Milan Showroom | Aldo Rossi x UniFor
Milan Design Week was the occasion to present ARCHIVIOUNIFOR to the public. This project to re-edit the most iconic pieces by the great architects who have collaborated with the company was launched with an evocative installation by Ron Gilad at the historic showroom in Corso Matteotti.
The installation mimics a micro urban piazza that opens up before the spectator’s eyes and invites him to immerse in it. Scaled down chairs resting by a large reflection pool, almost abandoned, yet playing with the observer’s perception and questioning the scale as humans. In the background, a continuous roar of water seems to come from afar: an open ended stone fountain placed on top of the Consiglio table. Endless windows are reflected in the water: an uninhabited skyscraper, illuminated, rises above the sky. Is it the facade of a small building? An extra large bookcase? Are we indoors? or outdoors? As in a surrealist painting, Ron Gilad travels inside Aldo Rossi’s mind and makes the impossible possible. The interior - a chair, the Museo chair, a bookcase, Cartesio - becomes an exterior - a seat in a public square, a building. The scales blur: Rossi’s monument to the Partisans in Segrate is shrunken, elongated, petrified, and water flows through it without a source. The Cemetery of San Cataldo becomes a lighting sculpture: a dim light filters through the cube-oxarium reduced to a miniature. Elements of Rossi’s imagination follow one another, they are design objects, architecture, and toys at the same time - in a theatrical gameplay. This bizarre little piazza unfolds before our eyes, disorienting and overturning dimensions, meanings and objects, in a timeless place: the place of Rossi’s psycho-architecture.
The installation continues at the first floor with original designs, drafts and documents from the UniFor archives.
