At the University of Milan, the future Italian Pavilion for EXPO 2025 Osaka
Already the focus of two meetings organised last autumn — in Bergamo for the Landscape Festival and in Bologna at Cersaie — the Italian Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka is now the star of FuoriSalone in Milan. In fact, the 1:100 scale model of the building designed by Mario Cucinella – MCA Architects is on display as part of the Cross Vision exhibition in the University of Milan auditorium. The model illustrates the founding principles of the work but also the communication agreement between the General Commissioner for Italy at Expo 2025 Osaka and INTERNI. This partnership will result in a series of events and presentations that will accompany the public at the World Expo scheduled in Osaka, Japan from 13 April to 13 October 2025.
‘Milan Design Week celebrates “Italian know-how”, whose value is globally recognised,’ says the Italian Commissioner for Expo 2025, Ambassador Mario Vattani. ‘The FuoriSalone exhibition organised by Interni is the ideal setting to officially present the Italian Pavilion designed by Mario Cucinella’s Studio (MCA), which will host all of “Sistema Paese”. The theme of our pavilion is “Art Regenerates Life”. For us, the term “art” is understood in a broad sense and is synonymous with eclectic Italian creativity, that “thinking with your hands” that forms the basis of our success in design around the world.’
Mario Cucinella’s project focuses on people and their interactions with society, technology and sustainability. The architecture of the pavilion revisits the ideal Renaissance city in a contemporary key, with the theatre, piazza and Italian-style garden as distinctive sites of Italian urban planning. ‘Designing the Italian Pavilion for Expo 2025 Osaka,’ says Mario Cucinella, founder and creative director of MCA – Mario Cucinella Architects, ‘is a unique opportunity to create a stage where we not only showcase our country’s culture, history and innovation, but also create a place where we can weave connections.’
Installations and designers: the leaders in INTERNI CROSS VISION
The large INTERNI exhibition-event was created to initiate and multiply connections and relationships in a virtuous system among creative figures, businesses and distribution networks who have a fundamental need to connect people and ideas from different cultures and backgrounds. In collaboration with businesses, multinational companies, start-ups and institutions, more than 44 designers have created over 40 projects (site-specific installations, displays, design islands, micro-architecture and macro-objects) to explore the theme of this year’s exhibition.
University of Milan
At the University of Milan, a series of impressive installations come to life. Oceans, mountains, paths suspended over water, stone gardens, constellations and monumental sculptures lead visitors through environments that require respect and rediscovery, inviting people to reflect on the topics of design, innovation, recovery and sustainability.
The 18th-century courtyard houses the installation SUB: Sustainable Underwater Balance, designed and created by Piero Lissoni and Sanlorenzo. Through immersion in a virtual sea, it tells of the green future of yachting, setting the silhouette of innovative hydrogen-powered boats alongside sea creatures, waves and swimmers. The work consists of an open pavilion with rectangular floor plan enclosed by a roof and wall to mark the edges. Both architectural elements are entirely covered with LED walls that recreate the lights and sounds of the marine environment, while the platform is made of a reflective material. Walking through the pavilion, visitors are enveloped by the projections for evocative immersive effect.
The Pharmacy Courtyard houses The Amazing Walk, created by Amazon in collaboration with MAD Architects. The international architecture firm chose the image of a mountain to accompany the public through the discovery of home products, furniture, lighting, smart home and technological accessories available on Amazon.it. The mountain is accessed via a path suspended over a body of water, symbolising the customers’ journey of product exploration.
The exhibition continues in the Courtyard of Honour with dozens of extraordinary installations, starting with Travelogue on Mountains by Wu Bin, a project with strong symbolic value that translates into the discovery of Oriental architecture. Made of lightweight and environmentally friendly materials produced by Yardcom, it consists of a labyrinth outlined by long sheets of DuPont® Tyvek® positioned at regular intervals, leading to the heart of the work containing a pool of water. The work was also supported by INTERNI China.
