Prada at START Museum — Pradasphere II warehouse exhibition (2023)

Shanghai's START Museum hosted Pradasphere II, an exhibition staged as a working warehouse holding more than 400 archival garments, objects and digital works.

The venue

START Museum sits on Shanghai's West Bund, the riverside strip where former industrial land now holds a run of private art museums. The building reads as a plain, warehouse-scale volume: tall galleries, broad floor plates and few fixed internal divisions, so exhibitions can be built as rooms within a room. It normally shows contemporary art and design, toured on foot at a slow, room-to-room pace.

How the space was used

For this project the museum was fitted out as a warehouse in use. Open storage racks, crates and archive material carried more than 400 physical and digital works, with a chronological core in the central area stepping through the key Prada collections. Visitors circulate along the racks, reading outward from that central timeline into cross-disciplinary material on art, architecture, culture and sport.

Why it works here

Archive exhibitions need neutral, high-volume galleries where scaffolding, racks and crates can be built without fighting the architecture, and a West Bund museum location supplies a design-literate audience already moving between neighbouring art venues. The industrial scale lets the warehouse conceit read as a structure rather than a set.