Corso Magenta 24
7-13 April
10:00 am-20:00 pm

The 17th- and 18th-century palace in Corso Magenta, which has now established itself as the epicentre of Design Week, hosts Design Variations for 2025, the cluster curated by MoscaPartners, and this year it manages to offer one of the most sought-after things amidst the bombardment of content that accompanies every Fuorisalone: a pause for quiet, even contemplation.

The Korean architect Byoung Soo Cho’s “Nobody Owns the Land” immediately provides this: the 17th-century courtyard is occupied by a surface of red earth on which to walk and lie down, seeking the connection with the sky that the designer told Domus had been at the centre of his research. A forest of abstract paintings and a series of traditional Mahksabal ceramics accompany the installation, celebrating imperfection in an act of humility.

We meet on the earth, we belong to the earth, we don’t own it. The invitation of this edition of Design Variations, entitled “Migrations”, is to return to the perception of our bodies in space and their possibilities of connection.  Still in the courtyard, "Design is Courage" - curated by Michele De Lucchi, Francesca Balena Arista and Marco DeSanti for the Politecnico di Milano School of Design - makes us explore the only apparent fragility of light structures born of craftsmanship - it could be the wooden construction with interlocking joints like macramé.

Going upstairs to immerse oneself in the stately rooms of the Piano Nobile guarantees a loss of time and space, but it is there that one encounters other ideas born of the body and other new visions of the geography of design. Adrenalina, for example, has renewed its commitment to participatory curatorial projects by having its new sofa developed by blind people who designed it together with DebonaDemeo: the way in which bodies aggregate and use space creates the shapes, proportions and details - a pocket, for example, which is fundamental. Or the way they use and reuse materials: Aqua Clara and Honoka Studio show the potential of used water bottles as a material for architecture with great imaginative scope: the space turns blue, further suspending time and providing a new pause for contemplation.

Different geographies, then, like that of Fico, a Bangladeshi company that claims to be rooted in the cultural, social and creative fabric of its country and is making its debut on the Design Week scene with furnishings that challenge the clichés of proportions and compositions in hand-woven Jamdani fabrics. Or that of the 21 designers based in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania brought together by "Tactile Baltics", curated by Triin Loks, Dita Danosa and Audronè Drungilaité; a heritage of craftsmanship, but research that goes beyond the usual roles of objects and materials: can a rocky, rough, solid black object - created by the artist Heiter X - be a very light cork base ready to house a domestic micro-garden?