Annabel Karim Kassar responds to the theme of INTERNI Cross Vision with her first encounter between performance and installation. In fact, Travelling incorporates a studio space where visitors can watch her paint (Tuesday 16 and Wednesday 17 April, from 2 to 4 p.m.). The works she produces will complete and transform the environment during the exhibition period, crossing the boundary between finished architecture and active experience. The project, by AKK Architects – Annaka, is divided into seven rooms, each representing a human activity: work, music, sexuality, meditation, art, play, cinema.
In contrast, the image of a flower, which symbolises lightness, renewal and evolution, is the leitmotif and basic module of the Stone Garden, a project by Vivian Coser promoted by Centrorochas (Brazilian Center of Natural Stone Exporters) and ApexBrasil and organised by It’s Natural – Brazilian Natural Stone. Involved in creating biophilic projects for more than 20 years, the Brazilian designer chose this form because it encapsulates the concept of biophilia used in architecture to give life to spaces ‘that blossom and change, just like the life of a flower’.
Internationally renowned Japanese architect Kengo Kuma presents StoneGrove. Using modular elements in marble and quartz agglomerates, he reinterprets the principles of Ikebana in a contemporary key and with alternative materials, creating a composition that represents the different textures and finishes of stone products made by Quarella.
Umbral, the Temple of Listening was produced by Rubner Haus based on a design by Carlo Farina, Veronica Pesenti Rossi and Memo Sánchez Cárdenas, under the guidance of the Franco Albini Foundation. The concept of the installation is the importance of co-creation. The title Umbral — ‘threshold’ in Spanish — evokes the idea of a boundary between the known and the unknown, and invites us to enter a new design culture, whose centrepieces are the Blockhaus solid wood construction system and the principles of the Albini Method. Red thread, both real and symbolic, creates the central tree representing the bond that unites us all in a single community of sharing.
Marco Piva for Saint-Gobain Italia gives life to Material Tower a rigorous hexagonal structure more than 5 metres high that houses and encloses a glass wool sculpture with soft, undefined contours, symbolising ‘a cloud of creative thoughts’. The filaments capture light and nuances from the top of the tower, which is outlined in LEDs of different colours. Of the six sides of the tower, two have tactile cladding and two are transparent, which, like suspended windows, reveal what lies within the glass volume. The remaining two consist of LED walls presenting the story of production at Saint-Gobain.
Inspired by Kiko Milano’s iconic 3D Hydra Lipgloss, which blends glossy transparencies with sensual colours and volumes, Tandem interweaves the two different design approaches of Jacopo Foggini and Massimo Iosa Ghini to recount how diversity can be transformed into harmony. Anchored to two elements with rounded corners designed by Massimo Iosa Ghini, Jacopo Foggini’s large chandelier is a cascade of transparent rods that plunge into the ‘lip’ shapes of the sofa designed by Massimo Iosa Ghini.
The large totem El Paron – Wisteria Tower by designer Patricia Urquiola for Cimento evokes a sense of movement, towering in the Courtyard of Honour and representing the intersection of nature and technology, production and the environment. El Paron — a term in Venetian dialect meaning ‘the master’, traditionally referring to the bell tower of a church, a tall structure that dominates the landscape — is a monumental sculpture composed of four overlapping modular elements that reach a height of 10 metres.
Designed by Mario Cucinella Architects for Roca, Sparking Change is a 4.5-metre-high semicircular backdrop made of 1,200 3D-printed modular ceramic elements. It recounts the evolution of the sector between tradition and industrial innovation. The concept is inspired by new developments in technology and digital tools and bears witness to the renewal behind sustainability, thus reflecting the essence of Roca.
I am what I throw away is by Italo Rota, NABA Scientific Advisor, and Claudio Larcher, NABA Design Area Leader, with the involvement of students in the Design Department of NABA Academy and AMSA – A2A Group. It uses both recycled and innovative materials to make the ethics of circular processes and the virtuous results of recycling visible and understandable.
