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Architecture for Exhibition 2022 Edition

Design of a Contemporary Art Exhibition for Fondazione Prada

Design of a Contemporary Art Exhibition for Fondazione Prada

The workshop, held in collaboration with Fondazione Prada and under the tutorship of Bjarke Ingels Group, offered the students the opportunity to work on an installation of contemporary art to be located in the “Podium” area – a container of renowned exhibitions in the heart of Fondazione Prada -  designed by Rem Koolhaas. Located in one of the most famous cultural architectures of the contemporary period - the ex-distillery designed by OMA for Prada – the workshop has posed the students with a considerable challenge in multiple aspects. Firstly, the installations’ design up to those of the Fondazione which hosted, among many other works, masterpieces by Jeff Koons, Carsten Höller and Robert Gober. Secondly, the comparison between fluency and flexibility that a space destined to culture always needs to support, considering a refined and uncompromising logic of environmental eco-compatibility. Fondazione Prada, to this day, has never replicated an exhibition: instead, one of the goals of the workshop was to imagine an itinerant exhibition that - thanks to particular attention to the architectural side - is able to colonize different locations of the museum, allowing also to bring the cultural experience to the largest public and in the most different contexts, according to a mission of cultural and artistic dissemination, on which the vision of Fondazione Prada is based.

Fondazione Prada

Fondazione Prada is a cultural institution created in 1993 by Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli. Its new permanent headquarters were inaugurated in Milan in 2015, and were designed by OMA, an architectural firm led by Rem Koolhaas, in an old distillery of the first decades of the twentieth century. The result of this architectural reconfiguration is a campus of post-industrial spaces of recent construction. These multiform spaces hosted a wide cultural program, essentially focused on contemporary art, but open to other languages and disciplines. In 2016, Fondazione Prada’s Osservatorio was opened: a space dedicated to photography located in the Vittorio Emanuele II Gallery in Milan. In 2011, another permanent space was opened in Venice inside the eighteenth-century Queen’s Palace of Ca’ Corner. Since 1993 the activities of Fondazione have included monographic commitments developed by international artists, conferences of contemporary philosophy, research exhibitions, and initiatives related to cinema and architecture. With the opening of the new headquarters in Milan, in 2015, the experimental vocation of Fondazione Prada and the constant research for new correlations between different languages have been strengthened. This research realizes itself in historical exhibitions, designs in collaboration with artists, large retrospectives, performative art projects, film festivals, and activities that have explored creative exchanges among visual arts, cinema, media production, technology, and science.

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