Fondazione Prada

Fondazione Prada is one of the most ambitious contemporary art institutions in Europe — a 19,000-square-metre campus designed by Rem Koolhaas' OMA that combines seven existing industrial buildings (a former gin distillery from the 1910s) with three new structures clad in aluminium foam, mirror-finish gold leaf, and white concrete. The complex, opened in 2015, has become an architectural destination as much as an art one, and the interplay between the weathered industrial buildings and Koolhaas' sci-fi additions is the most visually exciting thing in Milan since the Duomo.

The art programme is curated by Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli (the couple behind the fashion house) and consistently features major international exhibitions — retrospectives, new commissions, and the kind of large-scale installations that only a fashion-industry budget can support. The permanent collection includes works by Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, and Carsten Höller (whose slide sculpture — a functional slide from the third floor to the ground — became the institution's most photographed feature).

Bar Luce, designed by Wes Anderson in the style of a 1950s Italian café — pastel colours, Formica tables, a jukebox, pinball machine — occupies the campus's ground floor and is open without museum admission. The bar is simultaneously a functional café, a film set, and a commentary on the relationship between design, nostalgia, and commerce that is so perfectly Milanese it could only exist here.