Walking with Domus
‘50s Milan- April 17 | Out of town - April 19
Walking with Domus
Discover the Milan of Design Week with Domus walks
First walk: Milan in the 50s
This itinerary winds its way through the heart of the city centre and intercepts a number of architectures-symbols of a crucial moment in which 20th-century Milan was built: the "resurrection" from the emptiness of the unfinished and wartime destruction, the years in which Milanese society expressed the knowledge and visions from which the design-ecosystem we know today would take shape.
Wednesday 17 April | 4:45 pm
Second walk: Out of doors: rediscovering design where it all began
The nineteenth-century Lombard villa par excellence, an eclectic project by Osvaldo Borsani, and the platform for the intersection of design and research, symbol of Fuorisalone: a journey through the history, present and future of design.
Friday 19 April | Villa Borsani - Varedo | 4:45 pm
BOOKING REQUIRED
Stage 1: A fragment of downtown from the 1950s
Corso Europa:
Vico Magistretti, Office Building, 1955-1957
Luigi Caccia Dominioni, Building for shops and offices, 1959
Stage 2: Welfare and architectural quality
Via Francesco Sforza corner Corso di Porta Vittoria:
Arrigo Arrighetti, Restoration-reconstruction of Palazzo Sormani and conversion into a public library
Stage 3: Modernity and history
Piazza Velasca:
Asnago Vender, Office and residential buildings, 1939-1950
BBPR, Velasca Tower, 1951-1958
The tour will be guided by Alessandro Benetti
Historian and collaborator of Domus, currently a post-doc at the Department of Architecture and Design of the Polytechnic University of Turin. Benetti has contributed to numerous guides on modern architecture in Milan and has led a series of itineraries on the same themes promoted by the Foundation of the Order of Architects.
This year's Alcova programme, which has always focused on the relationship between content and container, between objects and unseen places in the city, will open up a confrontation of epochs, languages and design visions, all waiting to be discovered.
Stage 1: Villa Borsani
Built in Varedo during the Second World War and completed in 1945, this is a modernist building by Osvaldo Borsani, who designed it as a house next to the family furniture factory and ended up creating an eclectic masterpiece.
Stage 2: Villa Bagatti Valsecchi
The quintessential 19th-century Lombard villa, with elements such as 15th-century columns recovered from the demolished Milanese Lazzaretto.
The tour will be guided by Matteo Pirola
Architect, critic, and researcher in Design for IULM University of Milan, Professor of History of Design and Contemporary Arts, Events for Creative Industries, Interior Architecture, and Set Design, author of several publications, and cultural consultant for various companies and institutions in the field of art, design, and architecture.