With the 2017 Salone del Mobile now behind us, photographer Laurian Ghinitoiu has shared a collection of photographs from Milan Design Week. From housing prototypes to immersive "digital installations", the annual design show—which is often touted to be the fourth largest of any kind in the world—this year brought together a wide range of practitioners and design companies. In Milan, unusual collaborations are the order of the day.
Unlike our top five installations at 2016's incarnation, the installations of 2017 have not been ranked.
COS × Studio Swine: New Spring at Cinema Arti
Inspired by the famous cherry blossom festival in Japan, the installation is designed to create a special moment that brings people together. A fleeting shared experience that evokes a sense of the changing seasons.
Diller Scofidio + Renfro: A Matter of Perception: Linking Minds at Palazzo Litta
Very often good ideas are generated by closed encounters and long lasting collaborations. The goal [was] to create an exhibition that lends into the creative process between two or more persons. Ideas that grow from scratch through a mix of friendship, mutual trust and experience.
nendo: Invisible Outlines at Jil Sander Showroom
The project is about creating more edges from a single sheet. [...] With one sheet there are four sides, but by cutting them and spreading them open, the edges create this kind of landscape.
Sergei Tchoban, Sergey Kuznetsov and Agniya Sterligova with VELKO GROUP: City DNA at Cortile del 700 (University of Milan)
The installation consists of mirrors and media screens: they divide the courtyard space into four sectors, each of which develops its own local transformation of material into the immaterial. Its main theme is the visualization of a modern metropolis: the media screens broadcast video collages out of maps and photographs of four cities – Shanghai, New York, Moscow and Milan.
SO-IL: MINI LIVING – Breathe
[It] calls into question conventional living concepts and introduces a creative problem-solving approach for future challenges in urban areas [and] shows what happens when we view houses not only as a space in which to live, but as an active part of our environment.
AA Museum Lab + Lärs Muller Publishers: Nomadic Bookstore in Piazza San Marco
Conceived as an itinerant urban structure, the hovering LED-lit roof of the pavilion projects into the city ever changing provocative titles of Lars Müller’s books and shelters the publications within a soft interior-scape.