Okay. Enough of this self-righteous rant. What about the architecture? There is some marvelous work. Herzog & de Meuron’s Prada is striking at the scale of the cityscape, jutting appealingly just above its roofline context. The diamond-gridded structural wall, with its mix of bubbled and flush glass panels, is a lovely thing, and the interior is luminous and dramatic. Circulation is suave, carpet is white, clerks are impeccable in gray. At Tod’s down the row, Ito claims inspiration from the angularity of the branches of the trees out front and creates a facade of big, irregular openings that play against the rectilinear form of the building. The interior is less successful, with too much action and too little resolution in the overbusy details. Part of the problem—which also occurs at Prada—is that exterior walls that depend on the play of nonorthogonal openings must resolve the crisis of intersection with floor slabs that are perforce horizontal. Herzog & de Meuron simply allow the slabs to butt against the building’s skin, which doesn’t look too bad. Ito fusses away on the interior, using surface details to try to resolve the meeting of the irregular openings with the right-angled floors and walls. This dissipates what I think would be the greater potential of a more direct approach.
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