Hasta La Ideas

Starchitect Rem Koolhaas popped up in a weird little interview with Reuters this week to talk about how he envisions the immediate future of his profession, given that no one has any money anymore. Of course he said be believed that new buildings would be less flashy and more “socially responsible.” Though it felt a little strange that he was saying all of this as he stood outside of his newly opened Prada Transformer temporary exhibition hall (by definition, something that is inherently non-sustainable). Granted, he talks about how it was “constructed at reasonable costs” but mostly said it was a good way to take people’s minds off these hard times, which we read as “it cost a lot and let’s not focus on that right now.” One party in particular probably not eager to talk about the price is Prada itself, which just released its financials from 2008, which found the fashion empire’s annual net profit down more than twenty percent. Though, to be fair, they claim a lot of what they took in was immediately reinvested back into the company. But if they had even a slightly rough go of it in ’08, one wonders if we’ll be seeing any more publicity-grabbing things like the Transformer again any time soon.