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The new Prada Beverly Hills is finally here, everything the SoHo store is – and much that it isn't

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Two large questions surrounded the new Rem Koolhaas/Prada collaboration on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.

One, could they do it again? And two, would they do it again?

The answers are “yes” and “yes.” Prada, clearly pleased with the buzz Koolhaas produced in New York, encouraged his Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) to repeat the effort for its Beverly Hills project. The brief for this 24,000-square-foot megastore “epicenter” was to conceive of something equally capable of provoking shockwaves of press and street-traffic fascination, though in its own reinvent-the-paradigm way.

According to OMA project architect Eric Chang, “in conceiving of the Prada epicenters, we were thinking about the history of retail. If you go back to ancient times, there was a table or counter set up in the agora, evolving over time into a counter with a window, then a window display, then a full-height window to draw you in with a recessed entrance. In New York, you can think of the whole first floor as a store window a city-block long (as the primary sales area is really in the basement). Here, we removed the storefront entirely and engaged the street in a completely new way.”

The most buzzed-about feature of this building is what is not seen on Rodeo Drive. The storefront has no glass, no grille, no velvet ropes, nothing but an invisible air curtain between the luxury merchandise and the street. Crime deterrence is addressed by guards discreetly located just inside the entrance on both sides of the ground floor and by sensors buried under the floor. Temperature control is maintained by a thermostat-activated air curtain descending from above.

The 50-foot-wide lot is without any signage – not in the pavement, nor on the massive slab overhang canopy (the second floor), clad only with a single piece of unarticulated brushed aluminum.

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On the street, three elliptical pools of light glow eerily up from the sidewalk as if illuminated from the earth's core. Peering down into an opalescent fiberglass tunnel, approximately 10 feet farther underground, this twisted wormhole reveals a fully Prada-clad mannequin wittily looking like a chic spelunker.

After hours, these “display cones” are all that one can see of the merchandise, as a jumbo retractable wall seals up the building for the night.

Inside, visitors follow two colossal 9-foot nude headless mannequins up the 20-foot-wide staircase that dominates the center of the first floor. Ascending the stairs leads to a hallucinogenic cloud-cover, as the panels of glass surrounding the stairs fog over and clear in lightning flashes. Similarly, video projections shift on the command of motion sensors responding to human movement.

The second floor walls are bordered with “sponge,” in the signature celery green used in all of Prada's stores. The 4-inch-thick UV-treated and fire-tested resin was specifically developed for Prada over two and a half years. Instead of natural light, this area is back-lit by carefully chosen fluorescents to show off the quirkiness of the material. Resembling a mermaid's coral boudoir, this section has an intimate, quiet vibe for the elegant women's collection. The dressing rooms border the enormous central stairwell, and while a shopper can depress a foot pedal labeled “Privacy” to render the glass opaque for decency, ghostly silhouettes can still be seen moving within.

The whole third floor, dedicated to the men's collection, has an airport security theme. At both ends of the floor are video panels set up like metal-detector gates. Shoes are displayed on roller tables, like those on the ramps of airport security machines. Suitcases and other sundries are displayed on circular luggage-carousel-looking diplays. Exposed white beams zig-zag floor-to-ceiling across the interior, as in many contemporary airport terminals. And the Southern California sun-filled sky casts bold striated shadows via blue-tinted glass panels between the galvanized steel ceiling beams.

The staircase down the back of “the hill” features tons of legs-only mannequins sheathed in multihued Prada hosiery, sitting beside bejeweled shoes in many sizes. The implication is that shoppers are welcome to plunk down next to them and try on their size, or do some stoop-sitting people-watching.

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A “peepshow elevator” connects the three floors, lined with a row of mini-screens playing non-stop video, vertically streaming up or down depending on the elevator's direction.

The non-storage wall on the third floor is covered with a massive wallpaper mural, which can be replaced overnight to alter the interior with minimal hassle. For the inaugural installation, 2X4 – the New York graphic design studio and frequent OMA collaborator headed by former design critic and current Yale design professor Michael Rock – created a series of graphs from whimsically selected American demographic data. Bar charts, pie charts and X-Y axes depict such minutiae as percentage of female population forever on a diet, amount of fresh fruit consumed in a year, etc. Prada also commissioned Rock's firm to develop the wallpaper and short video films seen throughout both the SoHo and L.A. stores. As in New York, there are video panels the size of large garment boxes hanging on the racks, rubbing shoulders with the merchandise and popping up in delightfully wacky places on screens of all sizes.

