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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In 1948, Frank Lloyd Wright redesigned a home-furnishings shop on Maiden Lane in San Francisco for Lillian and Vere Morris. His plan called for a multistory interior space but no traditional display windows, which worried the Morrises, and Wright assured them that he was thinking of their commercial needs. "We are not going to dump your beautiful merchandise on the street," he wrote, "but create an arch-tunnel of glass, into which the passers-by may look and be enticed. As they penetrate further into the entrance, seeing the shop inside . . . they will suddenly push open the door, and you've got them. . . . Like a mousetrap!" Rem Koolhaas has given Prada more or less the same advice. Koolhaas doesn't think much of the old modernist idea of transparency, which says that you put goods in big, open windows and let them speak for themselves. He also believes that if Prada is to survive what seems to be overexpansion it can't keep building those mint-green stores everywhere. Koolhaas, like Wright, has good marketing instincts, and after studying Prada's problems, he told the company that it should start selling architecture along with the handbags.
Koolhaas has suggested that to avoid "the Flagship syndrome: a megalomaniac accumulation of the obvious," Prada should create a series of "epicenters," or super-sized stores, each a distinct work of design. This seems sensible enough. A company that has based the aura of its brand on cutting-edge design might be well advised to think in terms of a cutting-edge environment. Alas, however, the first of these new stores, the Prada shop at 575 Broadway, in SoHo, is not a staggering reinvention of the...
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