A Building that Wears Prada
A visit inside the architecture of a brand that redefines luxury
Originally, this was going to be a follow-up or additional brand identity breakdown to go along with my YouTube video, Branding In Real Life: Prada. But when I got to thinking about it, I realized that my favorite Substack articles are the ones that really have a personal element to them; that offer a different perspective, but in an honest, first-person kind of way.
So, I will talk about Prada’s branding, but share with you an experience that really brought the brand to life for me in a way that my countless hours drooling over the brand’s gold brocade jackets and polished loafers at Bergdorf’s while a fashion design student at FIT (it was research, okay?) never did.
Rewind to 2016. Parts of the Fondazione Prada in Milan had just been completed by OMA, while its Tower was still a hard-hats-only construction site. I was there to interview the lead architect of the project, Federico Pompignoli, for my feature in the online design magazine, Yatzer.
It was also Milan Design Week, and the city was literally buzzing with excitement and exhibitions. I remember walking around, latte in hand (I realize espresso is the Italian coffee of choice, but I’m not Italian… I need my latte) and just thinking that I wish I could bottle up this feeling. All of the palazzi were open to the public, serving as venues for exhibitions from every designer under the sun. Weaving in and out of the crowds and actually being welcomed behind the gates that are usually closed was a memorable experience.
I know a lot of people who visit Milan regularly during MDW, and they always try to act so nonchalant or even condescending about it. Treating it like a chore instead of a privilege. But I love it.
So, the morning I spent at Fondazione Prada, I was in full Design Week exhibition mode. I was used to seeing spectacles and hard sells disguised as (sometimes campy) art installations or newsworthy statements.
The Fondazione was on a different planet.
There were no over-the-top exhibitions or loud installations. Instead, what greeted me was the most honest translation of a fashion designer’s brand ethos in real life.
The brand persona isn’t just a single human here. It is personified in the entire building; at once polished yet rough, a work that is both “done” and in progress.
The brand colors range from industrial gray cement to retro green terrazzo to shining 24-karat yellow gold leaf cladding.
The quirkiness of the brand logo is quietly visible in the rough vs. shiny surfaces, in every artfully disjointed yet connected corner, and in every juxtaposition of space and volume.
The Fondazione felt alive and breathing. As if it were designed to be the venue for every single Prada runway collection that has ever been, even before the building existed in its current manifestation.
Originally a distillery complex from the 1910s, the building is vast and yet intimate, industrial and yet polished.
I’d be lying if I said that the 24-karat gold cladding on the Haunted House building didn’t immediately catch my eye. Like a new manifestation of the gold brocade woven into a fur-collared Prada coat. The warm glow the gold leaf casts, even on an overcast day, is transforming.
Bar Luce, designed by filmmaker Wes Anderson, is situated directly across the courtyard from the Haunted House, and the warm gleam basks through the large plate-glass windows.
Bar Luce is part The Royal Tenenbaums and part Prada runway venue. In my video, I mention that Prada has a retro-from-another-reality feel to it, and that is exactly what you feel in Bar Luce as well. Think seafoam green formica furniture, brown terrazzo floors, and neon yellow or pink seat cushions. Like a bizarre time warp that you never want to escape.
A highlight of my visit was touring the Tower, the tallest of all the buildings and a new addition. We had to wear hard hats as the architect, Mr. Pompignoli, took us up the service elevator and guided us around freshly poured cement and iron rods poking from the bottom floors. I honestly don’t know if we were really allowed to be there, but who was I to argue with a once-in-a-lifetime experience?
We walked all the way up to the top (or almost the top) floor of the Tower construction site to see the view. It was amazing, and I was so enthralled I even managed to ignore my fear of heights (despite the goosebumps running up and down my arms, which kept trying to remind me of its presence).
The building complex stretched out before us; an almost playful spatial layout of red-tiled roof buildings, flat garden terraces, and non-linear pathways among it all. The gray cement of the newer structures juxtaposed with the sun-burnt finish of the older ones. And crowning it all, over in the top right corner, was the gilded Haunted House, which looked extra shiny from above.
I couldn’t help but feel that this was, at once, a great orchestration to bring to mind the brand whose name the complex bears—but at the same time, it all looked so effortlessly placed there. As if almost no thought was needed to design it, and yet it all looked so… Prada.
But then again, that is the best form of branding: creating a space that is so purposeful that one stops even noticing the reason it was created and instead begins to just feel its energy; and recognize it as the sum of its parts and what they represent.
Now, whenever I look at the Prada logo, I can’t help but instantly see this space and time in my mind’s eye: its industry and elegance, its burnished cement and 24-karat gold leaf cladding.
Interesting take on branding...I really enjoyed this article!🙂