New to the L.A. store, however, are innovative approaches to the video component. One video model, called “Headline Karaoke,” spontaneously develops new collages from a newsfeed stream off a Google image search. Another, called “Dataman,” projects streaming celebrity headlines onto a walking body. Another scrambles personal data from FBI files. These cultural “eavesdropping” programs, with titles like “Babel Spiral,” “Pattern Maker” and “Digital Truth,” are meant to reference our information overloaded culture – and they aren't meant to be pretty.

Back on the first floor is a tunnel that traverses the whole width of the main staircase. A nod to Prada's original turn-of-the-century Milan boutique, the floor is the classic black-and-white checkerboard marble and the fixtures are traditional wood-and-glass display cabinets. However, the space is literally rendered topsy-turvy by its curved polished metal ceiling that descends to the floor, reflecting the time capsule in a fun-house manner. The rest of the floor is surrounded by the same fluorescent back-lit polycarbonate walls used on the third floor (and in New York) and inset with thick pink resin display shelving.

What remains most powerful here, as in New York, is the generous gift of interior volume not selling anything. The carefully sculpted air feels like poetic breathing space and, like all good art, it exudes an irresistible awesomeness.

Fondazione Prada, the art project created by Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli, has published a book on OMA's work for the company that suggests Prada and Koolhaas are aspiring to canonize these stores as High Art. And, while the pretention is cheeky, our urban areas might be vastly improved if other retailers and designers took themselves as seriously.

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Because while Prada Aoyama Tokyo and New York packed in astounding innovative environmental effects &endash; as befits their crowded urban locations &endash; this more-laid-back California epicenter is well-suited to its sunny surroundings and is sure to rock the retail world, on its own terms.

The backside of “the hill,” or central staircase, is populated with surreal leggy mannequins – resplendent in Prada hosiery – inviting shoppers to plunk down alongside and try on some shoes.

Client: Prada, Milan
Miuccia Prada, Patrizio Bertilli, Constance Darrow, Giuseppe Polvani, Paolo Pratesi, Fulvio Grignani, Mynor Turcios, Marco Lenardon, Gary Healion, Chris Beetha, design team
Paola Tollini, Carolina Brun, service content
Marco Parachini, Elvio Dalla Valentina, Edward Kim, Michael Andrejko, IT team Moreno Morini, material development

Architect: Office for Metropolitan Architecture OMA-AMO, Rotterdam, Netherlands
Rem Koolhaas, Ole Scheeren, partners-in-charge
Eric Chang, Jessica Rothschild, Amale Andraos, project architects
Christian Bandi, Catarina Canas, David Moore, Mark Watanabe, Torsten Schroeder, Jocelyn Low, Keren Engelman, Ali Kops, Jeffrey Johnson, OMA team
Markus Schaefer, Clemens Weisshaar, Reed Kram, AMO technology
Nicolas Firket, Michael Rock, Joakim Dahlqvist, Reed Kram, Stephen Wang, Richard Wang, Sung Kim, Dan Michaelson, Leigh Devine, AMO content
Chris van Duijn, material development

Executive Architect: Brand + Allen, Architects, San Francisco

Outside Design Consultants: Arup, Los Angeles (structure, services)

General Contractor: Plant Construction, San Francisco

Curtain: Inside Outside, Amsterdam

Façade, Skylight: Dewhurst McFarlane, New York

Fiberglass Display Cones: American Fiberglass, Phoenix

Lift Wall: Hamilton Engineering, Los Angeles

IT Partners: Panasonic USA/Matsushita Electrical Industrial, Secaucus, N.J.
Technosoft SNC, Bologna, Italy
Self-Propelled, Hartford, Conn.
Serp, Burolo, Italy
MindtheGap, Milan

Mannequins : Abyss Creations, San Marcos, Calif.
Prada, Milan

Material Development: Ram Contract SRL, Monza, Italy
Panelite, Los Angeles
Wekplaats De Rijk, Rotterdam

Wallpaper and Graphics: 2X4, New York

Photography: Courtesy of Prada, Milan

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