The Walk installation by Michele De Lucchi|Italian architect and designer Michele De Lucchi||
Michele De Lucchi will create an installation based on the modern workplace for this year’s Salone del Mobile exhibition in Milan. The Walk will have four sections, each designed as a different type of contemporary workspace, linked by a swirling walkway and surrounded by a garden.
The Italian designer says it will be an area to showcase ideas and “design triggers” for planning the contemporary office in its many interpretations. “We should think of the workspace as a gymnasium for the mind,” De Lucchi says, “conceiving it as a place where relationships generate new ideas and possibilities. Offices of the future should be visualised with the focus on lifestyles unfettered by convention, evolving spaces that perpetuate an endless stream of new ideas.”
A render released by De Lucchi’s studio shows a wooden path raised up above the centre of the installation that splits off into four ramps, each of which circumnavigates one of four hubs.
The first hub, named The Club, will be an area for quick informal meetings, reminiscent of hotel lobbies and airport lounges, which De Lucchi views as open, deconstructed offices.
The second space, named Free Men, considers the balance between private and collaborative space in the office, allowing areas for group work and the exchange of ideas, as well as protected, separate areas for individual concentration.
Agorà will be a roofed pavilion for presentations, exhibitions and conferences, which De Lucchi says will foster a sense of community.
The final hub, named Laboratory, will be the production area with facilities for producing documents, presentations, 3D prototypes, where workers can learn skills and explore new processes.
According to the studio, the office is the space most susceptible to social, economic and cultural changes in a rapidly evolving world. New ways of working have generated new ways for inhabiting the office, which has increasingly become a hive for social interface and community, a “liveable” space.
“Technology has changed everything,” De Lucchi explains, “leaving us freer to organise things the way we want them and enabling us to work anywhere, at home, in the train or even in the park.”
The Walk installation will be a central part of Workplace 3.0, previously named SaloneUfficio, Salone del Mobile’s biennial exhibition of design for the workplace.
It follows on from Jean Nouvel’s Project: Office for Living installation at the 2013 fair.
Salone del Mobile 2015 takes place from 14-19 April.
