If you happened to walk down Prince Street in New York’s Nolita neighbourhood these past few years, you probably noticed a new angular structure rising next to the ‘stacked box’ New Museum, completed by Japanese architecture firm SANAA in 2007.

The new tower, designed by OMA in collaboration with Cooper Robertson (now Corgan), was slated to be a separate yet connected extension, doubling the museum’s overall square footage to 120,000 sq ft. After a decade of development, the museum finally reopens this Saturday (21 March). It marks OMA’s first cultural project in the city, completed almost five decades after firm founder Rem Koolhaas published his seminal manifesto, Delirious New York.

'It’s not simply an extension, but a complement, a counterpart,' Koolhaas said in a video address (the Pritzker prize-winning architect was unable to attend a media preview due to a construction site injury). ‘We didn’t want to compete with scale. We interpreted the commission as if there were two parts that were finally united and that would form a single entity.’

While the two halves appear diametrically opposed – one formed as offset rectilinear volumes and the other a cut-crystal form with oblique setbacks – the spatial flow inside is seamless. The bulk of the expansion comprises four floors of galleries, which host an inaugural show titled 'New Humans: Memories of the Future.' These greatly expanded exhibition spaces extend across both buildings, with little indication of whether you're entering the new building or the old. There’s flexibility in how these open floor plates can be segmented and programmed, more than the existing building offered. As New Museum president Lisa Phillips put it, the addition can be thought of as an ‘insurance policy for the future’.

A series of carefully introduced interstitial spaces – an unfolding atrium staircase and a new street-facing plaza – also address the museum’s present and anticipate a future beyond just art-viewing: ‘Museums are the last truly public spaces in our cities,’ OMA New York director Shohei Shigematsu says – platforms for communities to gather and exchange ideas.

The street-facing atrium staircase, for instance, works to connect different groups of visitors, whether they’re browsing the galleries or catching a lecture. As part of the opening exhibition, a fibre artwork by Czech artist Klára Hosnedlová tumbles down four storeys. The three uppermost levels contain artist studios, offices, a 75-seat forum and a set of ‘sky rooms’, all of which comprise what the museum calls its ‘brain’.

One of OMA’s chief challenges was to telegraph the museum’s range of programming to the street; the SANAA-designed building was a ‘stacked pillar of art’, Shigematsu explains. ‘We needed to create a sense of transparency to outwardly communicate the diversity of activity taking place here’.

True to practice for OMA, this was achieved through the strategic configuration of the building’s massing. While it might seem like it’s pulling away from its counterpart, it’s actually making way for the plaza, which will soon be home to an installation by British artist Sarah Lucas.

The considered deployment of exterior cladding and glazing was also critical. Nodding to the metal mesh façade next door, Shigematsu and his team opted for a fine mesh laminated in sheets of glass. When sunlight hits the façade during the day, it takes on a metallic quality but one can still look outside from various vantage points and feel connected to the city. ‘During the day it has a monolithic quality and at night it exposes the anatomy of what’s going on inside,’ Shigematsu says. On long-term view at the intersection of the old and new façades is the site-specific sculpture titled Art Lovers by Tschabalala Self.

Interior finishes are largely kept to a minimum, but there are moments of excitement. The ground-floor restaurant, which will open later this spring, features materials like cork and textured glass. The stairway balustrades are made out of two layers of back-lit metal mesh, painted from behind in the New Museum’s signature green. The colour appears to glow at every turn.

Shigematsu likened the two buildings to a human couple, united yet unique. ‘The two buildings are similar but different,' he says.

The New Museum will open to the public on 21 March 2026 at 235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002

In a press conference on 29 January 2026, Salone del Mobile has unveiled its plans for the fair's 64th edition (21-26 April), most notably announcing a new initiative dedicated to contract furniture and led by Rem Koohlaas and David Gianotten of OMA.

The announcement introduced Salone Contract 2027, which will mark the fair's first foray into the field of contract furniture offering an opportunity to dissect it and create new connection for companies participating in Salone del Mobile. 'Salone Contract is designed to intercept the transformation of a high-potential market segment and translate it into concrete opportunities for the manufacturing industry,' reads a note introducing the initiative.

It's a project that marks a conscious shift for the fair, towards no longer existing solely as a presentation of products but as a 'market-oriented infrastructure' to help participating companies manage the increasingly complex demands of contemporary design.

Salone del Mobile 2026: OMA to introduce Salone Contract

For Salone del Mobile president Maria Porro, it was important to find a partner that could introduce the fair to the contract market in a way that was both practical and scientific, helping dissect what is often considered a murky field.

'Contract is today one of the segments where the most significant transformations are taking place, from an industrial, operational and market perspective,' says Porro. 'The collaboration with Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten of OMA, among the most perceptive observers of the present, represents an opportunity to engage with a strong vision combined with a solid methodological approach.’

'Contract is a segment that relies less on individual products and more on an established ecosystem – one that aligns the design, production, and delivery of both furniture and architecture to create desirable built environments for the long term,' adds Giannotten. 'The growing global significance of the contract segment presents opportunities for industry stakeholders to reinvent themselves, considering not only individual objects but integrated systems.'

For the 2026 fair, Koolhaas and Gianotten will introduce the theme through a dedicated lecture and an international forum that the Salone del Mobile.Milano will curate in collaboration with OMA, as well as a contract-focused pathway that will take visitors across the fair.

'Since the 19th century, world fairs have functioned as experimental grounds where industries project their ambitions, where cultural dialogues are reinvented, and where opportunities for collaboration materialise,' says Koolhaas. 'Today, Salone Contract presents a contemporary iteration of that typology – an arena for examining its relevance and observe how it adapts within an increasingly unstable geopolitical landscape.'

Salone del Mobile 2026 will take place from 21-26 April, Fiera Milano, Rho

You will look long and hard for any OMA/AMO drawings at ‘Diagrams’, the new show at the Fondazione Prada event in Venice, even though it is curated by Rem Koolhaas, the practice’s lead partner. The foundation’s show, which coincides with the Venice Architectural Biennale 2025, does feature one image, amongst nearly 200, of the Scalo Farini masterplan for Milan by the Dutch studio. Other than that small moment, its work is absent from this wide-ranging, frequently stunning, always fascinating exhibition. One might have expected more.

Explore OMA/AMO’s ‘Diagrams’ at the Prada Foundation in Venice

At OMA in the 1980s, Rem Koolhaas and his early colleagues, such as Elia Zenghelis, incorporated the diagram into the wealth of drawing types used by architects to create work. Added to the repertoire of the section, plan and perspective, the diagram puts the focus on the building’s use or programme and how this might suit the user first and create form second. The Seattle Public Library’s wonky stack, for example, emerges from layers of different uses: public spaces on the lower floors, the book stack above, and the building’s admin capping it all. The De Rotterdam resulted from separating out multiple uses in a diagram and then bringing them together in a dramatic aggregated form.

The ‘Diagrams’ show, however, is a wider cultural history of the diagram, beginning in the early Renaissance and coming up to the present day, an expression of OMA’s affinity for the diagram rather than examples of the firm's use of it. An arrangement of troops in Machiavelli’s book, the Libro della arte della guerra (first published in 1521), is probably the oldest work in the exhibition; images of photovoltaic cell efficiency are perhaps the most recent. Koolhaas and fellow curator Giulio Margheri have arranged the historical documents into nine different 'urgencies' – the vital concerns of humanity, such as health, migration, inequality and resources. These themes are given an overview in identical vitrines in the central space on the first floor of the palazzo, with each room off that central space exploring the subject in more varied hangs. The war room, for example, has banked vitrines redolent of, well, a war room.

In previous exhibitions, such as the interesting but uneven ‘Countryside’ at the New York Guggenheim in 2020, Koolhaas included a series of awkward, unpalatable or banal images to prove a wider point. In ‘Diagrams’, these moments are kept to a minimum – interestingly, the ugliest diagrams are in the built environment section – providing not only an engrossing insight into the way humans communicate collective needs to each other, but also exemplars of panache, style and in some cases, beauty.

One of the most striking moments in the show is a series of 16 images by the Black activist and sociologist WEB Du Bois for the Paris Exposition in 1900. Not only do they convey the enormity of the massive social progress made after the abolition of slavery, but they are also remarkably clear and simple, proto-modernist somehow.

There is a longer history to the aesthetic of the diagram, however. Koolhaas also suggests that modernism (and, presumably, modernist architecture) was the rise to aesthetic preeminence of an already existing way of thinking. The diagram, he explains in the catalogue, is 'a form of thinking that almost transcends aesthetic style or period'.

Often, there is a strange combination of absolute bathos to the clarity. In 1869, Charles-Joseph Minard depicted the losses of the French army during Napoleon’s Russian campaign in 1812–13 as a thick black line leaving Paris. As men die on the road to Moscow, the line thins and narrows until it returns to Paris a mere thread. Designers use beauty to convey often ugly things.

There is much to unpack in this wonderful show, curated with sensitivity but also clear admiration for the work selected, born from OMA/AMO’s internal understanding of the power of a good diagram. The thematic organisation highlights the hidden purposes behind the apparently neutral arrangement and display of material in the diagram, as does the focus on authorship. There are clusters of work by Minard and Du Bois, but also others: the economist William Playfair and the cartographer Philippe Rekacewicz, for example. Together, though, this is an absolute must-see if you are visiting Venice for the 2025 biennale.

fondazioneprada.org

Last week, the New Museum, a Manhattan hub for new art and ideas, announced that it will open a 60,000 sq ft expansion in autumn of this year. The building has been designed by international architecture firms OMA (the Office for Metropolitan Architecture) and Cooper Robertson, and its opening will coincide with an inaugural exhibition called New Humans: Memories of the Future.

The New Museum originally opened in 1977 on New York’s Hudson Street; it has since moved and expanded, becoming a renowned space for contemporary art. OMA founder Rem Koolhas and partner Shohei Shigematsu are among the architects to work on the extension, the practice's first public building in New York, which will be named after the late philanthropist Toby Devan Lewis, a long-serving New Museum trustee. It will ‘usher in a new era of possibilities for the New Museum as a vital civic resource for New Yorkers and the global arts community’, said Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis director of the New Museum.

She added that ‘the New Museum has always been a ‘future-facing museum’ – ‘not a place for preserving and recording history, but a place where history is made’. As such, the extension will complement the existing building on the Bowery at Prince Street, which was designed by SANAA, whilst also bringing a new dimension, doubling the museum’s gallery space, improving visitor flow, and creating new venues for artist residencies and public programs. The new building will be a ‘highly connected yet distinct counterpart to the existing museum’s verticality and solidity’, said Shigematsu.

The OMA partner also revealed that the extension will ‘offer horizontally expansive galleries for curatorial variety, open vertical circulation, and a diversity of spaces for gathering, exchange, and creation’. It will include, he said, an outdoor plaza at the ground level, ‘moments of transparency throughout the central atrium’, and terraced openings at the top.

The inaugural exhibition will be an ‘encyclopedic, interdisciplinary exhibition that continues the Museum's engagement with the most pressing issues of today’, said Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson artistic director of the New Museum: ‘Through the work of more than 150 artists, writers, and cultural figures, New Humans reveals how our most terrifying contemporary concerns are in fact as old as humanity itself. [The exhibition] highlights the role artists play in interpreting and confronting the critical issues that will shape our collective fate.’

The New Museum is ‘an incubator for new cultural perspectives and production’, said Shigematsu, and we look forward to seeing OMA’s architectural interpretation of this methodology.

oma.com

Dame Zaha Hadid was known globally for her dynamic public buildings. She was the first female architect to receive the Pritzker Prize, in 2004, and the RIBA Royal Gold Medal, in 2016. Her singular career was abruptly cut short when she passed away suddenly on 31 March 2016 in Miami, aged just 65. 

Yet her legacy lives on. So powerful was her impact on the world that she is still, nearly a decade after her death, hugely influential, often cited in discussions, publications and events across the field, affectionately often by her first name only, 'Zaha'; and always alongside the greatest of the 20th and early 21st century, such as Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, Tadao Ando and Rem Koolhaas. Her radical design work includes furniture, products and art (indeed, her famous deconstructivist paintings and drawings helped propel her career to stardom, way before her first built project was ever realised). 

In 2008, Hadid guest-edited Wallpaper* (W*115). We hailed her as the greatest architect of the age, and no one called to argue. She brought her futuristic touch into the magazine, testing the ‘powers and patience of the print production department’ with grey-scale cut-outs across 16 pages.

Just a couple of years before that, in 2006, Hadid was shot as a creative pair together with Karl Lagerfeld outside the Mercer Hotel in New York as part of a celebratory edition of Wallpaper's 10th anniversary. In that issue, Lagerfeld said on Hadid: 'Zaha is the first architect who found a way to part with the all-dominating post-Bauhaus aesthetic. The value of her designs is similar to that of great poetry. We are collaborating. For Chanel. Too early to talk about it. I would love her to build a house or a library for me, but where?'

Here, to highlight her lasting legacy, we look back at Zaha Hadid's profile from the Guest Editors 2008 issue, when art critic David Collings visited her in her London HQ; we track some of her greatest hits; and take an expansive look into her inimitable career and her studio, Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA).

10 of Zaha Hadid's most notable buildings

Vitra Fire Station, Weil Am Rhein, Germany (1993)

Zaha Hadid’s first built project was the fairly modest (in size, at least) Vitra Fire Station in Weil Am Rhein, Germany as part of the Vitra Campus there. At the time of opening, the architect spoke about its unusual, angular forms saying: ‘The whole building is frozen motion ready to explode into action at any moment.’

Phaeno Science Centre, Wolfsburg, Germany (2005)

One of the earliest completed Hadid buildings, the Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg is decidedly futuristic - perhaps more akin to a spaceship than a building design. In 2005, when it opened, it was also the very first science museum of its kind in Germany. A cultural centre and exhibition space, it's defined by its flowing concrete shape and series of irregularly shaped windows. 

BMW Central Building, Leipzig, Germany (2005)

Another early Hadid building, the BMW Central Building in Leipzig was a competition win for a central building in the car manufacturer's German campus. 'BMW's bold objective was to translate functional industrial architecture into a new aesthetic,' Hadid's website describes the building, and true enough, this is a structure that defies categorization.  

MAXXI Museum of XXI Century Art, Rome, Italy (2009)

The MAXXI Museum of XXI Century Art in Rome is Italy's first public museum entirely dedicated to contemporary creativity, spanning arts and architecture. Going beyond showcasing the displays inside it, it becomes an object to show off in its own right, defined by its flowing forms and signature cantilever concrete viewing platform that juts out its top. 

Guangzhou Opera House, Guangzhou, China (2010)

Set at the foot of Zhujiang Boulevard in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, this is an opera house like no other. Creating a contoured landscape around it that connects it with its site, it's also a true spectacle inside too, offering an interior that rivals the ambitious performances taking place within. 

London Aquatics Centre, UK (2012)

Fittingly inspired by 'waves, the water, sea life and sea life creatures,' according to its architect British-based Zaha Hadid, the Aquatics Centre was completed in time for the official start of the London 2012 Olympic Games. Situated within the East London Olympic site, near the Park's south entrance, the Aquatics Centre is 'positioned as a gateway and the lifting entrance canopy will invite the visitors in,' explains lead architect Jim Heverin. Its aerodynamic, aquatic-creature-inspired form is distinct, boasting a curvaceous roof and slowing volume. 

Heydar Aliyev Centre, Baku, Azerbaijan (2012)

Hadid's Heydar Aliyev Centre in the Azerbijani capital is a vast and curvaceous building - which, while under construction, won 'Best Building Site' in our 2011 Design Awards. It contains 101,000 m2 of floor area, and sits on a 111,292 m2 graphically landscaped site beneath which there is parking for 1,500 cars. Under its 39,000 sq m of fluid roof, it houses a 1,000-seater auditorium, a conference centre, a library, a museum, cafes, restaurants and expansive meeting points between all these where Bakuvians can hang out and mingle. It is, in reality, a massive new chunk of civic realm.  

The Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London, UK (2013)

The Serpentine Sackler Gallery opened in 2013 within a Grade II*-listed building located a stone's throw from the original gallery in Hyde Park. Pritzker Prize-winning architect Zaha Hadid has transformed the interior of the Magazine building - a 200-year-old former gunpowder store - and added a curvaceous new extension as a contemporary counterpoint. 'We wanted to use a new materiality,' says the architect, who opted for a PTFE coated, glass-fibre woven fabric membrane for the exterior skin. 'It looks temporary but is actually attached to the [existing] building in a really light way.'

