The gilded Haunted House
A four-storey remnant of the distillery wrapped in 24-carat gold leaf, holding permanent works from the collection.
Jay Dixit — CC BY 4.0 · This Photo was taken by Wolfgang Moroder. Feel free to use my photos, but please mention me as the author and send me a message. This image is not in the public domain. Please respect the copyright pr — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Tomasz Rynkiewicz thmsr — CC0 · Sailko — CC BY 3.0
Honestly: half the visit is architecture and half is demanding conceptual art. If the art side tires you, the buildings, the Haunted House and Bar Luce may still justify the trip, but you would be paying about 19 euros for shows that might leave you cold. Check the current programme first, and if it does not convince you, come for the free courtyard and the cafe instead.
Yes. The courtyard, bookshop, Bar Luce and the Torre restaurant all sit outside the ticket line, so you can come for coffee and photographs and leave having paid only your bill. The ticket is needed only for the exhibition buildings and the Torre's art floors.
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In an industrial pocket of southern Milan, inside a gin distillery that dates to the early 1900s, stands a four-storey building sheathed entirely in 24-carat gold leaf. This is the Haunted House, the thing everyone photographs at Fondazione Prada and the sign that you have arrived. The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and his office OMA turned the old works into an art complex in 2015 that resembles nothing else in the city: cisterns, warehouses and new galleries sitting next to the original factory walls, with neither side pretending to be older or newer than it is. This is not one gallery but a scatter of buildings around an open courtyard, and you plot your own route between them. The largest is the Torre, the white concrete tower opened in 2018, sixty metres and nine floors, five of them given over to Atlas, the long-running display drawn from the foundation's collection, with a sixth-floor restaurant that looks out over the rooftops of southern Milan. The temporary shows change constantly and tend towards serious, conceptual contemporary art; you may leave dazzled or you may leave baffled. The architecture is the part that never disappoints. Check what is actually on before you book, because the programme is what decides whether this earns a day of your trip. One thing many visitors miss: the courtyard, the bookshop and Bar Luce are all open without a ticket. Wes Anderson designed that cafe to echo a Milanese bar of the 1950s, in pistachio and pink, under a vaulted ceiling that quotes the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, complete with pinball machines and old music. Coffee and pastries cost what they cost in Milan, and it is an easy place with children because nobody is shushing anyone. Plenty of people come for the bar alone and go home happy, which is a perfectly respectable plan. Practically: this is far from the Duomo and Brera cluster. The simplest approach is metro line M3 to Lodi T.I.B.B., then a ten-minute walk through workaday streets with nothing to look at. Allow two to three hours, remember that the ticket desk closes an hour before the galleries do and that Tuesday is the closing day. Spaces are wide and there are lifts, so strollers are no trouble; there is no dedicated prayer room, but quiet corners are abundant. The surrounding neighbourhood is thin on restaurants, so if you plan to eat, eat on site: Bar Luce runs through the day, while the Torre restaurant keeps its own hours and is mostly an evening affair.
A four-storey remnant of the distillery wrapped in 24-carat gold leaf, holding permanent works from the collection.
A pistachio-and-pink cafe under a vaulted ceiling, staged like a 1950s Milanese bar, and free to walk into.
A nine-floor white concrete tower opened in 2018, five levels of it exhibition space, with a sixth-floor restaurant over southern Milan.
Largo Isarco 2, 20139 Milan, Italy