Fondazione Prada – Koolhaas's gold-leaf distillery and the Torre

In a 1910s distillery in the south of Milan, OMA built an art centre where one house is clad in gold leaf and the café was designed by Wes Anderson. A guide to Fondazione Prada, from the Haunted House to the terrace at the top of the Torre.

Fondazione Prada, co-chaired since 1995 by Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli, has run an exhibition space on the Grand Canal in Venice, Ca' Corner della Regina, since 2011. Its home in Milan opened on 9 May 2015 at Largo Isarco, in the former railway and industrial district south of Porta Romana: a distillery dating from the 1910s, transformed by OMA under Rem Koolhaas.

Koolhaas kept the old industrial buildings and added three new ones, the Podium, the Cinema and the Torre. Together they cover 19,000 square metres, 11,000 of them exhibition space, and the meeting of old and new – warehouses and silos beside sharp contemporary volumes – is the point of the place. Exhibitions change through the year; the architecture, the permanent works and the two places to eat and drink are reasons to come in any season.

The Haunted House

In the middle of the complex stands the Haunted House, a four-storey building from the old distillery clad entirely in 24-carat gold leaf. Seen against a grey Milanese sky or a blue one, it glows; inside, its small rooms hold works from the foundation's collection. For the opening in 2015, Robert Gober and Thomas Demand created site-specific installations for the complex.

The Torre

The last piece, the Torre, opened on 20 April 2018: 60 metres of exposed white concrete over nine floors, six of them galleries. Half the levels are rectangular in plan and half trapezoidal, and the ceilings rise from 2.7 metres on the lowest floor to 8 metres at the top. It opened with Atlas, a display of works from the collection by artists including Carla Accardi, Jeff Koons, Walter De Maria, Mona Hatoum, Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, Michael Heizer, Pino Pascali, Damien Hirst, John Baldessari and Carsten Höller.

On the sixth floor, the Ristorante Torre is furnished with original pieces from Philip Johnson's Four Seasons Restaurant in New York, designed in 1958, elements of Carsten Höller's The Double Club, three sculptures by Lucio Fontana and paintings by William N. Copley, Jeff Koons, Goshka Macuga and John Wesley; artists' plates cover the walls. Above it, the rooftop terrace has a bar, a black-and-white optical floor and a mirrored balustrade with a view all the way round Milan.

Bar Luce

Back at ground level, Bar Luce is the work of the film director Wes Anderson, who took his cue from Milanese cafés of the 1950s and 1960s. The vaulted ceiling and patterned wallpaper echo the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in miniature; the furniture is Formica in pastel colours, the floor pink terrazzo, and there are two pinball machines and a jukebox. Bar Luce has its own entrance on Via Orobia, so it can open outside gallery hours – a reason to come for breakfast or an afternoon coffee even without an exhibition in mind.

In the centre: the Osservatorio

The foundation also has an outpost in the heart of the city. Since 2016 the Osservatorio, a space for photography and visual culture, has occupied the fifth and sixth floors of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, with views down into the arcade's glass vaults. It is easy to combine with the Duomo and the Galleria in a morning.

How to visit

Largo Isarco is a short walk from Lodi T.I.B.B. on metro line M3. Allow at least half a day for the main site: the exhibitions, the Haunted House and the Torre, then a drink on the terrace or a coffee at Bar Luce on the way out. Opening hours and ticket prices change with the programme, so check the foundation's own website before you go.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.