Dongdaemun Design Park & Plaza, Seoul, South Korea (2013)

A major urban development landmark in Seoul, South Korea, Dongdaemun Design Plaza is the work of Zaha Hadid Architects together with Samoo. Conceived as a cultural hub for its neighbourhood, it features its architect's signature sweeping lines and intriguing forms. It includes gallery space, exhibition areas, a media centre and a conference hall, among others.

One Thousand Museum, Miami, USA (2020)

This is Zaha Hadid Architects' debut residential tower in the USA. One Thousand Museum is a glamorous and organic high-rise in downtown Miami. Completed posthumously by ZHA in 2020, it features a range of amenities, as well as bespoke landscaping by specialist Enzo Enea. The property's 84 units have been designed as half-floor, full-floor and duplex residences. Each boasts oversized terraces and East-West views of Biscayne Bay, the Atlantic Ocean and the Miami skyline, and comes fitted with a bounty of custom-designed features ranging from walk-in closets by Poliform and kitchens and cabinetry by Gatto Cucine.

Wallpaper* meets Zaha Hadid: a profile from 2008

Zaha Hadid – greatest architect of the age. What has she done, what does her stuff look like, why is it good? Post-modern deconstruction, forms always surprising but never silly, responding differently to different sites, cities and societies, never allowing a mere style or brand to stand for her, but always being incredibly stylish, making you feel amazed and uplifted by the sight of, say, tower blocks. The two blocks she’s done in Dubai, for example, where curving organic speed lines merge with minimal rectangles, so the towers look like they’re flickering or bending. It’s no mirage: they really are built like that. Or at least they will be, when they’re completed in 2011. And so is architecture the greatest art form of the present? It can often seem more uplifting than art, which seems to want to ditch the one thing that made it great in the past: beauty. Contemporary architecture says a big yes to amazing visual impact, while contemporary art just kind of grunts a weary ‘Uh?’.

With such buzzing thoughts in my head, I step into an old school building in London’s Clerkenwell, which has been turned into the great architect’s practice. The spaces haven’t been done up outrageously – just white paint. It still looks like a school. Only, instead of children at desks, it’s 20-somethings and 30-somethings at computer screens, nearly 200 of them in all, the architect’s employees. They’re churning out the supplementary magic stuff that is needed to finalise the architect’s designs. The primary stuff comes out of the architect’s head. I wonder if they’ve all got degrees in architecture, or what it is you actually need to work here: if, like the boss, you need originality, vision, energy, difference, attitude, but also wisdom and a sense of history and an ability to communicate and to impress and to please people. Even though you have the reputation of being incoherent and a bit frightening.

Having arrived at the appointed time I’ve been asked to wait, maybe for a long time, and maybe – Roger the press officer says – even to expect to have to come back on a different day. On the other hand, it might be OK: ‘She might like you.’

After glasses of water and a longish browse through magnificent publications featuring Zaha Hadid’s work, with the sound of muted keyboard tapping all around – as well as the worker-geniuses at their computers, there’s a bank of beautiful male and female receptionists with bright friendly faces – and occasionally an interesting musical growling coming from somewhere on the opposite side of the large light-filled space, I’m taken to a big room and ushered a couple of feet inside the door.

Far away the Big Z sits in black at a white table. A plate of biscuits and a Diet Coke before her, some men in suits standing nearby. Roger consults, Zaha speaks, and, as I suspected, this is the source of the growling sounds I’ve been aware of. Roger returns across the room: ‘She says not today.’ When I say ‘OK’, I’m genuinely not offended – I really think she is magnificent.

In the art world, all you ever meet are preposterous poseurs whose achievements are dubious, but here’s someone who really has done something. On the other hand, I can’t say relief wasn’t entirely absent. Now I can swot up more on the kinds of things her work is about, its super-modern terminology and weird and wonderful aims – not just to provide protection for fire engines or industry people or works of art or trains whizzing in and out of cities, but to express the moment, define what we are, leave an imprint for the future of what bugs us and fires us up today.

I look at a picture of her first built building, the Vitra fire station in Germany (built on the Vitra premises and manned by Vitra volunteers; it was considered necessary following a fire at the factory). I laugh at her great comment on it from the time: ‘The whole building is frozen motion ready to explode into action at any moment.’ It really does look like it is ready to take off, all dynamic swerves, slants and angles; as if expressing the mind of someone whose very being is synonymous with action and willpower. Reassuring for a place that is in charge of putting fires out.

Roger says, as he guides me back to the reception area with a fresh armload of Hadid-glorifying glossy publications, ‘You probably know more about her than I do.’ I say no, I wish, ha ha, and nervously get down to studying the articles, just in case I am called back today.

What does ‘deconstruction’ in architecture mean? Like fashion at the end of the 20th century: a sense of something ordered and classical, but an elegant unravelling of the same thing, so you feel you’re getting both, neither stuffy nor silly. She has a sense of an ordered building, she undermines it by inserting a whole new set of contemporary values, and the result is convincing.

Her design for the compressed spaces of Cincinnati’s Rosenthal Contemporary Art Center, built for nearly $30m in 2003, causes city life to flow in and out and even through the building. A glass-walled public area on the ground level, with a lot of electric light strips, seems to stand for a kind of staged everyday city space: a delightful architectural metaphor for the cliché of blurred boundaries between art and life.

Inside, on different stages, are the galleries – eight of them – a series of changing spaces, appropriate to an art centre that has no permanent collection of its own, and is devoted to a constant stream of changing exhibitions. Some are taller than others, some have daylight, some have none, but most have a sloping or zigzag shape, few are ‘ordinary’ spaces. They’re all connected by a kind of trick staircase that appears to be tilting. As a visitor, you’re not allowed to forget the space; you’re under attack in a way. But it’s a pleasurable way. In Abu Dhabi, she’s got a museum of performing arts being constructed on a pleasure island full of museums created by architectural hot shots: hers is easily the most striking, like a low-lying reptile the size of a small town.

It’s only an hour or so later. Roger appears: ‘She’s been talking about cement all day; she wants something different.’ (As if it might be something different to eat.) I gulp and we return together to the big room, where she is telling off a lot of assistants who dart in and out of the door. They vaporise and telling-off merges into interview.

Born in Baghdad in 1950 (to a liberal democratic Muslim family who left Iraq in the 1960s), she has lived and worked in London for more than 40 years. But it turns out that, as well as the low growling speaking voice that often makes her hard to understand, she has a peculiar way of talking in solid concepts, just serving up meaning-clusters and not bothering with grammar. I know what an axonometric drawing is and what topology is and, of course, what complexity and voids are, but when they are just stuck together in a clump, I don’t know where I am. But I sincerely believe that she does. She is not at all pretentious; she knows about something difficult, her area, and she appreciates someone wanting to hear about it, even if they are a bit bewildered by what comes out.

It reminds me a little of interviewing Andy Warhol a few months before he died. I only realised much later how out of my depth I was and that he was actually being quite kind in tolerating me. He was doing something new that had a lot of complicated levels, and if he needed his verbal mode to be ‘wow’ and ‘gee’ that didn’t mean he wasn’t a formidable thinker. He had the right. And, likewise, if Hadid doesn’t go in for verbs and tenses, it’s petty to complain.

I ask her about the original artwork she’s making for Wallpaper*. She wants a shape cut out of the magazine, literally a cavity in the middle. I don’t know if this is exactly what’s going to happen in the end – I thought of my friend in the publications department at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, who told me that when Hadid had her 30-year retrospective there in 2006, she wanted a similarly logic-defying circular catalogue. She also said that Hadid used to shout at her staff in front of the publications team, and now here she was doing exactly that in front of me – I’m not sure they really minded that much, though.

She is the real thing, my friend had thought, and I do too: this amazing-looking figure, like a female Wizard of Oz, a wizard of the night, in striking black and gold Prada, with her big eyes and deep, growling voice. The artwork for Wallpaper* relates to a set of ideas about space and fluidity that she’s been developing for the last ten years. She says these ideas include all sorts of notions, but, while I understand their literal meanings, I don’t exactly know how they all add up: carving, layering, the void, space, archaeology and landscape (which certainly sounds how her buildings look). ‘But it needs a big hole in the magazine,’ she rumbles.

We get on to her paintings. She’s famous for doing them – geometric abstracts. I like them because of their balance of forms, not so much for the handling of paint, which is rather anonymous. But I’m impressed by the sense of pattern, the play of shapes, the balanced asymmetric distribution of intensities and more muted bits: what it says to me is sensitivity, experience, knowledge, feeling and a genuine mental-jumping-about energy (all rare in the Turner Prize world).

The paintings are not really abstract art, but plans for architecture; they’re her personal way of working through ideas. She started doing them in the 1970s at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture when she was studying there under the architects Rem Koolhaas and Bernard Tschumi. Hadid is thought of as a postmodernist, but at the same time as someone for whom modernism is a burning issue, not something to be merely ironic about or jokey towards. Modernism was progressive and optimistic, but we’re all a bit more jaded now, is the postmodernist received idea: nothing is more true than anything else, and everything is relative. Hadid’s architectural spirit was formed at a time when anyone creative was on fire with postmodernist cleverness. But while she mines modernism for forms, she doesn’t use them to laugh at the days of sincerity and belief. She is a great believer in progress herself.

Painting, the influence of Russian constructivist Kasimir Malevich and her first sense that she really might have something the world might want, all happened at once for her, with Koolhaas presiding. He gave her a project, solving some problem of space, and her solution was to re-employ spatial ideas that Malevich had come up with in the run-up to the Russian revolution.

Malevich was a visionary. He wanted Russia and the whole world to move into the future, with him in the lead. He called himself The President of Space. But his ideas were too hot for the new regime, and under Stalin – after Malevich died in 1935 – they were simply banned. Now Hadid, the hot student, was going to revive them. The first blast of Malevich-return, or neo-modernism, was going to be a project on Hungerford Bridge: a hotel spanning the Thames, made of pure white, geometric, modern-art forms (similar to the ones in white relief on the wall in the room I’m sitting in with Hadid now, which turn out to be her original plans for Cincinnati).

It was just a student project, and although it earned Hadid a prize, and eventual employment by Koolhaas when she left the AA, there was never any expectation of it actually being built. However, the 1970s was a funny time at the AA, because no one actually expected anything to be built. The big architectural stars designed buildings and towns that challenged all existing buildings and towns, and were really a kind of heroic conceptual-art version of architecture. Then, in the following decade, the same iconoclasts gradually became real builders.

For Hadid it was very gradual. She won a stream of prizes, but none of the designs were realised: she was considered too radical and difficult by the powers that be. The most prestigious prize was in 1983 for a design for a leisure centre in Hong Kong, called The Peak, but then another architect was given the gig instead (perhaps because she proudly called her design for The Peak ‘a suprematist geology’). Even as late as 1994, she had a major prize-winning design (the Cardiff Bay Opera House) turned down for actual building by a board of conservative bores.

She was used to being put down by such types, but convinced she would get somewhere in the end. She kept going on about ‘complexity’, she was big and bold, she really went for it, and eventually she won. Her first built building, the fire station, went up ten years after The Peak rejection. Ten years later, she had buildings under construction all over the world, and now she’s a byword for Now.

She laughs when I ask her if Malevich is too simple for her these days, and says, ‘Yes!’ She has the greatest respect for him, but her mind is more her own now. If the typical Hadid look is elegant, slinky, organic and flowing, there is still a great range to how those characteristics are manifested: one building does something, while another one does something else. (Her predecessor, both as great guru of the art of building and great beneficiary of information technology, Frank Gehry, does a sort of computer-generated knitting, which is fun, but it’s the same knitting each time.)

What is greatness? All the past art and architecture styles that go into the Zaha Hadid product – constructivism, futurism, expressionism – have had their original ideologies taken away as they (kind of) merge with what we might call computerism. Is it that they just fit, as everything must, into the new global ideology: consumerism? The information age’s big belief is: no belief, just buy. But this is a social change that Hadid – whose overriding preoccupation right now, she tells me as we end the interview, is social housing – cannot be attacked for.

You could ask where she stands on the emptiness of our age, its emotional flatness and lack of ambition to do anything about social injustice, but does art really work like that? Her architecture is the greatest art of the moment. It expresses the age, but that means it has contradictions, too. Just as Malevich didn’t paint the revolution, but expressed a vision of change in abstract forms, or by abstract allegory and abstract metaphors, so Hadid’s buildings are metaphors for new rising optimistic ideals that fight apathy: especially a new fascination with nature, not just lovely trees, but nature’s intricacy and deep structures, its internal complexity, its processes. Her ambition is to push forward her ideas about space, to make fluid forms even more stately and surprising and moving, in order to offer society models of change. And the power and joy of the way she goes about all that is what makes her great. 

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Milan's iconic 10 Corso Como concept store has just unveiled a new look. The design is courtesy of Milanese agency 2050+, the creative collective co-founded by former OMA partner Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli – who, during his time at the Dutch practice worked on projects such the Fondaco dei Tedesci in Venice, and Monditalia, the large-scale, Arsenale exhibition at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale that Rem Koolhaas curated.

Step inside 10 Corso Como Milan by 2050+

The store interiors unveiled this week in Milan consist of two key spaces – the Gallery and the Project Room – offering an immersive experience for visitors. They form part of a first phase in the spatial transformation that 10 Corso Como has been undergoing. 

The new spaces were 'conceived of as a flexible theatre', the designers write. Utilising raw, clean surfaces and multifunctional elements that can work in different configurations, the refreshed interior goes back to the building’s early 20th century industrial roots. At the same time, it allows for the curation of a variety of atmospheres and purposes.

'The spatial strategy conceived by 2050+ is centered around the idea of clearance, or “selective archaeology”: by removing materials and devices accumulated over time, 10 Corso Como is brought back to its original, delicate, early 20th century industrial character, generously opening up to light and air,' the 2050+ team writes in its statement.

Seeing the retail interior as an ecosystem occupied by different creatives, 2050+ worked on a series of 'micro-architectures' to craft a new identity for the space. 'Through a renewed architecture and a cutting-edge cultural offer, 10 Corso Como will unlock its potential as a “transitory museum1”: a space in potential, with no fixed purpose nor role, which constantly challenges the relationship between the people and the architectural elements that occupy it,' the designers explain. 

At the same time, strategic architectural gestures, such as a new external staircase between floors, will critically improve visitor flow and operations inside the landmark concept store. 

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The house of Prada, currently under the creative direction of Miuccia Prada and Belgian designer Raf Simons, stands distinct in the landscape of fashion. Its style is characterised by a dual narrative: on one side, Prada embodies a timeless elegance rooted in sophisticated cultural references, such as Italian neorealism. On the other, it boldly ventures into cutting-edge modernity, bravely skirting the edges of banality.

A Prada fashion show is the prime setting for observing these narratives, particularly when they take on the language of architecture. Here, we are granted a view of how the future of fashion might materialise. Since Miuccia Prada introduced her first womenswear line for the family-owned business in 1988, these runway shows have proved a benchmark to gauge the zeitgeist.

Prada’s show sets have become intrinsic to the presentation of the house’s collections. They are designed by the Rotterdam-based OMA/AMO, led by the eminent Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. This collaboration is the most enduring of its kind, bridging the worlds of architecture and fashion for 25 years. It has revolutionised the fashion show as spectacle and pushed the boundaries of what is expected from a runway presentation.

25 years of OMA/AMO and Prada’s extraordinary runway sets

The collaboration began in 1999 when Prada approached OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture) with a request to design its New York store. This marked the active start of AMO (OMA in reverse), the research arm of the practice, dedicated to applying architectural thinking to various disciplines. Initially, AMO’s role primarily involved experimenting with content creation and video production, showcasing a new architectonical ability to enhance the Prada brand through various mediums. With the S/S 2004 fashion show, though, AMO focused exclusively on the set design, which was then regularly staged in an industrial space at the Prada HQ on Milan’s via Fogazzaro. The practice has been collaborating with Miuccia Prada – and later, with Raf Simons – on the show sets ever since.

This season’s sets were particularly striking. For the men’s and women’s S/S 2024 show set, which featured a dripping wall of slime, the architects successfully straddled a difficult line. They not only transformed the set into a space that spoke to the social-media moment but maintained the essence of experimentation with physical space. The achievement marks a unique fusion of digital-age aesthetics with the tangible aspects of architectural design, appealing to a modern, tech-savvy audience while preserving the authenticity of spatial exploration.

