Amo

Twenty-five years separate the zebrano wave ramp that Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren dropped into the former Guggenheim SoHo at 575 Broadway on 15 December 2001 from the 12,000 sqm Beymen flagship that Ellen van Loon and Iyad Alsaka have just slipped beneath the cast-iron columns of the Tersane-i Amire on the Golden Horn. Between those two openings sits a more or less continuous practice — OMA fashion retail architecture, plus the parallel AMO research studio directed by Samir Bantal — that has built the most recognisable luxury store typologies of the early 21st century. The Prada Epicenters defined the category in 2001 and 2004. The Repossi flagship at 6 Place Vendôme opened OMA’s jewellery vocabulary in 2016. T Fondaco dei Tedeschi reframed adaptive reuse for luxury retail the same year. Sotheby’s New York rewired the auction house typology in 2019. And, in 2026, the Beymen Tersane plants the practice on Turkish soil for the first time. ...

AMO opened a stone-carved supermarket inside the ME Milan Il Duca on 22 April 2026, and in doing so produced the cleanest summary in twenty-seven years of what the AMO design crossovers actually are: a think-tank that designs objects when the brief is to make a brand legible at one-to-one scale. The Il Sonno Supermarket, made with SolidNature for Designboom’s Room for Dreams programme at Milan Design Week 2026, stocks onyx bananas and travertine milk cartons on shelves under fluorescent light, twelve SKUs available to pre-order through SolidNature until 21 June 2026. AMO director Samir Bantal framed the installation as “freezing the idea of time.” The harder question the installation answers is one Rem Koolhaas opened in 1999 when Prada commissioned the New York Epicenter store: what does the research arm of an architecture firm do when it is not designing buildings? ...