Why you should experience Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, Italy.
Pirelli HangarBicocca is a colossal industrial arts center where Bicocca's postindustrial character meets Breda manufacturing, cavernous factory architecture and contemporary installations conceived at an almost architectural scale.
Set along Via Chiese near Viale Sarca and just steps from Via Privata Roberto Bracco, the arts center occupies a vast former industrial enclave where surviving factory sheds, railway-era structures, landscaped open ground and the reconstructed blocks of Bicocca preserve the extraordinary physical scale of northern Milan's manufacturing territory. The low brick Shed gives way to the Navate, an immense three-aisled hall rising close to thirty meters beneath exposed steel infrastructure and former overhead cranes. Dark structural bays extend through the interior with almost no interruption, allowing works measured in tonnes and meters to occupy volumes originally created for industrial machinery. Anselm Kiefer's seven concrete towers rise permanently through one aisle, using the hall's height to turn the former factory itself into part of the encounter. The result is an arts center where the proportions and engineering of heavy industry remain indispensable to the contemporary work occupying them.
What you should know about Pirelli HangarBicocca.
Pirelli HangarBicocca is best known for converting part of Ernesto Breda's immense Bicocca manufacturing works into a 15,000-square-meter contemporary art institution without erasing the radically different industrial buildings accumulated across the site. Breda, founded by engineer Ernesto Breda in 1886, began transferring production to Bicocca in 1903 as Pirelli, Falck and Marelli were helping turn northern Milan into one of Italy's principal industrial concentrations. Its new factory covered 200,000 square meters and produced railway carriages, electric and steam locomotives, boilers, agricultural machinery and tools, followed during the First World War by aircraft and projectiles. The building now called the Shed is visible in photographs from the first half of the 1920s, when its exposed-brick walls, double-pitched roofs and broad skylights enclosed production of locomotive and agricultural-machine components. Breda Elettromeccanica e Locomotive expanded the complex in 1955 with the barrel-vaulted cubic structure now called the Cubo. A far larger intervention followed between 1963 and 1965 with construction of the Navate for the transformer department, where high-powered electrical machines were assembled and tested. That hall retained its original 9,500-square-meter footprint and height near thirty meters, preserving a nave and two lateral aisles on a scale dictated by machines moving through the building. Ansaldo acquired Breda during the early 1980s as industrial activity across Bicocca entered decline. The Bicocca Project launched in 1986 accelerated conversion of the wider manufacturing district toward university buildings, offices, housing and cultural institutions. Former Ansaldo 17 remained abandoned for a decade before Prelios, formerly Pirelli RE, acquired it and decided in 2004 to convert the industrial complex into an exhibition center, allowing nearly a century of Breda construction to become the architectural basis of a new institution.
Anselm Kiefer established the artistic scale of the converted factory immediately through The Seven Heavenly Palaces, conceived for its 2004 opening from a project by Lia Rumma. Kiefer drew the title from the ancient Hebrew Sefer Hechalot and constructed seven reinforced-concrete towers from angular modules derived from shipping containers. Individual towers weigh ninety tonnes and rise between thirteen and nineteen meters, with lead books and wedges compressed between concrete levels. The installation developed ideas Kiefer had explored after moving in 1992 to La Ribaute, an abandoned industrial property at Barjac in southern France, where concrete towers entered his increasingly architectural body of work. Pirelli HangarBicocca expanded the installation in 2015 with five paintings produced between 2009 and 2013 under artistic director Vicente Todolí, joining Jaipur, two works from Cette obscure clarté qui tombe des étoiles, Alchemie and Die Deutsche Heilslinie to the towers inside the Navate. Another permanent work occupies the grounds outside: Fausto Melotti's La Sequenza, created in 1981 and installed in the garden in 2010 after storage buildings and sheds had been removed from that section of the former factory. The institution does not maintain a conventional permanent collection beyond the Kiefer and Melotti installations, directing its principal interior spaces toward large solo exhibitions developed in close collaboration between artists and its curatorial team. That approach preserves the industrial hall as an active condition of exhibition making, with the dimensions inherited from Breda continuing to determine what artists are able to build inside it.
How to fold Pirelli HangarBicocca into your trip.
Pirelli HangarBicocca works as the anchor for a daytime exploration of Bicocca through three nearby sites that move from a Renaissance country residence through the district's conversion into a university quarter into a theater built to receive La Scala during reconstruction of its historic home.
Begin at Bicocca degli Arcimboldi, the fifteenth-century country villa whose name eventually passed to the surrounding territory. The Arcimboldi family built the two-story residence during the second half of the fifteenth century with a ground-floor colonnaded portico, upper loggia, terracotta ornament and painted decoration. By the early twentieth century agricultural conversion had obscured substantial portions of its Renaissance fabric, prompting Ambrogio Annoni to direct restoration beginning in 1910 for the Società Anonima Quartiere Industriale Nord Milano, created in 1907 by Pirelli, Ernesto Breda and financial partners to manage conversion of agricultural land into an industrial district. Pirelli acquired the villa in 1918, and the building later became its official reception venue, preserving the architectural ancestor of Bicocca inside the industrial territory that adopted its name. Continue to University of Milan-Bicocca, whose creation brought higher education into the former manufacturing district as deindustrialization opened enormous areas for redevelopment. Milan selected Bicocca for a new University of Milan hub in September 1993, placing academic expansion inside the larger reconstruction project coordinated by Vittorio Gregotti from the 1980s. The new university emerged from national efforts to relieve overcrowding at major institutions and occupied buildings created across former Pirelli territory for teaching, laboratories and research. Its establishment in 1998 gave Gregotti's redevelopment a permanent academic center, replacing industrial production across substantial portions of Bicocca with scientific and educational work. Conclude at Teatro degli Arcimboldi, designed by Vittorio Gregotti and constructed between 1997 and 2002 by the Comune di Milano in collaboration with Pirelli. The complex exceeds 18,000 square meters, including 11,000 devoted to production, and centers on a hall accommodating 2,400 spectators behind a vast curved glass entrance wall. Its stage was engineered to hold three opera productions simultaneously, preparing the building to receive Teatro alla Scala during restoration of the Piermarini theater. Arcimboldi opened on January 19, 2002 with Verdi's La traviata conducted by Riccardo Muti and hosted La Scala until the historic theater reopened in December 2004. The progression moves from the Arcimboldi family's Renaissance retreat through Gregotti's university district into a theater engineered for La Scala, revealing how successive architectural programs converted Bicocca from aristocratic countryside through industrial concentration into one of Milan's most consequential cultural and academic districts.
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