With the opening of the OMA-designed Fondazione Prada’s Torre in 2018 – part of the foundation’s new location in Largo Isarco in the south of Milan – Prada’s fashion shows found their new home in Deposito, a vast industrial space on its ground floor. En route there for the A/W 2018 womenswear show, I chatted with my taxi driver, pointing out the neon lights that Prada and AMO had erected on the skyline that season. The driver shook his head: ‘No, signora, non è Prada, è un lunapark!’ (‘No, ma’am, it’s not Prada, it’s an amusement park!’). His confusion reminded me of Koolhaas’ words in his 1978 book Delirious New York, where he stated that ‘Luna Park [in Coney Island] is the first manifestation of a curse which is to haunt the architectural profession for the rest of its life, the formula: technology + cardboard (or any other flimsy material) = reality.’

‘What has always interested me is whether we could find ways to experiment, and to experiment with architectural transformation,’ says Koolhaas when I ask him why he believes the collaboration with Prada has been so lasting. ‘A lot of our work together has been connected to an interest in generating transformation through the know-how of fashion. For instance, if you take the ceiling that moves up and down [as was the case at Prada’s A/W 2023 men’s and womenswear show sets], if you were to do it as an architect, it would take at least a year and a half to engineer, and it would cost at least €3 million at that scale.

‘What is fascinating [about collaborating with a] fashion mentality is that it takes maybe three weeks, and is done not using metal and steel but foam and Velcro, yet the effect is the same. For us, it’s really interesting for us to use fashion tools to experiment with architecture.’

Reflecting on the formula learned from Luna Park, one of Coney Island’s first enclosed theme parks, Koolhaas says: ‘In my early writings about New York, my focus extended beyond just the phenomenon itself; I aimed to understand the early effects of technology on communities and on reality. This early realisation has always stayed with me.

‘But it’s important to emphasise that none of the work we’ve accomplished with Prada would have been possible without a dedicated team. It requires an extensive team effort, and often, changing team dynamics is crucial to keep the project’s intelligence alive. We work with a mix of consistent elements – you could call it a formula – and an endless array of variations. These variations come from our partners, the teams themselves, and the people who work on the project. This is why Giulio is here with us today.’

Giulio Margheri, associate architect at OMA, joined the Prada project team at AMO for the house’s S/S 2016 show. Margheri tells me that AMO never starts with a conventional brief. Instead, the process begins with distinct, sometimes seemingly unrelated words. It’s a deeply involved and interactive journey, typically necessitating around six discussions between the AMO and Prada teams. These dialogues guide AMO’s work by fostering an understanding of the overarching mood or critical elements that might influence the collection. This is then translated into a unique expression, explored in architectural drawings, visualisations, and physical models.

‘There is never one direction we work, but several, and it is a constant,’ Margheri adds. ‘It’s also a response to what is happening in the outside world, or to the political situation. This conversation is always a challenge on both sides. It’s interesting, sometimes when we discuss a show, we at AMO might refer to, let’s say, the “yellow curtains” show (S/S 2021), while the Prada team might refer to the “banana pattern” (S/S 2011). This illustrates that we operate with two different reference systems simultaneously – architecture and fashion.’ Asked for the words for S/S 2024, Giulio responds with ‘organic minimalism’.

Koolhaas dislikes being asked about his or AMO’s contribution to fashion. In his own words: ‘I’m nervous about discussing my work or our influence in such terms. I aim to maintain freedom. Dwelling on this could become a significant burden. Our office strives to explore any direction without being tied down by these heavy considerations, as it could restrict our freedom.’

After pausing, he continues: ‘One aspect I can acknowledge is our demonstration of long-term engagement in fashion, an industry typically known for short-term partnerships. This might be the most intriguing aspect and perhaps why we’re discussing this now. Our collaboration covers a broad spectrum of contrasting approaches, yet they all stem from the same source. From the start, there was an almost automatic understanding of our mutual ambitions and aesthetics with Prada. We instinctively embraced Prada’s ambitions to challenge convention, to work with concepts of ugliness, and to experiment with uniforms and uniformity.’

In line with Koolhaas’ formula in Delirious New York, the collaboration between Prada and OMA/AMO shows that shaping the reality of architecture and the future of fashion through runway shows involves more than just technology and simple materials; it’s fundamentally driven by a continuous hunger for knowledge and innovation.

A/W 2021

For the Prada A/W 2021 show (featuring the first menswear collaboration by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons), AMO created a colourful set designed to be broadcast rather than experienced by a live audience. The models navigated an interior of faux fur and marble planes, with the camera closely following them. This led Koolhaas to coin the term ‘close-up from the back’, a rare instance of an architect creating terminology that was later adopted by the fashion industry

S/S 2024

For the S/S 2024 men’s and womenswear set, AMO focused on the idea of ‘organic minimalism’. Walking alongside a cascade of pink slime (having shifted from the green of the menswear show), the models at Prada’s S/S 2024 womenswear show wore dresses in hues of white, pink, light blue, light green, and brown, complementing the salmon-pink set and creating a satisfying visual spectacle in which the fashion and the architectural framework merged seamlessly.

‘That was indeed stunning,’ says Koolhaas. ‘There was no brief provided about the dress that transforms [in] the space. But I do think that sometimes the set influences what they’re doing. There’s a resonance between the fashion and the design of the space, which is based on a conversation, where these elements materialise in different forms later [on]. For us, it is always exciting to see the final show – not just the space itself but seeing who is inhabiting it.’ 

The slime concept for S/S 2024 introduced fluid architectural elements, something that contrasted with the mechanical rising ceiling used for the A/W 2023 set and somehow felt less industrial, harsh or threatening. This reflects a common trend in the Prada and AMO collaboration – a new set often reacts to the previous one.

A/W 2023

For this show, the focus on the ceilings highlighted a significant architectural ambition. Margheri emphasises the desire for a space that initially seems unchanged, but where introducing just one element can lead to a radical transformation. Here, a ceiling rose as the show progressed, eventually revealing enormous hanging art deco chandeliers (for the men’s show) and columns of sweetly fragranced lilies (for the women’s show). This strategy utilised the height of the Deposito, demonstrating the role of architecture as an engineering discipline to redefine a space.

A/W 2022

For this cinema and sci-fi inspired menswear show, OMA transformed the Deposito into a theatrical space featuring seats from the nearby Cinema Fondazione Prada and a recreation of its iconic olive green carpet. But the spotlight was firmly on the models (including Hollywood actors Kyle MacLachlan and Jeff Goldblum) who emerged and disappeared from tunnels illuminated by bright blue neon lights and lined with metal grating. The resulting scenes echoed a mix of cinematographic references, from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey to Twin Peaks.

S/S 2021

Thanks to their previous spatial experiments, the traditional catwalk had already begun to lose its role as the main principle in Prada’s fashion spaces well before the pandemic. However, the digital presentation of Prada and Simons’ first collaborative womenswear collection, S/S 2021, was markedly different.

‘I would use the metaphor of a film studio because, without any kind of public, we became much more experimental and aware of the camera,’ Koolhaas explains. ‘The freedom of movement that the camera suggested meant that the camera alone became very prominent and present in the show itself. It became a new actor. Since that moment, our approach, even when the public is present, is a lot more about filming and mobility. This change was partly due to Covid but also partly due to Raf Simons’ co-creative direction with Miuccia Prada, who was interested in pursuing that direction. So, the set became a merger of the previous and the upcoming.

S/S 2023

The exploration of height in the Deposito began with the S/S 2023 set, which is a perfect example of the strength of the collaboration. It combined Rem Koolhaas’ intellectually driven architectural philosophy with Prada and Simons’ unique approach to fusing contrasting elements via novel combinations. ‘The Paper House’ – a paper mock-up executed from rolls of regular paper suspended from 10m-high ceilings (white paper for the men’s show, black for the women’s)– served as a subtle tribute to ‘paper architecture’, embodying visionary, yet often unrealised, architectural concepts. More than a mere fashion space, it was a manifestation of architectural imagination and theory.

A version of this article appears in the March 2024 Style Issue of Wallpaper* available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

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Our Style Issue celebrates the mood of escapism and fantasy which permeates the S/S 2024 collections with a round-up of contemporary style that draws inspiration from around the world and invites us on a journey of discovery.

Our newsstand cover is by photographers Melanie + Ramon and our fashion & style director Jason Hughes, who were granted exclusive access to Balenciaga’s history-steeped haute couture salons to capture Demna’s latest transformative couture collection. The Georgian designer also opens up to Dal Chodha about instilling a feeling of modernity into this most traditional of mediums. (Fans of the house should also see our review of ‘Cristóbal Balenciaga: Master of Tailoring’, currently on show in Atlanta.)

Our limited-edition cover, meanwhile, available to subscribers, takes a more classic trip, seeing the season’s most transporting looks photographed across the otherworldly volcanic landscapes of the Canary Islands. 

There’s also the return of the Wallpaper* Glossary, our essential guide to this season’s defining codes, which revels in the art of dressmaking, combining feats of craft with flights of imagination. Elsewhere in the issue, we distil the new season’s escapist mood down to 12 key pieces and objects to covet. 

Rem Koolhaas talks us through the drama and fantasy of the runway show, bridging the worlds of architecture and fashion, with a look at the dramatic sets that OMA/AMO has created for Prada over the last 25 years. As Vésma Kontere McQuillan writes, ‘It has revolutionised the fashion show as spectacle and pushed the boundaries of what is expected from a runway presentation’.

In Tuscany, writer Scarlett Conlon delves into Ferragamo’s rich atelier and archive to discover how Maximilian Davis, the brand’s brilliant young creative director, is exploring the storied Italian house’s ultra-sophisticated heritage in order to inspire its future.

In Paris, meanwhile, we’re granted a glimpse of Saint Laurent’s new flagship Champs-Élysées store, designed by creative director Anthony Vaccarello, which features marble, concrete, dark wood, Donald Judd chairs, a Cerith Wyn Evans neon sculpture and seating by Rudolph Schindler – a true vision, and a clear sign of architectural direction from the house. 

Finally, an enormous thank you goes to Jason Hughes, Jack Moss and Tracy Gilbert, our much-travelled fashion team; you have truly made this a Style special to remember. We hope you enjoy the trip!

Sarah Douglas
Editor-in-Chief

The March 2024 issue of Wallpaper* is available in print from 8 February, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Collective is a young and dynamic architecture studio based in Hong Kong and Spain. The practice works on a wealth of art, commercial and residential projects, including this apartment in Hong Kong (above); the Art Collector's House; and exhibitions for M+ Museum and Taipei Art Biennial 2020. Now, Collective has joined the Wallpaper* Architects’ Directory 2023, our annual round-up of exciting emerging architecture studios. 

Who: Collective

Collective was founded by architect Betty Ng in 2015 – Chi Yan Chan, Juan Minguez and Katja Lam have since joined her as co-directors. While the studio is 'globally oriented and strongly rooted in Asia', the team explains, it remains headquartered in two continents, with offices in both Hong Kong and Madrid. With the directors combining experience at some of the world's most influential practices, such as the studios of Pritzker Prize-winning architects Rem Koolhaas/OMA and Herzog & de Meuron, Collective has a truly international outlook and a range of projects under its belt.

'We love working in a diverse genre of international projects, to move away from the standards and routines. Every project becomes a new adventure that allows us to tackle new circumstances, offering us an opportunity to come out with new answers and design solutions. These fresh encounters and processes motivate us in design,' the architects say, explaining that their overall approach can be applied to schemes of any scale and type. '[We] practise architecture, interiors, urban design and exhibition design. Collective specialises in design as a methodology, not a style.'

What: Hong Kong apartment, and more

With a background as diverse as Collective's, it's no surprise that the team can apply their varied skills to projects that span the residential, commercial and cultural realm with ease. Among their recent and current residential work is a Hong Kong apartment, a newly completed space defined by its sleek simplicity and soft, timber-clad interiors; and the ambitious Art Collector's House, one of the several ongoing standalone, single-family houses they have on their drawing boards. 

Meanwhile, Collective takes pride in its contributions to the cultural sector too, having already developed several schemes and concepts for high-profile, global institutions, despite the practice's young age. Among those, the M+ Museum's 'Things, Spaces, Interactions' exhibition in the destination's East galleries is an expansive showcase of some 500 examples of furniture, architecture, graphic arts, and other design objects, for which Collective designed the display. 

The office and exhibition gallery for Art Intelligence's global headquarters in Hong Kong is another project in the same field by the studio – it's a textured, minimalist, and highly functional space that blends simplicity with 21st-century technology and design solutions, fit for the art space's multi-layered uses. 

Why: Wallpaper* Architects’ Directory 2023

Conceived in 2000 as an international index of emerging architectural talent, the Wallpaper* Architects’ Directory is our annual listing of promising practices from across the globe. While always championing the best and most promising young studios, over the years, the project has showcased inspiring work with an emphasis on the residential realm. Now including more than 500 alumni, the Architects’ Directory is back for its 23rd edition. Join us as we launch this year’s survey – 20 young studios from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Congo, Ecuador, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Mozambique, Pakistan, Senegal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UAE, the UK, the USA and Vietnam, with plenty of promise, ideas and exciting architecture.

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In a glass-walled meeting room overlooking the production floor of stone company SolidNature’s Amsterdam headquarters, CEO David Mahyari is recounting his brand's first big break. 'OMA came by looking for some specific travertines that they hadn’t been able to find,' he recalls. During their visit, partners Rem Koolhaas and Ellen van Loon found not only the travertine they had been looking for but also another stone that they even more urgently needed, for the National Library of Qatar, which they were in the midst of designing. 'It was two or three months before we had even officially registered the company,' says Mahyari, whose brother founded the SolidNature in 2011 before handing over the reins to the thirty-something-year-old CEO in 2018. 'So the relationship started before we officially did.' 

That serendipitous discovery spawned a nearly decade-long relationship (as well as Fondazione Prada's iconic dyed-pink onyx elevator) and for Milan Design Week 2023, SolidNature has once again collaborated with the Dutch firm. This time for their exhibition, 'Beyond The Surface', which will see OMA recreate the journey of quarrying, finishing and crafting stone through an allegorical experience that compares the industrial process to the act of dreaming. 

SolidNature presents 'Beyond the Surface' at Milan Design Week 2023

Set in the basement of the neo-Romanesque Casa Maveri, a private villa in Brera, visitors will venture below ground, and into the realm of sleep, passing through a series of illusory installations that respond to themes such as ‘Confrontation’, ‘Revelation’ and ‘Patience’ – each exhibiting various 'treatments, applications and approaches of designing with natural stone,' says OMA senior architect Giulio Margheri – before emerging into the daylight and consciousness in the home’s sprawling garden.

From our conference room view, we watch a team of men at the opposite end of the building prepare pieces that will soon be shipped to Milan. Engulfed in clouds of marble dust that settle like snow on their black uniforms, they’re carving out the shape of a reclining woman, which will become an anthropomorphic seat designed by the Iranian artist Bita Fayyazi. The sculpture will live in the villa’s garden, alongside an undulating bench titled ‘The Wave’, also by Fayyazi, an installation inspired by Elizabethan theatres by Studio Ossidiana and a party-ready table in glass and travertine by Sabine Marcelis.

This will be the second time the Rotterdam-based Marcelis has joined SolidNature in Milan. At Alcova in 2022, she presented a monolithic bathroom system carved entirely out of pink onyx. However, the designer’s relationship with the company stretches back to 2019, when she called on them to develop the travertine elements in her ‘No Fear of Glass’ exhibition at Barcelona’s Mies van der Rohe Pavilion. This year, Marcelis wanted to create an object visitors could interact with, so she took it upon herself to devise a buffet table and bar that could take centre stage during the week’s events – while also revisiting the same glass and travertine palette she and SolidNature explored four years ago.

The ten-foot-long glass tabletop is marked by a gradient pattern that subtly shifts from yellow to orange to red. The glass is propped up by a series of mismatched stone legs that extrude like islands through the transparent pane, and whose natural tone reflects their corresponding section of the gradient. 'I was trying to find that tension between the manmade and the natural,' she explains of the concept. 'I really wanted to showcase what different ideas can bring to the same materials.' 

Marcelis then shaped the tops of the stone pillars to act as serving platters – for example, milling out concave wells for cradling ice – for staging a conceptual feast by culinary artist Laila Gohar. According to Marcelis, the edible installation will respond to the table’s warm-toned hues. 'Every aspect of the project was determined by the colour palette,' she adds. 'Including the food.'

'The main objective for us as a company is to push boundaries and change the perspective of how we normally use stone and what kind of stones we use,' Mahyari reflects on the nature of the collaboration with the architects, artists and designers who will represent the brand Milan. 'The reason why it works so well is because when they come up with an idea – it is never no. It's always OK, let's try.'

