Benetton Launches Architecture Competition to Design Buildings in Iran

If Prada can build a store in Marfa, Texas and Zaha Hadid can travel the world with her Chanel mobile pavilion (before the tour was canceled, of course), then surely there must be more room in the world for another architecture and fashion pairing. So it is with the label Benetton who has just announced plans to hold an architecture competition to build two twelve story buildings in Tehran. While the project certainly has its heart in the right place, with judge Odile Decq saying that she and Benetton were out to prove that its easy to work and build interesting things in the Middle East (outside of Dubai), one has to consider that it also feels like something of a publicity stunt or a severely-in-over-their-heads situation, particularly after reading about a recent even at one of their current stores in Iran:

…there are fears for the future of the project after activists recently set fire to a branch of Benetton in Tehran following claims in the local press that company founder Luciano Benetton had Zionist links.

But wait, that also happened to Rem Koolhaas’ Prada store in New York — though probably not due to Rem or Miuccia’s potential Zionist links, right? Yowch.

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