DDN HUB
PIAZZA DEL CANNONE
To celebrate AATC’s first participation in Milan Design Week, VGA is designing Archetype, a special installation that will be the protagonist of the DDN HUB in the scenic setting of Piazza del Cannone, between the Castello Sforzesco and the Parco Sempione.
Archetype is a project of great impact, a majestic marble architecture in the shape of a parallelepiped with a square base 3x3x6 apparently monolithic, but which hides a modular structure. The basic prototype of the installation is a block of Grolla di Chiampo, an elegant marble with a small and compact grain but extremely resistant, left in its raw state and worked only on some faces, to represent the encounter between the material in its natural state and the project, in an ideal reference to Michelangelo’s Pietà Rondanini, a masterpiece kept in front of the Castle.
The name Archetype refers to the modular nature of the installation but also plays with the meaning of archetype as a primordial image: the structure, in its overall appearance, evokes the same apparent simplicity of the archetypes and the power of the symbols embodied by the monumental architectures of the past – from the Inca walls to the Mayan and Egyptian pyramids, from the Great Wall of China to the Sforza Castle itself.
The VGA studio has designed Archetype as a natural stone architecture at the same time ancestral and contemporary, designed to enter into harmony with the natural and urbanized scenery of the Sempione Park. Faithful to its architectural nature, the structure is conceived as an object for the public, which visitors can touch, interacting freely in a playful and sensory exchange.
Archetype is conceived as a symbol of a new perspective for the design of complex structures that AATC and the VGA studio share: a vision of architectural design where technology and digital innovation meet in a sustainable process, effectively combining prefabrication and customization, industrial production processes and craftsmanship.
The installation makes visible the executive, logistical and implementation capacity of AATC, which thanks to a deep knowledge of the production capabilities of the machinery and a careful predictive analysis, was able to realize and assemble in a short time a tailor-made project that would once have required years of work.
And time is one of the key elements that decrees the effectiveness of the design process that Archetype embodies: from the first sketch to the installation of the finished project (which in this case involved the extraction of the material in the Chiampo quarries, the processing in Verona and finally the delivery to Milan following a direct transport line), Archetype was completed in just two months.
