Casa per tutti at Milan Triennale

Rose Etherington | 20 May 2008 25 comments

Construction is underway on prototype houses by architects Alejandro Aravena, Massimiliano Fuksas, MVRDV, I-Beam Design, The Mad Housers and Kengo Kuma in the grounds of the Milan Triennale as part of the exhibition Casa Per Tutti (Housing For All), which opens this week.

The exhibition opens on 23 May and aims to address problems related to housing. Visitors will be able to explore the structures until 14 September. Top and above: house by Massimiliano Fuksas.

Dutch architects MVRDV have designed a pavilion (above) called House of Clothes - The Milan Fashion Brick. It's made from Milanese second hand clothes packaged in blocks.

Kengo Kuma's shelter (above) is based on the structure and mechanics of an umbrella.

American organisation The Mad Housers have constructed more than 40 huts like the one shown above for homeless people around Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

See more about the Pallet house (above) by I-Beam design in our previous story.

The following information is from the Triennale:

Casa per tutti
Milan Triennale
May-September 2008

As part of Triennale Architettura, the Milan Triennale is this year holding an International Forum on the problems of housing, coordinated by Aldo Bonomi and Fulvio Irace and divided into two events: the Casa per tutti [Housing for all] exhibition, fitting into the Milan Triennale tradition which took the home as its principal theme way back in 1933.

Casa per tutti
The July 2005 exhibition Le Case nella Triennale [Houses in the Triennale] reconstructed the main stops on the journey, which then flowed into the creation of the QT8 model neighbourhood under the direction of Piero Bottoni.In taking up this mission again, the Casa per tutti exhibition (23 May – 14 September 2008), coordinated by Fulvio Irace and Carlos Sambricio with Matteo Agnoletto, Silvia Berselli, Teresa Feraboli, Federico Ferrari, Gabriele Neri and Jeffrey Schnapp, exhibition design by Cliostraat and graphics by GrafCo3, thus relaunches a theme that has been almost completely abandoned by international architecture in the past 25 years: habitation.

While efforts in the first half of the 20th century were concentrated on redefining the theme of collective housing, in the second half interest shifted to other themes. Called upon to represent the changeable face of a society apparently based only on material and cultural consumption, architecture thus produced many icons in the area of museums, theatres and concert halls, sports facilities, skyscrapers.

The exhibition aims to provide constructive design responses to the social interaction requirements of communities or individuals deprived of the basic right to a home, bringing back onto the agendas of architects and their clients the theme of the house as a primary resource in the difficult situations caused by the many forms of urban and environmental emergency.

Thus it puts forward problems and attempts to classify them according to an interpretation that alternates history and contemporaneity around a few main genres such as the furniture-house, the cabin-house, the prefabricated house, the macro-house, the minimal house. In order to strengthen the message, the Triennale returns to the roots of its past exhibitions, with prototypes to be built to scale in the garden.

So the public will be able to move among the housing models specially designed for the Triennale by Alejandro Aravena, Massimiliano Fuksas, MVRDV and Kengo Kuma, who will also speak at a large conference on 16 May devoted to the theme of the house.

Workshop
During the exhibition period, in collaboration with the Milan Polytechnic and the Italian division of Architects Without Borders, Professor Camillo Magni of the Civil Architecture Faculty, together with his students, will coordinate the workshop “Costruire con la gente” [Building with the people] at Triennale Bovisa: a week of work experimenting to find the building processes most suited to the conditions in developing countries

Casa per tutti Competition
As part of the exhibition the Milan Triennale, under the aegis of the Milan Polytechnic, has announced an international competition for the purpose of selecting a series of designs for habitable modules that can offer a possible solution to housing emergencies in metropolitan areas and areas affected by unforeseen disasters.

The competition is open to young designers with an Architecture, Design or Engineering degree. A full scale model of the winning design will be built and displayed in the Milan Triennale garden. The prizewinners and other outstanding designs will be displayed in the atrium of the Triennale, and all the projects submitted for the competition will be publicised through the website at triennale.it.