Destabilization: Prada Transformer
The fashion industry is based on change: steady, predictable change. Twice a year the vast network of designers, retailers, manufacturers, critics and shoppers holds its collective breath to find out what comes next. If fashion is to be read beyond that sense of manufactured anticipation, the fashion designer must harness the incessantly cyclical system to fuel an ongoing exploration that expands the borders of the field while questioning its very assumptions. Prada has attempted just that: to create an approach, at once intellectual and contradictory, that perpetually produces newness while simultaneously investigating the limitations of the system. The goal is to embrace all the illogical constraints of the fashion industry — never to retreat behind the label of ‘artist’ — and to explore the way in which a designer can create theory through practice. To find alternative perspectives, an essential component of that exploration has been to seek collaborators outside of the fashion world and find inspiration in architecture, art, film and new media. Of those collaborations, perhaps none have been so generative, nor irreverent, as the work between Prada and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). One of the world’s foremost architects, OMA founder Rem Koolhaas, is also one of its greatest skeptics, pointing out the discrepancy between the “acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture.” Prada and OMA — along with OMA’s binary opposite, the think-tank AMO — have joined forces on an ever-widening array crossmedia ventures, from stores and tempo-
rary environments to museums, exhibitions, films, websites and product design. If one feature of OMA/AMO’s work for Prada is to question the inherent stability of architecture, the Prada Transformer may be the apotheosis of that interrogation. The Transformer defies the basic tenets of gravity, stasis, orientation and location. Designed to accommodate four different public programs, the entire tetrahedron-shaped pavilion flips over after each phase and reconfigures for a new use: the ceiling of one exhibition becomes the floor of the next and the wall of the one after that…and so on. Each floor plan is especially shaped for its content: Waist Down, a film festival, an art exhibition and a special closing event. The Prada Transformer, notes Koolhaas, “is a dynamic organism, as opposed to a static object that arbitrarily fits a program.” What better place to situate a dynamic organism than at the center of one the largest, most vital cities on earth; the Seoul metropolitan area is home to almost 25 million people and growing. Further accentuating the frisson between the fast and the slow, the Transformer rests on the front lawn of the traditional 16th Century Gyeonghui Palace, one of the treasures of Korean Culture. “Architecture can’t do anything that the culture doesn’t,” Koolhaas remarks, but rarely does the form of a building so perfectly match both the content it is designed to contain and the frenetic culture from which it rises. The architecture is literally wrenched from its foundations and with the lumbering movements of an awakened giant, learns to roll with the punches.
렘 쿨하스는 트랜스포머가 “내용을 강제적으로 끼워 맞추는 고정된 형체가 아니 라 동적인 유기체다”라고 설명한다. 서울은 세계에서 가장 거대하고 생기 넘치는 도시 중 하나이다. 광역 총인구가 2천5백만에 근접하고 지금도 끊임없이 확장하 는 서울은 이 동적인 유기체를 설치하기에 더없이 완벽한 배경이 될 것이다. 트랜 스포머는 4백 년 역사를 자랑하는 한국의 전통문화유산 경희궁 앞뜰에 자리를 잡 으면서 빠름과 느림의 대비가 전달하는 전율을 최대화할 것이다.
렘 쿨하스는 “문화가 하지 않는 것을 건축이 할 수는 없다”고 말한다. 그
러나 내부에 포함될 내용은 물론 주변에 바쁘게 돌아가는 문화에 이토록 완벽하 게 어울리는 건축물을 실제로 찾기는 쉽지않다. 트랜스포머를 통해 건축은 그 바 탕에서 뿌리를 뽑고 잠에서 깨어난 거인처럼 서서히 전진하기 시작할 것이다.