Penultimate day, but also the first real weekend day: and the scene changes. At the Milano Design Week, many visitors and industry professionals have already left, making room for Milan locals and those arriving in the city just for the day. The lines don't disappear, on the contrary: they get longer, but with a different rhythm.

It's also the time for the first assessments, when we understand what will remain beyond the hype. Better to choose carefully then: enter a deconsecrated church reopening for just a few days, cross a house made of tents and steel, discover an unlikely collaboration that works, and reread light as a project. Here is our choice for this Fuorisalone Saturday.

A Design Week where Mies van der Rohe is surprisingly invoked time and again: if at the cloisters of San Simpliciano we find ourselves picking up canned drinks under a rather familiar canopy, in via Farini we instead cross rooms evoked by mere gray velvet tent panels, just as Mies did with Lilly Reich for the Velvet and Silk Café installation. The space is that of the brand-studio NM3, which for the occasion becomes a house, populated with the group's signature stainless steel furniture and personal objects from the three partners. NM3's product collection is enriched by new evolutions of two classic storage systems, entering modular optics for the first time and creating a domestic landscape of objects—kitchens, beds, tables—that defines itself from project to project, with the option to select materials to pair with steel, leveraging another brand hallmark: the dry assembly system.

Giovanni Comoglio

At Design Week, unlikely collaborations are the rule. But the one between Alessi and C.P. Company succeeds where many others stop: it's not just a curious encounter, it's something that really works. “Blend: The Kinetic Pulse of Italian Industrial Mastery”, in the C.P. Company showroom, brings together two seemingly distant worlds—domestic design and sportswear—finding very concrete common ground: the way matter is worked. It's not so much a matter of style, but of method. On one side, Alessi objects reinterpreted through treatments that transform their surface and behavior over time; on the other, C.P. Company garments built to evolve, mark, and change with use. In between, a shared idea: the project as an open process, never definitive. If you want to know more, read here.

Alessandro Scarano

Vico Magistretti, Joe Colombo, Tito Agnoli are some of the protagonists of a beautiful story that began 80 years ago. The name Oluce adds the first letter of the surname of Giuseppe Ostuni, the founder, to the word describing the material he skillfully treated. To celebrate this important birthday, the company publishes a volume recounting its history and inaugurates an exhibition hosted on the -1 floor of the Adi Design Museum. Proceeding among the products, some exhibited for the first time and kindly lent by private collectors, it emerges how lamp design was born in response to the need to use the incandescent bulb, regulate the light without burning oneself, and manage in different ways what for a long time was the only available light source. Over the decades, technological advances in lighting have freed the designer from this necessity, and designing light has become a different challenge. The exhibition is a journey that highlights this evolution, charting the long history of one of Italy's most important design companies through the works and faces of the designers who wrote it.

Nicola Aprile

San Paolo Converso, in Piazza Sant’Eufemia, is a 16th-century church among Milan’s most beautiful and one of the city’s first to be deconsecrated, at the beginning of the 19th century. This makes it a true historical gem: not only for its frescoes, organ, and facade, but also because, in the centuries it has been only half a church, it has hosted the most diverse functions.
First a concert hall for sacred music, then the recording studio of the record label PDU owned by the father of Mina. From 2014 to 2019 it housed the architecture studio of Massimiliano Locatelli and, at one point, became one of the city’s most fun exhibition spaces. Some will remember the tennis court built by artist Asad Raza in the nave; others the event curated by Domus with Tom Dixon, John Pawson, and Arnold Chan during the 2001 Salone del Mobile. Today, unfortunately, the church is often closed to the public: for some years it has been leased to Deloitte, which has its headquarters nearby and opens the church only during Design Week (for two years now, by the way, exhibiting the same artist). A real shame, both for the limited times and the selection of works. It remains, however, a place worth seeing for those who truly love Milan.

Alessia Baranello

At the Milano Design Week, increasingly dominated by brands, the DesignSingapore Council chooses a different trajectory. With "Prototype Island", Singapore does not tell its story through objects but as a continuously evolving system: a nation conceived as a living prototype. The exhibition brings together 15 projects spanning material research, care infrastructures, and everyday life devices. From AI-assisted therapies to adaptive materials and compact medical tools, design here stops being form to become process: integrated, iterative, almost invisible. More than a staging, "Prototype Island" proposes a model where design approaches governance, as a continuous practice of testing and adaptation capable of projecting the future into the present.

Alessandro Scarano