Amalgamating the Civic and the Retail

By applying and manipulating the logo of each brand, a new map emerges: a network of projected lifestyle stories and promises. It corresponds with the same area of Soho as the orthographic map, but conveys the more unconscious messages by the symbols, fonts, voids, and colours. Whether hinting at modernity, historical acknowledgement, youth, prestige, grunge… the store speaks through its merchandise, its interior (and sometimes exterior) architecture, and its marketing. The landscape of the site affects the participant at all levels of needs and desires.

As cities are the artifice of man, interpretations of them create myths that propel their growth, energy and complexity. History and reinvention layer remnants upon memories. New York City has reinvented itself through mosaics of episodes ever since its urban grid of streets was laid in 1811. Indifferent to topography, the grid claims superiority of the intellectual programme over realities of geography. In particular, SoHo is an anomaly to this grid as its edges are defined by an earlier grid of 1790, when the irregular river edges made SoHo’s grid parallel to Broadway, an old Native American trail, the Weckquaesgeck. Through a series of transformations, the area has been a suburban residential field, a bustling industrial cluster, Manhattan’s first red-light district, the worst commercial slum of its time, a haven for avante-gardists, until the mecca of retail and real estate it is known as today. Its tension and intensity are all due to its evolution and re-appropriation. And since the consumerist culture has already folded into the architectural realm at this site, the synthesis of a new urban stage is ready to germinate here.

In one of the few precincts in the world that can support this potency, and with the social stage heightened, the tension between the intimate and the public blurs into a precarious and shifty assemblage. The nodes of tensions pulling at the core of this cultural phenomenon are the sale versus the display and singularity versus volume. The Mall of America sits comfortably at the sale and volume periphery, while the Metropolitan Museum is at the opposite end of the spectrum of singularity and display. Somewhere in between sits the Prada Epicentre of SoHo. The proposed design spans all four quadrants.