Reclaimed materials become a sustainable architecture installation at the Fuorisalone in Milan, hosting Meuble Plus, a project by Yona Friedman in collaboration with Conai.
The packaging materials we use and recycle every day are becoming a work of art. It is happening right now during Milan Design Week (17–22 April), thanks to the site-specific installation Meuble Plus, conceived by the celebrated "utopian" architect Yona Friedman and positioned in one of the strategic venues of the Milan Fuorisalone.
In the courtyard of the Materials Village set up by Material ConneXion® Italia at the Super Design Show at Superstudio Più in Via Tortona, visitors can already see the work designed by the 94-year-old Hungarian designer and urban planner, who travelled to Milan in person for the occasion.
The installation, which uses tin cans, bottles and reclaimed materials to recreate an urban environment, was curated by art critic Maurizio Bortolotti and made possible through the collaboration of Conai (Consorzio nazionale imballaggi), which is a partner of the Materials Village and of the accompanying exhibition Smart City: Materials, Technology and People (17 April – 12 May).
The stars of the work are, therefore, plastic, steel, aluminium, paper and cardboard, wood and glass, which become a metaphor for a social architecture attentive to the reuse and life cycle of materials. These are materials that lie at the heart of many recovery and recycling projects run by the Conai consortia, and here they are used precisely to give form to some of Friedman's most cherished architectural themes — he has always been committed to environmental sustainability and the circular economy.
As early as the early 1970s, the Jewish architect had theorised and championed the concept of material reuse — materials capable of being reshaped potentially indefinitely — to build and rebuild communal environments and spaces. This attitude was aimed at minimising the waste of raw materials and at upholding the value of reuse, in keeping with his fundamental idea of an architecture capable of meeting people's basic needs in harmony with their own community ("survival architecture").
A vision that has become a reference point and source of inspiration for many generations of architects, and that has been publicly recounted on numerous occasions — as in 2016 at the Serpentine in London with his Summer House, or with the stone tapestry No Man's Land created in Abruzzo.
This is, then, a not-to-be-missed opportunity to see his pioneering vision of sustainable architecture take shape once again, at the Materials Village 2018 in Milan.
Founded in 1998, Conai is a private, non-profit organisation that deals with the recovery and recycling of packaging materials such as steel, aluminium, paper, wood, plastic and glass. Made up of approximately 900,000 companies — producers and users of packaging — over its first twenty years the consortium has collected and sent more than 50 million tonnes of packaging waste for recycling, with a positive impact not only on the environment (40 million fewer tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere) but also on the national economy and employment.
Whereas in 1998 only 1 in 3 packaging items was recovered, by 2016 the figure had risen to 3 in 4, to the benefit of all parties involved: from businesses to public administrations and, of course, individual citizens.
This is a track record of continuous improvement, one that led Conai to become a member of the National Green Economy Council from 2012.
Specifically, Conai directs the recovery activities of the 6 materials consortia: steel (Ricrea), aluminium (Cial), paper/cardboard (Comieco), wood (Rilegno), plastic (Corepla), glass (Coreve). The task of each of these consortia is, in turn, to coordinate and advance the collection and waste-retrieval operations within their remit, and to promote research and technological innovation with a view to further progress in those same recovery activities.