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Prada gallery brings artistic spirit to Milan's industrial centre

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Model of Fondazione Prada's contemporary art gallery in Milan. Photo: OMA

It was once home to a distillery in the industrial heart of Milan. But a sprawling warehouse that for decades sat crumbling into disrepair, the paint peeling and the windows boarded up, is to be transformed into the city's newest and largest contemporary art gallery.

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The ambitious project is the vision of the Fondazione Prada, the art organisation set up by fashion designer Miuccia Prada and her husband, Patrizio Bertelli, in 1993.

While the foundation has championed numerous arts projects over the past two decades, including Carsten Höller's installation, a pop-up club and restaurant in Islington, London, the gallery will be its first permanent home accessible to the public.

Other notable projects backed by the foundation, which operates independently from the commercial side of the Prada fashion brand, include works by Anish Kapoor, director and artist Sam Taylor-Wood, and Turner Prize winner Steve McQueen.

"This new opening is an act of responsibility towards present times," says Miuccia Prada. "Fondazione Prada will not be a museum, but rather the continuation of an intellectual process founded on the exploration of doubt and on extensive research."

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The foundation's expansive arts and exhibition space is to be designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, blending the building's original industrial character with extensions, including an eight-storey tower which they hope will become "a new landmark in Milan's urban landscape".

The 10 buildings that will be gallery spaces for the Fondazione Prada's contemporary art collection, as well as a rolling series of specially commissioned exhibitions, include a cinema, a library and other facilities. At the heart of the compound will sit the Haunted House, an intimate space which will house site-specific installations conceived by international artists.

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