Hasta La Ideas

(Photos: Prada)

Now that its spooky Marfa outpost has been co-opted by Gossip Girl, Prada is stepping up its public art game with a highly anticipated “Transformer.” More than meets the eye? You bet. A robot in disguise? Don’t rule it out. Designed by OMA/Rem Koolhaas and his Office of Metropolitan Architecture, the Prada Transformer is a shape-shifting event space nestled beside the 16th-century Gyeonghui Palace in Seoul, South Korea. Beginning tomorrow and over the next five months, it will host a series of exhibitions, screenings, and live events in the realms of fashion, art, film, design, and performance.

First up is “Waist Down” (pictured at right, inside the Transformer), the splendid exhibition of skirts designed by Miuccia Prada that has already impressed the pants off of viewers in Tokyo, New York, and Los Angeles. In addition to skirts from the first ever Prada show to the present, the show will feature skirts created by Korean fashion design students. Come June 26, the four-sided structure (hexagon, cross, rectangle, and circle) will be transformed in more ways than one. A crane will flip the elastic-encased Transformer so that the rectangular side forms the ground plan, and it becomes a cinema showing a series of films selected by Babel director Alejandro González Iñárritu and critic Elvis Mitchell. Subsequent events include an art installation by Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg (on the cross side, it will open on July 30) and a hush-hush culminating “special event” that will take place in the round, when the Transformer is flipped onto its circular base in October.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media