Idea

THIS is a year for opening presents early. Last week, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’s beautiful new home for the American Folk Art Museum opened its doors on West 53rd Street, next door to the Museum of Modern Art. Yesterday, Prada’s SoHo store, designed by Rem Koolhaas, opened on Broadway and Prince. Someone has been making a list of architecture fans, and checking it twice.

For a place whose opening has been delayed almost as long as Chanel’s postwar comeback, the Prada store delivers a surprising jolt. Just a few weeks ago, the store was shaping up to be a landmark of unbeatably bad timing. With all around us counseling restraint on luxury, with Prada itself the target of cackling over its troubled finances, the launching of an estimated $40 million flagship emporium — in traumatized Lower Manhattan, no less — looked headed toward a calamitous capsize.

Then you walk through the door to discover that time and space have revolved into miraculous alignment. Architecture, at least, has come through. Even if Prada were to tumble into Chapter 11 by New Year’s Eve, New Yorkers would still have had a blessed two weeks to walk through a model block of intelligent optimism about urban life. Think of this as a museum show on indefinite display. However precarious Prada’s assets, its grip on the imagination is firm. If we must shop to save America, some of us won’t mind shopping for architecture. If you’re in the market for ideas, here’s the place to stock up. Try Contemporaneity — your free gift.

Entered on the ground floor of the building where a diminished version of the Guggenheim Museum’s SoHo branch holds down what is left of the fort, the store shoots through a full block from Broadway to Mercer Street. It is not a narrow space, but the extreme length creates the quality of a vortex. On a clear day, you can see Milan.

To the left, just past an oversized pair of Statue of Liberty-green mannequins that guard the door, the eye is caught by a clear glass cylinder: the shaft for a round elevator that descends to the basement level, where much of Prada’s merchandise is located.

The cylindrical elevator is the first of many technological flourishes with which the store is garnished. Used for displaying merchandise as well as transporting shoppers, it signals the design’s extreme flexibility. Set off by a wall and ceiling of corrugated plastic, the sparkling glass shaft epitomizes the game between luxury and rawness that is everywhere played out.

The north wall is covered with wallpaper, designed by the local firm 2×4 Studios. The design will change as new collections are introduced. At the moment, the pattern evokes images of large carnivorous plants. Why don’t you . . . paper your little boy’s room with Venus flytraps? Alas, the wall of horrors is not for sale.

Space itself is the ultimate luxury at Prada; space, and the dedication of so little room to stuff you can buy. Much of the two-story interior is taken up by what Mr. Koolhaas calls the Wave. A Big Kahuna version of a visual motif that is by now virtually the logo of progressive design, this concave shape extends the full length of the store. The Wave’s trough, which dips down to the store’s basement level, is Mr. Koolhaas’s most conspicuous architectural move.

Mr. Koolhaas and Miuccia Prada are kindred spirits. Both of them have exploited the potential of their respective art forms to engage in social criticism. The irony of this ambition, particularly in the sphere of fashion, does not escape them, but is accepted as a broad condition of modern life. No arts are inherently more capable of exploring the fantasy structure of the contemporary city than architecture and fashion.

The Prada people showed up one day two years ago at Mr. Koolhaas’s Rotterdam office, ”out of the blue,” the architect says. The conversation led to commissions for stores in Los Angeles and San Francisco in addition to SoHo. (According to Mr. Koolhaas, plans for the West Coast stores are proceeding.) Along the way, the architect has ventured far beyond the boundaries of conventional store design. Technical innovations, marketing strategies, imaging concepts and social analysis have been incorporated into the program.

The opening of the Prada store is accompanied by a catalog of telephone book size. It chronicles all three American projects commissioned from Mr. Koolhaas by Prada. Gaga Napoleonism permeates the pages. Charts map the coincidence between future stores and centers of globalized capital in Europe, Asia and the United States. OMA, Mr. Koolhaas’s Rotterdam-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture, is photographed in conference with the staff of AMO, the architect’s recently formed think tank. Drawings, maquettes, computer renderings and pictures of new synthetic materials are tumbled together with polemical slogans.

On the book’s cover, red flags part to form a curtain framing a perplexed road warrior: the worker-slash-model for globalized times. Suits of the World, Get Wired! Laid out on the diagonal, the Prada logo evokes the Cyrillic typeface for Pravda: the Truth, or whatever passes for it under totalitarian rule. All this is cause for mirth. But those familiar with contemporary European styles of thought will recognize something more: an effort to reckon with the collapse of extremities in the post-cold-war period.

Several streams of cultural history feed into the Prada store, creating a context with greater depth than its immediate SoHo environs. Prada is rooted in the aesthetic of Arte Povera, an Italian art variant on minimalist art popular in the 1970’s. The term was coined by Germano Celant, the curator who now directs the Prada Foundation, which sponsors various cultural projects. (Mr. Celant is also an associate curator of contemporary art at the Guggenheim Museum.) Arte Povera was perverse. Its artists wanted to get away from the privileged aura of the museum and expensive materials. They made work from old bedding and tar-stained rope and displayed it in barren, out-of-the-way locations. But somehow you always needed a private jet to get there. You couldn’t afford to be povera at all.

