Interview

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Although many an artistic genius would argue that two heads are not always better than one, when those two heads happen to be Miuccia Prada and Rem Koolhaas, it’s safe to say that two heads can be better than 2 million. Prada and Koolhass are designers who blazed into the 21st century as the radical success stories of their fields—hers in fashion, his in architecture. But they are both virtuoso cross-disciplinarians as well. They’ve collaborated on a number of projects, starting with the Prada “Epicenter” flagship store in SoHo, New York, that opened shortly after September 11 in 2001, all the way to current plans, unveiled in April of 2008, to build a permanent compound for the Prada Foundation south of Milan—the latter, in effect, turning Ms. Prada’s 16-year-old arts organization into an enduring cultural institution. In the last decade, Ms. Prada herself has actively championed an unruly cross-hatch of talented young multimedia artists such as Tom Sachs, Mariko Mori, Carsten Höller, Nathalie Djurberg, and Francesco Vezzoli. Where so many top designers find their interests outside of fashion limited to the scope of Hollywood, Ms. Prada has shown how fashion can sit next to art, design, cinema, and architecture as a full partner.

In keeping with this history, Prada and Koolhaas are about to unleash what might possibly be their most ambitious joint project to date. In the last week of April, they open the Prada Transformer in Seoul, South Korea, a building that is, in reality, four entirely different structures housed inside the same tetrahedron shape. The Transformer promises to finally bring together all of the various disciplines that have engrossed Prada over the years: cinema, art, and fashion. Her long-traveling show “Waist Down: Skirts by Miuccia Prada,” will make an appearance here, as will ventures by enterprising Korean fashion students.

Learn more at prada-transformer.com

What has allowed Prada to combine these cultural genres into one hub isn’t Koolhaas’s ability to pack together a number of competing pavilions under one roof. It’s that the roof itself—along with the walls, the floor, and everything holding the building together—will actually rotate, flip, and transform. With the help of four cranes, the structure changes into four distinct shapes: a hexagon, a cross, a rectangle, and a circle. Each new façade operates as the setting for its own distinct cultural program. Prada is already planning a number of curations and special projects to fill these shape-shifting walls, moving Seoul culture in and Western culture out before the whole structure is packed up in September to be resettled anywhere else on the planet that the Foundation sees fit. When you’re Prada and Koolhaas, you really can have it all.

The two sat down with artist Francesco Vezzoli earlier this year for what is the first interview that the close collaborators and cultural masterminds have ever agreed to do together. The meeting took place a little more than a week before a fire in Beijing threatened another of Koolhaas’s highly regarded projects in Asia—the mesmerizing titanium zinc alloy-clad CCTV headquarters. Thankfully, the structure survived. Here, Prada and Koolhaas weigh in on the value of transformational architecture, the death of celebrity culture, and why the next generation isn’t as cynical as most people think.