Fondazione Prada resembles deathcamp
The Dutch Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), headed by architect Rem Koolhaas, has been commissioned to oversee the transformation of an early 20th-century industrial complex in Milan into the Fondazione Prada’s (Prada Foundation) new headquarters. An auditorium, a tower and an exhibition building will be added to the seven existing structures and courtyard, creating a total of 188,000 square feet of space for shows, including an innovative hybrid storage and- display area (see picture below). Strangely enough, one of the images that were released by Prada and OMA, resembles a widely discussed work by the American artist Tom Sachs.
Two years ago Fondazione Prada hosted a large-scale solo-show with works by the artist who repeatedly uses the Prada brand as the target for his artistic attacks. In 1998 he created his highly controversial Prada Deathcamp, a miniature replica of a concentration camp made from Prada’s distinctive navy blue hatboxes and emblazoned with the company logo (see picture below). The piece even included an entrance gate inscribed with the ominous motto’ Arbeit macht frei’ (that for Sachs, perhaps, equates to an advertising slogan?) and a model of the ‘incinerator’ from the Treblinka Nazi death camp.
According to the artist, however, Prada Deathcamp had nothing to do with the holocaust, but was instead intended to be a denouncement of the way shopping had been turned into a new form of religion. In an ironic twist of history, the very place where Sachs showed his “piece of resistance” will now be transformed by the architect who prophesied that “shopping is arguably the last remaining form of public activity”.
Design for Prada Foundation’s new headquarters by OMA
Prada Deathcamp (1998) by the American artist Tom Sachs