PRADA reinvents shopping

The Prada Store in New York City is triptych and peep show – touch screen, magic mirror, switchable glass. As a genetically-modified museum, shopping mall, disco and maybe even Eros center, the Prada "epicenter" sets out to be the experimental prototype of the 21st-century store. It is a mixture of luxury, technology and manipulated space, a suspended city as architects call it.

The Prada Store is not only a tourist attraction, attracting crowds that eluded the Guggenheim SoHo when it occupied the same location, it is also a metaphor, an architectural abstraction of the American city, and a laboratory for the study of merchandising as a philosophy of communication.

Located in the former SoHo Guggenheim at the corner of Prince and Broadway, the Prada Store is designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). For two years, I’ve seen the sign with a Prada logo and the words "opening soon" on the building, and like everyone else, waited for the phantom project to finish. The store finally opened just before Christmas 2001.

The Prada project represents the most sublime coupling of fashion and architecture ever achieved: Fashion reached out to architecture and architecture responded with hype. Applying his theories of critical commercialism, Koolhaas has reinvented the conventional fashion store.

I was able to view some of the approved details of the New York store when the first sketches were "leaked" at the Milan Salon Mobile in spring last year. What caught my attention then was the dressing room doors. Made from electrically-charged glass, it showed how clear glass transforms to opaque at the flick of a switch. I realized, at that point, that retail design will never be the same again.

With my New Yorker friend Mario Tuason, I went to see the Prada Store one Saturday in Spring. We weren’t the only ones who were there for a look-see. In the store, which looked like a supermarket cum pavilion hall, no one carried a shopping bag. People were just thrilled to move around trying the latest gadgets.

In Koolhaas’ Harvard Guide, he theorized that shopping works best when it insinuates itself into another life activity. That is, stores in hospitals, museums, airports, even churches make more money than stores without such "cover."

While all this was going on, a question popped in my eager mind. Was Koolhaas successful in creating a shopping venue camouflaged as a shrine to high architecture? Or was he just giving in to his ambivalence about commercialism?

Presumably, Prada hopes to get back the US$40 million it funneled through Koolhaas. Whether the Prada epicenters in Los Angeles and San Francisco (which are still on the drawing board) will get built will reveal the company’s direction.

Koolhaas has indeed made New York the epicenter of fashion once more through his newest design baby which opened with a bang. At the opening of the Prada store, paparazzi chased Rudy Giuliani, Kevin Spacey and Miuccia Prada. Thousands of revelers drank free champagne and nibbled hors d’oeuvres from the fashionable Mercer Kitchen. It may be that New Yorkers were ready to forget their troubles, ready to romp in "real" architecture.

Shop Or Theater?

The Prada site is a neat rectangle in a solid, red-brick factory building. The space is long and narrow with a single entrance at each end. With cast-iron columns every four meters or so, the space could have imitated the great shopping arcades of 19th century London, Milan and Paris.

Only a master of design could object to the thing of which he is a part. It is a shop that is reluctant to be a shop, high architecture that dares not speak its name. Merchandise is assiduously downplayed. It is put in a lift, under the stairs, squirreled away in a remote basement sales area disguised as a stockroom. Or it is placed in metal cages hanging off tracks that allow it to be trundled to the back of the shop when not required. Or it is upstaged by sharing shelf space with vivid video screens showing Prada "inspirations," passages from Italian art-house movies rather than brand propaganda.

The south wall is covered with milky plastic, which diffuses the view through nine large windows, and the north wall with billboard-like wallpaper, Koolhaas has chosen to emphasize the linearity of the space. Rather than giving the room the rhythm of an arcade, he has opted for a single focus: a giant depression created where the zebrawood floor swoops seductively down into the basement. Although it is possible to walk the length of the store at street level, skirting the northern edge of the space, the crater beckons.

Overhead, a series of cages – which at Studio 54 would have contained go-go dancers – hold merchandise. Hung from motorized tracks, they can be repositioned at will. Like many of Koolhaas’ interventions, this is a lot of technology for a fairly mundane purpose. Also hanging from the ceiling is a sculpture that looks like it is made of thousands of silk stockings, meant to conceal some 320 kg. of sound equipment.

Handbags are displayed on a continuous steel shelf, cantilevered from the cab’s interior walls, so customers can shop until they drop to the lower level. Grotto-like compared to the block-long expanse of the ground level, the lower level has dropped ceilings, multi-media alcoves and compressed rows of hanging clothes. Downstairs is about seeing, touching, and ultimately buying.

I found the lower level to be a big disappointment. The merchandise is stuffed so densely, hardly anyone can move. Worse, because it extends under a lobby next door to the shop, the basement is a kind of junk space, with rooms that lack clear boundaries. In one of these rooms, merchandise is displayed on a row of sliding shelves that create the feeling of entering a stockroom. Indeed, a glass door opens to the real stockroom and there isn’t much difference.

Flat screens and other gizmos – the output of Koolhaas’ Prada-funded exploration into shopping technology – are everywhere. One seating area is upholstered in a medical gel thought to be especially comfortable because its density is equal to that of the human body.

Breakthrough technology, delivered by OMA’s alter ego, Architecture Research Office (AMO), rules the experience below. AMO injected the latest high-tech gadgetry into the least public space – the dressing room. The customer depresses a pedal on the floor that turns the transparent glass partition into a translucent shield.

Aspecial micro-climate system will heat the dressing rooms on demand, so December customers can slip comfortably into May fashions. And because at times, it can be irksome to pull one’s Prada slippers and scamper out to hail a salesperson, there is a hotline from each booth directly to the inventory room.

Touch screens allow access to a database with information about product availability and alternatives. A plasma screen, embedded in an ordinary mirror, displays a delayed video image of the space recorded by a camera on the opposite wall. The shopper literally views himself coming and going, transforming the action of trying on clothes in a 360-degree solo performance in time and space, the inverse of exhibitionism encouraged by the wave. It’s not just shopping, it’s theater.

As an architect, I find myself asking if the power of Prada going beyond the retail concept and adopting a double-edged strategy is an advantage. True, the less a store resembles a conventional shop, the less it narrows the imagination. But the more it engages life beyond retail, the more it colonizes life, the more subtly it extends the empire of the brand. Thus, the store succeeds at being the quasi-public space Koolhaas has intended it to be.

What leaves me still a little perplexed are Koolhaas’ declarations – that shopping has become the framework of our lives and that our shopping compulsions become more intense and lucrative in spaces that are ostensibly devoted to another main function, such as museum malls or airport malls. Prada and Koolhaas have set out to turn shopping into a cultural experience, they say. But many of us think that it already is a cultural experience. I hope they will not try too hard to be cool in an old-fashioned way, and will instead address the new climate. Let people come and harangue the elegant audiences about politics.

Koolhaas has indeed struck a blow against blankness. The SoHo Prada is branded as an act of decisive resistance. Theater, worship, fashion, architecture, design and shopping are now merged into one complex. Koolhaas has created a high-end emporium for a high-end merchandiser. Irreverent and expensive, it is the architectural equivalent of a Prada handbag.