Conservation, recycling and cultural regeneration

With the workshop "Let's build the literary café together", cultural centre MACAO and Parisian collective EXYZT experimented with new forms of horizontal participatory design.

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Regenerating the city through culture, art and research — not just a motto, but a philosophy that relocates the significance of design to a real and living dimension. The aim? To operate in urban space as a place for complex relationships, paying particular attention to the perceptions of the people that live in it. How? Beginning with the direct exploration of territory. According to what processes? Rethinking and experimenting with new forms of horizontal participatory design. Bottom-up projects circumscribed to specific situations, where the completion of work can be contained within a time-frame. With what resources? A coming together of knowledge and practice, occupation and reuse of disused spaces that are salvaged and rehabilitated without the investment of money but through the alchemic addition of ingeniousness and manual skill used to transform materials found on site.

In Milan, from 1 to 7 October, cultural centre MACAO and the Paris collective EXYZT converted these axioms into an experience in design and self-building with the workshop "Let's build the literary café together". Founded by five architects in 2003, EXYZT is now a multi-disciplinary group that works directly on site, with locals, designing and putting into practice often ephemeral constructions. They aim to use a participatory and self-built architectural project to generate shared action, new living and social contexts and cultural exchange in the city.

EXYZT first came to Italy for the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale with Metavilla, a multi-functional hybrid project conceived to set in motion different forms of encounter, integrating a kitchen, a hotel, a sauna and a mini-swimming pool on the roof, all built by reusing other installations. The collective returned to Venice in 2010 for the design of the Morion centre. "A project where the visitor plays an active part in the invention and execution of social spaces and laboratories for experimentation. An experience," recounts a member of EXYZT that in some aspects is connected to MACAO's workshops, "with which we share the intention to induce a transformation in the city based on a safeguarding of the territory and the establishing of open cultural projects".

“Let’s build the literary café together”, workshop by MACAO and Paris collective EXYZT, Milan, October 2012

MACAO's conservation continues with an increasingly articulated cultural project to respond to a question that has grown over the course of time, which branches into multiple aspects of the city's cultural life and finds its foundations in city neighbourhoods. "The literary café," explain some of the workshop participants, "is the first stop for establishing and empowering the local cultural offering, like the hall for the cinema and the theatre, the infopoint, the library, bookcrossing, and simultaneoulsy an opportunity to contact with a network that extends beyond the city. The creation of a design is for us synonymous with participation in a transformation of the urban fabric that is both physical and social".

As with EXYZT, context is considered by MACAO an essential part of the design. The site is the former borsa dei macelli, the meat-market in viale Molise 68, a 1920s building adjacent to a site assigned to the Bilblioteca Europea di Informazione e Cultura (BEIC). Close by are also the cartoon museum WOW, the Frigoriferi Milanesi company, and a one-time trading area of the city, where food was distributed and industrial buildings for food production were built. For MACAO and EXYZT, the first step has been the design of the literary café, conceived as a multi-functional space for reading and socialising, also fitted out for the presentation of books, magazines and publishing projects in general, put together through the cooperation of different skills in terms of sphere of application and cultural origin, combined with the notion of "the city and the common good."

Here is a bearer of a different way of interpreting the architectural workshop and its capacity to regenerate itself in other design experiences, now taking place at MACAO

These words have given life to one of the first "tables" by MACAO, already underway at the centre's first occupation at Torre Galfa. The "tables" identify the research groups of the self-managed centre for arts. They host meetings, discussions, reading and studying. The table was therefore taken as a generating element of the literary café. The design process is turned around, becoming less product design and more like interior design, based on the analysis and inclusion of space rather than on the realisation of a product. The difference, in this case, is that the existing architecture is both the space to be used and the only material resource available with which to build. The workshop begins with an inventory of the scrap left to rot in the cellars after closure: pulleys, wheels, metal hooks used for transporting meat, timbers of various types and dimensions, curved steel tubing, sturdy coloured containers for food, inserts in glass blocks, metal shelving, and old wooden shutters constitute the components from which the ongoing work takes shape, in a process which is both design and building. "Every fragment brings to the fore its association with the life of the building and those that lived in it," participants point out. "The reuse and conversion of materials creates a kind of self-generating architecture".

Nevertheless, the main challenge is to organise the group work with people who don't know each other and must finish the project in a limited time span, using the skills of 25 fixed participants — architects, designers, artists and artisans — and those who take part on an occasional basis, while maintaining a good level of safety and efficiency on site. "Without going too much into the philosophy of the furniture in itself, the work is divided into micro-groups (kitchen, chairs, tables, lighting) in a non-pressured atmosphere and with a freedom of action and creative communion with the inhabitants of the neighbourhood," participants explain.

The flexibility of a space conceived to serve a number of functions is echoed in the design of modular and multi-purpose furniture. Chairs and tables can be grouped together in various configurations. They are unified by the ethics of recycling, including nails — only a couple of strips of material to roll the shutters on the tables were purchased — and by a minimalist language given warmth by the use of diverse materials. All outcomes display a predilection for the transformation of furniture and its adaptation to a multiplicity of different situations. "Joint design and practical synthesis, the possibility of giving tangible meaning to design, discovering and controlling every aspect of the making of a piece of furniture, simultaneously playing the role of clients, designers, makers and users and spending entire days working in a cohesive community for the growth of a place that can also be inhabited by others" — these are the words that echo in the rooms now already used by the literary café. Here is a bearer of a different way of interpreting the architectural workshop and its capacity to regenerate itself in other design experiences, now taking place at MACAO. Cristina Fiordimela