At this year’s Milan Design Week, cooker hoods company Elica recounts its philosophy of innovation and design through the Visionair installation developed by the architectural firm Labics. During the Milanese design week at the ‘House-in-motion‘ exhibition presented by Interni, visitors can dive head first into a suggestive sensory experience guaranteed to reveal a new and unexpected way of living the kitchen.
The idea behind the project comes from a reflection on the theme of the reversal of the point of view, concept used by the brand to describe the paradigm shift underlying the recent experiments conducted on aspiring hob.
The installation is a visible object inside the Ca’ Granda, a small architecture that immediately communicates its presence; a structure that, when approaching, reveals itself, letting perceive the presence of a space inside, an unusual space that invites the visitor to enter a surreal and upside-down dimension of reality.
The act of crossing a threshold, of entering an interior space, alludes to the imaginary of the home, which welcomes and protects. But it is also a metaphor for a large door through which it is possible to access the Elica universe. The choice of mirroring materials creates an abstract image from the outside and immersive from the inside.
As in a kaleidoscope, the video images of the interior are broken down, overturned, recomposed in new forms, generating an unexpected story of which the visitor is completely part of. The installation, completely independent from the context in terms of language and materials, finds a strong dialectic relationship with the existing through a close dialogue with the neighboring portico, finding in it its own geometric and spatial matrix.
The basic model is generated starting from the rhythm of the portico, a square matrix of 1.17 m – one third of the intercoluminio – and consists of the intersection of three families of vertical surfaces, two oriented parallel to the porticoes, one inclined at 45 °. Starting from this simple geometry three cutting operations were carried out: the first generates the internal space, the second accommodates the existing tree making it become part of the composition, the third finally defines the diagonal section that tends towards the sky.
Finally, the installation, read as a prototype, is part of a research path that Labics has been carrying out for years on the relationship between structure and space and on the idea of the supporting structure as an element of maximum reduction of the architecture.
all images © Marco Cappelletti