Shinya Watanabe
Date 05/05/2003
Capitalism and the City: Prada SOHO
Shinya's View: UNDO, the spell of power and how to develop myself
Rem Koolhaas denies the categorization. He has shown his radical multi talent as an architect, author, traveler, designer, professor, economist, sociologist and so on.
In the interview, he said "In my own mind, I am as much a writer as an architect". (Rem Koolhaas Builds) The book titled "S, M, L, XL," is a wander inside of Koolhaas's mind. The essentials are in a state of visual and textual collision, and the real and the virtual are equally important. "I have always had a psychological thing of wanting to recreate or destroy," Koolhaas says. "The book was an initial way of examining what we are doing and have been doing. It was also a deliberate suspension of the office to make a new beginning."(Rem Koolhaas Builds)
In his architecture, there is a sharp intelligence which refers to the system
of capitalism. For him, escalator becomes the tool to generate money, and the
metaphor of the expanding city. Prada SOHO is one of the zeniths of his style.
His 2000 manifesto, the Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, featured his
dazzling essay on the mall-style developments that he calls "junkspace."
For him, shopping mall is a junk, and the salesperson in the Prada SOHO is “Prada
Army” (Project for Prada) He is thoroughly cynical to the system of capitalism.
China Central TV (CCTV)
For him, even Manhattan is conservative city. He refused to join the competition
of new World Trade Center, and gracefully won the competition of CCTV in China.
China Central TV, $650 million television broadcast center in Beijing, will
open for the 2008 Olympics. About the World Trade Center competition, he said
in the speech at Columbia in February, was all about looking backward, while
the Chinese government was looking forward. (Post Prada) Also in the interview
when he won the competition of CCTV, he said that after the terrorism, the United
States lost former passion. So far, he noticed the United States, but from now
onward, he wants to shift the attention to Communism country. (Casa Brutus)
After this interview, he left to Moscow to do research for the former communism
architecture. His intelligence and radical ideas are outstanding in the current
scene of architecture.
Rem Koolhaas was born in Rotterdam in 1944, at the close of World War II. He was the eldest of three children, and his sensibility was first created by that landscape of destruction. "Ruins everywhere and really poor," he says. (Vogel)
His father, Anton Koolhaas, edited a leftist newspaper that supported the Indonesian struggle for independence. When the movement of independence prevailed, Anton Koolhaas was one of the few Dutchmen who were welcome in the new state. He was invited by the government of Indonesia to become their cultural director. Rem moved to Indonesia and spent four years in an exotic environment before moving back to the Netherlands.
Rem began his career as a journalist with Haagse Post in The Hague, and then, he started screen writing both in the Netherlands and Hollywood.
By 1968, he attended the radical school of architecture, the Architecture Association School in London. After the graduation, he received a Harkness Fellowship for research in the United States. He studied at Cornell University for a year, and then became a visiting Fellow at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies leaded by Peter Eisenman in New York. He got a huge influence from New York City and progenitor.
“…I was interested in the Russian Constructivist Ivan Leonidov, in Mies van der Rohe, and in American architecture of the 1920s and 1930s.” (Conversation P57)
While in New York, he wrote Delirious New York, retroactive manifesto for Manhattan. It was published in 1978 and acclaimed as a classic text on modern architecture and society. It made him famous even before he had realized any buildings. Also he has described the book as “an exploration of the culture of congestion.”
At this stage, Rem Koolhaas wanted to progress from theory to practical application and decided to return to Europe. In London in 1975, he created, with Elia and Zoe Zenghelis, and his wife Madelon Vriesendrop, the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), whose objectives were the definition of new types of relations -theoretical as well as practical- between architecture and the contemporary cultural situation. Since 1978, He got several orders in Holland, such as the Extension of The Hague's Parliament, so he decided to open an agency in Rotterdam which centralized OMA's activities. At the same time, he created the Grosztstadt Foundation, an independent structure controlling the cultural activities, such as exhibitions and publications. About publication, OMA published the oversize book S, M, L, XL in 1996.
Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large
When OMA fell apart financially, Koolhaas embarked on a course of personal redefinition,
seeking, he says, "a replenishment of themes and issues." A crucial
step was accepting a teaching position at Harvard in 1995, on condition that
he would not have to teach design. Instead, he would direct one small graduate
seminar a year on a subject about which he wished to learn more himself. As
the first topic in the seminar, he chose to examine the Pearl River Delta in
China, which includes Hong Kong and the area to its north. This region is rapidly
urbanizing, and it will triple in population, to 36 million people, in the next
20 years. The subject of his next seminar was shopping. (Rem Koolhaas Builds)
Public Library in Seattle
In 1999, he won the competition of Public Library, which costs $156 million in Seattle. In the year 2000, he won Pritzker Prize, the most honorable award of contemporary architecture. In 2001, Prada SOHO was opened, and in Decenber 2002, he won the competition of CCTV.
Also Koolhaas has had a hard time to realize his project because of the enormous cost of the projects. Because of this extremely high budget, the realized plans are only slightly more than 10%. In November 2002, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art halted a project that he was to build there. Also the Guggenheim Las Vegas, a soaring exhibition hall he designed for the Venetian Resort-Hotel-Casino, has been closed indefinitely less than two years after it opened. On April 14, 2003, The Whitney Museum of American Art announced that it has scrapped its plans to build a $200 million ambitious expansion by Koolhaas. (Vogel)
In many ways, he stands at the top of the capitalism.
Capitalism and the City: Prada SoHo
“SoHo is perhaps the most dramatic territory to document the changes in the
city," Koolhaas says. "Ten years ago, this entire domain was a cultural
domain or an industrial domain, and now virtually every ground floor is commercial
space." (Post Prada) Koolhaas has finalized this commercial wave by $40
million Prada store which opened 2001 in Soho.
Prada SoHo
At the entrance of the shop, Koolhaas designed an amphitheater-style space for public events. The space includes video display equipment that folds out of a ramp made of zebrawood that dips into the basement section of the store's space.
Especially the changing room design is outstanding. The concept was to eliminate the “hostile environment” in typical changing rooms. To that end, the OMA designed a glass door using SGG technology. Liquid crystal film inside the glass becomes opaque when an electric current through the film is cut off. Three lighting options are available inside the rooms. Koolhaas also wanted video monitors next to mirrors to show a person's front and rear view at once. The software for Prada SoHo senses the rate of motion in an image. As the rate of motion increases, so does the delay of the video signal. This means that with little motion within the image, the display is near realtime. But if a person turns for the camera, the monitor does not show the spin until the person has come around to their original position, where they can watch it.
In the project for Prada SoHo, Koolhaas calls the salespersons “Prada Army”. The first wallpaper photo was taken by Andreas Gursky, and the shoes corner is called Shoe Theater. To get the aura of the world, he puts media stage, which is 14 video projections, and broadcast “peep show”, the world news and some images of the fashion show. In his diagram, service and the aura is a different vector. Atlas, big stores and catalogues are on the side of aura, and the database is on the side of service. (Project for Prada)
It is not practical at all, but Koolhaas' design made the store a tourist stop, as a part of the mission. Hipness has a very high return on investment. Prada has reaped untold amounts of essentially free advertising from the SoHo store.
Commerce button at the cashier of Prada
His position is such as capitalistic cynicism. Sometimes in the lecture, he uses the logos says YES, which is made by yen, dollar, and euro. (Asada) Also this is called Commerce Button, and used at the cashier of Prada. If you say no to the world economy as an idealist, it does not change the reality of the world. Rather, pretend to assert YES, and jump into the reality of the world will be the beginning of the game. The threat which is sustained by the power of capitalism itself shows the overwhelming destruction against the avant-gardes and traditionalist in the former generations. Also this threat influences the new generation who tries to be radical at the place where the radical negativism seems denied.
The dynamism of the city as a world is the reality. He thinks the architects who do not concern this dynamism and talk about the beauty of the architecture are just out fashioned idealists.
New EU Flag Idea by Koolhaas
The “YES” logo design has a similarity with another Koolhaas’s design. This is a new design of European Union flag by Koolhaas. This new flag uses 45 vertical stripes, taking colors from every existing member's national flag. The logo - designed in response to a request by European Commission president Romano Prodi to find ways of rebranding the EU - represents Europe's "diversity and unity", according to Koolhaas. (BBC)
The pole of BBC shows that more than 80% people are against this idea, but this design point out the similarity of European culture in a radical way. The person who realized the similarity of European design as a stripe was Daniel Buren, and Koolhaas expand this similarity to the flame of European culture. Also about the “YES”, Yen, Euro, Doller and Pound are only the signs which signify currency unit in the world, so he has comprehended the similarity of language and currency system by his broad knowledge and traveling experiences.