SolidNature - Beyond the Surface is on view from 17 to 23 April 2023

Via Cernaia 1
Milan

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Rotterdam and OMA have long been intertwined. The Dutch port city has been home to the celebrated architecture practice for over four decades now, and it is also co-founder Rem Koolhaas’ birthplace. Still, the architect didn’t spend a lot of time there until the 1980s. Instead, he followed a more international trajectory in his early years. His childhood was mostly divided between Amsterdam and Jakarta, and after graduating from the Architectural Association in London, he moved to New York to attend Cornell. His book, Delirious New York, published in 1978 to much acclaim, was a kind of love letter to the great American city, exploring its development as well as notions of urbanity and congestion that came to define his career.

OMA was established in 1975 between New York and London (by Koolhaas together with Elia Zenghelis, Zoe Zenghelis and Madelon Vriesendorp) and by the time of the book’s publication, the architect was heading back to Europe. ‘I was in a strange position, as the book made me relatively well known, but I had never built anything,’ he admits. He decided to return to the Netherlands to pursue work; and if New York played a landmark role in making Koolhaas architecture’s favourite theorist, Rotterdam allowed him to build, to turn theory into practice.

Landing in Amsterdam in 1979, a meeting with a Rotterdam city councillor soon resulted in a ‘dream’ assignment – and one of the first big commission wins for OMA. ‘He was sitting in front of a map of Rotterdam and asked, “So, where do you want to build?” It was very generous. I saw a site on the river and the interesting thing about it was that it was very constrained on one side by water, on the other by a bridge, on a third side by a road and on the fourth by a building,’ says Koolhaas. He picked the site and started designing. The scheme was named Boompjes (‘little trees’ in Dutch) and mixed housing and workspace along the Maasboulevard. It marked the start of a long relationship between the port city and the architecture firm.

Rotterdam, devastated by bombing from both sides during the Second World War, presented a challenge and an opportunity for architects and planners in the second half of the 20th century – large parts of it had to be entirely rebuilt. This was also the reason Koolhaas chose it as his Dutch base in 1980, shortly after the Boompjes commission (two more schemes, the IJ-plein housing and a commissioned study for the possible renovation of the Koepel Panopticon Prison were also in the works in different parts of the country). ‘It made the city very fertile ground for architecture. I had more affinity and interest in Rotterdam. I started an office there almost on a hunch,’ he says. So, in the 1980s and early 1990s, the OMA headquarters was next door to the Boompjes’ plot and the water (a London office had opened in 1975, and Koolhaas and colleagues travelled back and forth as needed). 

Due to its geographical constraints, the Boompjes site could only be experienced in two ways: either passing by the road running parallel to the plot on ground level, or approaching it from across the River Maas via a bridge. These ‘unusually controlled’ views stimulated Koolhaas’ imagination and informed the design. This, combined with the fact that the city authorities allowed him great flexibility, meant the site was ripe for experimentation. ‘We made the design so that it was like an accordion. It could be spread wide or if you approached it from a single angle, you only saw a very narrow side,’ he says. 

The formal response reflects Koolhaas’ architectural preoccupations at the time. The design incorporates a series of five tall, lean highrises set against a horizontal slab placed at the top. Some vertical elements are perpendicular to the slab, others sit at an angle, while one is just slightly apart. The formation became a kind of urban screen, filtering light and framing views from the river to the city and the other way round. ‘Of course, I had written a book about New York, but I was actually much more interested in another typology, the slab,’ the architect points out. ‘Towers are the expression of capitalism and slabs are the main expression of socialism. In the 1980s, it was very interesting to try and create a hybrid shape. Boompjes is a hybrid.’  

The main artwork for the design, produced in 1982, is a silk-screen rendering created by Koolhaas with Italian architect Stefano de Martino, and can still be found in the practice’s archives. It is a triptych – a colourful, geometric composition that brings to mind abstract or constructivist art, and the work of Piet Mondrian or László Moholy-Nagy. A print run of a couple of hundred editions was produced and now many of these sit in museum collections – at MoMA, the Centre Pompidou, CCA and The New Institute, for example. ‘We wanted to explain everything you need to say about this project in a single representation,’ says Koolhaas. The buildings’ colours nod to the passing ships’ bright hues; as port activity was ever-present in the office views, it provided constant inspiration. 

Beyond formal considerations, Koolhaas’ vision for the long and narrow site explored new models for housing development and the future of living. ‘In the 1980s, housing in the Netherlands meant social housing,’ he says. ‘I had just come from America and I was interested in less defined spaces, open spaces. So the building had an industrial quality.’ The design, including a range of private apartments from studios to larger duplexes and loft-style spaces, with its river views, ‘was about flexibility, openness, an uncluttered space’. It also contained a gym and a library on site – a particularly forward-thinking move at a time when amenities in larger-scale residential schemes were anything but the norm. 

Boompjes was sadly never built (‘We presented it to the city a number of times; in the end they sold the site to a developer, but nothing came out of it,’ Koolhaas concludes) but its ideas were pioneering, and live on. In the late 1990s, OMA was commissioned to work on another site by the river in Rotterdam, which faced a similar situation – again, approached by a bridge and its perception controlled by limited viewpoints. That project, just across the water from the Boompjes site, eventually became De Rotterdam, a mixed-use, ‘vertical city’ completed in 2013 beside the city’s Wilhelmina Pier. 

Now, Boompjes is about to get one more incarnation. In 2019, American Express approached OMA for an artistic collaboration with Rem Koolhaas on a new design for Amex’s exclusive Centurion Card. The practice had been working with the card’s signature Roman references, when the client came across the Boompjes project. It became a starting point for the new design, with Rem and his team adapting the triptych visual to the card’s specifications. The result launches from this month. Blending graphic design with thought-provoking architecture that was truly ahead of its time, the product is the smallest item ever designed by Koolhaas. ‘I see graphic design as a crucial domain to project ideas in,’ says Koolhaas, who regularly explores two-dimensional design through OMA’s research and design arm, AMO. ‘Architecture is also a domain to project ideas in. The similarity [between the disciplines] is about ideas, and these can take any form.’ §

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Nigerian architect Kunlé Adeyemi’s office – NLÉ, meaning ‘at home’ in Yoruba – is based in two cities built on and from water: Lagos, in the country of his birth, and Amsterdam, the city where Adeyemi settled after a long stint at Rem Koolhaas’ Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam. Since its inception in 2010, NLÉ, just like the city of Lagos, has kept expanding, mostly over water, with the architect highlighting the importance of a new practice – more open-ended and versatile, not exclusively imposed from the top down but rather more conversant and recombinant, accepting of informality and of citizens’ imagination. Something we need now more than ever, when we come to regroup, rethink and rebuild after the pandemic. Adeyemi and Paola Antonelli discussed the potential of architecture in helping communities cope with urban density and withstand climate change by acknowledging the power of water.

Paola Antonelli: In 2007, while you were still working at OMA, you published an essay in the journal Log, entitled Urban Crawl. It was an occasion for the western/northern hemisphere to consider cities in developing countries as paragons and paradigms for the future, and also argued for a radical rethinking of the position of architecture.

Kunlé Adeyemi: The article was written shortly after my post-professional degree at Princeton, and I published it with a view in mind. My thesis at the time was on the role of market economies in rapidly emerging cities. I had a lot of reflection around the impact of cities of the Global South and how they would become more important in the future. It was a prompt to rethink our perceptions of cities, understanding that there’s a critical point where cities, just out of the growth of population and economy, begin to become a lot more organic in their expansion, and the nature of the performance of the city – whether economically, socially or environmentally – becomes exponential. That’s what we’re starting to see in several large, growing cities in the Global South. Without infrastructure, or with very minimal infrastructure and very minimally organised economies, they start to regulate themselves, just out of sheer population growth and impact.

PA: In that same essay, you argued that ‘the space of architecture as we know it is getting smaller and smaller’. How do you consider that statement now, 13 years later? Has architecture changed?

KA: I think there’s been a lot of changes in the practice, but not enough change to cope with the speed of development that is necessary to accommodate the growth of human population and the environmental impact of this growth. We’re also losing grip if we do not realise the implication of acting in the capacity of the public realm, as opposed to just providing solutions that are very specific to individuals. In my view, architecture is more of a service, and the client is really more public than private lately. Whatever we do even for private clients has an impact on a larger community.

PA: Would you call that acting in the public realm politics?

KA: For sure. There’s a lot of influence on politics, and political influence on architecture. And I think there are a lot more people that have done more specific work in that realm. In our way of understanding the role of architects or architecture in the built environment, we developed a tool for analysing this sort of urban dynamics, which we call the seven DESIMER Factors. Typically, the architect is trained to think about design as the first solution for addressing any problem, but we would like to analyse the context and the requirements through seven factors – Demographics, Economics, Sociopolitics, Infrastructure, Morphology, Environment, and Resources – that actually drive development. Indeed, politics and social context, even the shape and the topography of the environment are huge factors, and design is only a tool to orchestrate these complex dynamics into built form and to understand programme. Essentially, these factors are divided into two areas of research – issues of humanity and growth, and issues connected to the environment. And that’s what this is for us. Architecture in what we stand for is about diversity and coexistence of humanity and environment.

PA: Are you keeping humans and environment separate because of the agency that humans have over the environment?

KA: Yes. You keep them separate, but you also look at them together. It’s about their coexistence. Whereas as a standard practice we understand people as our clients, but we also at the same time look at the environment as our client.

PA: In 2014, you participated in the MoMA exhibition ‘Uneven Growth’, which looked at the idea of a postcolonial city in which a bottom-up material culture leads and complements a traditional top-down idea of design. What is the role of community in the vision that you have for architecture in the future?

KA: I presented a vision of Lagos in 2050, centred around three points: water, transportation and energy. The image is somewhat our general prototypical vision of what a city that has embraced water looks like. We were beginning to understand the role of climate change and the impact on the environment on our cities. Eighty per cent of our major cities and capitals all around the world are by the waterfront, by oceans, rivers, lakes. Our view is that the development and evolution of humanity are going to become somewhat more aquatic, there will be an increase in that relationship between cities and water. We should learn not to continue to fight it, but learn to live with it.

PA: Are you saying that we will need to expand over water?

KA: There are different conditions, all kinds of very specific site conditions all over the world. We hear a lot about cities that are by the sea or by the ocean, the threat of sea levels rising, the frequent flooding. There are also inland wet areas, wetlands, marshy areas, where groundwater is rising – they need different approaches. We think, generally speaking, that in the real estate that we allocate to the development of cities, the portion that relates to water should increase. We need to accommodate more water basins and have fewer hard surfaces. Even if it’s simply about increasing a drainage system and having more canalisation, that is already an approach to dealing with water and learning to live with it; having more room for capturing rainwater as part of our landscape and urbanscape; actually building on water as a form of habitation, and also reducing land reclamation, which is very, very invasive – it’s expensive, and literally reduces the area of water in a region.

PA: Your Makoko Floating School is a famous, and also tragic project. Can you tell us about the community and the school itself please?

KA: Makoko Floating School is a project that began in 2011. I was voluntarily trying to research affordable housing and offering my service to the Lagos State Government. I started to look at what may be considered the cheapest dwellings in a city like Lagos. I realised people who live in Makoko – in what would technically be defined as slums – on water, with very poor quality of construction, were able to build so much out of so little. I got the opportunity to visit the place, and was completely blown away by what I experienced there. There was, of course, a lot of hardship, a lot of environmental challenges but being in the community itself is a totally different experience. One of the community members I met said they would like an extension to an existing school. I thought that if we could improve on their building system, it could be a great collaboration. So we started conceptualising. At some point in the process, we were thinking of building on stilts, like they did. But a few months after we began, there was a huge storm in Lagos, and it occurred to me that a lot of the parts of Lagos that were on land were actually going to be flooded. It is a very vulnerable environment for a very large city of nearly 20 million people. Even though people in Makoko were building on water, they were still affected by the tidal change, so we developed the floating solution that adapted to the tide.

PA: In 2016, however, a seasonal storm destroyed the school. What did you learn from it?

KA: There’s a misrepresentation and misunderstanding of the situation surrounding the collapse, especially from the public realm. A lot of people considered it a disaster, a tragedy, maybe out of our control, but it wasn’t that, and we have a full report on our website about the circumstances that led to it. The building was a test, it was a prototype. We had worked on it with the community and we saw it coming to its end. It was not literally brought down just by the storm; we had had many storms in the past. What we learned is to be completely relentless in innovation, and innovating means understanding that failure is also part of the learning curve.

PA: Indeed, you transformed the experience into an evolving construction system. It had different prototypes, shown at the Biennale in Venice, in Bruges (Belgium), in Minjiang (China), and the latest one is in Cape Verde.

KA: We’ve evolved Makoko Floating School into what we call Makoko Floating System, which is really a simple way to build on water by hand. We learned from the people of Makoko and then improved the process into a flat-pack system, prefabricated, easy to assemble, disassemble, highly engineered to European codes, which you can apply internationally. We’ve built it in five countries across three continents, tested it in different environments, tested it with different local materials, looked at the collaboration, understood different contexts and how it would adapt in its different variations and uses.In Bruges, we had some covering with panels, and it was used as a school. In China, we had bamboo. In Mindelo in Cape Verde it’s a floating music hub. It’s in the ocean now. We’ve made a lot of improvements to what started out as a handcrafted, guerrilla-style project. And I want to mention that while it was a school – an incidental use at the time – the project was actually funded and supported by the United Nations Development Programme under the Climate Change Adaptation programme. So it’s always been a project about climate change adaptation, about response to the environment, and the school was an example of the use of it.

PA: A very inspiring example, however, because it was in such a creatively energetic community.

KA: The community is the origin and the key, and the source of the potential of using the system as a way to develop a much improved quality of life for the poor or the rich, it cuts across social classes. It’s about local materials. It’s about local responsibility, understanding what is within means, and maximising it. So that’s where we’re at now, where you can use the system for housing, a resort, a library, all kinds of facilities – on water.

PA: What has the Covid-19 crisis taught you?

KA: There has been the opportunity to step back a bit, slow down, re-evaluate what is important, understand, try to be more efficient, connect with family, change my diet [laughs]. So it’s been a great time to be reflective, as with most people, but also to try to develop the focus on what we think would be important.

PA: Your research right now is about African cities and water.

KA: Water cities as a body of work for the last nine years, since we began Makoko Floating School. We immediately saw the potential, both globally and also for the African continent. I’ve continued the research at the various institutions where I’ve taught. We took students to different cities: Durban with Harvard, Abidjan with Columbia, Lagos with Cornell, and we looked at Mindelo with Princeton. There’s a whole world. A lot of African cities that we’ve been focusing on are on water – the African Water Cities Project. The students are looking at different approaches to tackle the urgent challenges we’ve identified from the research – the adaptation of cities to the changing climate.

INFORMATION

A version of this story appeared in the October 2020 issue of Wallpaper*, guest edited by Design Emergency. A free PDF download of the issue is available here.

nleworks.com

Back in February, journalists in Milan, agog at the news that Raf Simons was joining Miuccia Prada as co-creative director of the historic house, speculated over espressos as to what the duo’s debut show would bring. But no one imagined that their first S/S 2021 show would not be physical – but live streamed worldwide without an in-person audience – to journalists, buyers and Prada fans alike. 

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced us to deepen our relationship with the digital world, and Simons and Prada touched on the importance of today's online universe, stating ‘technology is a part of humanity itself’, in S/S 2021’s show notes. As anticipatory fans live streamed the show from their iPhones, laptops and tablets, models strode within an all yellow curtain lined space lined with plush carpet – designed by regular show set collaborators OMA/AMO. The ceiling hung with monitors – today’s utilitarian take on the decorative chandelier. Usually, post Prada shows, journalists scramble backstage to listen to Miuccia Prada’s take on her designs. For spring, this audience was opened up, with Prada and Simons staging a Q+A post show, answering questions submitted worldwide from online guests from Kiev to Nara.

In S/S 2021’s show notes, Prada and Simons described the collection as ‘a creative conversation in progress.’ Exploring the concept of uniforms (an attitude to dressing that has resonated with designers for spring), it featured facets of the duo’s design heritage. Simons’ streamlined silhouettes, and focus on streetwear shapes and typography, and Prada’s subversively feminine shapes and exploration of colour. Fifties pleated skirts were paired with hoodies, emblazoned with slogans designed by Simons’ regular collaborator Peter de Potter. Icky archive prints from A/W 1996 and S/S 996 were used as canvases to print onto and the Prada logo was reimagined in a soft padded triangle, the only embellishment on pared-back nylon vests and trousers.

Prada and Simons spoke of ‘garments are drawn around the body, held by the hand’ and in a well-known Miuccia-ism, models clutched moire opera coats and technical mackintoshes around their chests. Hybrid design was also a focus, with shawl coats featuring in-built bags and mini skirts, with soft pouches. The designs spoke of a duality between utilitarian and elegance – paradoxes integral to Prada’s design DNA.

