Abstract
This article explores an extended sense of autonomy in contemporary architecture activated through the practice of fashion, by taking architect Rem Koolhaas' work Prada Epicenter in New York as a case. In doing so, it argues that throughout the work Koolhaas sets up a world in which the corporate and the individual are entangled together in complex ways. Instead of considering Prada Epicenter to be the exemplar illustrating that the global company-Prada-institutionalizes the designed commercial space in a top-down manner, this article claims that such a space imbricates a multiplicity of meaning that is generated at the intersections of the local and the global, the ordinary and the spectacular, and the individual and the institutional. In this respect French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky's fashion theory works as a critical point: his claim that the ambivalence of fashion-both as corporate power and individual freedom-is a threshold encouraging us to better understand the operativity of late capitalism in daily life is extended to Koolhaas' case. In other words, Koolhaas' Prada Epicenter brings forth possibilities that the ostensibly technocratic and institutionalized space in fact works as a resillient field where senses of individual autonomy arise in the aid of corporative practice of branding.