12/05/2015

Fondazione Prada Opens its OMA-designed Platform in Milan

The new Milan venue of Fondazione Prada, conceived by architecture firm OMA—led by Rem Koolhaas — expands the repertoire of spatial typologies in which art can be exhibited and shared with the public. Articulated by an architectural configuration which combines preexisting buildings with three new structures, it is the result of the transformation of a former distillery dating back to the 1910’s. Located in Largo Isarco, in the South of Milan, the compound has a gross surface area of 19,000 m2/205,000 ft2, of which 11,000 m2/118,000 ft2 is dedicated as exhibition space. The entrance building will welcome visitors to two new facilities, developed through special collaborations: a kids’ area designed by a group of students from the École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Versailles, and a bar where director Wes Anderson has recreated the typical mood of old Milan cafés.

On the occasion of the opening of its new Milan venue, Fondazione Prada presented a wide range of activities. Robert Gober and Thomas Demand realized site-specific installations in dialogue with the industrial architecture and the new spaces in the compound. Roman Polanski explored the cinematographic inspirations behind his artistic vision, which will translate into a new documentary and a series of film screenings. Selections of artworks from the Prada Collection are presented in a series of thematic exhibitions. ‘Serial Classic’ — an exhibition curated by Salvatore Settis in collaboration with Anna Anguissola — completes the program. The project, whose display system has been conceived by OMA, focuses on classical sculpture and explores the ambivalent relationship between originality and imitation in Roman culture and its insistence on the circulation of multiples as an homage to Greek art.

At the same time, the Venetian headquarters of Fondazione Prada, which has launched 4 exhibitions in the venue until today, concurrently with a preservation and repair programme of the palazzo which is developing in several phases, presents the exhibition ‘Portable Classic’. The show explores the origins and functions of miniature reproductions of classical sculptures from the Renaissance to Neoclassicism, showcasing more than 90 artworks.

The Blogazine – Images courtesy of Fondazione Prada 
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09/04/2013

Public Works: Architecture by Civil Servants

Public Works: Architecture by Civil Servants

The architect, or so the popular narrative goes, is a singleminded auteur, a créateur hellbent on erecting his or her (mostly his) vision of the built environment. He’s a mix of van Bruggen and Serra, decking out the city with pretty showpiece sculpture. He is Hadid and Gehry and Calatrava and the like, dreaming up improbable, untouchable icons akin to garish Rolls-Royce hood ornaments.

But, in case you haven’t noticed, you likely don’t inhabit an ornament. Rather, it’s probably a series of boxes penned by someone with a far less impressive name. Do you know who designed London’s magnificent, sweeping Barbican? Chicago’s utopian, yet tremendously functional Marina City? Your own home, for that matter? Doubtful. Yet it is precisely those functional, perhaps benignly anonymous buildings that our human lives actually inhabit. These works by architects no less diligent than their better-known colleagues are the real fabric of the built environment.

So, while the names of the architects who design these buildings have already been forgotten by posterity, OMA has curated Public Works: Architecture by Civil Servants, a fresh exhibition that seeks to at least pay tribute to their excellent work. Ironically enough, OMA itself is headed by the irascible Rem Koolhaas (the contemporary architect who perhaps best defines the aforementioned starchitect archetype – starchetype?), but his practice is nothing if not a visionary and considerate of human society. It seems strangely appropriate that this starchitect would be behind such an inclusive tribute to the extensive work of “anonymous bureaucrats” (the words of co-curator Reinier de Graaf): his forbears, his successors, his minions. The servants which make the boxes against which his starkly original designs look all the more impressive.

The show, which first opened at last year’s Venice Biennale d’Architettura, focuses specifically on large-scale, oft maligned brutalist/modernist 1960s-1970s public architecture of London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Italy and France. De Graaf calls the period “a short-lived, fragile period of naïve optimism, before the market economy’s brutal command took the lead.” It was the last gasp of an era when designers and planners actually seemed to believe they could neatly, cleanly solve world problems of urbanism once-and-for-all through building.

Open through April 14th at St. Agnes at Alexandrinenstraße 118 in Berlin.

Tag Christof

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22/01/2013

AMO and OMA for Knoll and Prada

AMO and OMA for Knoll and Prada

We knew about the design-architecture-fashion love triangle for quite some time now. It has, by now, taken many different shapes, from Marni’s 100 chairs made by Columbian ex-prisoners, to more than a few no-brainers where a fashion company provided the textiles and a design company thoughtlessly applied them to their furniture. Nevertheless, the collaboration we have witnessed last week could hardly fit in any of the previously imaginable categories.


It is the widely appreciated love story between OMA and Prada that has managed to surprise us once again, but maybe this time, not in a very good way. During Milan’s Men’s Fashion Week, Prada presented their new line of clothing on a specially designed runway, arranged around the theme of the ideal home. And even though this might seem quite nice, the best part of this story is yet to come: the fabulously designed runway featured some of the most un-fabulously designed furniture, this time by AMO, the research counterpart of OMA, for the American company Knoll.


This explicitly post-modernist furniture, if judged strictly in the context of a fashion week, could definitely be appreciated. But, it is the fact that the furniture displayed on Prada’s runway, to be officially presented by Knoll on another high-profile Milanese event, Salone del Mobile, isn’t just a conceptual inquiry into post-modernist design, but an actual line of furniture to be sold and used in our more than un-perfect homes, that leaves a sense of doubt. Made from shiny plexiglas, carefully masked wood and colourful foam, these geometric swivel armchairs and stacked coffee tables aren’t something anyone should aspire of having in their ideal house. The only way this furniture might be understood is in the highly fashionable circles of ‘conceptual’ and ‘radical’ design where it is supposed to be looked, thought about and admired, but not actually used.


Rujana Rebernjak

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