Superstudio Più, Milan

Why you should experience Superstudio Più in Milan, Italy.

Superstudio Più is an enterprising creative complex where Tortona's industrial character meets fashion, international design and the conversion of former manufacturing space into one of Milan's defining platforms for large-scale creative production.

Set along Via Tortona near Via Bergognone and just steps from Mudec, the complex occupies a former General Electric plant within a district whose workshops and factories have been extensively repurposed for creative industries. Long shed-roofed halls, white elevations and large black-framed openings preserve the proportions of the industrial buildings beneath a restrained contemporary treatment. Moving through the complex establishes the primary encounter through dramatic shifts between expansive former production halls, smaller interconnected rooms and exterior courts capable of supporting radically different installations. The surviving factory spans deepen that encounter by giving fashion presentations, exhibitions and design installations dimensions inherited from industrial machinery. The result is a creative venue whose physical scale makes the reinvention of Via Tortona from manufacturing corridor to international fashion and design district unusually tangible.

What you should know about Superstudio Più.

Superstudio Più is best known for extending the creative experiment Flavio Lucchini and Gisella Borioli began nearby in 1983 into an immense former General Electric factory that helped establish Via Tortona as a major center of Milanese fashion and design. Lucchini had already shaped Italian visual culture through publishing positions at Amica, Vogue Italia, L'Uomo Vogue and Donna, giving the later Superstudio undertaking direct roots in the editorial transformation of Italian fashion. He and Borioli created Superstudio 13 on Via Forcella in 1983 as a complex of photographic studios where photographers including Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, Peter Lindbergh, Gian Paolo Barbieri, Giovanni Gastel, Oliviero Toscani and Fabrizio Ferri worked alongside an expanding international fashion industry. That concentration of photography, styling and publishing supplied an early creative nucleus in a quarter still strongly marked by industry. General Electric subsequently reorganized its Milanese operations and in 1999 moved the remaining machinery from its Via Tortona 27 plant, following earlier departures from neighboring buildings at numbers 33 and 35. Lucchini and Borioli recognized that the vacated complex directly opposite the former Ansaldo works offered a scale unavailable at Superstudio 13 and opened Superstudio Più at the beginning of 2000. The original factory sheds presented long rows of pillars spaced six or eight meters apart, requiring extensive alteration before the complex would support exhibitions, fashion shows, film production, conventions, theater and dance. Electrical substations and a garage became a two-level art gallery connected through the bridge spanning Via Tortona, as the former caretaker's lodge gained additional floors for offices. The undertaking carried the Superstudio name only 200 meters from its predecessor, turning two related projects into physical anchors for the creative conversion spreading through the former industrial district.

Design gave the new complex an international role almost immediately through the exhibition initiative that evolved into Superdesign Show. Giulio Cappellini and the French design association VIA participated in the inaugural 2000 program, bringing emerging designers and experimental presentations into the former factory as Milan's established furniture fair remained centered elsewhere. The format encouraged individual companies and designers to construct independent presentations across the Tortona spaces, helping establish a decentralized design circuit that expanded rapidly through the surrounding quarter. Companies including Alessi, Cassina, Boffi, De Padova, Moroso, Poliform, Poltrona Frau, MDF Italia, Living Divani and Alcantara subsequently became part of the design history assembled there. Superstudio's 2025 twenty-fifth anniversary revisited that lineage through Unforgettable, 25 Years of Design at Superstudio, with Borioli and Cappellini returning as curatorial figures and numerous earlier participants reappearing in the exhibition. The anniversary demonstrated how an initiative begun inside a recently vacated electrical-equipment factory had developed into a recurring international platform spanning established manufacturers, emerging designers and experimental installations. Superstudio Più consequently occupies a consequential position in Milan Design Week history as one of the projects that demonstrated how former industrial buildings beyond the conventional exhibition grounds could support a distributed citywide design culture.

How to fold Superstudio Più into your trip.

Superstudio Più works as the anchor for a daytime exploration of Tortona through three nearby sites that carry the district from heavy industrial production through municipal cultural conversion into fashion architecture shaped by one of Milan's most influential designers.

Begin at Mudec, whose home originated within the Ansaldo industrial complex that once faced General Electric across Via Tortona. Milan acquired the former Ansaldo property and selected David Chipperfield to develop a museum for the city's non-European collections, establishing a cultural use for industrial buildings previously associated with mechanical and railway production. The museum opened in 2015 around a first-floor agora conceived as a large covered central square, with exhibition rooms arranged around its irregular translucent form and a 300-seat auditorium extending the institution into performance. The project retained the industrial scale of the surrounding complex as Chipperfield inserted a new museum architecture within the inherited factory envelope, making the building one of the clearest architectural markers of Tortona's transition into a cultural district. Continue to BASE Milano within another section of the former Ansaldo works, where the enormous industrial compound acquired a second institutional life centered on creative production, experimentation and cultural programming. Its occupation of the factory preserves the relationship between broad manufacturing interiors and the new activities that arrived after heavy industry withdrew from the district. The internal courtyard remains a central organizing element, linking former production spaces around an open-air gathering ground and extending the complex beyond enclosed exhibition rooms. BASE demonstrates another route through the Ansaldo inheritance: the factory survives not as a static remnant of industrial Milan but as working infrastructure for contemporary creative activity. Conclude at Armani/Silos, the exhibition space Giorgio Armani conceived inside a former granary constructed in 1950. Armani opened the four-level, 4,500-square-meter building in 2015 for the fortieth anniversary of his career, selecting the name Silos in reference to the building's original function and to his conception of clothing as an essential part of life. The permanent presentation organizes decades of his work through recurring creative themes, turning an industrial storage structure into an architectural archive of a fashion house whose development paralleled Milan's emergence as an international fashion capital. Its austere exterior and retained industrial proportions complete a local sequence in which production buildings repeatedly acquired new cultural purposes without surrendering the scale inherited from manufacturing. The progression moves from Chipperfield's museum conversion through the working cultural spaces of BASE into Armani's transformation of a 1950 granary, placing Superstudio Più within a compact district where industrial architecture became the physical foundation for Milanese design, art and fashion.

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