N 45°28'9" E 9°12'7" Via Mozart (image: Florian Böhm).

To mark Milan Design Week, we’ve published these oral histories of the city from the designers and experts who know the Milan best, first printed in Disegno #10.

Milan’s position in design lore is legendary. Ever since the Salone Internazionale del Mobile was launched in 1961, the city has been a natural hub for design on an international scale. It is comfortably the world’s biggest furniture trade fair, with around 300,000 visitors attending each year from more than 160 countries.

And yet, over recent years, the supremacy of Milan’s Salone has been questioned. “Isn’t it odd,” asked the design critic Alice Rawsthorn in a 2015 column for Frieze, “that a furniture fair should exert so much power throughout design culture, not just in its chosen field… The problem is that the Salone faces growing tension between its official role as a trade fair (-cum-branding bacchanale) and its unofficial one as a general design forum.” Add to this Jasper Morrison labelling it the “Salone del Marketing”, a statement he later retracted, as well as Hella Jongerius and Louise Schouwenberg criticising its never-ending slew of new products in their 2015 manifesto Beyond The New, released on the eve of the fair: “We advocate an idealistic agenda in design, as we deplore the obsession with the New for the sake of the New”. The fear for the Salone is that marketing exercises for big corporations risk taking over a space where critical discussion and reflection should reign.

The criticism the fair has received is fundamentally tied to a shift in the importance of furniture design to the wider industry. Furniture is no longer at the cutting edge of design, as ably demonstrated by the standout event of Salone 2015 (at least in terms of setting tongues wagging) being a dinner hosted by Marc Newson and Jonathan Ive to celebrate the arrival of the Apple Watch. Elsewhere, Las Vegas’s Consumer Electronics Show now generates nearly as much design news as it does technology, while South By Southwest in Austin, Texas, is increasingly considered a must-visit for design curators and writers. By comparison, furniture can start to seem somewhat old hat.

Similarly, intellectual discussions around design and its role in society play out just as well at less vaunted events such as Ljubljana’s Biennial of Design or the Istanbul Design Biennial, which in 2016 was curated by academics Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley. “For me, design should be a discussion of life, society, politics, food and the design itself,” the Italian designer Ettore Sottsass once said. Today more than ever, the discussions that Sottsass had in mind seem to happen more naturally in places outside of the fundamentally commercial agenda of Milan.

But it is nevertheless impossible to deny the collective experiences that still take place in a city like Milan, as well as the accumulation of those experiences over the Salone’s fifty-something lifespan. Most people within the design world know about the 2,500 guests who turned up to the Memphis launch in 1981 – even if many of those people weren’t actually there to experience it firsthand – and they know what a launch like that communicated about design at that time in history. The same can be said for countless other occasions: the debut of Droog Design in 1993, the Established and Sons events between 2007 and 2010, or the crowds of people who regularly fill the streets outside Bar Basso late at night.

For Disegno #10 we decided to tap into these shared experiences. While it is clear that Milan needs to rethink its value to a world where furniture plays an ever decreasing role in critical discussions around design, what cannot be taken away is the city’s past. It is these stories that cement Milan’s position within the design world. The stories on the following pages are personal experiences that reveal a layer of Milan invisible to the eye. They are experiences that have remained in people’s minds and which are embedded in the fabric of the city. They are stories that linger, regardless of the Salone’s commercial interests or the changing focus of the design world.

Alongside these oral histories is a photography project from Florian Böhm, which depicts layers of Milan from a street-view perspective, capturing aspects of a city where, to quote the designer Alberto Meda, “a good ghost still lives.”

“An object has a great potential to exert an influence upon the individual,” the Milanese designer Vico Magistretti once said. “While it might be indirect and almost imperceptible, this influence can still be enduring and effective. It can provide the individual with a different understanding of the relationship between space and object in the home and of how one chooses to live.” We hope that Milan can remain just such an object.

Patricia Urquiola I’m Spanish and I come from Asturias, so I’m Atlantic, not Mediterranean. The seas are strong in Asturias and the clouds are always changing. There is a lot of geography: steep hills, mountains and the sea.

When I arrived in Milan 30 years ago I found it difficult to adapt to the flatness of the place and I still find it a little problematic that there are no geographical elements to guide me. There is no river, no seaside, no mountains. There are no points of view, no belvederes.

The city has canals, but many have now disappeared under roads, so knowing the city was always very difficult for me because I had no references. Instead, people became my references.