Eighteen portals consisting of golden spheres and arranged in six rows form Mille Miroirs is a brilliant, spectacular, dreamlike landscape of regular geometries by French designer Cyril Lancelin for Fidenza Village, part of The Bicester Collection. As they walk between the structures, people move between shadows, light and reflections, plunging ‘into the heart of the artist’s imagination and losing their balance, out of time and reality’ in an enthralling atmosphere.
PATH – Dream | Dine| Delight | 37 hectares of pure wellness by Simone Micheli recalls the PATH project at Porto San Vito in Grado, which covers an area of 37 hectares. Based on a concept by Andrea Bigot, CEO of Porto San Vito, the pavilion traces the geometry and contents of Simone Micheli’s vast architectural project and accompanies people viewing it on a virtual journey through the focus and themes of the area’s redevelopment.
Sit Together – Climate Adaptive Bench by Berlin-based studio Topotek 1 in collaboration with MDT-tex and with the support of Mapei, is part of the design project for a new range of street furniture that adapts to climate change. The prototype, previewed at the INTERNI exhibition-event, is the result of a formal union between the classical European bench and wind towers in ancient Persian tradition: a welcoming bench at any time of day and in any season, where one can sit and socialise. One side is warm and darker and the other is cool and lighter, while the tower protects it from the sun.
Also in the Courtyard of Honour, Ludovica Diligu, designer and founder of Labo.Art, together with the artistic duo Plastique Fantastique (Marco Canevacci and Yena Young), brings Planetarium to life. This 9-metre-diameter inflatable structure surrounds a tree trunk and transports the public into a planetarium with constellations made of branches, leaves, stars and the voice of Pablo Trincia reciting nursery rhymes by Gianni Rodari. The De Ambrogi Gallery exhibits Marvelous Creatures, two large sculptures in recycled plastic by the artist Dario Ghibaudo, while sport and design interact, intersect, observe and talk to each other in the Powerful Intersections project by Marco Acerbis for Santini Cycling.
Marco Nereo Rotelli, with Ever in Art® for Bertolotto, has designed a large golden portal, Door is Love, installed behind the arches of the lower portico of the Courtyard of Honour. Consisting of 46 golden gates, it symbolises entry to all the cities of the world. The threshold is understood as a real and metaphorical space, a boundary between matter and nature, which becomes a gateway, a place of passage, of waiting and meditation. There, a packaged tank displaying the word ‘LOVE’ is situated as a further message of peace.
The tour continues in the lower portico with the exhibition From a Thousand Years to the Future curated by Japanese designer Toshiyuki Kita with Bizen City and Odate City. It reflects on the future of traditional Japanese craftsmanship and the topicality of crafts that have reached high levels of perfection over the years. Juxtaposing the skills and creativity of the crafts originating in the two Japanese towns, the exhibition showcases, for the first time in Italy, works with a thousand-year history.
Re-Ceramic by Tom Dixon for VitrA is an exploration into the world of recycling and an opportunity to present the Liquid line of high-strength ceramic bathroom fixtures created using an innovative process. The installation shows the stages of material transformation leading to the creation of the Liquid washbasin, the first in the world made of almost 100% recycled ceramic from waste materials recovered during the production of such fixtures.
For Caravanserraglio, Lorenzo Palmeri elaborated on the concept of ‘mingling’, designing a space conceived precisely for transit and to receive people passing through the lower portico of the Courtyard of Honour. For its construction, he chose Cosmolite® from Stone Italiana, a material consisting of recycled minerals from the quarrying industry.
