Milano Design Week, 5 things not to be missed today / 3

The introduction of geography at the 2023 Fuorisalone tips the scale of the atlas towards the Barone area, where the Labò cultural project animates the never opened before spaces of the pharmaceutical section of the Rodolfo Ferrari SPA, a company that has been producing antibiotics since the post-war period. Rather than with the past of the spaces, the concept designed by Elsa Lemarignier and Francois Leblanc di Cicilia opens a dialogue with the live presence of machines and research – which shaped those spaces – and a hyper-selected, multi-shaped cluster of productions that lie between past, made of exhibitions dedicated to color and Surrealism, and present, made of the works of over 35 entities working in the field of collective design.
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“Grohe SPA. Health Through Water” is the synthetic and spectacular installation with which the well-known brand for bathroom solutions reinvents the court of honor of Palazzo Brera. Two series of monumental open galleries and the bronze statue of Napolean are reflected and doubled in a single pool of water, that stretched to almost reach the colonnade. The visitors stroll along its border, where they encounter four immersive rooms dedicated to the founding values of the brand: technology, high-quality, design, sustainability. Here as well the water is the protagonist, gushing, flowing, or tumbling from, onto, or through the products of the brad.
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“Design Variations 20223” is the collective exhibition organized at the Circolo Filologico Milanese by Mosca Partners for this year’s Fuorisalone. About thirty exhibitors are distributed over the three floors of the building, in their staid and vintage atmosphere. The most spectacular space is always the covered courtyard, that this year hosts Poltronova, where the iconic items of the brand are enveloped in silvery curtains, that shape a small organic shaped labyrinth. 
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Even for the 2023 Fuorisalone, Hermès reinvents the historical space Pelota in via Palermo. After the 2022 poetic inhabitable lanterns, the 2023 project “The Power of Fundamentals” builds a room within a room, or rather it suggests one. Two solid platforms, the walkable podium on the ground and the suspended sky, are connected by several curtains of thin iron rebars, an allusion to the usually invisible reinforcing steel of concrete. This permeable container hosts objects from the new home collection, which is profoundly “material” like its container.
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Triennale Milano this year confirms a kaleidoscopic contribution to the Design Week and at the same celebrates the institution’s hundredth anniversary. The Museo del Design Italiano (Italian Design Museum) opens its doors, directed by Marco Sammicheli, with an original selection of pieces handpicked from its century-long history; the Dutch firm Droog Design celebrates three decades of activity by surrounding its projects with wall made of all the good wishes received for the occasion, in Droog30 – Design or non design? Curated by Maria Cristina Didero and Richard Hutten; Nico Vascellari donated his work Falena to the collection.
The visitors are welcomed at the beginning of the monumental staircase by the gallery of expressions that are simultaneously intimate, intense, and light of Lisa Ponti. Disegni e voci (Lisa Ponti Drawings and Voices) – curated by Damiano Gullì and Salvatore Licitra – which brings together the drawings of Domus’s writer and editor and a sound gallery of her texts read by Ginestra Paladino.
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