Even before I was working with him I remember seeing Vico Magistretti on his bicycle. He always parked it outside De Padova on Corso Venezia and his was always the only one there. Magistretti and Maddalena De Padova were perhaps my first connections to the city, but the art critic Gillo Dorfles was another. I was always crossing his path as he lives close to me, but I never wanted to disturb him. He’s a small man but has such incredible energy in his step, even now at 105-years-old.

After I stopped working with Magistretti he remained a part of my daily life for many years. My daughter’s school was on the same street as his studio, right by the Conservatorio, and I always used to look up at his window. Sometimes I saw Franco Montella, his assistant, and sometimes, if he was sat at his desk facing the wall, I would see Magistretti’s back. That always made me happy; he always seemed to use the city in the right way.

Marco de Vincenzo For a long time, I thought Milan was too cold. Having lived in Sicily and then Rome, Milan feels like a place you have to discover. It’s beautiful in a different way than those other places; it's more secret.

I'm like a stranger here. Before I moved here, I never listened to what people said about Milan, good or bad, because I didn’t want to have too many preconceptions. I was waiting for the moment when the city would feel like mine, but then I always wait for the right moment to do everything. I'm never under pressure to make something if I think the moment hasn't come. With Milan it was the same.

I’ve now found a space for my office in the city. I saw many places before choosing the current location in Luigi Moretti’s Corso Italia Complex from 1956. Many of those places were beautiful, but they somehow felt common, whereas the Corso Italia is like working in a glass room: it's all open. A few walls are just made of glass and the whole city is in front of you. You can really feel the city, which is a good way to get familiar with it. In Rome it's obvious that you should live in a place with a view, but I didn't associate Milan with a great skyline.

Light is the most exciting thing in the new office. There is light everywhere, which gives you the impression of the day as it passes. It’s given me a feeling of freedom: the feeling that I could live somewhere else after a long time of thinking Rome was perfect. When I used to be in Milan, my first thoughts were, “I want to go back to Rome to work or to find something inspiring.” But today I was working on some drawings in the new office for the first time, and I thought “Wow, it's the same as in Rome.” I believe in the power of the place around you and this morning I felt like I was in the right place. I felt happy.

N 45°25'3" E 9°9'16" Autostrada dei Giovi.

Alessandro Mendini (1931 - 2019) I was born in Milan, have lived here for 84 years, and I have never wanted to change cities. Milan is sort of ugly, sort of small, sort of unfriendly, sort of violent. Yet it contains the mysterious humus that has allowed all my imagination to grow, something I really would not find anywhere else. It is a mixture of the cold poetry of the streets, the cultural traditions, my subconscious, 20th-century painters, the city's partly frozen architectural history, its great and historic designers, and glorious architecture magazines.

I am there inside all of that and live inside it, sometimes comfortably and sometimes uncomfortably. I frequent but a few people; I stay home at night; the official society of the bourgeois is not nice and it makes me timid. I do frequent an imaginary Milan that comes to me in my dreams at night. I walk in streets that do not exist, I enter phantom churches, buy bread in unknown, surreal shops, find objects, bump into friendly people, and all this might happen as I remain sat on my comfy sofa, reading novels by faraway authors. I am like those animals that can only survive in a certain microclimate, for example in the muted darkness of a cavern, and if they go out in the light they don't survive. The Milanese Designer is an endangered species indeed. There is another curious fact: as an architect I have practically never built a thing in Milan. It has never happened that I woke up in the morning and went to a construction site of mine by foot or by tram. My work is always far away; I mean extremely far away.

One memory that coincides with five years of my life is this: a long time ago, when I was the editor-in-chief of Domus magazine, I travelled to the editorial office every day, located in the historical, famous seat of the publishing house. The headquarters were romantic and outside Milan, toward the foggy flatland south of the city, close to the grassy rice fields. Exiting Milan every day, a 30-minute drive by automobile, I disengaged mentally from the city and spent that whole time in an abstract mental space and in a physical agricultural space: a bubble of decompression. We used to eat around there in countryside trattorie; sometimes they made fried frogs' legs. In this isolated place, full and rich with the stories of the legendary Casabella and Domus magazines, I became acquainted with the most famous architects and hundreds of young designers, who came to visit the editorial office as if on a pilgrimage. And during the round trip by automobile, one hour of classical music per day.

