The Prada Transformer was a temporary, shape-shifting pavilion located in

Seoul Seoul, officially Seoul Special Metropolitan City, is the capital city, capital and largest city of South Korea. The broader Seoul Metropolitan Area, encompassing Seoul, Gyeonggi Province and Incheon, emerged as the world's List of cities b ...

, South Korea. It had four different apparent shapes, depending on the function for which the pavilion is needed at the moment (ground plans: hexagon, cross, rectangle or circle). The pavilion was commissioned by

Prada Prada S.p.A. (, ; ) is an Italian luxury fashion house founded in 1913 in Milan by Mario Prada. It specializes in leather handbags, travel accessories, shoes, ready-to-wear, and other fashion accessories. Prada licenses its name and branding ...

and designed by

Rem Koolhaas Remment Lucas Koolhaas (; born 17 November 1944) is a Dutch architect, architectural theory, architectural theorist, urbanist and Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Graduate School of ...

' architecture firm

Office for Metropolitan Architecture The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) is an international architectural firm with offices in Rotterdam, New York, Hong Kong, Doha, and Australia. The firm is currently led by eight partners - Rem Koolhaas, Reinier de Graaf, Ellen va ...

. It was inaugurated in April 2009 and dismantled in October 2009.

History

The pavilion was commissioned by Prada and designed by Rem Koolhaas' architecture firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture. The brand had already hired the architect to design Prada's flagship stores in New York and Los Angeles, and the Prada Foundation for Contemporary Art building in Milan. The pavilion was first used for the fashion exhibition ''Waist Down - Skirts by Miuccia Prada'', which began April 25, 2009. Its form and function was first changed on June 26, 2009, into a movie theater. The pavilion was dismantled six months after it was inaugurated, in October 2009.

Description

The pavilion was located in Seoul, South Korea, next to the Gyeonghui Palace. It was roughly in the shape of a

tetrahedron In geometry, a tetrahedron (: tetrahedra or tetrahedrons), also known as a triangular pyramid, is a polyhedron composed of four triangular Face (geometry), faces, six straight Edge (geometry), edges, and four vertex (geometry), vertices. The tet ...

. Cranes rotated the structure so that different surfaces of the tetrahedron face downward, thereby changing the pavilion's form and function. The different faces of the tetrahedron are actually shapes other than triangles. The pavilion's base was a

hexagon In geometry, a hexagon (from Greek , , meaning "six", and , , meaning "corner, angle") is a six-sided polygon. The total of the internal angles of any simple (non-self-intersecting) hexagon is 720°. Regular hexagon A regular hexagon is de ...

when used for a fashion exhibition, a rectangle when used as a

movie theater A movie theater (American English) or cinema (English in the Commonwealth of Nations, Commonwealth English), also known as a movie house, cinema hall, picture house, picture theater, the movies, the pictures, or simply theater, is a business ...

, a cross when used for an

art exhibition An art exhibition is traditionally the space in which art objects (in the most general sense) meet an audience. The exhibit is universally understood to be for some temporary period unless, as is occasionally true, it is stated to be a "permanen ...

and a circle when used for a special event. The external cover of the pavilion was a smooth elastic membrane. The engineering companies

LG Electronics LG Electronics Inc. () is a South Korean Multinational corporation, multinational major appliance and consumer electronics corporation headquartered in Yeouido-dong, Seoul, South Korea. LG Electronics is a part of LG, LG Corporation, the fourth ...

Hyundai Motor Company Hyundai Motor Company, often referred to as Hyundai Motors, ( ) and commonly known as Hyundai (), is a South Korean multinational corporation, multinational Automotive industry, automotive manufacturer headquartered in Seoul, South Korea, which ...

and Red Resource Inc. contributed to the design of the pavilion.

References

External links

*
Special projects: Prada Transformer
. ''Pradagroup.com''. Retrieved 7 September 2023. Buildings and structures completed in 2009 Rem Koolhaas buildings Buildings and structures in Seoul {{SouthKorea-struct-stub