Des-Ino
Year: Fall 2023
Course: Advanced Topics Studio
Instructor: Neil Denari
Team: NA
Des-Ino (Design Innovation) is a museum for Italian industrial design in the period between 1950-1980. The project creates an extension for significant public engagement on a neglected interstice situated between the old city of Bologna and its rim of farmland and serves as both exhibition and storage space for the objects maintained in the collection.The museum utilizes this reconstruction of Le Corbusier’s Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau as a staging ground for exhibition of artifacts in both didactic and neutral faux-residential settings.
The Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau in Bologna is a reconstructed replica of the original pavilion built in Paris for the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and IndustrialArts. This replica itself was built through a collaboration with the Le Corbusier Foundation For Bologna’s International Building Exhibition in 1977 and operates as both a historical orienting device and projective tool for the exhibition. While not holding the status of original, the pavilion is brought into the collection as an object to be positioned and viewed, expressing the museum’s stance relative to the artifacts in its collection through its accessibility and geometric and chromatic associations.
The proposed museum builds off of the existing geometries of the pavilion and draws instrumental formal material from the museum’s subject matter of post-war Italian industrial design while adopting it from the plastic, injection molded aesthetic to a machine logic of metal structure, panelization, and regularity. The cantilevering defines an in-between space on the exterior for shading and marking threshold while reinforcing the formal connection to the existing pavilion and creating views both out of and into the building as a two-way optical portal.