Words The Kanto Team
Images Patrick Kasingsing
Ciao! Kanto is in Milano for our first-ever coverage of arguably the design world’s biggest powwow. Bannered by design lifestyle showcase Salone del Mobile in Fiera Milano (we’ll have your updates soon!) and its more spontaneous and urbane sibling Fuorisalone, Milan Design Week (April 15-21) has something from everyone, transforming Italy’s culture capital into a city-sized gallery of a 1000+ public art installations and design events. With an unprecedented audience and a chance to connect with peers, it is no wonder the design world’s crème de la crème makes it a point to make their presence known during MDW.
Our editor-in-chief, fresh off a sleepless 16-hour flight to Milano, wasted no time surveying Central Milan for a curated selection of must-visit public art installations for Fuorisalone 2024. This year’s theme, Materia Natura, advocates for sustainable design and responsible use of materials, a prompt many of the installations we say on display took to heart. While there are countless more installations to explore (with some, like Google and Chromasonic’s Making Sense of Color display, commanding long lines and three-hour waits), this handpicked selection should give you a taste of the diverse range, scale, and innovation that awaits at this year’s Milan Design Week.
Aquatecture Spaces by GROHE SPA (Palazzo Reale)
Raising the bar even higher from last year’s Red Dot-winning display at the Pinacoteca Brera, GROHE SPA presents two Miesian volumes halved into four quadrants, each showcasing products that exemplify GROHE SPA’s four-tier approach. Envisioning the union of water and architecture and the beauty and vitality this creates, GROHE SPA’s Aquatecture Spaces are made to be explored, with collections like the Icon 3D and the upcoming Allure Gravity staged to be touched and seen in action. Housed at the historic Palazzo Reale just beside the Il Duomo, the pavilion reinterprets the palace’s old courtyard garden, merging its spatial reincarnation with this year’s theme of Materia Natura with its stone textures and lightweight forms.
La Nascita by JR at the Milano Stazione Centrale (Piazza Duca D’Aosta)
French installation artist JR brings his signature outsized brand of trompe l’oeil to Milan with La Nascita (The Birth), commissioned by the Stazione Centrale for Milan Design Week. The gargantuan scaffold-mounted installation fronts the neoclassical façade of Milan’s busiest transport hub. It consists of layered imagery of alpine rocks that frame a large “gash” on the station’s façade, a call out to its growth into a transport hub upon the completion of the Simplon mountain tunnel in 1906, which connected Switzerland and Italy through the Alps. The Piazza Duca D’Aosta installation, JR’s first-ever layered display, will stay until May 1, 2024. Look for the mark on the ground that indicates the best vantage point to take in the piece, but do expect hundreds of others to do the same.
Poesis Materiae by Zaha Hadid Design and Iris Ceramica (Piazza Dei Mercanti)
Zaha Hadid Design blesses Milan with its signature sinuous curves through a new (if temporary) public space in their collaborative installation with Italian brand Iris Ceramica Group. Cleaving a section of the busy Piazza Dei Mercanti in half, the installation appears like a viscous drop of liquid rendered in ICG’s trademark ceramic slab, ebbing and flowing and forming walls and seating for the public to relax and people-watch.
Kodama: Spirit of the Forest by Kengo Kuma for Arte Sella (Albed Showroom)
We initially felt disappointed that the full-scale Kodama installation by Kengo Kuma was nowhere to be seen at the Albed Showroom (the original still stands in a forest in Treviso, Italy). However, the exhibit did well in satisfying any curiosity about Kuma-san’s monumental spherical sculpture, a larch wood sphere made of 335 wood pieces and nearly 6 meters in diameter that interlock like a Japanese Chidori puzzle toy. Named after a tree-inhabiting spirit from Japanese folklore, a small-scale model of the piece can be scrutinized in a store-front display, with a full-scale wood component from the original sculpture greeting visitors upon entry. Archival imagery of the sculpture’s construction, along with study models, further elucidates viewers on the artistry and craft that went into creating the structure.
The Interni Cross Vision Show (Università degli Studi di Milano Statale)
The entirety of Interni’s Cross Vision show at the Statale is worth the long-ish walk from the Duomo! Curated for the 70th anniversary of the illustrious Italian design magazine Interni, the exhibition is as much a celebration of history as it is about envisioning futures. Its laundry list of featured designers (which includes design superstars like Bjarke Ingels, Kengo Kuma (yes, he’s a very busy man), Arik Levy, Carlo Ratti, and Mario Cucinella, among others) cross-pollinated design fields and ideas in pursuit of beautiful design solutions or surfacing urgent messages for humanity to heed.
It is hard to pick favorites from the assemblage on display (and we didn’t have the chance to drop by two of the more monumental installations by MAD Architects + Amazon, and Piero Lissoni + Sanlorenzo), but here are the ones we saw and liked:
Wu Bin of W.Design’s Travelogue on Mountain – Pan Yuan: Momentality Unfold is a beauty, with its billowing curtain tunnels of DuPont® Tyvek® paper on interlocking square frames. Interni describes the picturesque installation’s goals: “The aim of the project is to offer visitors a sensory and contemplative experience within the architectural structure: a different vantage point on the surrounding environment, where speed and perspectives change, as well as perceptions.” Centrally located at the Statale’s Cortile d’Onore, the installation is one of the busier ones and most photographed.
Another must-visit is the Roca-Mario Cucinella collaboration Sparking Change, a curved wall assemblage of 1,200 3D-printed ceramic blocks whose technique “…respects the environment while enhancing tradition,” Cucinella shares. It is meant to embody the bridging of the digital and physical worlds as well as the harmony that can come from harmonizing pasts and presents.
The first and last display you’ll see at the main entrance to Statale is Tandem by Jacopo Foggini, Massimo Iosa Ghini, and Kiko Milano. It highlights the beauty of diversity with an installation that seeks to unite the distinctively different approaches of its collaborators: two noted furniture designers and a cosmetics brand. A super-sized chandelier of red-painted methacrylate rods by Foggini is suspended over an 8-meter metal frame by Iosa Ghini. Below it is a circular sofa designed by Iosa Ghini for Dameda with a high-gloss finish inspired by Kiko Milano’s 3D Hydra lip gloss. It’s also easily one of the show’s favorites, judging from the number of people who refused to give up their places on the piece. •
Information obtained from GROHE SPA, Fuorisalone.it, and Interni. All installations Kanto visited are publicly accessible.
