The latest work by Dutch "starchitect" Rem Koolhaas, a bizarre four-sided structure that will be rolled - like a dice - onto a different base for each of the four events it will host this summer, has just appeared beside Seoul's 16th-century Gyeonghuigung Palace.
Commissioned by the Fondazione Prada, which was created by Miuccia Prada and her husband Patrizio Bertelli in 1993, the building, as with the Fondazione's previous commissions, wouldn't exist without its deep financial support; this is more than mere collecting.
Koolhaas's OMA practice has designed shops for Prada in the past but this time the brief was to create a single building able to host a series of different events - art exhibitions, fashion shows and cinema screenings. Koolhaas's solution is the Transformer, a four-sided steel frame shrouded in an elastic skin. Each of the four different sides (there's a cross, a circle, a rectangle and a hexagon) can act as the Transformer's base, and huge cranes will roll it over for each of the summer's four month-long happenings. www.fondazioneprada.org
