You may have experienced walking all day in an Italian city and finding relief by entering and pausing in a lesser-known church without planning it, just to seize the chance to escape the urban chaos and rest your senses. That was our feeling upon entering Teatro Arsenale in the late afternoon of the fourth day of Milano Design Week, weaving through the construction areas that cover its entrance on via Cesare Correnti.

There’s no one in line and, beyond the threshold screened by heavy black velvet curtains, an installation reveals itself that captures the gaze and offers a contemplative experience far from the frenzy, the voices, the rhythm of the metro turnstiles, the flashes, and all those noises—even visual ones—that mark Milan during the days of the Fuorisalone.

In the small space of the Arsenale are displayed the rugs from the Floralis collection signed by Estúdio Campana for Art de Vivre. The largest hangs on the central wall, in the spot that in a church would be occupied by the altar: it yields to gravity, unrolling downward and folding when it meets the floor. The shape is irregular, asymmetrical, crisscrossed by a branching of dense, vividly colorful lines that seem to move. The inspiration is the caladium leaf, a species native to South America now widespread here too, and it renews the research of the studio led by Humberto Campana. A research that tirelessly draws from the biological aesthetic heritage, questioning plant and animal nature—particularly that indigenous to Brazil, where the studio was born and continues to operate.

“It’s urgent to look at nature as a source of healing and to interact with it in harmony with the common good of society. It’s something that nature itself has been asking of us for a long time and that requires a more intimate and profound gaze. It means giving less space to words and more space to action,” Humberto Campana told Domus. It’s this sensitive and attentive approach that allows us to understand his work: a geometry that doesn’t seek the perfection of rigid and immutable forms, but reproduces the movements that animate the life of things.

The other pieces in the collection also escape orthogonality and form an archipelago of textile islands without compositional schemes or privileged viewpoints. The characteristics of each element emerge thanks to the display designed by Campana for Art de Vivre: every rug is encapsulated in a luminous dome, like a specimen to analyze, sealed in a test tube and preserved in a scientific laboratory.

Humberto Campana

This is, after all, how Estúdio Campana has always observed the world: using the most suitable tools to read diverse phenomena and offering the possibility to look at them up close, transforming endangered animals into chairs, straw nests into wardrobes, branches into chandeliers, marine creatures into sofas. “Bringing our daily life closer to contact with nature and its expressions, integrating it into our routines, helps us recognize and respect it even outside, because everything becomes continuous: protecting what’s out there means protecting our home too.”

With these words, Humberto reiterates the approach with which he founded Estúdio Campana together with his brother Fernando, who passed away prematurely a few years ago and whose memory continues to guide a body of work that goes beyond the product: humanitarian missions and projects, a vision of design as a tool for reading the world. A studio known internationally also thanks to the trust of Italian companies and galleries that recognized its value, supporting and producing some of its most celebrated projects.