Aiming to give more to our users and from three different- yet united- perspectives, Designboom, Architonic, and ArchDaily which make up DAAily platforms, will be providing visitors of Milan Design Week an exclusive selection of inspiring architecture and design highlights via two inclusive guides. The DAAily fair guide and DAAily city guide will serve as the best example of what the power of the three provides to creatives during one of the biggest design events of the year.
A global city and cosmopolitan hub, Milan is mainly recognised today as a fashion and economic center, widely coveted by visitors from around the world. It is the second most populated city in Italy and hosts some of the major fashion and design related events in the world. Milan also houses prestigious educational institutions, many of which are renowned for heritage and conservationist specialties.
The latter is quite relevant, seeing as the city's most recognisable tourist attractions are the gothic Duomo di Milano, Santa Maria delle Grazia or the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, amongst other classical and baroque sites. It's in fact this marriage of the beautifully crafted and often ornamental heritage with the modern and contemporary monuments that makes its unique style.
Few structures are as elegant and ingenious as greenhouses. Largely built with simple and straightforward designs, these minimalist shelters create airy and light-filled spaces that shape indoor climate. Dedicated to the cultivation of plants and crops, they are diverse projects combining programs and systems to emphasize sustainability, education and conservation. At their heart, greenhouses are about experience and discovery.
With its quantifiable objectives and measurable performance, sustainability often passes as a technological challenge. Its primary language is that of data, equipment, and engineered systems, most often translated into a hyper-technologized layer hidden within a design upholding pre-existing aesthetic norms. As architecture is the image of society at one moment in time, how does the focus on sustainability translate into architectural language, further legitimatizing the efforts to establish an equitable relationship with the environment? Architecture serves as an expression of attitudes, and since sustainability has become a fundamental value, it is worth looking at whether or not it has produced an aesthetic transformation.
Although an architectural project comes to life with palpable materials, it is also defined by intangible qualities that give it richness, dynamism, and liveliness. Among them, the interplay of light and shadow can transform environments and affect their perception, determining the user's spatial experience. Besides providing natural ventilation, privacy, and thermal comfort, lattices allow this duality by filtering the entry of sunlight while projecting repetitive figures on the surface. In this way, perforated walls and ceilings can create multiple geometric patterns of light and shadow that become design elements capable of generating unique atmospheres.