Design Week
Listone Giordano Natural Genius
2024
Since the idea and opening of Listone Giordano Arena –concept store in the center of Milan- we focused on designing moments of experience linked to the city, given Fuorisalone’s increasing importance over the fair. But as 2024 puts the dark thoughts of pandemic isolation behind, it seemed like time for Rho’s exhibition spaces to grant the return of an international public with great potential. There was a need, then, while preparing a comeback, to show growth and change, making clear the awareness of a surface, a floor imagined and designed by design culture, defining the architectural space themselves.
That’s how the Natural Genius exhibition space was born. The idea of an upside down architecture, where what’s usually under our feet is now above, like a new cosmos. The space explodes; it presents floors organized on expanding levels, like a wave flow. Natural Genius is then a dynamic space welcoming the visitor to an inner central alcove dedicated to dialogue and exchange. For this occasion, we designed a special visual system, actually renovating the product collection’s identity and providing the basis for the international distributive development model dedicated to designers. The visual identity and original typography project designed by our team aim to give substance to the theme of knowledge as vital force of each design process.
Namely, our inspiration was the first and most important attempt to systematize universal knowledge, i.e. Enlightment’s Encyclopédie. A wooden floor, although contemporary, is the fruit of wit, nature and artisanship. That first and precious Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts specifically deals with substance, processes and methods of the human activities, through a figurative device whose precise will is to synthetically communicate and amaze.
We then wanted to rebuild a grammar tapping into that immense reservoir, putting on the same semantical level 18th century canvasses, contemporary works and experimental typography, in a dynamic and static form.
