Here & There

· September 28, 2026

Fondazione Prada, in the Ideal Order

Notes on the ideal order for a first visit to Milan’s most surprising museum.

Mention Fondazione Prada and most people picture a fashion museum, all handbags and runway archives. It is nothing of the kind: Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli founded it for contemporary art, film and ideas, and its Milan home opened only in 2015.

The site is a 1910s distillery. OMA, Rem Koolhaas’s office, kept seven of its buildings and added three, each in its own material: a Podium clad in aluminum foam, a mirrored Cinema and a sixty-metre Torre in white concrete. The old Haunted House is covered in 24-carat gold leaf, right down to the gutters.

It is also well away from the centre, a walk from the Lodi T.I.B.B. metro stop, so give it an afternoon of its own: three hours at least, and not on a Tuesday, when it is closed. Where you begin matters. Start with the big rotating exhibition and you reach the architecture and permanent works already overwhelmed. Here is the order we suggest for a first visit; on a return, rearrange it around whatever is on.

The courtyard of Fondazione Prada in Milan: old distillery buildings, the mirrored Cinema and the aluminum-foam Podium overhead

Arched openings in an aluminum-foam wall beside the gold-leafed Haunted House at Fondazione Prada, with a stair behind frosted glass

A young man walks beneath giant red mushrooms hanging upside down in Carsten Höller’s Upside Down Mushroom Room

Start at the Torre. First find the washrooms behind the mirrored cloakroom at its foot, even if you don’t need them: chartreuse walls, black basins and mirrors that repeat you into infinity.

Then take the lift straight to the top, and listen on the way: the soundtrack playing inside is Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma, installed there as a sound piece called Accent-soeur.

On the ninth floor, feel your way along a handrail through Carsten Höller’s pitch-black Gantenbein Corridor and step out into his Upside Down Mushroom Room, where giant fly agarics hang from the ceiling of a pink room, each turning at its own speed. It may be the most surprising, delightful museum experience anywhere.

A chartreuse steel lattice in the washrooms at the foot of the Torre, around a stainless steel recess and a pull handle marked Tirare / Pull

A detail of the washrooms at the foot of the Torre

Giant red fly agaric mushrooms hanging from the lilac ceiling of Carsten Höller’s Upside Down Mushroom Room, above a pink floor set with strips of light, with no visitors

Carsten Höller’s Upside Down Mushroom Room, without visitors

Jeff Koons’s Tulips, a bouquet of mirror-polished balloon flowers, beside a window in the Torre at Fondazione Prada

Jeff Koons’s Tulips, on the second floor of the Torre

The old distillery roofs of Fondazione Prada seen from the Torre, with Milan beyond

The old distillery roofs, seen from the Torre

Then walk down, floor by floor, on stairs that pass each other behind glass: Fischli/Weiss’s Suddenly This Overview, 157 small clay sculptures, on the fifth floor, Walter De Maria’s three 1950s Chevrolets on the third, and on the second, Jeff Koons’s Tulips, a bouquet of balloon flowers in mirror-polished steel more than two metres tall. They belong to his Celebration series, the same family as the Balloon Dog.

Out of the Torre, the Cisterna holds Mona Hatoum’s map of the world in more than thirty thousand loose red glass balls, until 9 November. Upstairs in the Sud gallery is the Godard we almost missed, Le Studio d’Orphée: his own editing studio, rugs, armchairs and all, moved here from his house in Rolle, with his films playing on the television he worked on. From 5:30 it shows Le Livre d’image in full.

Then climb the four flights of the gold Haunted House: rooms by Robert Gober, a door folded into a corner, a drain set in the floor, and Louise Bourgeois’s Cell (Clothes), a ring of old doors around her own garments, one coat embroidered with “the cold of anxiety is very real.” It is meant to unsettle. For us it was the weak link.

Beneath the Cinema is Thomas Demand’s grotto, a cave in Mallorca copied from a postcard in thirty tons of grey cardboard, cut into 900,000 layers. We stood in front of it for a long time, talking philosophy. That is what this place does: it is so strange, and so good, that you have to talk about everything you see.

Two visitors holding hands in front of Thomas Demand’s grotto, a cave rebuilt in layers of grey cardboard

Mona Hatoum’s world map of loose red glass balls on the concrete floor of the Cisterna

Mona Hatoum’s Map (Red), in the Cisterna

Jean-Luc Godard’s studio, with rugs, armchairs and televisions, reinstalled at Fondazione Prada

Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Studio d’Orphée, in the Sud gallery

–

An ensemble of fragments that will not congeal into a single image.

— Rem Koolhaas, on the Fondazione

Cars on the street seen through a row of thin transparent columns at the foot of the Torre

Books on precision agriculture laid out on straw bales in the research level of Cao Fei’s Dash at Fondazione Prada

The Precision Agriculture reading corner, in the research level of Cao Fei’s Dash

Lettuce growing from vertical black tubes under violet light in the research level of Cao Fei’s Dash at Fondazione Prada

Lettuce growing under violet light, also in the research level of Dash

Photography

Kathy Velikov

Finish in the Podium, home of the big temporary shows. We saw Cao Fei’s Dash there, now closed, with farm drones and film rooms on the ground floor and the research behind it on the other level. From 5 November it holds Global Antiquity, in a set by Koolhaas and AMO.

Keep your eyes open in between: beside the gold wall of the Haunted House, people on a stair behind frosted glass dissolve into soft ghosts, and at the foot of the Torre, thin transparent columns turn the street into a rippling film.

Then take a rideshare home; you will want to talk about all of it on the way.