 As part of Prada and Simon’s Q+A, Celia Thomson asked: ‘Is anything authentically “new” anymore or is everything regenerated’? In response, Simons mused: ‘The new just for the sake of doing new, doesn’t sound like the most important word.’ S/S 2021 saw a rejection of the superfluous, an evolution of heritage and a collaborative approach to design. They're tenets that will always trump novelty.

INFORMATION 

prada.com

Miami is a heady swirl of art deco architecture and luxury condos, tropical climes and pristine beaches, glitzy nightclubs and well-worn divebars. More recently, however, it has embraced a series of trophy buildings designed by the Who’s Who in architecture, from Rafael Viñoly to Frank Gehry, Foster + Partners, Bjarke Ingels, and Herzog & de Meuron. Here, we look at the architectural projects and real estate developments shaping Miami today.

Park Grove, OMA

Rem Koolhaas’ firm has already made its mark on a significant swathe of Miami, with the completion of a trio of buildings in Faena District in 2016. Now, it’s full steam ahead with a multi-tower residential enclave in Coconut Grove, backed by powerhouse developers The Related Group and Terra Group. Drawing inspiration from Biscayne Bay, OMA partner and project lead Shohei Shigematsu has imagined the towers as linked barrier islands. Each residence features open floor plans, 12ft ceilings with floor-to-ceiling windows, kitchens and bathrooms by designer William Sofield, Sub-Zero and Wolf appliances, expansive terraces, and private elevator access. Over 50,000 sq ft of the development has been parcelled for luxury lifestyle amenities, ensuring residents will almost certainly never want to leave Park Grove. Read more here.

LOCATION: Coconut Grove, Miami
YEAR: 2013 – ongoing
KEY FEATURES: Wine tasting rooms with private storage, five acres of private gardens by Enzo Enea, art collection, mind-body wellness lounge and bio-sauna, Meyer Davis-designed interiors, restaurant by James Beard Award winner Michael Schwartz

One Thousand Museum, Zaha Hadid Architects

Described astutely in a PBS documentary as ‘one of the most complex skyscrapers ever to make it off the drawing board’, One Thousand Museum was Zaha Hadid’s final undertaking before her death in 2016. Completed at the end of last year, the 62-storey tower has already cemented its status as an architectural icon of Downtown Miami’s skyline, thanks to its bold exoskeleton design. The 84 museum-quality units have been realised as half-floor, full-floor and duplex residences, fitted with Gatto Cucine kitchens, Gaggenau and Sub-Zero appliances, Molteni & C custom closets, integrated smart technology, and a choice of luxurious finishes chosen by Hadid herself. Potential buyers can also choose from curated collection of turnkey residences by design houses Artefacto, B&B Italia, Roche Bobois, Meridiani, and Luxury Living Group. Read more here.

LOCATION: Biscayne Boulevard, Miami
YEAR: Q4 2019
KEY FEATURES: Exoskeleton design, aquatic centre, rooftop helipad, bank-quality vault, indoor/outdoor spa, private beach club, on-demand house car, multimedia theatre, specialised security and valet personnel

El Espacio 23, Jorge M Pérez

Forty years in the making, El Espacio 23 is a private museum dedicated to philanthropist and entrepreneur Jorge M Pérez’s vast art collection and first opened to the public during Art Basel Miami Beach last year. A passion project of the billionaire real estate developer, the space is housed in a repurposed 28,000 sq ft warehouse in Miami’s Allapattah neighbourhood and designed by Pérez himself who sees it as an extension of his home (amenities include a library, living room and bar area to entertain guests). The year-round programming includes a series of residencies for artists and curators representing a range of diverse range of disciplines and ethnic backgrounds, as well as activations inspired by the surrounding neighbourhood of Allapattah.

LOCATION: Allapattah, Miami
YEAR: Q4 2019
KEY FEATURES: Artist apartments reserved for residency programmes, shared workspace, library, bar and lounge area

Rubell Museum, Selldorf Architects

When Mera and Don Rubell were looking for an architect to convert a former industrial complex into a museum-worthy setting for their family’s collection, the Miami mega-collectors turned to art world favourite Annabelle Selldorf. Located in Miami’s emerging Allapattah neighbourhood, the museum will draw on the Rubells’ extensive holdings of over 7,200 works by more than 1,000 artists. Selldorf Architects gutted and transformed six warehouse units into a cohesive 100,000 sq ft campus – tripling the exhibition capacity of the collection’s previous space. The Rubell Museum now unfolds across a single level, comprising 40 galleries, a flexible events and performance space, a richly stocked research library, a bookstore, an outdoor bar and restaurant serving Basque cuisine. Read more here.

LOCATION: Allapattah, Miami
YEAR: Q4 2019
KEY FEATURES: Refinished concrete floors, single-storey complex, courtyard garden featuring rare plants native to the Everglades and Florida

Eighty Seven Park, Renzo Piano Building Workshop

Flanked by a 35-acre public park to the south and a private park to the north, few condominium projects in Miami – if any – can boast the green credentials of Renzo Piano’s Eighty Seven Park. ‘What we’re expressing is that this building belongs to nature,’ said the Italian architect when we first checked on the development’s progress in 2017. The 70 residences, spread over 18 elliptical floors, emphasise outdoor living – each comes with a generously sized wraparound terrace ranging from 15-25ft wide. Paris-based design firm RDAI notes the interior design was built around natural materials collected at the site: the Venetian terrazzo flooring that recalls Miami’s white sand beaches, for example. Read more here.

LOCATION: North Shore, Miami Beach
YEAR: Q4 2019
KEY FEATURES: 24-hour concierge and butler service, enoteca (wine shop), onsite botanist, oceanfront swimming pools, spa, state-of-the-art fitness centre, outdoor juice bar, private elevator access to all units

Monad Terrace, Ateliers Jean Nouvel

‘From the beginning – and always – it has been important to me to put the spirit of place in all my work,’ says Jean Nouvel. ‘Here in Miami, I wanted to create a building that is like the reflection of the sun on the water.’ Comprising 59 luxury waterfront residences nestled around a shimmering lagoon, Monad Terrace in South Beach is the Pritzker Prize winner’s first and only residential project in Florida. The striking sawtooth façade is made up of honeycomb glass screens, which diffuse sunlight and provide privacy to residents while maintaining unobstructed views of Biscayne Bay. Vertical gardens on the north and south façades offer additional shade.

LOCATION: South Beach, Miami Beach
YEAR: 2020 (under construction)
KEY FEATURES: Honeycomb sawtooth façade, 116ft swimming pool and hot tub, climbing gardens, private or semi-private elevator access, wellness centre, residents’ lounge

Residences by Armani/Casa, César Pelli

This sleek, monolithic oceanfront tower was the last project designed by venerable architect César Pelli before his death in July last year. The 56-storey structure is composed of ‘two intertwined sail-like shapes, billowing and expanding as they rise’, says Gregg Jones, principal of Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects, while its blue-hued glass was designed to flow seamlessly into the water below. Giorgio Armani has stepped in personally to deliver Armani/Casa’s first residential project in the US, envisioning elegantly understated interiors fitted materials like white gold leaf, onyx and bronzed mirrors. Imagined as ‘homes in the sky’, the residences feature expansive terraces, master suites with his-and-hers bathrooms, and are wired with smart technology to access select building amenities.

LOCATION: Sunny Isles Beach
YEAR: Q4 2019
KEY FEATURES: Ocean-view yoga studio with Pilates equipment, Armani/Privé lounge, museum-quality art collection, 24-hour multilingual concierge service, cigar room, wine cellar, two-storey revitalisation spa, exclusive beach amenities, classic Hollywood-inspired movie theatre

Mr C Residences, Arquitectonica

Fourth-generation members of the storied Cipriani family, Maggio and Ignazio Cipriani are the forces behind Mr C, a hospitality and residential brand for luxury modern living. Following projects in Los Angeles and New York, the brothers are now making waves with Miami, teaming up with Terra’s David Martin, architect Ray Fort of Arquitectonica, and interior design firm Meyer Davis to bring a taste of old world Europe to a bayside residential tower in Coconut Grove. The 118 residences in the 21-storey building will feature 11ft ceilings, open floor plan layouts, private outdoor terraces, custom-designed Italian kitchens by ITALKRAFT with terrazzo and quartz countertops, European porcelain tile floors, and spa-like bathrooms.

LOCATION: Coconut Grove, Miami
YEAR: Expected Q3 2022
KEY FEATURES: Sail-inspired design, private Bellini bar on the pool deck, speciality gourmet market, lifestyle and nautical concierge, Bayshore owners’ club, peloton studio, indoor yoga studio, in-home delivery from on-site café

Rem Koolhaas has been thinking about the countryside for years, he tells a captive audience on a blustery New York morning, and it’s time to give it some attention. Koolhaas is introducing ‘Countryside, The Future,’ an exhibition that opens today at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. It’s a temporally and spatially massive show, the kind of focus on architecture that most practitioners and historians only dream of. And the exhibition, though officially billed as an AMO plus collaborators project, is vintage Rem, almost a greatest hits collection.

There’s the iconoclastic personality, which comes through in a bracing first-person wall text that introduces the show. It points out the exhibition's intellectual origins – an observation that a Swiss village he liked to visit was changing. Pop culture is referenced in the magazine covers that paper the central column. The typical OMA/AMO research-intensive vibe can be seen in the first gallery offshoot, where four categories of books under glass vie for attention with a massive wall-printed text, courtesy designer Irma Boom. 

Throughout the show you'll read an endless series of questions Koolhaas asked himself as he thought about the countryside. A projected map of the world is the exhibition’s iconic image, where the red graphics show areas the exhibition contends with, featuring rotating typefaces of information graphically overlaid. There’s an alarming graphic that shows heat anomalies, and another that shows the sheer number of shipping routes, and, well, much of the show is inherently alarming.

Koolhaas’ argument, such as there is one (the show seems purposefully non-polemical), is that the countryside has been overlooked, largely because of the UN’s observation that, by 2050, two thirds of the world’s population will live in cities. And that its being overlooked has caused it to be transformed from a bucolic land of peace and pleasure (how he remembered Switzerland) into a sort of weird and un-designed back office/storage room for the world’s cities.

The exhibition, put together with five generations of Harvard GSD students and a host of collaborators from Beijing, The Netherlands, and the University of Nairobi, offers a look into some of those back office mechanisms. Some – like a robotic bee and some lively greenhouses – feel familiar. Others – like a map of China’s political structure (extremely timely), and a look at how Qatar dealt with food insecurity caused by political blockades (also timely given our planet’s very real potential to experience global food insecurity) – offer some of that zing of excitement that we have come to associate with Koolhaas’, earlier in particular, contributions to the field.

Koolhaas, with his firm, made his mark with his book Delirious New York, which he brought up; then another book, SMLXL, and then the Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, always staying just one step ahead of what the staid academy expected architectural historians and theorists to do. ‘Countryside, The Future’ feels like the next move in that direction, but it’s also, like his 2003 publication Content was, somewhat messier, a bit, perhaps, historically sloppier; the word ‘antiquity' is used frequently to refer, generally, to ‘the past,’ though it’s clear that the actual locus of this antiquity is only loosely imagined.

Still, that’s what’s on the menu now, in this era of ever-expanding museums and a lay public increasingly interested in understanding the seemingly infinite complexities of our world, whether expressed here through fish farm videos or a moving Stalin robot. It is likely that enterprising students of architecture and future historians will see this as something like a capstone to his career. It’s a bit cheeky, it has its intellectual moments, and – just like the tractor that sits right out front – meant to capture our attention. What the public – or the politicians involved in maintaining all the various orders the show alludes to – does with this attention remains to be seen.

INFORMATION

‘Countryside, The Future’ runs 20 February – 14 August 2020 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

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When it comes to landmark architecture books, Rem Koolhaas' literary output is as iconic as they come. The celebrated Dutch architect – and famous co-founder of international architecture firm OMA – has been known to produce some of the most widely referenced and treasured publications in the field. Now, the master's latest offering, the hefty – at some four kilos heavy – Elements Of Architecture has just hit the shelves. 

From 1978's Delirious New York, a unique insight into the Big Apple, to 1995's S, M, L, XL, where the author explored the expansion of the architecture office through his projects, arranged by scale, and his more recent foray into Japanese Metabolism, with 2011's Project Japan (written together with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist), Koolhaas is a master in taking one strong theme and digging deep, meticulously exploring his subject. True to form in his new publication, Koolhaas takes the material from his widely acclaimed 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale exhibition and expands and updates, delving further into the use and meaning of building detail.

Including chapters such as ‘window', ‘facade', ‘balcony', ‘corridor', ‘fireplace', ‘stair', ‘escalator' and ‘elevator', the book (which draws on research from the Harvard Graduate School of Design) follows up on the Venice show's structure, including however added material, such as essays from Stephan Trueby, Manfredo di Robilant and Jeffrey Inaba, and an exclusive photo essay by Wolfgang Tillmans. Koolhaas collaborated on this book with Dutch graphic designer Irma Boom. ‘Every book is a collaboration', said Koolhaas of their work together at the book's launch. ‘We are neighbours and she is an artist and is the best editor, with the best radar for great content'. 

Koolhaas' own essay and each chapter aim to ‘excavate the micro-narratives of building detail', he explains. The publication goes back to the very basics of architecture, painstakingly examining each individual element through its history, from origins to current technological advances. At 2,600 pages long, this is not a book for the faint hearted; yet it's one that will reward its reader with valuable insights and information from one of architecture's most important contemporary proponents. 

INFORMATION

For more information visit the Taschen website

For most architects, leaving university means kissing the crazy ideas and impossible designs goodbye and buckling down to pragmatism and compromise; not for Ellen van Loon. The Dutch architect, a partner at Rem Koolhaas’ OMA since 2002, approaches her projects with the same ambition, uncompromising passion and conceptual rigour she had when she was a student back at TU Delft. And what’s more, she is extremely adept at bringing those ‘crazy’ projects to life. Following a strong concept is at the core of van Loon’s work, a quality that makes her buildings both very easy to explain, but also, often, pretty challenging to actually build.

‘I have always been driven by concepts; things like mood boards and styles came much later for me,’ she says, sitting in a nondescript Rotterdam café, having come straight from a seven-hour meeting in The Hague about the Dutch parliament renovation that she is working on there. Anyone else would probably be nursing a throbbing headache at this point, but van Loon seems completely unaffected, full of energy and happily reminisces about her university days.

‘My initial drive is the conceptual take on a project,’ she explains. ‘I was always in the model shop of the university, trying to find new shapes, new ways of organising buildings. I remember a moment in my studies when Rem gave a lecture about the library in Paris [Très Grande Bibliothèque, OMA’s competition entry for a new national library] and I was totally flabbergasted. I remember thinking this was the first architect I’d met that could really think conceptually.’

Van Loon graduated in the early 1990s and, seeking international experience, as well as the chance to cut her teeth on larger-scale public buildings (designing single family houses was never going to be enough), she went to Berlin. With the Wall having just come down, this was an exciting time for the German capital, full of positivity and architectural promise. ‘I was planning to stay for one year but I stayed five,’ she recalls. She was soon given more responsibility on bigger projects, which is exactly what she wanted – working, among other things, on Foster + Partners’ iconic Reichstag building.

When van Loon returned to the Netherlands in 1998, she was offered a job at OMA and it seemed a perfect match in many ways. ‘In terms of working conceptually, OMA was the right place to be. But I was also happy that, by now, I had a bit of experience in practice. This was a moment when OMA was gaining a lot of momentum; we got many commissions for new projects and international work. It was the perfect moment to start.’

The architect was a young mother at the time, but working with Koolhaas was enticing and the studio had an ‘exciting’ project for her, the headquarters of Universal Studios in Los Angeles. ‘I was a bit hesitant, as I was going to an office that is 24/7 and the light is always on, and I thought, “How on earth am I going to manage that with a private life and a baby?”’ she remembers.

It didn’t stop her. In fact, it seems not many things do. By all accounts, van Loon is not a quitter. She describes her breakthrough moment, the commission for the Casa da Música in Porto, as a ‘crazy concept’. It was completed to wide acclaim in 2005 and remains one of OMA’s most recognisable works. She is currently working on The Factory, a performing arts complex in Manchester, OMA’s first major public project in the UK, on the site of the former Granada TV Studios. ‘I like making things happen,’ says van Loon. ‘I like challenges and risks. I like projects that everybody thinks are absolutely impossible. That is where my drive comes from – to make impossible things possible. I will fight for what I believe. And if I don’t win the fight on day one, I just keep on repeating it until I do. I never give up.’

