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Location plan
The next attempt to address this state of affairs was through private development –or the market
– namely through the old Fiera site known as CityLife. A relatively sane Libeskind proposal
which was partly to be funded by planning gain and by the city was eventually killed, first by
slow sales of the luxury high-rise developments, then in a more considered but perhaps more
controversial way by architect Stefano Boeri in his role as Councillor of Culture in the city
council. In November 2011 he announced in a rather grandiosely entitled ‘decalogue’ on his
vision for the arts in the city that he was switching funds originally designated for Libeskind’s
contemporary art museum to Chipperfield’s ropey City of Culture. Boeri went on to describe a
system whereby the city might support private initiatives rather than providing a single state
institution. ‘The administration must both give visibility, reputation and services to cultural
initiatives that arise spontaneously,’ he declared.
It was not just a cop out. In Milan, large private institutions had blurred the line between the
public and the private throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Boeri’s proposal for a series of
contemporary art spaces diffused throughout the city simply acknowledged that the major
players in the city’s art scene were already operating more successfully in the public sphere
than any new public institution could. The Fondazione Nicola Trussardi with Massimiliano Gioni
as its director opened up some of the most stunning of Milan’s usually secretive palazzi to
exhibitions, such as the Palazzo Litta and Palazzo Citterio. Even the smaller collectors got in on
the act. A group of them got together in 2003, called themselves ACACIA and began collecting
according to what they styled ‘a philosophy of collective patronage’began. Of course, all public
collections are effectively based on private ones but in Milan the division is alive rather than
historic.
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‘There is inherently a play between the idea of private wealth and public display
in this building’
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It is unfair perhaps to pick on the one daft thing that Rem Koolhaas says at the launch of a new
building, given that he says many perceptive things, but to suggest that this complex has been
designed to either prevent or mediate against gentrification is rather ridiculous. Gentrification is
an economic process. Indeed the Fondazione Prada has a key role in the Largo Isarco area. It
bought the distillery and areas to the east and south in the 1990s. The luxury flats to the south
of the complex were built on land sold to developers by Prada when they needed to raise capital
following a dip in fortunes following the terrorist attacks in the USA in 2001. The compound is as
open as it can be however. The tower at the north-west corner (under construction) provides a
second entrance with a full duplication of ticketing and amenities, as well as providing rooftop
restaurant. Rising above the railway tracks it will be an important signpost to the rest of the city
of the building’s existence as well as a home for displaying the Fondazione Prada collection.
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Architecturally the golden building lights up the dull tones of the compound. The site is defined
to the north and south by two long two-storey buildings which are simple brick structures
covered in render. These house more exhibition space on the ground floor and administration
and studios above.
Axonometric
The podium is clad in ‘aluminium foam’ developed for military applications because it is very
light. According to OMA partner Chris van Duijn: ‘you put it between two steel plates though and
it becomes very rigid but retaining lightness. It is used as filler in plating for armoured cars and
such like’. It is a deeply textured, tactile material when viewed up close but at a distance it fades
to grey. The compound needed some variety then and, so the story goes, models of the
‘Haunted House’– as Miuccia Prada called this former administrative block – were tested with
different colours, with gold, apparently, being arrived at by chance.
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A gold building though makes a profoundly interesting artistic statement. In 1910, after six
months in Milan, Giorgio de Chirico, educated in Greece and in Germany, painted his first
Metaphysical Town Square picture, called ‘The Enigma of An Autumn Afternoon’. Usually when
it is described, curators focus on the statue and the two shadowy figures but make little of the
golden house (or is it a mausoleum?) that dominates the picture and completes this civic
compound, much as the golden house does in the Prada Foundation. The building in Chirico’s
painting is formed by two simple columns and a blank entablature, but shimmers in the gold of
the afternoon. Inside it is dark. Chirico – a classicist magpie in a nest of Dadaists – would go on
to create a store of fragmentary images and shapes that would profoundly influence Aldo Rossi
among others, but none so blank, so simple, so enigmatic.
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But then this being Rem Koolhaas, schooled in the method of the Surrealists as much as their
artistic vision, it is also something of a joke, albeit a typically intellectual one. There are two new
buildings in the compound. However, elsewhere, mundane buildings that remain have been
preserved in pristine condition or exalted to the highest degree by being covered in gold.
‘At the launch Rem Koolhaas thanked Prada for inviting a group of northern
Europeans into ‘the southern European condition’. He wasn’t kidding.’
Ever eager to resist the metaphysical, encompassing solution of the Modernist desire to
rationalise physical appearance, which he knows so well, he covers a building in gold. This
plays into architecture’s potential role as the physical manifestation of a grand historical
narrative, one that he resists. It is a Postmodernist device but, as they go, it’s a great one. (In
counterpoint, perhaps, is Wes Anderson’s bar which, Steve Zissou pinball and terrazzo floors
aside, is altogether too restrained, too pleasant.)
Throughout the complex there are equally dry, more obscure comments on the Italian attitude to
its past which are, frankly, typical of most European countries, albeit more stringently coded.
Despite these robust buildings having stood since the 1910s, as soon as new works began,
building codes applicable to earthquake zones kicked in, due to the L’Aquila earthquake of
2009. In the former administrative blocks, concrete trusses have had aluminium plates bolted to
either side of them as have the columns. No attempt has been made to disguise the heavy-
handedness of this stipulation. Indeed in the Great Hall as the converted warehouse, the extra
structural support has been painted a very Dutch bright orange lest it not be noticed. At the
launch Rem Koolhaas thanked Prada for inviting a group of northern Europeans into ‘the
southern European condition’. He wasn’t kidding.
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Fondazione Prada in Milan by OMA | Buildings | Architectural Review 17/11/2018, 12)12
Fondazione Prada
Architect: OMA
Local architect: Massimo Alvisi
Executive architects: Alvisi Kirimoto & Partners, Atelier Verticale
Structural engineer: Favero&Milan
Photographs: Roland Halbe and Bas Princen
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