This article is part of the special Design report previewing Milan Design Week.
In this city of 1.35 million people, a certain ritual happens in the weeks leading up to the Salone del Mobile. Ads are starting to appear on Facebook and Instagram offering private rooms and entire apartments for a few hundred euros a night. Then, just before the doors open at Fiera Milano – the exhibition center on the outskirts of Milan – residents pack up and leave their homes, making way for the more than 300,000 spectators who descend on the city every April.
“We were fascinated by this phenomenon of people leaving their homes just for Salone week,” said Salvatore Peluso, 34, one of the founders of Dopo, a creative space and cultural center in Milan’s southeastern Corvetto neighborhood. During Milan Design Week, Dopo presents “Runaways”, an exhibition that explores the complex topic of housing in Milan through a house envisioned by young designers that will also act as a real temporary residence for the entire week . This migration is not unique to Milan, or even to its design week. However, April’s design festival stands out from other happenings largely because most of its exhibitions are open to the public. (The four annual Milan fashion weeks, by contrast, are mostly reserved for industry insiders.)
Similar trends can be seen in cities around the world during large-scale sporting events and concerts. But a sports car race or a music festival does not provide a stage from which participants can criticize the system. For Mr. Peluso, it was important to use planning week as a tool to discuss these issues, he said.
Dopo, which takes its name from the ‘dopolavoro’, after-work social clubs organized by companies or unions, is located in a former warehouse at the end of a cul-de-sac in an industrial neighborhood populated largely by building material warehouses and nightclubs. Founded in 2022 by a collective of young creative workers and academics. In addition to Mr. Peluso, there is Bianca Felicori, journalist and researcher. Carlotta Franco, Grazia Mappa and Gabriele Leo, all architects. and three members of the design studio Parasite 2.0 (Luca Marullo, Eugenio Cosentino and Stefano Colombo). During the year, the headquarters function as a shared studio space that often opens its doors to exhibitions and parties.
The curators said they saw this “design week migration” as a microcosm of larger problems related to housing insecurity in Milan. According to Abitare, a real estate company, the short-term rental price of a furnished two-bedroom apartment jumps by 245 percent during Design Week. In the Brera neighborhood, home to many of the high-design showrooms, an apartment costs an average of 7,000 euros (about $7,500) a week.
Profit-making opportunities have led to a boom in homes being converted to short-term rental units, exacerbating an already squeezed housing stock. The average monthly rent for a 2-bedroom in Milan is €1,850 — 10 percent higher than in 2022.
The proliferation of short-term rentals can be partly attributed to the lack of hotels. According to Milan’s tourist board, almost 11 million people visited in 2023, yet the city counted only 448 hotels. Compare that to Madrid, which has a similar number of visitors and more than 800 hotels to accommodate them.
All these factors converge to create a system where students, other young designers and enthusiasts are priced out of visiting Milan Design Week, which for decades has been an important place to discover new work and network within the industry. At the same time, those who live here feel the effects year-round as they compete for apartments in desirable neighborhoods that now host increasing numbers of short-term visitors.
Indeed, skyrocketing rent costs sparked protests last year, with students across Italy setting up tents outside campus buildings to highlight the unaffordable cost of living – a movement that the collective Dopo said factored into its decision to focus on housing at Milan Design Week this year. year.
The main exhibit consists of shelters designed by different groups from across Europe, said Ms. Franco, 33. One Bedroom is the creation of Abadir Academy, a design school in Sicily, with Ortigia Sound, an electronic music festival. In March, seamstress Greta Naselli organized a workshop for the academy’s students, who scoured local bazaars for scraps of fabric that they then sewed into scenes inspired by the vibrant awnings that shadow the markets of southern Italy. The shelter will be reused as a shade during Ortigia Sound’s event in Syracuse, Sicily in August.
A second bedroom was constructed by Milanese architecture collective Zattere using discarded materials found at Dopo’s premises to create a temporary sleeping space.
For the third bedroom, Cecilia Casabona, a curator from Rotterdam, invited young Dutch designers – experiencing a housing crisis of their own – to supply improvised furniture. “The Dutch Embassy of Living”, as this project is called, includes a rug and fireplace by Jonas Hejduk. Colorful, abstract lighting by Diego Favre and Hugo Beheregarai. living room by Teun Zwets. and two portable beds by Flora Lechner. The beds are based on Ms. Lechner’s Odd Size Luggage, furniture that folds up to fit in the overhead compartment of an airplane.
“As a student, housing is always an issue,” Ms. Lechner said. A 2020 graduate of the Eindhoven Design Academy in the Netherlands, she recalled some of her classmates living in campsites during the first months of school. Without support, the cost of exhibiting at Milan Design Week while studying can be prohibitive. “Some people just send their work but don’t come themselves,” he said.
Instead of conventional product presentations, several up-and-coming design firms offer multidisciplinary experiences at Dopo. Berlin-based Bottone created a sound performance for the living room. Zerogloss, from Vicenza, Italy, runs kitchen workshops based on cooking and sharing meals. And the 12m (39ft) long dining room created by Felix Pöttinger of Munich in collaboration with woodwork and design studio Eham, in Hausham, is the place for dinners and round table discussions based on the theme of pleasure.
In the evenings, sleepovers have arranged additional public events, such as a meditation session, an ambient music concert and a tea ceremony, in exchange for accommodation. “We want an environment that is extremely relaxing,” Mr. Peluso said.
Dopo’s curators didn’t have to look far for creative inspiration. Ms. Felicori, 29, pointed to radical Italian collectives of the 1960s that used temporary installations to explore new ways of living, such as Archigram’s 1971 “Instant City,” an inflatable utopian experiment in communal housing that ran for three days at Ibiza Island. . “It’s a show of a domestic space,” he said. “In a world that is going faster and faster, we propose something slow.”
A few other Design Week projects explore alternative shelter ideas. In the Tortona area, the Base cultural center is organizing a multifaceted exhibition entitled “The Convivial Laboratory — Camp”. On the roof of the building, Parasite 2.0 has constructed a temporary campsite that will house Base’s designers, as well as students and other cultural organizers.
And IED, the European design institute, has invited students to stay for two nights for free in a makeshift campsite in a sports field in the Navigli area, working with Ikea and outdoor company Ferrino to furnish the tents. Riccardo Balbo, the school’s academic director, said he sees it as an educational opportunity.
“As a school, our mission should be to nurture curiosity, which means making it easier for a younger generation to see new things,” Mr Balbo said. “If you put this in the context of the Salone, the gentrification in the city, the rising rents and the rising cost of living, then we should just try to make it easier for students to come and see.”
Integrating young people into Milan Design Week is also a goal of the Salone del Mobile governing body, led by Maria Porro, director of marketing and communication at the Porro furniture company.
Salone del Mobile recently partnered with the Polytechnic University of Milan to study the economic and social impact of the exhibition in the region. Among the research areas are the effects on temporary housing and permanent housing in the city.
Although the results of the study will not be published until later this year, the report has reduced its admission fee to €20 from €55 for students “because we know that students are the future”, Ms Porro said.
By lowering the barrier to entry for students and young people to participate in Milan Design Week and sparking a conversation about the factors that prevent them, the curators of Runaways see it as an opportunity to reconnect with the more common — rather than corporate — aspects of design.
“It’s about exhibiting an environment that is completely collective,” Ms. Franco said. “Which is something we really need to build back into the design.”