This desire sees her revel in big and complicated public projects – of which OMA has an abundance. It is also what drew her to her latest built work, the design for a mixed-use building in Copenhagen, called BLOX – a commission by local philanthropic organisation Realdania to house the Danish Architecture Centre (DAC), which it funds, along with further offices, housing, underground parking, leisure and retail.

One of Copenhagen’s main ring roads goes right through the site and a new pedestrian bridge is planned next to it, opening in autumn. This meant that the design had to negotiate some heavy circulation and, together with the slew of different functions to be included, made for an extremely challenging and complex brief. But van Loon was not fazed. ‘I like complexity. Not as a main goal, but I like complex interactions between programme parts, or certain elements in a design. It’s like solving a puzzle, but also creating new relationships,’ she says.

Her solution involved locating the DAC at the heart of the design and arranging all the different functions around it, creating a kind of solar system of mini-worlds that allows the traffic to run undisturbed beneath. Van Loon draws an apt parallel between the centre’s operations and its placement within the building: ‘From the core you can see all the functions the centre deals with daily, everything that matters in a city – bicycles, cars, people. It’s like a mini-city in a box.’

This overarching concept is enriched by meticulous design details at every scale, such as the children’s playground that was incorporated to replace an existing one on site (a first for OMA, and one of the trickiest parts of the project, says van Loon, only half-joking); and a ‘golden room’, a high-security, brass-lined exhibition hall for sensitive art pieces. The building is a composition of different ‘boxes’, stacked on top of each other, but each with its own identity, explains the architect.

It all seems very rational, but van Loon begs to differ. ‘We are good at branding our work as being extremely rational, but in reality it is, of course, quite emotional. For the Casa da Música, for example, I made so many emotional decisions. I like that combination of emotional and rational decisions. You can’t always explain everything.’

That may be so, but the result is sure to become a major destination for Copenhagen. With its public spaces, the DAC’s programme, and BLOXHUB – its own urban innovation hub – exciting times await this seafront scheme come May, when the official opening takes place; not least thanks to the spirit of its enterprising architect, the mastermind behind its intricately balanced ecosystem. §

A version of this article was originally featured in the May 2018 issue of Wallpaper* (W*230)

INFORMATION

oma.eu

Bucking the trend for digitalisation, this project, a large-scale library complex for Qatar, is one of OMA’s most striking works to-date. The scheme is impressive in scale and ambition, comprising within a single building the National Library, the Public Library, the University Library, and the Heritage Collection – a selection of valuable historical texts and manuscripts related to Arab-Islamic civilisation. Providing a home for over a million books and thousands of readers, the Arab country’s new Qatar National Library spans an area of 42,000 sq m and has just opened its doors to the public.

Led by Rem Koolhaas, Ellen van Loon, Lyad Alsaka, Vincent Kersten and Gary Owen, the project was conceived as a ‘single room’, explain the architects. Here, both people and books can coexist, in a building, where book storage and circulation spaces create a unique internal topography. Accessed from a large, triangular open space at its heart, the library interior is defined by three large aisles that are flanked by shelving, and serve as socialising, resting and reading areas, offering views across the library and out towards the surrounding environment.

‘We designed the space so you can see all the books in a panorama’, says Koolhaas. ‘You emerge immediately surrounded by literally every book – all physically present, visible, and accessible, without any particular effort. The interior is so large it’s on an almost urban scale: it could contain an entire population, and also an entire population of books.’

At the heart of the building and built on a six-metre deep lower ground level, in the style of an archaeological excavation, sits the Heritage Collection. Here, in a special section clad in beige travertine stone, is the library’s rich selection of historical documents, symbolically placed at the complex’s very core.

The library, which is only the third of its typology to be completed by OMA ever, forms part of the Education City, Qatar’s new academic campus, which is the home of a wealth of university and institution buildings – aiming to highlight the country’s leading role, globally, within the sector.

INFORMATION

For more information visit the website of OMA

Architects often talk about flexible buildings, interiors that can easily adapt to different needs, ready to accommodate several functions. But you’d be hard pressed to find one that took the meaning of this as literally as Rem Koolhaas’ practice OMA did in its most recent project in Paris, Lafayette Anticipations, its first finished building in the French capital.

Faced with a 19th-century industrial structure on a relatively modest site in the Marais, and a brief from Fondation d’Entreprise Galeries Lafayette to create an art centre fit to host three to four annual shows, plus performances and workshops, the architects approached the design with a truly open mind.

The result, Lafayette Anticipations, is a ‘curatorial machine’ of a building, with an adaptable interior that gives spatial  exibility a new meaning. ‘Paris is replete with prestigious collections, yet no place is absolutely dedicated to the work of artists or to the production of their pieces,’ says Guillaume Houzé, president of Fondation Galeries Lafayette.

‘There was thus an opportunity to establish, in the heart of the city, a toolbox giving creators the chance to multiply their capacities and actions, prompting the emergence of new forms and ideas, then sharing them with the greatest number. Within the 9 rue du Plâtre building, OMA made these aspirations a reality.’

In order to achieve this, OMA completely gutted the existing structure (built in 1891 by French architect Samuel Menjot de Dammartin for Xavier Ruel’s Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville), keeping the interior simple and uncluttered, while transforming the courtyard at its heart into a glass ‘exhibition tower’ composed of four mobile platforms.

‘We were asked to accommodate an institution that offers carte blanche to artists in a building entirely protected by heritage regulations,’ says OMA project architect Clément Périssé.

‘Only a machine could solve this. By inserting a moveable mechanism into its courtyard, the only space open to intervention, we activated the entire existing building and gave it the potential to serve this ambitious project.’

The gallery now spans 2,200 sq m and includes 875 sq m of exhibition space, as well as production workshops, visitor engagement areas, an organic, vegan, gluten-free café-restaurant, and a store, within one beautifully composed, well-oiled ecosystem clad in timber, concrete, anodised aluminium, galvanised steel grating and limestone.

The gallery’s holistic vision also allows for artwork to be made on site, with its facilities open to professionals from a wide variety of disciplines, including fashion, design, visual arts and performance.

Referencing the opening show by American artist Lutz Bacher, Houzé says, ‘Numerous pieces presented in the show will have been produced in the Lafayette Anticipations workshop. Here, the diversity of the artists and their work will encourage new opportunities for spatial cohabitation within our modular environment.’

As originally featured in the July 2018 issue of Wallpaper* (W*232)

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the OMA website and the Lafayette Anticipations website

ADDRESS

9 Rue du Plâtre
75004 Paris
France

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When the Fondazione Prada opened its doors in Milan to critical acclaim in 2015, the fashion, art and architecture worlds found a natural home in the OMA-designed complex. The site, a former distillery dating from 1910, has been widely covered and lovingly visited since, but behind the scenes, further works have been quietly underway. Now, the foundation and its architects have just announced the completion of the complex’s next phase – its imposing tower. 

Fittingly named ‘Torre’, this new element brings height to the campus, which is composed of seven structures in a calculated mix of looks and sizes. The completed design, headed by Rem Koolhaas, with Chris van Duijn and Federico Pompignoli, also marks the completion of the Milan venue. 

A soaring 60m of white concrete, the tower unfolds across a total surface of approximately 2.000 sq m and nine levels. Six of these are exhibition spaces, with a restaurant, a panoramic terrace with a rooftop bar, and further visitor facilities occupying the remaining floors. 

Each floor is designed to host specific environmental conditions, according to the type of art displayed within. The height varies accordingly too. Glass opening are cut out of the concrete form, making the most of the Italian sun. The irregular shape allows for the variations in sizes and needs, cantilevering gracefully over the public spaces.

‘Torre is the final section of a collection of different exhibition conditions that together define Fondazione Prada’, says Koolhaas, going on to focus on the tower’s own, varied exhibition spaces. ‘Together these variations produce a radical diversity within a simple volume – so that the interaction between the spaces and specific events or works of art offer an endless variety of conditions…’ One thing, points out Koolhaas, brings it all together. ‘The staircase is the one element unifying all irregularities – its complexity lifts it beyond the typical pragmatic element, the staircase has become a highly charged architectural element.’

The Torre is scheduled to officially open its doors to the public on the 20th April 2018.

INFORMATION
For more information visit the OMA website

Alserkal Avenue – the Dubai arts district filled with galleries, hip eateries, a black box theatre and design shops – was once the site of a marble factory. Now, it's home to Concrete, the first building in the United Arab Emirates designed by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. When OMA received the commission a few years back, they were given a simple directive: 'To make that space multipurpose, to enable that building to live multiple lives, because today no space serves only one purpose,' recalls Vilma Jurkute, the director of Alserkal Avenue. 'A museum is not just a museum, a gallery is not just a gallery. They all accommodate so many other initiatives as part of their program. The idea was to create that space for Dubai.'

OMA delivered, transforming an existing warehouse into a 1,250 sq m multipurpose venue. 'We took a shape that was already existing, and then we looked at the behavior of what can happen in that building. We focused on that,' said Rem Koolhaas, the co-founder of OMA. Concrete can be used for everything from a museum-quality exhibition to a yoga studio to a concert hall where multiple events can be held at the same time thanks to a series of rotating walls. 'There is four of them and they have the ability to divide the space into two, three, or four and conduct four different events at the same time,' said Iyad Alsaka, the lead architect on the project.

Unlike the flashy buildings of Dubai – the most famous being the Burj Khalifa and the Burj Al Arab – Concrete takes a more minimal approach in tune with the architecture of the surrounding warehouses of Alserkal Avenue. 'The development of shape was not a very productive future, and it made the office switch to performance,' said Koolhaas. A translucent double polycarbonate was used for the facade, which features four enormous pivoting walls that double as entryways. The three other exterior walls consist of a sprayed concrete with integrated mirrors for a sparkly finish. 'The front was very intentional; we wanted to achieve a continuation of the inside space to the outside,' said Alsaka. The interiors feature sweeping 8m high ceilings, walls composed of concrete cladding and skylights that bring natural light into the space. Tucked away in the back is a green room that takes the concept quite literally by covering it in green velvet, and prayer rooms.

The space’s inaugural exhibition is 'Syria: Into the Light', a survey of Syrian art presented by the Atassi Foundation, on view until 3 April. 'It’s about showing that the region has art history, has talent,' said Abdelmonem Bin Eisa Alserkal, patron and founder of Alserkal Avenue. Expect to see a myriad of other happenings, exhibitions, talks and concerts over the next few months.

'Over the last decade, Alserkal Avenue has grown and evolved organically with the arts and culture scene of the United Arab Emirates,' said Alserkal. 'The introduction of Concrete marks a new milestone as part of the cultural advancement of the region.'

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the OMA website and the Alserkal Avenue website

ADDRESS

Concrete
1 Street 8
Dubai

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After a long search for a candidate to provide Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery with a new extension, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), with its New York office lead partner Shohei Shigematsu, has been selected to expand and refurbish the site. The $80 million scheme – the largest ever initiated by a cultural organisation in western New York – will be the international firm's first art museum designed on US soil.

The project, titled AK360, will enlarge the Albright-Knox, enhancing the visitor experience and helping transform the gallery into a 21st century venue to benefit Buffalo's future generations. The expansion, which is the museum's first in over half a century, will be overseen by Shigematsu. The architect will spend the next year developing ideas with the community and board to formulate a vision for the site.

‘Our selection process sought creative approaches to the challenges of expanding and refurbishing the Albright-Knox,’ says the museum's board president, Tom Hyde. ‘At the top of our list, we were looking for genuine sensitivity to our historic buildings and Olmsted campus, which anchor the increasingly vibrant Elmwood Avenue Cultural District. OMA [and] Shohei Shigematsu have demonstrated their creative approaches to building in complex sites, most recently at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, which also connects parkland and urban landscape.’

The new extension is planned to include numerous state-of-the-art spaces, including a designated area for events, galleries for the display of the museum's world class collection and learning and social areas. The Albright-Knox and Shigematsu will embark upon the next phase of the process this September.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit OMA’s website

ADDRESS

Albright-Knox Art Gallery
1285 Elmwood Avenue
Buffalo, NY 14222

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A highly anticipated Rem Koolhaas/OMA project to reconceive and redesign the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice as a department store – a project commissioned by the Benetton family's property group in 2009 – is now coming to the end of its six-year-long schedule. Wallpaper* paid a visit during the opening week of the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale before the building was handed over for fitting out by the tenant, DFS Group, in a tour courtesy of project partner-in-charge Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli.

OMA’s exhibition 'Cronocaos', for the 12th International Architecture Biennale in 2010, demonstrated architects’ fascination with old buildings and the special challenges involved in their renovation. Prime examples set by Koolhaas in recent years have included the Fondazione Prada in Milan and the Garage Museum for Contemporary Art in Moscow.

The Fondaco dei Tedeschi was built in 1228 and has since seen service as a trading post for German merchants in the 16th century and a customs house in the 17th century, before being converted last century into a post office. Over the years, it has undergone radical structural changes and was then listed as a 'Monument' in 1987, which restricted further permissible alterations.

The 9,000 sq m space maintains the traditional concept of a covered urban area, while the renovated 19th century pavilion over the central courtyard is supported by a new steel and glass floor. Authenticity has been preserved by retaining many important historic features, such as the corner rooms, and resurrecting others such as the galleries, which will once again become a surface for frescoes, reappearing in contemporary form. In order to encourage circulation to the building, new entrances from the Campo San Bartolomeo and the Rialto have been created, while the existing entrances into the courtyard have been retained for the locals; escalators are also in place to create a new public route through the building.

OMA created a new rooftop by the renovation of the existing 19th Century pavilion at the top and the addi­tion of a large wooden terrace, now offering spectacular views over the city. Both this and the central courtyard below will remain open to the public. 

Department stores, as quasi-public buildings, have often been the focus for various different artistic disciplines and OMA, too, plans for the project to be a mixture of the artistic and the commercial. London-based Jamie Fobert Architects is responsible for the retail concept and the store is due to open this autumn.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit OMA's website

Photography: Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti

So often we are intimidated by the scope and scale of contemporary architecture, the expansive vaults, the soaring atria, the undulating walls. We might be unsure of our place in it; passive viewer or active participant? For a decade, Italian Ila Bêka and French Louise Lemoine, two young filmmakers, have taken us on an alternative journey, one which allows us to experience the built and natural environment from the perspective of those who interact with it on a daily basis. As well as speaking to the architects or designers (after the design process is complete), they also talk to everyone from construction workers to tenants, to passers by.  

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has recognised this novel approach and announced acquisition of their entire 16 film oeuvre – at once innovative in the realms of architecture and cinema. This gesture represents the Department of Architecture and Design's first foray into the medium of film.  

'Film is becoming a significant tool for in-depth exploration and transmission of architecture and design experiences, and not only aesthetics and process… In focusing on the subjective experience of architecture,' wrote MoMA collection specialist Paul Galloway. 'The [films of Beka and Lemoine] further MoMA's ability to examine and present the relevance of building design to everyday life.'

Lemoine, who grew up in the house that launched the series, Koolhaas Houselife (2008), followed Guadalupe, the wry housekeeper, as she made her daily rounds in the challenging dwelling, which Rem Koolhaas designed especially for Lemoine's father who had been severely injured in an automobile accident. This process was intensely personal to Lemoine, but also gave the rest of us a chance to intimately experience the solutions of a world famous architect faced with an unusual family program while still delivering signature work. 

Beka and Lemoine, who somehow manage to insert themselves in their works without stealing the show, elicit candid responses both from the architects and these 'human maps of the buildings', to capture 'the spontaneity of life', as Lemoine puts it.  Projects from Renzo Piano, Frank Gehry, Herzog and de Meuron, Richard Meier and Bjarke Ingels have been matched by commissioned films from the Fondazione Prada and the Barbican Center and more environmental subjects like Paris's Place de la République, the vineyards of Pomerol, the island of La Maddalena, and most recently Bordeaux's La Garonne river embankment.

To actually polish a window or interact with neighbours or cycle by a river's shores is to form an ongoing dialogue with architecture or place and unveils an organic symbiosis that these thoughtful, slow-paced films gently, but clearly, expose. Neither precious nor fawning, and often charming and amusing, the work of these filmmakers leaves a singular impression. 

In Koolhaas Houselife (2008), Lemoine followed Guadalupe, the wry housekeeper, as she made her daily rounds in the challenging dwelling designed by Rem Koolhaas especially for Lemoine's father who had been severely injured in an automobile accident

INFORMATION

For more information visit the Beka & Lemoine website

A grey pixelated cloud rises from Rotterdam's street level to form the city's latest architectural addition. The Timmerhuis, created by Dutch super-practice OMA is an all-encompasing response to several starting points; it is an inner city, urban structure that unites office, public space and residential; it was conceived as a beacon of sustainability; and it is also a reflection on a city's architectural identity. 'It is informal and monumental at the same time,' explains OMA's partner in charge Reinier De Graaf. 'It is a mirror of its own identity.'