Shinya’s View: UNDO, the spell of power and how to develop myself
In the chapter of Globalization, Koolhaas wrote his favorite topic to discuss, the United Nations building in New York City.
“According to myth, Wallen Harrison was the “bad” corporate architect ? if not simply a hack ? who stole Le Corbusier’s design for the United Nations building (1947-50) and made it mediocre reality. This myth was sufficiently established to prevent anyone from taking a serious look at the building itself. But a closer inspection of the dry theoretical pretension of Le Corbusier’s proposition and the polymorphously perverse professionalism with which Harrison realized it suggested, if not a reversal of the myth, a rewriting: the UN was a building that an American could never have thought and a European could never have built. It was a collaboration, not only between two architects, but between cultures; a cross-fertilization between Europe and America produced a hybrid that could not have exited without their mating, however unenthusiastic.“(S,M,L,XL p363)
Also when a clone of Mies’s pavilion was being built in Barcelona in 1986, Koolhaas said “How fundamentally did it differ from Disney?”(S,M,L,LL P49) About the difficulty of cross cultural design in Japan, he says,
“Dilemma if European architect building in Japan: Should the project be “as Western as possible? Is it just another export like a van Gogh, a Mercedes, or a Vuitton bag? Or should it reflect the fact that it exists in Japan? “(S, M L, LL P80)
All of these questions break out from the system of capitalism and globalization. However, to denounce the capitalism inside of the capitalistic city is ridiculous. It is ridiculous such as to join the anti-globalization movement in Genova by globalized transport system.
Especially in New York City, it is almost impossible to resist the power of
capital. If the United Nations did some action toward the United States, it
is impossible to be free from the pressure of American corporations. That is,
the action of the United Nations (UN), do becomes UNDO because of the spell
of capitalism. These are all related to the history that Rockefeller family
donated the land to the UN, and also the name of Manhattan, which comes from
Manahachtanienk, meaning “the island where we all got drunk”. The beginning
of Manhattan was a fraud contract with alcohol between western colonists and
the Native Americans.
"Angelus Novus” Paul Klee 1920
What I learned from Koolhaas is to develop myself with cynical point of view.
It is such as the angel of history by Paul Klee. About this painting, Walter
Benjamin says,
“The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”(Benjamin)
Probably, Koolhaas has made his own identity in the storm of progress. In this process, the person can form their own identity. For me, recent storm in the United States was too strong, but I cannot close my wings. I hope that this storm would make me my own identity.
Works Cited
Bingham, Robert. Open City The Only Woman He’s Ever Left Number Six
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Bullock, and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002
Brutus Casa What’s happening in China now? March 2003 Tokyo: Magazine
House
Czerniak, Julia. CASE: Downsview Park Toronto Munich: Prestel Verlag,
2001
Koolhaas, Rem. Conversations with Students New York: Princeton Architectural
Press, 1996
Koolhaas, Rem. Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping Taschen, 2002
Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York New York: The Monacelli Press, 1978
Lucan, Jacques. OMA Rem Koolhaas Architecture 1970-1990 New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1991
O.M.A. Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau. Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large
New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995
OMA/AMO. Projects for Prada part 1 Fondazione Prada Edizonioni Milano,
Nava Milano spa divisione press, 2001
Rem Koolhaas Harvard Project on the City. Mutations Bordeaux: ACTAR,
2000
The Hyatt Foundation. The Pritzker Architecture Prize 2000 Rem Koolhaas
The Hyatt Foundation
Asada, Akira. Arata Isozaki and Rem Koolhaas Asahi Newspaper 03/06/
2001
Bernstein, Fred A. Post Prada, A Design Star Slims Down The New York
Times 04/24/2003
Buruma, Ian. Don't be fooled - China is not squeaky clean 06/30/2002
The Guardian
Flanagan, Barbara. Currents: Architecture; Rem Koolhaas's American Hurrah
The New York Times 06/24/1999
Lubow, Arthur. Rem Koolhaas Builds The New York Times 07/09/2000
Muschamp, Herbert. Critic’s Notebook; The Premiere of a Koolhaas Fantasy
The New York 04/08/1999
Vogel, Carol. Whitney Scraps Expansion Plans The New York Times 04/15/2003
BBC News Down with EU stars, run up stripes 05/08/2002 BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1974721.stm
(C) Copyright Shinya Watanabe