Architect Marco Piva, founder of Studio Marco Piva, gives a master talk in occasion of the Italian Design Day in Hong Kong held on 28th June. As representative of contemporary architecture and interior design, Piva presents his work and vision for the future, an opportunity for intelligent urban planning and regeneration. A design project created by PolyU Design and Hong Kong Design Institute is then presented and will be exposed in September during the Milan Design Week.
Gwen Marletta, laureata in lingue e presto in gestione dei sistemi turistici, è un’nstancabile viaggiatrice e nomade per natura, esplora il mondo da quando, a soli due anni, i suoi genitori le hanno fatto scoprire le prime destinazioni. Oggi collabora per Agenda Viaggi scrivendo in inglese.
Hong Kong, China
Sara Bologna, junior product coordinator at 5VIE, a cultural network aiming at the creation of value through art and design which contributed to the organization of the event, moderates the meeting. The first to be introduced is Clemente Contestabile, consul general of Italy in Hong Kong, for an institutional greeting and for a brief description of Marco Piva’s work and the meaning of the Italian Design Day. “Architect Marco Piva is an ambassador of Italian style in the world and his talent has been serving the values of sustainability, quality of life and constant innovation”, he then continues, “this year’s goal is to investigate the relationship between design and materials and to further boost the dialogue between Italian and local thinkers and manufacturers”. The floor is then given to architect Marco Piva for his master class, a journey through the experience of his studio in Beauty by Design, signature for all their current activities. The studio is located in Milan but works in China, Japan, Dubai and all over the world; having 17 different nationalities in their portfolio of collaborators it is defined as a system of merging knowledge from different cultures.
Core values and activties
Emotional, fluid, exciting and functional. That’s how Marco Piva describes his work together with the terms “complexity”, the concept that every project should be a fusion of different skills and knowledge from different disciplines to create something beautiful, and “sustainable” which reflects onto the materials used by the studio, among which are special resins, marble and wood. Overall, the raw materials should feed the purpose of rhythm, lightness and dynamism, they should blend to distort the perception of density or to experiment with proportions and shapes. “The final result should be purity, solving complex connections between elements creating simplicity”, clarifies Piva. Some elaborations of these values in practice are the Shape of the Wind project in Caofeidian Tangshan, China and the Dancing Sails of Suzhou near Shangai, China. The areas of activity of the architect and his studio, although, are not limited to the realm of urban design but they expand onto residential structures, private luxury homes, furniture, retail, with important clients such as Bulgari, and events, like the Biennale di Venezia in which they will be participating in September 2021.
The university project
Francesco Mainardi, co-founder of Mr. Lawrence, a design consultancy studio based in Milan, introduces the project that saw a collaboration between Milan and Hong Kong Design schools. “This bridge between the two cities had to reflect on the topics of language of design and contemporaneity” and the project was divided into the three main subprojects: home, materials and the SuperStack. Daniel Chan, Head of Department of Architecture, Interior and Product Design at the Hong Kong Design Institute, presents the focus of the project, a reinterpretation of domestic spaces to fit the new needs of co-habitation in Covid times. Home issues arising from the constant contact among family members or flatmates were investigated to come up with innovative ideas to allow the construction of effective and efficient co-living spaces. “The different scenarios were analysed to come up with pieces that would satisfy different needs of different generations and occupations”, says Chan. Finally, a student from PolyU, Caroline Du, briefly presents the work of their group on SuperStack, an elaboration of homes where positive/negative, tangible/intangible interactions have been stacked up. Du concludes:“These congested homes needed solutions to become liveable again and we thought of modular furniture and sustainable materials to help in the process”.
Screen shot di Gowen Marletta