Timmerhuis sits adjacent to a municipality establishment dating from the 1950s, on a site symbolising, in a way, the reconstruction of post-war Rotterdam. The plot flags up the city's particular urban identity; its flattened city centre meant that a large part of Rotterdam had to be completely rebuilt. 

Now carefully designed for its plot, the new building's biggest part is occupied by city hall offices. The structure's cascading form culminates into two peaks that house 84 residential units. The series of apartments feature sky patios boasting exceptional views over the city (a rare luxury in central Rotterdam).

OMA's design forges close relationships with its context, as new and old blend physically and symbolically. The architects have used the city museum's archive to create striking tapestries adorning carefully designed interiors that cater for a diverse array of office typologies – open plan, meeting rooms, 'break-out' spaces, and work cubicles, to name a few. They have also turned part of the original municipality building's ornamental brick façade into an interior wall, reminding users of the site's historical heritage.

On the ground floor, however, the building reveals a more public front. The 'passage', an interior thoroughfare, dissects the space to connect the existing city hall premises and the Eastern portion of the city centre. A new museum showcasing the city's archive is set to open in February in a second atrium. Cafes and shops complete Timmerhuis' contribution to the surrounding street life.

As part of the brief, this is one of the country's most sustainable buildings to date, explain the architects. 'It had to be the most sustainable mixed-use building in the Netherlands – and it is. The components are recyclable,' says De Graaf, 'this was the main idea for sustainability.' Its structurally efficient modular form also contributes to this agenda.

Seen against the backdrop of the city's skyline, Timmerhuis 'dissolves into Rotterdam,' adds De Graaf; visually, physically, as well as symbolically. 

INFORMATION

For more information on OMA visit the website

Photography: Ossip van Duivenbode

For what seems like eons architecture schools have debated the role of speculative artistic endeavour in their curricula. 'Drawing Ambience: Alvin Boyarksy and the Architectural Association', opening today at the Cooper Union School of Architecture, makes one of the most powerful arguments for its value that you'll ever see.  

The show, co-organised by the RISD Museum and the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis (it was displayed at each before arriving at Cooper Union), highlights the collection of drawings and ephemera assembled by the late Alvin Boyarsky during his tenure as chairman of the Architectural Association (AA) in London from 1971 until his death in 1990. 

Boyarsky oversaw the blossoming of some of the greatest talent in contemporary architectural history - largely a testament to his steadfast advocacy for experiment and his ability to nurture creativity.  He received the 44 pieces in the show from John Hejduk, Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Lebbeus Woods, Eduardo Paolozzi, Coop Himmelblau, Bernard Tschumi, Superstudio, and Archigram's Michael Webb and David Greene, to name just a few. 

These works, which showcase an astonishing range of techniques, styles, and philosophies, reflect not just the flourishing of the groundbreaking school, but a time of unprecedented ingenuity, particularly in drawing, which arguably reached its pinnacle (and perhaps the pinnacle of artistic freedom in architecture, before software began to dictate aesthetic and practical choices) in this time just before the dawn of the digital age. 

While the exhibition does contain a few technically-inspired pieces, such as Tschumi's striking sketches for La Villette in Paris and Hadid's study for the Irish Prime Minister's residence in Dublin, most of the depictions dive deep into alternate urban worlds, mega-structures, abstracted buildings, mashed-up landscapes, and visual manifestos. At times their sensibilities merge with Pop Art, collage, Cubism, Futurism, Hi-Tech, Russian Constructivism, or Japanese ukiyo-e. 

Drawing Ambience also includes plates from AA publications containing these artworks, and construction photos of large-scale installations (by Hedjuk, Mary Miss, and Coop Himmelblau) in nearby Bedford Square during Boyarsky's tenure. Most of the drawings were exhibited at the school shortly after they were created, but with few exceptions this is the first time they've been accessible to a wider audience. 

The sketches were given to Boyarsky as gifts, while these masters-to-be were still students, visiting lecturers, or pre-tenured professors, shedding light on their early processes and inspirations, and yielding unexpected surprises. Untitled by Libeskind, reveals a rare desire to break from ordered chaos into organic form; graphically-rich pieces by OMA's Alex Wall and Zoe and Elia Zenghelis reveal the firm's artistic depth (beyond Koolhaas' contribution) from its early days; and Hadid's four works expose a profound variety of investigation, from painterly, dimensional forms to surreally altered cityscapes. 

'It was very much a time of pure experiment,' said Boyarsky's son Nicholas, who grew up with much of this art at his family's home. 'They didn't know where it was going.' He adds of his father: 'He was very much interested in the beginnings of things, and where they would go.'

Steven Hillyer, director of the Architecture Archives at Cooper Union, argues that the show will help today's students 'think more alternatively and poetically about their approach,' particularly because the bold inventions came during these architects' formative years. 

Boyarsky, along with Joan Ockman, Tschumi, Webb, former Cooper Union Dean Anthony Vidler, and current Dean Nader Tehrani will be participating in a panel discussion inspired by the show on November 6.

INFORMATION

’Drawing Ambience: Alvin Boyarsky and the Architectural Association’ runs until 25 November

ADDRESS

The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture
The Cooper Union
30 Cooper Sq, New York,
NY 10003, USA

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Architects have long turned their hand to product design – from David Adjaye to David Chipperfield and Zaha Hadid – these A-listers have all occasionally thought small in scale and occasionally wiggly. (Yes, Frank Gehry, we’re looking at you!)

To mark our 200th issue, we decided to double our Power 100 into a meaty, two-ton Power 200; an upscaled calibration of design achievement. Or rather 100+100 (normal disservice will be resumed next year) – including the top 20 architects to turn their pencils to product design.

Rising in the ranks are the likes of master multi-tasker Antonio Citterio, great British minimalist John Pawson and the monochromatically stylish Richard Meier. Daniel Libeskind, Isay Weinfeld, Shigeru Ban and Toyo Ito feature prominently as well, pushing the boundaries of product and material ever further. There are also illuminaries like Nigel Coates, Jean Nouvel, Mario Bellini, Renzo Piano and Rem Koolhaas/OMA who have and pretty much done it all. While collaboration isn’t a requirement, many have turned their talents to similar brands, including legendary Italian brand Alessi which counts Peter Zumthor, SANAA, Norman Foster, Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas among their stylish ranks. 

Let the debate begin...

See the Power 200 in full here

INFORMATION
See the Power 200 in full

Architecture studio OMA has resurrected a 1960s Soviet Modernist ruin as a contemporary art museum in Moscow's Gorky Park, restoring original features and wrapping the two-storey space in a gleaming polycarbonate façade.

The 5,400 sq m building is a new permanent home for the Garage art centre founded in 2008 by art collector and philanthropist Dasha Zhukova and named after the centre's first location, the Konstantin Melnikov-designed Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage. More recently, a nearby pavilion designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban has provided a temporary home.

The new structure looks nothing like its Brezhnev-era predecessor, the 1,200-seat Vremena Goda restaurant that OMA founder Rem Koolhaas first saw when he visited Moscow in his twenties.

'What we tried to do was to preserve some of the history of its decay.  For me, the great fallacy of the whole preservation movement is that it can only preserve great monuments,' says Koolhaas.

New architectural interventions include a double-height lobby that accommodates large-scale commissioned projects such as the debut Come to Garage! painting by Russian artist Eric Bulatov.

The double layered translucent polycarbonate façade also acts as a space in which to hide the building's electrical services while two 11-metre wide panels on either side of the building slide upwards revealing views in- and outwards. Garage curator Kate Fowle says this creates a unique 'visual interface' with the park that has also received something of a facelift with manicured lawns and an artificial beach where young Moscovites suntan on sculptural recliners.

According to Koolhaas, the generous dimensions of 1960s Soviet architecture offered a unique chance to experiment with the act of preservation in a 'radical' way adding galleries, education facilities, an auditorium, and a rather utilitarian-looking cafe.

Inside, original brickwork has been left exposed while 'found' features like a crumbling mosaic artwork and moss-green ceramic tiles - once ubiquitous in Soviet interiors - are coupled with contemporary concrete and birchwood floors.  

OMA's innovative design stands in contrast to Moscow's relatively conservative art scene where political works are especially still perceived as highly controversial. The inaugural programme avoided any such issues with the likes of Yayoi Kusama's playful works that included several of the park's trees sheathed in the artist's trademark polkadot pattern, Rirkrit Tiravanija's Ping-Pong Club Moscow, and a small concrete space that will eventually contain a work made from nuclear waste.  It is 'scheduled' to arrive post-treatment in 3015.

ADDRESS

9/45 Krymsky Val Street
119049, Moscow, Russia

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Milan is having an uncharacteristically hip moment.  Despite messy logistics and half-baked construction, The Expo has revitalised the city’s spiritual shroud, while iconic public figures such as Giorgio Armani have helped buoy the wave of attention with a new fashion museum and a recent Hollywood-studded 40th anniversary event.  But no one has done more to shine a truly long-term, international and bright lens on this city than Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli who will open the doors to their long-awaited Fondazione Prada on 9 May.

In the works for more than a decade, the Fondazione opens with 'Serial Classic', an exhibit curated by Salvatore Settis, and lives up to every bit of hype that has swirled around it. The project is massively ambitious – 10 different buildings packed with a dazzling selection of contemporary and modern art sprawl like a labyrinth across 19,000 sq meters — and is just as satisfying.

‘People keep asking me if this is an art gallery, a public museum or a private foundation,’ Bertelli told us in a private preview of the substantial compound.  ‘In truth, we wanted to make a space that was an aggregate of all three. It is very homogeneous and at the same time very heterogeneous.’

Visually, the Fondazione Prada is an intriguing hodge-podge of different buildings, styles, spatial sizes, creative themes and time periods.  Shiny mirrored surfaces battle against raw concrete interiors;  tiny, intimate rooms contrast with vacuous warehouse-sized hangars.  Without a typical plan, the discovery process unfolds without a pre-ordained path, though a stop in the Wes Anderson-designed cafe, wrapped in tromp l’oeil wallpaper recreating Milan’s famous Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, would be an excellent place to start.

A former distillery, the location features a disparate mix of seven structures that date back to 1910, plus three new ones (one of which, called Torre, is still under construction) all set within a tall-walled, art-filled campus.  Hundreds of pieces of art have been sourced from both Fondazione Prada’s private collection as well as non-permanent exhibits and site specific installations. 

‘It was our intention to make old and new work seamlessly here,’ observed longtime Prada collaborator Rem Koolhaas, whose OMA architectural firm was charged with designing the compound. ‘At any moment, you can’t really tell if you’re in an old building or a new one.’

Set in the southern section of the city across from bleak railroad tracks, Fondazione Prada’s neighbourhood is in a decidedly un-cool part of town.  ‘What’s fabulous about this area is its industrial quality,’ Koolhaas stressed.  ‘We absolutely do not want to create any gentrification here - this was crucial for all of us.’

The classic Milanese might not be pounding on the surrounding real estate, but the space itself — which unfolds like a creative village with charming public spaces and open-air courtyards — is sure to become a lure, not just for the city’s resident design class, but for top art and architecture scene-makers around the world. And let’s be honest:  this (much more than a six-month, mass, eat-fest) is exactly what the city of Milan needs most.

ADDRESS

Largo Isarco, 2
20139 Milan
Italy

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From the first announcements back in 2013, it was clear this year's Venice Architecture Biennale would be different. Starting with the change in season, then a change in the exhibition format and of course a new curator - the influential Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas - everything seemed to point to the fact that, in 2014, the biannual celebration of architecture would offer a unique take on the industry zeitgeist. And it does.

Tour the highlights from the Venice Architecture Biennale

Delving into his overall theme of Fundamentals in architecture, Koolhaas, supported by his OMA/AMO team, looked after the biennale's two main events and set the pace for the national pavilions. Exploring issues of modernity in architecture, culture and society, this year's shows are a feast of research and analysis, craft and materials, dipping into archives around the globe for a hefty volume of information. They make for a must-see whistlestop tour of the past, present and future of the practice.

The Arsenale show, this year dubbed Monditalia, explores the biennale's host nation through the mediums of film, music, dance and theatre - taking into account the effects of modernity and the past century on Italy's social and urban development. A key element is the collaboration of the other biennales: cinema, dance, theatre and music. 'It is the first time they worked together,' says Ippolito Pestellini of Koolhaas' creative thinktank AMO. 'We tried to initiate a new format and it was a coordination challenge.'

Pestellini looks at the show as a 'scan' of Italy, from south to north, though it's not necessarily meant to provide answers. 'For me, it is a point of departure,' he says. Certainly the experience raises more questions as one progresses through the long, darkened halls of the Arsenale, beset by large-scale projections, collaborative dance, operatic performances and installations.  

The central pavilion at the Giardini, by contrast, provides a contemplative experience. For this second of his curated areas, entitled Elements of Architecture, Koolhaas goes back to basics. 'Architecture is a profession trained to put things together,' he says, 'not take things apart.' So this is exactly what he does. Dismantling the art of building into its parts, Koolhaas dedicates each room to an element - floor, balcony, facade, wall, escalator, toilet, door, corridor, elevator, ramp, window, ceiling, roof, fireplace and stair. The results - like the Brooking Collection of architectural features in the 'window' room - are unusually exciting.

The global participants, spread across the Giardini and various locations in Venice, have responded to Koolhaas' theme in different ways, though some common threads are detectable. Archival and historical research remain a strong premise, dominating, for instance, the British, Belgian, Dutch, Brazilian, Greek, Swiss and Australian pavilions (the latter featuring an augmented reality format as it is waiting for its new physical space to complete, by Denton Corker Marshall). The idea of looking back is, after all, part of the theme.  

This year stands out also for its inclusiveness, with 11 new participants, including New Zealand, Morocco and Turkey. Even Antarctica is represented, with a pavilion of experimental, built and unbuilt projects 'examining the provisional nature of architecture in Antarctica'.

An absence of more established architects in the main exhibitions is more than made up for in the national pavilions and the sheer number of collateral events - official and unofficial - that have sprung up across town. The substantial Time Space Existence exhibition, spread across two Venetian palazzi and curated by the Global Art Affairs Foundation, includes an impressive 100 architects, including Foster and Partners, AHMM, Eduardo Souto de Moura and Ricardo Bofill.

At the same time, the Fondazione Cini, on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, does the opposite, focusing on one piece by a single artist: the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. Art has indeed crept into the architecture biennale in several places, blending ever more with design and the public realm. Genius Locci, a show by London's Lisson Gallery, examines this with a selection of sculpture and installation art by the likes of Ai Weiwei and Daniel Buren.

Ultimately, it is a biennale about history and information, with the sheer depth of research often threatening to overwhelm the casual visitor. Dozens of books are due to spin off the 2014 event, and some even speak of finding a permanent home for the fantastic displays in the central pavilion. If nothing else, Koolhaas's key achievement has been to take the spotlight off the stars and shine it on the overlooked corners of a global profession. Charting 100 years of societal upheaval is a tall order, but Koolhaas and his collaborators have made the 2014 Venice Biennale an important waypoint on modern architecture's ongoing journey.

During the opening of 'Auguste Perret: Eight Masterpieces' in Paris, architect Rem Koolhaas shepherded Miuccia Prada through the pillared room of the Palais d'Iéna, pointing out various features of the exhibition. The Palais d'Iéna itself is one of Perret's masterpieces, as well as the venue for Prada's Miu Miu catwalk shows, often featuring set designs by Koolhaas and his Rotterdam-based practice OMA.

Curator Joseph Abram proposed the show to the Economic, Social and Environmental Council (ESEC), the body that currently occupies Perret's Parisian landmark. The Fondazione Prada agreed to fund it, but only if Koolhaas designed the scenography. Says Abram: 'Madame Prada is an extraordinary patron and the collaboration with Koolhaas has been a true luxury.'

The Dutch architect reused some of his earlier design elements for this space, such as an illuminated metal cage that runs along the left wall from which Perret's architectural drawings hang. The masterpieces are lined up in chronological order: from the rue Franklin apartments that established the Frenchman's reputation a century ago to the soaring concrete spire of the Saint-Joseph Church in Le Havre, named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2005. Dedicating the exhibition to eight buildings allowed the curators to demonstrate in detail the creative process behind each one - how the French architect reconciled modernism with classicism and found grace in reinforced concrete.

