Does Transformer really transforms?

Questioning a possible "coming community"?

"I really do not know what the architects trapped in the grip of the crisis of modernity can do. It seems to me that they need to decide how to interpret the relation between inclusion and disjuncture, the productive relation that extents between metropolis and multitude"(1)

It is a hot, humid day of Seoul summer. Rain is expected as usual. The vertical city is in a move together with the dynamics of the human crowd, people, taxis, food....
I am among the construction workers, with few friends of Korean architects PARKKIM and few other visitors watching the two Dutch guys who are giving enormously effort to change the entrance of Transformer. With a landscape of skyscrapers and in the opposite of it the old Gyeonghui palace (16.cc) in a peaceful environment: the Prada Pavilion/Transformer(OMA/Prada)waits to be transformed from a cinema to an exhibition space (21.07.2009).Besides its well presented and valuable booklets of the events, press releases, conceptual framework of the cinema.... there are few aspects that you might question the project:

Firstly, the "symbolic value" as an "object" and how is transformed into "exchange value" becomes a self-referential piece in a manner of a modernist object which totally serves the market (few European collectioners waiting to buy the piece to move it to Europe - also with the office prefabricates that surround the pavilion). Simply, the symbolic value is being created through both Prada and OMA brands which plays with the urban marketing of Seoul that the city and private corporate brand making firms desire. So, as it gains (transforms) an exchange value by becoming a simple object for urban consumer market, it looses its radicalism of temporality and intervention in urban space. Koolhaas replies to the what the market economy does to architecture? (2): "...With Prada, then, there was an opportunity to see how within that you could create a kind of bubble, maybe not of its opposite, but, at least, of another world, simply by making it a space for selling or for being together". So, the closure here is, being simply aware of the border of market economy and its object (here transformer, the bubble there is no chance to discuss further the potential radical role of it. What Negri would call: a cynical realism.

Secondly, you might focus on the function of the pavilion as an urban sculpture (that supposed to be functional) that stands among the urban morphology. The center of Seoul is a forest of skyscrapers that really plays with a vertical perception of an urban environment. At the other hand, the traditional heritage of palaces and temples remain another kind of representation in the city. As Transformer is placed in-between these two types of representations and sense of places, it does not really take the risk to play with them. As a postmodern clip+fold, copy+paste design structure, Transformer has neither symbiosis nor anti-relation with the traditional architecture of the palace and do not uses the possibility of the enormous surreal representation of the bunch of skyscrapers.

Thirdly, its possible function of creating "public space" attracts and gathers only certain communities of designers, Prada people and elite intellectuals but remains alien to the rest of the citizens of the city. Pity... what a missing chance for this structure to go and participate in this attractive, fragmented and multiple urban society...

Lastly, you might compare with other already existing examples of "event making flexible pavilion" or "sculpture as an urban element". Several examples are proposed by artists and architects, sometimes with simple material and design concepts. To have flexible, temporary design of a space you might not need to mimic moving structures. As much as different events are hosted in different periods with the public interventions in a spatial structure or pavilion; the function of a designed space could transform through events and interactions. Radical experience of a space is almost impossible in modernist architecture as the design program already bounds the movement, perception and possible action of a human with a certain object referential modernist representation. Radical spatial experience depending on human action transformed in the 1990s into "collective experience"..."experience of inter-subjectivity (Guattari)"...a "coming community (Agamben)"...a "singular infinity (Nancy)" that searches for a "relational representation". The dilemma between temporary "coming together" and creating a certain representation is inert in the spatial experience. Transformer misses again another chance to become a self-reflective, process-based project in provacating an antagonistic public space by remaining a self-referential formal object that can't release its values from the boundries of the of modern aesthetics.
Such examples are working differently:
Raumlabor
A Dome as a modest public gesture by Seoul based architecture office masstudies by Min Suk Cho.

I think, I like to follow OMA projects which are increasing my sense of adoration for Sejima(SANAA) and
Diller+Scofidio'
projects in context of temporary radical experience, radical intervention in urban...and so on.

My question here as a person watching the useless effort of Prada Transformer is:
What is the clue of to create a radical urban element that could be either architectural or art, which is flexible, able to create events and change its context through events and unexpected encounters...and also able to create temporary environment for different parts of public in which an antagonistic creative culture could be created without being remaining as a "spectacle" for the exchange value of urban market?... and furthermore, intervening the dissemination of the spatial knowledge?

any answers?

the weather is quite hot in Seoul.



ref:
1. p. 50, A.Negri, On Rem Koolhaas, Radical Philosophy, 154, 2009
2. p.47, Propaganda Architecture, Radical Philosophy, 154, 2009
"Metropolis and Multitude" by Negri: www.generation-online.org/t/metropolis.htm