Fondazione Prada

Fondazione Prada's Milan campus, designed by OMA, adapts a former distillery complex in the city's southern district. Industrial buildings stand alongside newer structures, including the gold-clad Haunted House, the Podium, Cinema and Torre.

Why it matters

The foundation has been active since 1993, co-chaired by Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli, and spent its first two decades staging ambitious solo shows in borrowed spaces before opening its permanent home on 9 May 2015. Koolhaas's design kept the industrial complex — warehouses, workshops, fermentation silos — and inserted three new structures: the Podium for temporary exhibitions, the Cinema, and later the Torre, a 60-metre tower in exposed white concrete completed in 2018. Between them stands the Haunted House, a four-storey building sheathed in 24-carat gold foil that holds works from the permanent collection. The campus totals about 19,000 square metres, with some 11,000 given to exhibition, and treats architecture as part of the programme rather than a container for it.

What to notice

The campus juxtaposes retained industrial buildings with new architectural interventions. The Torre houses exhibition spaces, while Bar Luce was designed by film director Wes Anderson. The foundation's Osservatorio in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II is devoted to photography, while L'Accademia dei Bambini is an educational space developed with students of the École nationale supérieure d'architecture de Versailles.

Context and history

From 1993 to 2010 the foundation organised 24 solo exhibitions in Milan, building a reputation for artist-led programming, with early campus shows and performances by figures including Robert Gober, Thomas Demand and Gianni Piacentino, and a Gianni Piacentino retrospective curated by Germano Celant, the foundation's longtime artistic director. The Largo Isarco site was chosen in a still-industrial stretch of the Vigentino district, south of the centre, and its opening in 2015 — the same year as the Expo — helped redraw the city's cultural geography toward the south. The Torre's completion in 2018 added the vertical element that the original plan had postponed. The foundation also runs Ca' Corner della Regina in Venice, giving its exhibitions a two-city calendar.