A Transforming Tetrahedron Invades Korea

Charlie Jane Anders — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 13:00:00 PDT

One solitary Transformer has taken over one of Seoul's oldest buildings. This bizarre-looking building can become a movie theater, a fashion exhibition, a live performance space, and maybe a killer robot.

Prada's shape-shifting "Transformer" can take on different configurations and uses, depending on which side it's placed on. Designed by Rem Koolhaas' legendary Office for Metropolitan Architecture, the 160-ton structure can be lifted and rotated in just one hour to create a different shape, including a totally different inner space. It's wrapped in a highly elastic polyvinyl chloride membrane, which was sprayed on as a liquid.

Stationed next to the 16th century Gyeonghui Palace, the building is designed to be easily rotated in a tight space, without damaging any nearby buildings. Each side has three openings, which connect to a series of air-conditioning vents.

For now, the building — which just opened last week — is sort of cone shaped, for an exhibition of skirts. On May 24, the structure gets turned around and becomes a rectangle, to allow movie exhibitions. And then the structure will be turned again, to become cross-shaped, for an art exhibition. And finally, it'll be turned into a circle for a fashion show. All images by Getty or Prada. [WWD]

Terraforming Dubai's Next Artificial Island City

Annalee Newitz — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 11:52:15 PST

This gleaming hunk of urban development is about to rise on an artificial, perfectly square island off the coast of Dubai. Engineers in the coastal country are already adept at building islands — Dubai possesses three artificial island developments, including one made of house-sized islets that form the shape of all the continents of the world. With this new development, architect Rem Koolhaas will design an entire city that reflects his futurist philosophy about the "generic city." That glowing ball you see will be a city unto itself. See inside it below.

Those tubes are escalators connecting different living areas to each other.

Koolhaas says he's using this 6.5-mile square mini-city to launch a critique of generic cities filled with acres of sameness. He wants this city to look like a cross between the supergeneric urban spaces of New York and the superfantastical, weirdly-shaped buildings for which Koohaas is known. According to the New York Times:

The core of the development would be the island, which would be divided into 25 identical blocks. Neat rows of towers — some tall and slender, others short and squat, depending on the zoning — line the blocks, as if a fragment of Manhattan had been removed with a scalpel and reinserted in the Middle East.
The monotony is broken by mixed-use structures whose immense scale and formal energy draw on mythic examples from architectural history. A spiraling 82-story tower might have been inspired by the minaret of the ninth-century Great Mosque of Samarra in Iraq; a gargantuan 44-story sphere brings to mind the symbolic forms of the 18th-century architect Étienne-Louis Boullée.

It also brings to mind a gated community writ large. These gleaming towers on their isolated island have only a few tiny bridges to the outside world. People could live their entire lives here, keeping all the poverty-stricken masses at bay. As the Times architecture critic Nicolai Oroussouff says, "Think of George A. Romero's 2005 flick, "Land of the Dead," with its menacing corporate masters peering down on a world of faceless zombies." We are.

City on the Gulf [NYT]

io9: rem koolhaas

A Transforming Tetrahedron Invades Korea

Terraforming Dubai's Next Artificial Island City