Embracing openness
Scholars of the future puzzling out the differences between New York and Los Angeles will have, among other evidence, the cities' dueling Prada stores. Two and a half years after the opening of Prada SoHo, the first of several "epicenter stores," the Italian fashion house is about to open a serene, mint green and dark wood 24,000-square-foot boutique Friday on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.
The stores are both based on and defined against each other.
"What interested us most was to have a degree of continuity and a degree of difference," says Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, the 2000 Pritzker Prize winner whose Office for Metropolitan Architecture, based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, designed the shops. "What I think is so beautiful about L.A. is the lack of visible pressure. We tried to be a little more quiet or subtle than in New York."
Architect Ole Scheeren, a lanky and effusive young OMA partner, was in charge of the project, and OMA's Eric Chang, who also worked on Prada SoHo, was the project architect. Scheeren says the Beverly Hills store is about juxtaposing the pristine and the mundane. "It's a search for a more informal environment for shopping," he says, "so the customers can really interact with the merchandise."
Both stores use glass that appears to mist up at the touch of a button to become opaque. Valuable in a dressing room -- allowing shoppers to disrobe, dress and model their selections without leaving it -- the trick glass also changes the apparent size of rooms, creating vastness or intimacy as walls form or melt away.
And both stores are somewhere between boutique and conceptual art piece: Like much of what comes from Koolhaas, they were heavily thought out.
Unlike the L.A. store, which was begun from scratch, the New York Prada was built into the former Guggenheim SoHo. To reflect the history of the building, and of its neighborhood, the space was designed "to perform a kind of double act," as Scheeren puts it: It's a store with a cultural space that has played host to dance performances, lectures and the TriBeCa Film Festival.
The themes of the Rodeo Drive store, the young Dutchman says, are more about California's openness, its horizontal culture, its embrace of technology.
So the third, top floor is mostly open, to allow in as much natural light as possible, along with views of the sky.
The second floor is lined with a sponge-like material, to give a futuristic California feel.
- Prada Enters a New Frontier of Retailing Apr 16, 2001
- Skirting the border between art, fashion Jul 15, 2006
- Store Design May Be Bold, but It Doesn't Fit Quite Right Jan 18, 2002
