Prada Frames: In Transit

Under the title In Transit, the 2025 edition offers a prismatic gaze on infrastructure as a dynamic and multifaceted system that enables, restricts, and shapes movement, whether of people, goods, data, or power.

The symposium examines the interaction of mobility, design, and environment, addressing the impact of digital revolutions and global distribution networks on daily life; analyzes the disruptive nature of infrastructural advancements – from the internet to large-scale logistics systems – as well as advancements in procurement and distribution; considers how goods and products traverse the globe with an ease that human mobility, subject as it is to geopolitical biases and legal constraints, lacks, evaluating the inner contradictions of contemporary hypermobility.

The event took place from Sunday, April 6, through Tuesday, April 8, aboard the Arlecchino train, recently restored by the Fondazione FS Italiane and originally designed by Gio Ponti and Giulio Minoletti in the 1950s, with an exterior informed by naval aerodynamics, and interiors featuring glass partitions, adjustable armchairs, and panoramic lounges, as well as in the Padiglione Reale, the historic structure once reserved as a waiting area for Italian royalty and heads of state within Milan’s Central Station. Both places pose questions on societal structures and mobility while allowing veritable masterpieces of design and architecture to be rediscovered by the public.

Prada Frames is a project founded to provide the opportunity to collectively explore and share ideas, with a scientific yet educational and informative approach. The first symposium in 2022, On Forest, featured a series of sessions on the forest environment, analyzing the logics that govern the modern timber industry and extending this thought to the role of design and science as agents of change. The following year, the second symposium, Materials in Flux, held first in Hong Kong then in Milan, focused on the ethical and aesthetic implications of materials. It explored the concept of waste as an endlessly changing entity, based on research by anthropologist Tim Ingold. In 2024, the third edition, entitled Being Home, looked at the living environment as a framework to address contemporary challenges.