Turkish designer Julide Konukoglu then covered part of the columns of the lower portico with strips of Kutnia fabric for her installation Weaving Inside Out. She creates a contrast between the hardness of stone and the softness of this contemporary handmade fabric, which blends history, research and innovation. Other columns give life to the Quinte Mutevoli project, created by Catello Raffaele, Ornella Formati and Vincenzo Esposito in collaboration with the students of the Interior Architecture Course at the IUAD. This project immerses visitors in ‘active participation’ that allows them to customise parts of the installation, freely moving its coloured slats.
Conceived by Giulio Cappellini, The Art of Independence stems from the activities at the San Patrignano Community craft workshop. It expresses the latest developments in the work carried out there using digital tools, which allow the community’s young people to follow training useful for their professional reintegration. Covering four entrance columns of the University of Milan, it is intended to emphasise the ancient building by means of graphical signs that draw on a contemporary key to reinterpret a series of decorations found in various corners and historical buildings of the city.
The theme of wellness, taking care of oneself and reconnecting with nature, is dedicated to Metodo Benessere, the installation designed for Zentiva Italia by Emiliano Calderin, which tells the story of the iconic Schoum Solution bottle. With its harmonious scheme, the installation creates a transverse relationship between the product, its narrative, and the architecture, before returning to the city with the iconic Torre Velasca, which becomes the view, reference, inspiration and perspective of the installation itself. The itinerary, which develops organically around the columns of the cloister in the Courtyard of Honour, also houses the work by students at the University of Genoa who took part in a workshop focused on creatively reinterpreting the bottle of this well-known plant-based drug.
An example of the versatile Tile of Spain catalogue of Spanish ceramic manufacturers is presented by designers Carlos Sánchez García and Luis Navarro Jover with their House of Mirrors, an installation consisting of ceramic elements with mirrored walls that multiply the view of the tiles on display.
The West Loggia, doorways of the Grand Staircase and the Courtyard of Honour are transformed into the Brazilian design manifesto curated by Bruno Simões and organised by ApexBrasil. The project is inspired by Coccoloba gigantifolia, a plant recently discovered in the Amazon which is known for its resilience and originality. The 50 selected companies and independent design studios reflect the present, and the creations, made with different materials and techniques and inspired by Brazilian culture and landscape, hail from different regions of the country. The exhibition is accessed via the two imposing staircases on either side of the university vestibule, which will house an immersive installation evoking the importance of water and light in the process of photosynthesis. The organic design of nature is exemplified both in the set design by Estojo Arquitetura and in the pieces and their innovative, sensitive use of natural materials.
The East Loggia will shine with Arik Levy’s Path of Visions for Sans Souci. Suspended mirror elements held together by cables and jointed connections that rotate randomly continuously multiply the space, superimposing images of architecture, landscape and people. The installation continues in the Courtyard of Honour, where the faces of the sculpture Ghost interact with anotherreflective composition that, when placed on the wall, projects light and reflections prismatically.
The works will also include chandelier-sculptures: Unlocking No.3 Flavours a spiral shape (1.20 x 1.50) designed by Alessandra Baldereschi for No.3 Gin, which interprets and imagines ‘making the aroma of gin visible’ with a delicate, fairy-tale touch; and Scomposizione di un volo by Federica Marangoni which, with the support of Murano glassworker Simone Cenedese, uses a deliberately classical structure to depict crystal seagulls, whose legs also run along the central tube almost as if supporting it. The work is ‘a metaphor for the life of a city on the water, a strong aesthetic presence, symbolically uniting good and evil, air and earth’.
Finally, 100% Arabica, Uni viaggio alla scoperta tra design e sostenibilità is the design for the exhibition press rooms at the University of Milan. It is inspired by Arabica coffee plantations, and the walls are covered in wallpaper depicting coffee plants. The arrangement of the space, curated by Carlo Bach, artistic director of illycaffè in collaboration with Kartell, is intended to highlight Italian know-how in a constructive comparison with the cultures of other countries. It consists of research, innovation, and experimentation based on the universal principles of sustainability and protecting places — so much so that the furnishings are made from coffee capsule waste.