• Korean Institute of Interior Design Journal
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.47-55
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• 2016

This article explores an extended sense of autonomy in contemporary architecture activated through the practice of fashion, by taking architect Rem Koolhaas' work Prada Epicenter in New York as a case. In doing so, it argues that throughout the work Koolhaas sets up a world in which the corporate and the individual are entangled together in complex ways. Instead of considering Prada Epicenter to be the exemplar illustrating that the global company-Prada-institutionalizes the designed commercial space in a top-down manner, this article claims that such a space imbricates a multiplicity of meaning that is generated at the intersections of the local and the global, the ordinary and the spectacular, and the individual and the institutional. In this respect French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky's fashion theory works as a critical point: his claim that the ambivalence of fashion-both as corporate power and individual freedom-is a threshold encouraging us to better understand the operativity of late capitalism in daily life is extended to Koolhaas' case. In other words, Koolhaas' Prada Epicenter brings forth possibilities that the ostensibly technocratic and institutionalized space in fact works as a resillient field where senses of individual autonomy arise in the aid of corporative practice of branding.

• Journal of the Architectural Institute of Korea Planning & Design
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• v.34 no.2
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• pp.33-40
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• 2018

The purpose of this study was to analyze integration of the surface of Prada Aoyama Epicenter by Herzog & de Meuron. To understand various aspects of surfaces & constituents related, each elevations are analyzed minutely by distance both inside and outside. The results of this study were as follows; the individual surface of Prada Aoyama Epicenter sets a multi-layered relationship with the actual environment. Their architectural surface still has a significance in presenting a way of creating a building along with everyday surroundings.