The Prada Epicenter New York, designed by OMA and completed in 2001 in SoHo, redefined the retail interior as a spatial, cultural, and technological experiment. Inserted into the former Guggenheim SoHo, the project uses a continuous zebrawood topography, movable display systems, graphic media surfaces, and unstable programmatic conditions to test how commerce might overlap with exhibition, performance, and public life.
Prada Epicenter New York Technical Information
- ArchitectsOMA
- Location575 Broadway, SoHo, New York, NY 10012, USA
- Gross Area2,190 m2 | 23,573 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years2000 – 2001
- Photographs© Roberto Ortiz de Landazuri / ArchEyes
Shopping is arguably the last remaining form of public activity.
– Rem Koolhaas
Retail as Civic and Cultural Interior
OMA approached the Prada Epicenter New York as a test of retail architecture rather than as a conventional shop fit-out. The project occupies the ground floor and basement of 575 Broadway, a nineteenth-century cast-iron-and-brick building in SoHo that previously housed the Guggenheim Museum SoHo. This institutional memory is central to the project. The interior retains a gallery-like spatial order in which clothing, projections, graphics, and temporary events are arranged within a framework for display and public viewing.
The design reflects Rem Koolhaas’s broader argument that shopping had become one of the dominant forms of urban collectivity at the turn of the century. Rather than resisting this condition, the project examines it architecturally. The store becomes a hybrid interior that can operate as a boutique, exhibition hall, auditorium, and street extension. Its block-long footprint, connecting Broadway and Mercer Street, allows the retail floor to be understood less as a room than as an interiorized urban passage.
From the street, the intervention remains embedded within SoHo’s dense commercial and pedestrian context. The historic facade, with arched windows, cast iron details, and red brickwork, establishes a strong contrast with the restrained interior surfaces and minimal display strategies beyond the glass. The project does not erase the existing building. It uses the tension between the inherited urban fabric and the inserted commercial program as a productive condition.
The Wave as Circulation, Display, and Event Infrastructure
The central architectural device is the zebrawood Wave, a continuous topographic surface that descends from the Broadway level into the basement, then rises again toward the main floor. In a typical retail arrangement, the basement would risk becoming secondary space, dependent on signage and escalators to attract visitors. Here, the sectional gesture makes the lower level unavoidable. Movement through the store is choreographed as a spatial descent rather than a simple transfer between floors.
The Wave is divided into two different but interdependent conditions. One side is stepped, extending across the width of the slope as a broad stair, product display, and informal seating area. Shoes and accessories can occupy the treads, while visitors can pause on the same surface during events. The opposite side is smooth and ramped, containing a motorized platform that can rotate out to form a stage. When activated, the stepped side becomes amphitheater seating, turning the retail interior into a lecture room, screening space, or performance venue.
This dual function gives the Wave its architectural force. It is not an ornamental centerpiece, nor is it only a circulatory connector. It combines movement, merchandising, and collective gathering in a single constructed landscape. The result is a deliberate instability of program. The visitor encounters a space whose role can shift without requiring a change in plan, suggesting that retail architecture can be measured by its capacity to absorb non-retail uses.
Flexible Display Systems and Material Contrasts
Above the sales floor, OMA introduced a suspended infrastructure of movable metal cages mounted on overhead tracks. These elements operate as display vitrines, storage devices, and media carriers. Their mobility allows the interior to contract into a dense field of merchandise or open into a clearer floor for events. Display is therefore treated as an architectural system rather than as a layer applied after the design is complete.
The material palette reinforces this tension between precision and provisionality. The warm zebrawood of the Wave provides the strongest continuous surface in the project, its grain emphasizing the slope’s constructed topography. Around it, translucent polycarbonate walls diffuse light and partially veil the older masonry fabric. Cast iron columns remain visible within the plan, some painted and others left darker, preserving the rhythm of the existing structure.
Other materials resist conventional luxury finishes. Unfinished gypsum board, plywood furniture, industrial shelving, metal mesh, and exposed technical equipment produce an interior that is controlled but not polished in the usual commercial sense. This contrast is critical to the project’s meaning. The space stages refinement against rawness, suggesting that value can be produced through spatial intelligence and material juxtaposition rather than through surface opulence alone.
Technology, Media, and the Limits of the Experimental Store
The project was also conceived as a technological laboratory. RFID tags, handheld readers, interactive screens, electronically controlled glass, and delayed-video mirrors were intended to modify the relationship among visitor, garment, and sales associate. Dressing rooms used switchable glass for privacy and embedded media to provide product information and delayed views of the body in motion. In architectural terms, these systems extended the store’s ambition from spatial flexibility to behavioral scripting.
The long north wall operates in a different register. Rather than relying on complex interactions, it serves as a large graphic surface that can change the store’s atmosphere without altering its built form. The wallpaper stretches along the interior’s block length, turning the wall into a mutable exhibition plane. Its changing imagery and text allow the space to absorb new themes while preserving the continuity of the architectural section.
The more complex technologies were difficult to sustain in everyday operation. Reports of malfunctioning dressing rooms, unreliable RFID readings, and staff reverting to conventional methods revealed the distance between speculative architectural systems and the demands of retail use. This failure is not incidental to the project. It exposes the Epicenter as a built experiment whose importance lies partly in the friction between concept and maintenance, and in the unresolved question of how far architecture can reorganize patterns of consumption through space, media, and mechanism.
About OMA
OMA, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, is an international architecture firm founded in 1975 and working from offices in Rotterdam, New York, Hong Kong, Doha, and Australia. Led by Rem Koolhaas, the practice operates alongside its research and design studio AMO, applying architectural thinking to media, fashion, curation, technology, and branding.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Structural engineers: Leslie E. Robertson Associates (LERA)
- MEP consultants: Arup, New York
- Landscape designers: Inside/Outside (Petra Blaisse), Amsterdam
- Client: Prada (I.P.I. USA Corp.)
- Design Architect: OMA, Rotterdam (Rem Koolhaas, Ole Scheeren)
- Partners in Charge: Rem Koolhaas, Ole Scheeren;
- Project Architects: Timothy Archambault, Eric Chang;
- Executive / Associate Architect: Architecture Research Office (ARO), New York
- Lighting Design: Kugler Tillotson Associates
- Material Research and Development: Panelite / Werkplaats de Rijk
- Acoustics: Shen Milsom and Wilke
- Curtains: Inside/Outside (Petra Blaisse), Amsterdam
- Wallpaper / Graphics: 2×4, New York
- Movable Furniture: Ludwig Seufert GmbH
- Technology and Media Content: AMO with Prada IT and IDEO
- Contemporary Photography: Roberto Ortiz de Landazuri / ArchEyes
- Period Photography: Courtesy of OMA
