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| No design at all but delicious! Friet van Piet at Fuorisalone 2014 |
For the
last six days, the fashion city Milan has been full of design. Like every year the city fills-up with design lovers looking
for the newest trends, talented students and the best works of famous studios.
I’ll try to give an overview of what I saw, off-course seen from the eyes of Food in the Streets.
The Design
week is divided into two main events: the Salone del Mobile in the Milano Fiera Rho and the fuorisalone which spreads out over the city. Personally I am not at all interested
in the first one which takes place in the boring fairgrounds and is full of commercial agencies
that mainly want to sell their furniture. No. As a ‘starter’ myself I am much
more interested in the young people that are creative and create to make
beautiful products. This year was extra interesting for Food in the Streets as
also the Design Week is getting ready for EXPO 2015 exposing a lot of food
related projects.
The
fuorisalone started already on the Saturday before, as I promised my friends
from Orti d’Azienda to help them to prepare their
installation in the Ventura Lambrate District. I was delighted to spend some hours far from
my computer and put my hands in the fertile soil to plant rosemary, tomatoes,
colorful flowers and much more. While working where were surrounded by the Dutch that are present in the area. One of
the exhibitors was Amaro Creative Industries, a Dutch pop-up restaurant that – I
found out later – was so arrogant to think he could prepare the Italians a
spaghetti they would like. He was mistaken.
Esterni
organized this years’ Public Design Festival on Piazza XXV Aprile, a busy square
between the old center and the new Porta Garibaldi Area. Here 10 street food
trucks where hosted, feeding the hungry design lovers with some creative
energy. As I was one of the participants of their contest, I wanted to see what
the others did. Although the atmosphere wasn’t optimal (it lacked a central
area where people could eat all together), the idea was good and I could
imagine that over the time (hopefully over the 5 days) it developed itself into
something that functions.
One of the
advantages of the fuorisalone is that it gives the visitors the possibility to
visit places that are usually closed to the public. In Via Palermo I bumped into
an interesting project by PiuArch. They
presented an interesting project called DiCortile in Cortile which aims to make their courtyard (cortile in Italian) more green and more livable. In a similar
location not far away, Amazelab presented
their Sky Hives. In different courtyards within the city they build these ‘hotels’
for the bees, insects that are indispensable for our food system but which have
a hard time surviving.
Just before
the design week finished I passed through the Ventura Lambrate District again. Hungry
after six days of visits in the city, aperitivi and short nights, it was time
for a drink at Via Canzi. Besides the free beers there was, to my surprise, the
delicious ‘Friet from Piet’. Like Amaro, Piet is also a Dutch project but Piet
understood that you better stick with what you’re good at. Piet sells typical
Dutch fresh fries with mayonnaise. Even though it is not something I used to
eat a lot in the Netherlands, this was an opportunity I did not want to miss.
All in all
it was an inspiring week again. Now it is time to translate this into more
durable projects and see if we can get an even ‘foodier’ design week in 2015!
