs, charts, all of the visual information that Koolhaas has become known for through such books as "S,M,L,XL," and "Mutations." In "Projects for Prada Part 1," his working methods and thought processes for this unique design job are presented with remarkable depth.

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