My first experience of Milan Design Week is a traffic jam on the way from Malpensa Airport to my hotel in downtown Milan. The driver of the cab assures me that pileups “only happen during Design Week”. Later, as we’re passing through the residential portions of the city, he tells me how the city government has stopped cutting some of the grass in the public parks to promote biodiversity. Already, Milan starts to take on a utopian sheen, a little urban haven where the government is foisting greenery onto its citizens and traffic jams happen one week every April. Around lunchtime, while I’m waiting to check into my hotel room, I take a walk to BAM, or Biblioteca degli Alberi Milano (Library of Trees), a contemporary park in the heart of the business district.
I landed here just following directions from a placard in my hotel that urged Design Week visitors to also make it a point to check out the city’s many public parks. BAM is more of an urban experiment than a city park—an eco-corporate ecosystem, if you will. Here, steel and glass corporate behemoths and high-school geometry share space with tree-lined walkways, biodiverse waterbodies, and large patches of earth devoted to vibrant flowers. It also seemed to be a popular place for office workers to bring their lunch.
Close by, the iconic Bosco Verticale (also called the Vertical forest) by Stefano Boeri stands like a beacon in the background with its plumes of foliage, but during Design Week, the eye is drawn to the AI-powered ‘Vertical Connections’, a modular plant-strewn installation that invites prompts from visitors to generate a vision of a greener, more sustainable “city of the future”. The site-specific installation used a zero-impact Layher structure that blended AI with architecture, technology, and nature to talk about the regeneration process a city can adopt.
Later that evening, I manage to get into the Google exhibit at Garage 21. Every year, it’s one of the hardest exhibits to access—and for good reason. This time, the primary draw was a light installation by American artist Lachlan Turczan, a literal “veil” of light immersed in mist that responds to touch, changing shape and even colour. The next segment was dedicated to the Nest, Google’s smart home ecosystem, which employs the same sensors that Turczan had visualised in his installation. This portion—and by this point I’m not even surprised—is full of plants.
I ask one of the team members about the exhibition design, and she adds, laughing, “Plants make everything better.” She then draws my attention to an exhibit about Google’s Pixel Buds Pro 2, which are being fine-tuned to deliver a more natural auditory experience. Like the glossy buildings of Milan’s business district, personal tech too, it seems, is starting to cloak itself in the ornaments of nature with hyper-realistic birdsong ringtones, pebble-like geometries, variegated surfaces. Even sensors, once lauded for their futuristic, almost magical precision, were being “deconstructed” for the audience in playful ways so that they seemed less intimidating, more inviting...again, more natural.
On the walk back to my hotel, I stopped at Skoda’s exhibition in the courtyard of the Pavilion of Contemporary Art (PAC), where a very cool series of sculptures and audiovisual exhibits detail the carmaker’s technology alongside its corresponding ecological inspiration (hummingbird precision, lynx-like agility and so on).
The next morning, I speed-walk to Gucci’s Bamboo Encounters, where the fashion label explored the bamboo’s adaptability through installations, furniture, and objects. Curated by Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli of 2050+, and held in the historic Chiostri di San Simpliciano, it was one of the biggest draws this year, with an early-morning queue around the block. The exhibit drew focus to the Gucci’s “legacy” of bamboo through an exhibition of creations by seven international artists (including Mumbai-based artist-designer Yaazd Contractor) and a bamboo kite installation fluttering above an actual patch of recreated bamboo forest.