On the opposite side of the space, visitors can explore the buildings' ongoing existence through a contemporary lens: watch a new film tracing the residents and use of these places or flip through oversized photo albums of the buildings by photographer Gilbert Fastenaekens. The show also features architectural models, furniture, photographs and personal paraphernalia, including a glowing fan letter to Perret from the artist Jean Dubuffet in 1946. 

Perret originally designed the Palais d'Iéna as a museum of public works. Little did he know that one day it would serve as an exhibition space for his own greatest hits.

ADDRESS

Palais d'Iéna
9 Place d'Iéna
75016 Paris

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Rotterdam's Wilhelmina Pier already plays host to architectural pieces by the likes of Renzo Piano, Mecanoo, Alvaro Siza and Norman Foster. Its latest addition, the characteristic stacked-block shape of De Rotterdam, was designed by none other than the city's own OMA architecture practice.

The tower took a lengthy 16 years to complete. Design-work began in 1997 but the late noughties financial crisis halted the project and it wasn't until 2009 that construction was able to commence - perversely, also thanks to the crisis. The recession's second dip meant that construction became more affordable.

Still, the delay hardly fazed the architects. 'Sometimes, it is good to wait,' says OMA partner Ellen van Loon, who is from Rotterdam (this complex is the first project she has completed in her hometown). 'It makes the building sharper and stronger.' This also gave them plenty of time for fine-tuning, and while the building's main concept didn't change much during the wait, it did gain height along the way.

The building's striking overall volume arrangement was carefully planned, as one would expect from OMA and Rem Koolhaas, an architect who has been known for studying variations of tall-building ever since his landmark publication Delirious New York came out in 1978. The CCTV in Beijing is another of the office's well-known explorations of the theme. Rotterdam, OMA's main base, offered excellent ground for experimentation. '[Rotterdam] was completely destroyed [during the war] and it has in its DNA an urge to build,' says Koolhaas.

De Rotterdam can be reached through a specific route, over the Erasmus Bridge (designed to critical acclaim by Amsterdam-based UNStudio), and its shape was painstakingly calculated around that route. 'It is important that it can only be approached in one way. That is why we designed it in a particular way,' explains Koolhaas. 'It was designed to work with the bridge.'

And while its considerable size is hard to ignore (it was described by OMA as a 'vertical city'), it is not what this building is all about. The city's aim for decentralisation means creating a counter-centre across the river Maas from central Rotterdam, on the Wilhelmina Pier peninsula. Koolhaas himself urged guests at the opening not to dwell on De Rotterdam's size. 'This is not simply an ambitious architectural project, it is also part of a necessity,' he said. 'We need to emphasise how much urban activity is injected in this place at this moment.'

The structure's ground floor was designed to be as open and transparent as possible; cue the central lobby's glass enclosed, dramatic cathedral-like high ceilings. Even the commercial units were created so that no blind spots and awkward rear sides appear on the ground level, in order to make for a generous, vibrant environment and true draw for the city's inhabitants.

Now, the mixed-use De Rotterdam is the largest multi-purpose building in the Netherlands, spanning a sizeable 160,000 sq m. The program – whose interiors will be fully complete in May 2014 - includes apartments (West Tower), office space, and the NHow hotel in the East Tower, which will be throwing open its doors to its first guests this January.

Watch OMA's De Rotterdam taking shape on the city's Wilhelmina Pier. Film: Paul Martens

Ever since it launched during the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, the Strelka Institute for media, architecture and design has been making waves with its innovatively experimental approach and fabulous Moscow HQ.

With a Rem Koolhaas/AMO-curated educational programme, the independent non-profit organisation offers post-graduate research, hosts lectures and workshops and consults on urban development. In the past two years the school has been growing in size as well as international reputation, and its most recent scheme, Strelka Press, has just launched.

Proposing a new digital model for writing on architecture, design and the city, Strelka Press and its director, British critic and writer Justin McGuirk, create e-editions of essays and long-form journalism, offering instant digital access to critical architectural thinking from around the world to a global audience.

The inaugural Strelka Press series includes seven titles touching on subjects like the post-Soviet city, urbanism and architecture in China and São Paulo. It also features acclaimed authors such as writer and journalist Owen Hatherley, architect Sam Jacob, as well as the Strelka press director himself. 'Despite this angst about the "death" of the book, this is an exciting time for publishing, and we want to be at the forefront of these new possibilities,' says McGuirk.

Picking the right talent for the scheme, as well as the right, timely themes was tough, but a challenge McGuirk relished. 'I started with the writers. I brought together a group of authors that really have something to say and that I knew would rise to the challenge of a new format - longer pieces produced as ebooks', he says. 'Through discussions with the writers we arrived at the topics that they wanted to address, which is a more natural process than thinking up the themes and then trying to find the writers to take them on.'

Beautifully designed by London-based graphic design studio OK-RM, this first series of Strelka Press ebooks are now available online. A second series is already in the making, strengthening Russia’s voice in the international architecture and urbanism debate. 'We're already starting to develop a second wave of ebooks to come out later in the year', says McGuirk. 'For us, the exciting thing is the platform that we've created. Yes, we've just released seven titles, but really what we're launching is the platform, one that has the potential to grow quite rapidly. So for us this is just the beginning.'

Prada and Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas have been collaborating for a decade, and whilst the best-known fruits of the partnership are probably their innovative architectural endeavours – think Seoul’s Transformer project and the Prada Epicenter in New York – those on the inside track have, for the past eight years or so, been exposed to another side of the creative partnership.

Koolhaas, his Rotterdam-based design studio OMA and the AMO think tank, have, since January 2004, collaborated with the Italian house on Prada's catwalk shows.

Adapting the expansive interior space that is part of Milan’s Prada Fondazione in order to meet Koolhaas’s exacting design agenda, the shows are consistently groundbreaking - creating a benchmark in show design not found anywhere else in the industry.

Beginning back in 2004, the show collaborations kicked off with the menswear A/W outing, featuring a relatively simple series of AMO-designed wallpapers draped throughout the space. Recent years however have seen Koolhaas and his team at AMO turn the traditional runway concept on its head, in characteristically innovative style.

The presentation of Prada's S/S 2010 womenswear collection in Milan is one such instance. Designed to split the audience down two sides of an abstracted wall – which came punctuated by seven regularly spaced doors – the openings provided the audience with a fleeting glimpses of the models, whilst 12 projections emulating the interior spaces of grand dame hotels came splashed across the walls, creating a beguiling, through-the-looking-glass effect.

Raising the bar, the Fall 2011 menswear and womenswear setting was a two-storey steel 'house' comprising various rooms - all connected by a corridor which acted as the catwalk.

Following on from this, the menswear and womenswear shows for Sring 2011 took place on an elevated stage, surrounding by stadium-style seating. Covered in a metal grille, the surface of the runway was illuminated with neon lights concealed beneath it.

The latest (and arguably most directional) collaboration, the S/S 2012 menswear show saw guests being greeted not by the traditional catwalk, but rather by a perfectly organised 'field' of 600 cornflower blue foam blocks that were individually spaced in 1.5 x 1.5m grid and spread out on top of bright green artificial grass.

Based on a disciplined spacial system, this layout allowed models to walk through the audience in a carefully choreographed sequence - completely banishing the element of front row hierarchy.

Prada isn't the only brand, however, to be shaking up the fashion show as we know it. To read about more fashion houses cutting the traditional catwalk to embrace the spectacular, turn to our March 2012 issue - out now.

Rem D Koolhaas, nephew of renowned OMA architect Rem Koolhaas, may have abandoned his own previous career as an architect to set up international footwear brand United Nude, but his training remains very much in evidence not only in the shoes he designs but in his ground-breaking use of retail space.

United Nude's newly opened London store is the biggest of the brand's 10 sites around the world and employs the same 'dark-shop' concept -- leaving the interior totally unlit apart from the 'Wall of Light', a computer-controlled LED wall displaying each shoe in its own individual box, like a framed work of art.

United Nude was launched in 2003 as a collaboration between Koolhaas and Galahad Clark, seventh generation shoemaker and scion of the famous Clark's family. The brand's arresting designs are now sold in over 40 countries, winning high-profile fans like Lady Gaga and occupying a self-appointed territory 'at the intersection between design and fashion'.

We caught up with Koolhaas just after the London store opening...

What was it about footwear that tempted you away from architecture?

I started designing shoes because of a broken heart back in 1999, but I was already looking how to escape from architecture. I find architecture too big and too slow and you are always working for someone else.

How do you go about designing a shoe -- what is your starting point?

This differs case by case. We work in a team of designers and often start from the material that we will use, as each material has its own behaviour. Sometimes we work the other way around and start from the shape and then we match the materials accordingly.

What inspired the 'dark-shop' concept? What is the thinking behind it?

When I worked for OMA on the conceptual design phase of the NYC Prada store we got into the importance of the shopping experience. Nearly ten years later, we developed our 'Dark Shop' concept with the same goals. We took our inspiration from the theatre where you sit in a dark space and look at the show, the only place where the light is.

Can you tell me more about your Iris Van Herpen collaboration -- how did it come about?

I first saw her clothes at our Amsterdam PR company's showroom. When Iris and I first met I offered to make shoes for her catwalk show. A few months later the first Iris Van Herpen x United Nude shoes where there, on the catwalk. Last month she showed in Paris and we again made the shoes with her, already for the fourth time.

Who in the world of fashion/film/music is your biggest inspiration when it comes to designing shoes? Who would you most like to design a shoe for?

My wife is my biggest inspiration, but if you are talking celebrities it would be great to see somebody like Uma Thurman or Milla Jovovich kick some some bad guy in the face with our shoes on. I would also love to work with somebody great like Joseph Kosinski who is also an architect and directed the movie Tron, a visual and musical masterpiece.

Do you have any designs coming up that use interesting/unexpected materials?

For our Autumn/Winter season we have some boots with a laser cut fabric like feathers named the 'Falcon'. These boots come to life with movement, which makes the great for dancing.

Where do you see shoe design heading in the future?

I guess big factories will focus on a more efficient and automated way of shoe making with bigger moulded components. At the same time there could be an increase of localized handmade shoemaking. The ways in which shoes are made will direct designers more and more as there will be less and less factories willing to make just anything you come up with.

ADDRESS

13 Floral Street
Covent Garden, London

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Since becoming the center of Asia's fourth strongest economy, Seoul's Government has refreshed the lackluster appearance of the city through supporting private investment and funding projects of metropolitan beautification - anything to escape the monotonous apartment-block aesthetic it was notorious for. As a result, contemporary Seoul is embracing the benefits, hosting competitions that are bringing the biggest names in international design, architecture and municipal planning to transform this ancient city into a magnetic urban metropolis. Being designated World Design Capital 2010 hasn't hurt, either.

Structures such as the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul National University Museum and moveable installation, the Prada Transformer, designed by Rem Koolhaas, have achieved international recognition. Most recently, Dongdaemoon Design Plaza and Park, by Zaha Hadid with Patrik Schumacher, have been core projects of WDC Seoul.

The Yongsan IBD Dream Hub

Unveiled at MIPIM 2010, the Yongsan IBD Dream Hub, will be connected to the newest green space ‘Seoul Central Park', while the Han River Renaissance project will be another marker in the design community, featuring the Yongsan International Terminal linking Seoul to ports in China, Hong Kong and Japan. Art Island will house a concert hall, an opera theatre and a multicultural performing space that hopes to rival the Sydney Opera House. Attention is not being denied to Seoul’s historically relevant buildings either with Old Seoul Station currently undergoing a highly anticipated renovation.

Smaller, avant-garde design firms are also rising to prominence in what is still a very conservative society. They offer bolder individuals the chance to create buildings that stand out in the city landscape, like ChaePereira Architects, who cater to enterprising clients that are starting to appreciate a personalized approach to design.

So was 2010 the year that Seoul emerged as a potent force in international design? By embracing current architectural innovation, the city's remodelling job is intended to lure visitors who were previously unaware of its contemporary urban charms.

Having witnessed a wealth of projects mixing art, technology and design, we knew at a glance that United Nude's Lo Res was different.

Based on a very simple idea, the project explores the principle that every physical object is essentially a composition of numerous tiny two-dimensional surfaces, which can be blown up into a larger and playfully 'pixelated' low-resolution version of themselves. 'Take any item and tell the computer to generate different versions, by changing a very high resolution file to a lower resolution,' explains the company's Creative Director, Rem D Koolhaas.

Founded by Koolhaas (an experienced Dutch architect and the nephew of renowned OMA architect Rem Koolhaas) along with UK-born Galahad Clark (of British shoe dynasty Clarks) in 2003, United Nude kicked off with several series of characteristically architectural footwear designs.

Now the company is expanding far and beyond, into accessories, product and conceptual high-end design, and Lo Res takes it a big step furthur. 'Lo Res is a design method that will become software-enabled for designers to use as a tool to create a specific kind of design. The method is extremely efficient and allows you to generate design much quicker than ever before. The fact that the principle is very simple doesn't take away from the quality of what can be produced,' adds Koolhaas.

And watch this space; not only has the company just launched its brand new New York flagship store but it also partnered with leading 3D software company Rapidform to develop the Lo Res software. Here, we catch up with Koolhaas to find out more.

Your new Lo Res project is very impressive. What future applications do you see for it?

Thank you. We are very excited about the potential of the Lo Res project. We feel that the methodology of Lo Res, as it is currently applied, can become a tool that can quickly generate new versions of existing or new objects. As part of the design process, this can be very useful.

What inspired you to create it?

United Nude is not the first company to create a low-resolution object. In fact, it was the pre-existing objects that inspired us towards this direction. However, what is exciting about our approach is that we use it as a semi-automated design technique where, with the help of a computer, we can generate many different versions of the same object at once. By letting the computer do a lot of the work for you, it speeds up the process and presents more ideas and possibilities. We became so inspired by working with the 3D software that in the next phase we are developing a Lo Res software application with the world's leading reverse engineering software company called Rapidform. Rapidform makes professional software for the automotive and aerospace industries but the application we are creating with them is more directed towards designers.

Could you please explain in a few words how it works?

Lo Res is quite simple. You take an object (either a 3D scan or an existing 3D computer file), then you tell the computer to generate different versions for you - by changing a very high resolution file to a lower resolution - and by looking at the different versions from the smoothest to the lowest abstract resolution you can then choose the option you prefer most and this becomes the starting point for your design. Changes are of course made for practical or aesthetical purposes, as the designer sees fit.

United Nude is launching Lo Res, as well as a new accessories line. Does this mean that the company - which most people know for its unique shoe designs - is evolving? Are you moving forward to a more multi-faceted design identity?

United Nude was never meant to be just a shoe brand. So the natural evolution is to become more of a lifestyle brand and this means United Nude will design any kind of products we have ideas for or that our customer would like for us to make and opening stores allows us the possibility to sell these types of products. Recently we've released some small accessories that go well with our shoes but we've become interested in designing furniture and a concept car.

What other plans do you have for United Nude's future?

Principally the plan is to open more United Nude flagship and concept stores around the world. These stores allow us to represent the brand to the fullest extent and the entire environment enables a complete brand experience.

You also have the next footwear collection coming up - what is new there, what is being introduced for the first time and what has evolved?

For Spring/Summer 2010 we launched our widest range of products to date. I'll mention two new products that represent the diversity of the brand. On the more affordable side is a product called the 'Coral' - a 3D shoe made from lightweight EVA with a rubber sole and leather lining that is perfectly suitable for everyday wear and the beach. On the higher-end we've added to our 'Ultra' collection with a shoe called 'The Frame'. This is made with hand-moulded carbon fibre and has a very high heel. Our intention is to create products for every type of customer in terms of style but also in terms of affordability. This is why you'll also be seeing a men's shoe line from United Nude next spring.

To what extent does your background and experience as an architect affect your designs? Once an architect, always an architect?

At heart I am very much an architect. Whenever I visit a building site or look at a new work I am naturally excited and look at the building from an architect's point of view. However, building a brand also deals with a larger scale-level than the products that form the product-line. As United Nude continues to grow, it allows us to perhaps explore more and more categories and opportunities that could eventually lead us back to more traditional architecture.

Do you always design the store interiors yourself and is it your intention to continue to do so? How important is it for you to get involved in the UN design aspect in all levels, from the product to the showrooms?

I do design the stores and the reason why is because, as Creative Director, it creates a uniform identity for the stores that is also in line with the brand's identity and the products we offer. At the same time, when a brand becomes bigger, it is foolish to not get more people involved. Doing so allows you to become less predictable and gives you a higher diversity of design and experience.

Could you please summarise in a few words United Nude's identity?

What started out as a purely architectural design brand has become a brand known for conceptual products and high-level design with a versatility of materials. Even though the brand is becoming more and more accessible, while it grows, it is important that all the products be both elegant and recognisable as they sit side-by-side within the brand.

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