“Haunted Tower”

Fondazione Prada is Milan’s most exciting place, where curated art meets architecture and its past. The creator of Fondazione Prada is, as the name might suggest, Miuccia Prada, whose love to art is as strong as to fashion. This is not an average, contemporary art museum – Fondazione fuses visual appreciation with intellectual pleasure – everything that happens here, from silent dance performances to temporary exhibitions, feels bonded together. The “Haunted House” covered with gold and the whole Fondazione Prada site is part of a former distillery complex dating back to the 1910s.

Without transforming the original volumes, the architecture project has preserved and enhanced the building by reinforcing the structure and gilding its external surface. As stated by Rem Koolhaas, the architect behind the museum, “Fondazione is not a preservation project and not a new architecture. Two conditions that are usually kept separate here confront each other in a state of permanent interaction–offering an ensemble of fragments that will not congeal into a single image, or allow any part to dominate the others. New, old, horizontal, vertical, wide, narrow, white, black, open, enclosed–all these contrasts establish the range of oppositions that define the new Fondazione. By introducing so many spatial variables, the complexity of the architecture will promote an unstable, open programming, where art and architecture will benefit from each other’s challenges”. Permanently, Fondazione Prada exhibits Louis Bourgeois‘s metaphysical installations, Robert Gober‘s eerie and surreal artworks. As part of the temporary exhibition, it’s essential to see Damien Hirst‘s “Trittico“, which literally presents a gynecologist chair immersed in a huge, fish-filled aquarium.

After few hours of discovering and learning about Fondazione Prada’s treasures, it’s a great idea to have cup of coffee at Bar Luce, which was designed by Wes Anderson, the famous director of “The Grand Budapest Hotel” – the pastel green wallpapers and delicious, marmalade cupcakes certainly give the caffè a status of the best museum cafeteria in the world. If you are planning a visit to Milan, then don’t even try to miss Fondazione Prada on your go-to list!

 

Via Largo Isarco 2 / Milan