This aesthetic was rooted, in turn, in the social and ethical complexities of Italian Communism, for years the preferred political affiliation of fashion designers, editors and other comrades in the upper echelons of style. Miuccia Prada is described in the company’s press material as a former communist. Fans of Antonioni and Bertolucci will see no insurmountable conflict here. Last year, there were rumors that Prada hoped to acquire Humanità, the Italian Communist Party’s defunct newspaper. Many of us who are not communists would still consider subscribing, if not defecting, to gain an aesthetic perspective on the news as well as Continental comic relief from it.

There was also a rumor that Prada might back Mr. Koolhaas as a candidate for a seat in the Italian Parliament. One notes this not as an incidental aside, but as an insight into the personality structure of the most important architect of his generation. Mr. Koolhaas is architecture’s most advanced triple-thinker, in Flaubert’s phrase — for him, art arises from a continuous negotiation between objective reality and the subjective perception of it.

This dialectic skill is handsomely illustrated in ”The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping,” whose publication coincides with the opening of the Prada store. Prepared under Mr. Koolhaas’s supervision by students at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, the book offers a critical reckoning with the mutation of public space in advanced capitalist society. As startlingly factual as they are ideological, the studies collected here portray a stoic acceptance of realities (advertising, shopping malls) that critics often harangue against.

Call Mr. Koolhaas perverse, or counterintuitive. In the 1970’s, when architects and planners were fighting against urban congestion, he celebrated it in his book ”Delirious New York.” Today, when convention encourages architects to oppose the privatization of public space, Mr. Koolhaas again takes the contrary point of view. If fashion historically represents a trivial pursuit in comparison to architecture, Mr. Koolhaas will inevitably be drawn to it.

He has been influenced not only by fashion’s emphasis on image, but by the technical production of fashion and even customer service. It is evident throughout the Prada store, which was designed in association with the New York firm ARO. The precise layering of materials; the integration of advanced technology with craft; the interplay between seamed and seamless spaces, finished and unfinished surfaces: these have assumed a new prominence in Mr. Koolhaas’s approach.

The sloping contours of the Wave, lined with polished zebra wood, form an arena for flexible presentations. One slope is ranked with stadium steps. By day, the steps are used to display merchandise like handbags and shoes. At night, they become seating for art events. On the slope opposite, a small platform folds down to create a cantilevered stage. A row of cast iron columns, sheathed in white at their bases, forms one side of the jewel-box theater’s porous walls. Like the rest of the store, the space is activated by the interplay between the open and the bounded, the seamless and the seamed.

In contrast to the Wave, a set of metal boxes, in sizes small, medium, and extra-large, hang from tracks mounted on the ceiling. A Surrealist inversion, they define the upended skyline of a city that has moved indoors and flipped its head. The track system enables the density of the cityscape to be variously configured. Partly enclosed by metal screens, the boxes can be used as showcases for clothes or cages for intrepid go-go dancers.

Too bad you can’t rent Prada’s dressing rooms for the night. They are as extra-large as the Hudson Hotel’s guest rooms are compact. You could move in here with the city version of the nuclear family: you and three or four of your newest best friends. Here’s where Mr. Koolhaas’s so-called ”in-store technology” gets the fullest play, starting with the glass that encloses each room. Touch the button, and the electrified material peek-a-boo’s you, toggling from transparent to opaque.

Large video panels replace the traditional three-sided mirror with live cam shots of your back and sides. A.T.M.-style screens give you access to data on size, style and availability. Other techno-features require less customer participation. Scanning antennas, copper ribbons embedded like industrial jewelry in the glass, keep track of what you take in and out of the rooms. Prada is considering using the scanners for customers to charge their purchases automatically just by carrying them out the door.

The lower level of the store is reached by a staircase, surfaced with a sandwich of wood and steel, that descends alongside the stadium seating, to a U-shaped maze of shopping departments. The walls of the maze are lined with particle board, finished in green or pink. Spackling of the seams and rivets is left deliberately exposed, and even the rough edges of the white substance appear meticulously designed. Sweaters and shirts are displayed, on shelves of open stock, housed in rolling banks adapted from library stacks.

On the west side of the lower level is a pharmacy for cosmetic products. Beyond that is a warren of specialness alcoves, a V.I.P. maze within a maze, where everyone will want to be seen trying to enter or leave without being noticed.

You will want to pay attention to flat video monitors, placed throughout the store, on which is shown a continuous montage of images chosen to project the Prada sensibility. Scenes from Antonioni’s ”Red Desert” are a typically revealing motif. An aestheticized depiction of Marxism, featuring factories whose chimneys belch tinted yellow and pink smoke, the film typifies the particular blend of high style and social consciousness that the Italians have made their own.

At the Prada store, Antonioni is recast as a shopping experience. Consumption takes the place of production in the post-industrial landscape. Miuccia Prada plays Monica Vitti to Rem Koolhaas’s Richard Harris. Anomie, anyone?

We could learn a lot now from European efforts to weave art, philosophy and politics into a more supple social fabric. These days, it takes triple thinking just to cope with life. Shop! But don’t flaunt it. Be scared! But act normal. Big Brother is lurking inside your vanity. Smile! We’re turning into Singapore. At last, a practical use for those tar-stained ropes.