Re-think Spazio Domus

Many years after the closure of the Centro Domus, opened in the centre of Milan by Giovanni Mazzocchi, Domus returns and to the part of the city that has recently witnessed the most obvious changes. The exhibition venue is a fine space on the ground floor of a building and was rethought to host the Domus Design Week event.

As well as showcasing a specific cultural project, the exhibition offered a chance to redesign the interior, install the exhibition and “test” this venue for the publisher’s future cultural initiatives. The architect Gianni Filindeu says, “We decided to divide the interior into three different centres of interest and exploration centred on documentation, narration and performance.

Documentation. This area, just inside the entrance on Bastioni di Porta Nuova, contains three display cases in beech plywood and glass measuring 75x300x(h)75cm. Each one is approximately 15cm deep and displays documents, photos and drawings linked to the ten designers in the exhibition. The three display cases can also be repositioned subject to changes and contingencies and serve at a later date for other initiatives in the same venue.

Narration. This area presents the main corpus of the “Storie di ventenni. Youthful Stories” exhibition. It features a 45x450x(h)45cm bench on which visitors can watch three videos shown side by side on the wall. The soundtrack is provided by systems incorporated into the bench seat and is emitted through a system of perforations in the surface of the bench seat. The allocated space is just past the first row of arches dividing the space inside the entrance, on the Bastioni di Porta Nuova side.

Expression The “focus” of this large triangular space is a wall approximately 15 metres long. The exhibition design has turned this into a large phantasmagorical blackboard, from the surface of which emerge materials, objects and drawings linked to the ten designers’ output. This space also contains a large projection on the opposite wall.”

Narrating the early experiences of a selected group of outstanding designers means talking about the time before they became hugely successful and focusing on experiences in which the design process – and not the ensuing product – is a major form of experimentation and, indeed, what the exhibition was keen to illustrate.

  The exhibition specially devised by Domus to narrate the lives of 20-year-olds and their special relationship with design offered the added opportunity to encourage today’s youth to think about what they would like the Spazio Domus to be; how they would arrange it for a similar exhibition, with what aims, in what ways and in what forms. Twenty students from the Faculty of Architecture of the Sapienza University were asked to respond to the theme of exhibitions in the Spazio Domus. After a short briefing with Spartaco Paris, the students worked on the features, physical and non, of an exhibition design. A selection of their ideas are presented here.