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Rem Koolhaas's Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) is renowned for designing iconic buildings like the Seattle Public Library and the CCTV building in Beijing, but the firm's lesser–known little brother, AMO, is quietly becoming just as influential. AMO isn't an acronym—it's just the yin to OMA's yang, a think tank that takes on almost anything that isn't architecture: exhibitions, branding campaigns, events, and research. "It's about applying architectural thinking to nonarchitectural fields," says Shohei Shigematsu, a lanky 34–year–old architect who is director of both OMA and AMO North America, in between showing me foam models of buildings in the company's New York office. "We realized that a lot of clients don't really know what they want. They need not just architecture, but bigger strategies."

Since Koolhaas founded AMO in 1998, it has brought the same revolutionary approach found in OMA's architecture to other pursuits. Most famously, AMO proposed a visual identity and flag for the European Union based on a bar code made up of member nations' colors. (Last year, Austria adopted the graphic as the logo for its E.U. presidency.) It has developed a curatorial master plan for St. Petersburg's Hermitage Museum, consulted on future directions for Volkswagen and Ikea, and masterminded a marketing strategy for an organic fast–food chain. On a macro level, it developed an exhibition and book examining the rise of cities in the Persian Gulf for the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale.

One of AMO's longest–standing clients is Prada. When OMA designed the first Prada "epicenter" in New York in 2001, AMO developed the in–store technology. Since then, the firm has produced events, exhibitions, films, Web sites, and even runway shows for Prada and Miu Miu. The results are anything but conventional. For Prada's Spring/Summer 2007 men's collection, AMO created a crisscrossing catwalk hemmed in by projections of imaginary advertisements for futuristic products such as food that would change your skin color and pills that would allow you to "Feel Dutch," "Be Gay," or "Get Laid." (The graphics have since appeared on Prada T–shirts.) For Fall/Winter 2007, AMO curled a catwalk like a spiral; for Spring/Summer 2008, it created a labyrinth of foam seating. "Miuccia Prada's approach is to make the experience of fashion more intimate," says Alexander Reichert, the 36–year–old architect who leads AMO's Prada team at OMA's home base in Rotterdam. "There's nothing more intimate than folding the catwalk into a snake form and making people sit almost in a circle, like a community."