The Thin Red Line Prada as patron of avant-garde architecture

During the glory days of the Renaissance, Italian merchant families played their roles as great patrons of architecture. The immense fortunes of the Medici family enabled them to build incredible monuments such as the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi. Rival families such as the Borgias and Sforzas erected monuments in an effort to outdo each other, thereby transforming the city states of Florence and Venice into crucibles of culture. More than five centuries later, another Italian is methodically forging a new architectural legacy for today.

Miuccia Prada has been on a worldwide building spree. In the past five years, she has systematically commissioned the world’s leading architects to create a string of spectacular buildings around the globe. The first shockwave was the Prada Soho store designed by über-architect Rem Koolhaas. The super-hyped, much delayed, $40 million store opened to much fanfare in the spring of 2002. It is filled to the rafters with state-of-the-art technological wizardry such as radio frequency identification tags, liquid crystal electro-optic fitting rooms and an omniscient loyalty card/database system that tracks past purchases and makes recommendations for new ones. The store contains a striking space called the Wave, which multitasks as a wooden staircase, performance amphitheater and product display system. On certain evenings, the store transforms into an avant-garde film theater. It is here where Koolhaas deftly subverts consumerism and high culture as he blurs the line between the two defining activities of the modern age.

Fast forward to June 2003. The San Francisco store, also designed by Rem Koolhaas is scrapped as the global economy continues to grind to a halt. The dot-com bust scratches off the city by the bay as a world city worthy of one of Prada’s superstores. Construction of the Los Angeles store forges ahead, but the real hotbed is Tokyo. Just last month, Prada unveiled a new store in the city’s Aoyama district, an area filled with architectural monuments to luxury retail brands. Prada Tokyo is a six-story crystalline jewel designed by Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. The pair has been well known and respected within the industry for their work in their home country. Yet only recently have they attained broader recognition, beginning with their design of London’s Tate Modern museum, a former turbine factory on the banks of the Thames.

The Tokyo store is distinctly different from New York’s temple to technology. In fact, it feels much like a polar opposite. The building’s interiors seem more biomorphic than high-tech. The architects deploy powdery smooth white surfaces that curve throughout, rubbery silicone fixtures reminiscent of ligaments and fur-covered fiberglass display racks. It appears as if you’ve happened upon the remains of a wooly mammoth stuffed with the newest clothes from the runways of Milan. The building-as-living-organism theme continues at night, when the entire building glows and pulsates via a supremely choreographed lighting system designed by Derivative, a Canadian special effects company. It is both frightening and fascinating at the same time, as you realize that a building like this can only exist in Tokyo.

The building cost an astounding $85 million to build, more than double the record-breaking figure of $40 million that the company spent on the Soho store. It is amazing that Prada continues to forge ahead with its building program, even in the tentative atmosphere of today’s luxury retail industry. The company’s annual net profits have fallen from $59 million in 2001 to $32 million last year. But in Japan, where a decade-long recession has not shown signs of slowing down consumer culture, Prada’s profits are still at a healthy $3.3 million. The luxury group equates the ambitious architecture to a grand advertising campaign. The building program was part of their plan of reinvigorating the brand and creating a new kind of fashion retailing environment.

The idea of using bold-faced architects to generate hype and increase sales volume was not invented by Prada. In the 1980s, Alessi, the Italian manufacturer of stainless steel household goods commissioned the world’s top architects to create several product lines. It was enormously successful, creating such ubiquitous icons of product design as the Michael Graves tea kettle and the Philippe Starck juicer. Just this year, Alessi has launched another collection of household products, this time with architecture’s new wave. Jean Nouvel, Morphosis, Kazuyo Sejima and a host of other younger architects have done their takes on Alessi’s new coffee and tea services. Even non-luxury brands have caught on the trend, with companies like Target employing superstar designers like Starck to pitch their wares.

The results of Prada’s gamble on haute couture architecture will only reveal itself in the coming years. Global tourism is at an all-time low, but Prada has successfully stationed its main outposts in two of the world’s indefatigable shopping meccas, New York and Tokyo. Fortunately for the Italian retailer, more and more Americans have been vacationing and shopping at home since 9/11. Japan has also been fairly unaffected by the SARS epidemic. Aside from the cancellation of the San Francisco store, Prada’s empire building campaign remains on schedule. There is a good chance that Prada will weather the current retail storm and continue to stay above its competitors. Yet whatever becomes of the luxury retail industry, the company has already made an indelible mark on our cultural history.

Fashion and architecture are disciplines that are diametrically opposed. The former is intrinsically ephemeral, as this season’s collection will undoubtedly be discarded and replaced in a matter of months. In choosing to create architecture, Miuccia Prada has chosen to construct a more permanent legacy, one that may leave a more enduring mark on our collective consciousness. She has raised the cultural stakes and established her supremacy once again as an innovator for the rest to follow. Long live the queen.