N 45°27'27" E 9°11'16" Piazza Sant'Eufemia.

Oki Sato from Nendo I still remember an installation I did in Milan’s Museo della Permanente during the 2008 Milan Design Week like it was yesterday. I was exhibiting our Diamond chair, which is made using a 3D printer capable of producing a diamond-like structure, and I had also designed the installation space.

It was the first time I had taken on an exhibition of that scale and level of difficulty, and I ended up cancelling over six months’ worth of other projects. I had every single Nendo designer focused on the installation from morning to night. It goes without saying that by the time the day of the exhibition arrived the studio’s savings had been depleted, and it was clear that if no new projects arose as a result of the exhibit, Nendo would be out of business.

On the final day of the installation, when I had about halfway given up, the Italian designer Piero Lissoni showed up. Piero picked up the Diamond chair, tucked it under his arm, and started to walk out. I hurried after him to say something, at which point he handed me a blank cheque.

Piero’s personality played a big part in it, but this event made me feel very deeply that the people of Milan have an intrinsic attraction towards design. At the same time, it was because of this event that I felt compelled to use design to give something back to the city of Milan and its people. Although its criticism and judgement can be harsh at times, Milan is a city that provides a warm hand of support to those willing to give their all. Because of that it remains a city that I love dearly.

Nathalie Du Pasquier When I arrived in Milan, I had been living in Rome for nine months. It was September, around 7 or 8 o’clock in the evening, and I arrived by train at Stazione Centrale, a very imposing building. But it was full of people with red flags: a happy crowd leaving Milan after having taken part in the last day of the Festa dell’Unità, a festival organised by the Communist Party. There was an amazing atmosphere.

That was the first thing I saw in Milan: red flags that seemed to indicate a revolution and a huge Egyptian or Assyrian-style train station: quite beautiful, although very strange. That evening I went to stay with friends of friends, as young people do, and the next morning I went to look for a job.

I took a long walk from via Torino towards the old Fiera in Corso Sempione. The first thing you see in a city is the architecture and, if Rome was beautiful, Milan appeared very ordinary at first. But after having crossed the Parco Sempione and begun walking along the Corso Sempione, I started to notice things I liked. The street was broad, planted with high French trees, and the more I headed towards the Fiera, the higher and more modern the buildings became. But it was a type of modernity that I was not used to; it was a modernity that seemed handmade.

I found my first job in Milan that day and the friends of friends whom I was staying with let me a room in another area of town. Little by little, I was attracted to things I would never have thought would interest me. First of all, the trams. They were a very old model of tram, quite short with wooden benches and nice lamps. I had never been in a city with trams and they seemed very urban, because at that time most cities had suppressed their tramlines. There was also a metro, but a modern one, with modern graphics and clean trains (then…): very different from the metro in Paris, the only one I had known. Through Milan, I started looking at architecture from the 20th century and I started to be interested in my own time and culture. That was the time I realised I wanted to take part in that culture.

Paola Antonelli I grew up in Milan. I was a kid during the years of terrorism and a teenager when Milan became the world capital of fashion. Between age 15 and 18, every day after school, I worked in a fashion PR office. Barbara Vitti was my sister's best friend's mom. When I started, she was the PR for Gruppo Finanziario Tessile and she needed girls who would help keep press and buyers separate at fashion shows. Soon thereafter, Barbara became Armani's exclusive PR, and so every day I would leave my liceo in via Passione around 1:30pm, grab a slice of focacccia, and walk five minutes to Armani's showroom in via Durini.

It was devastatingly elegant: black carpets, black aluminium tube dividers, black curtains; the famously frescoed ceilings were the only touch of colour. During Fashion Week, Armani would not show with the hoi polloi at the fairgrounds, but rather would invite press and buyers by appointment. He had models on call at the showroom, like an old-school atelier.

One year, when I was probably 17 and in my New Romantic period, I arrived at work during Fashion Week decked out Spandau Ballet-style in full black, except for a wide white lace gorgère and, ahem, bright white boots. It was a pair of disembodied phosphorescent pointy shoes, and I felt cool and gorgeous running around attending my tasks.

Little did I know that I was interfering with the showroom's black magic, which was set up to cast light only on the right clothes worn by the right models. Armani, who had never really noticed me before, came close, smiled warmly, took me by the arm, led me into the room that contained all the accessories, picked a box, put it in my hands, and told me "You look so smart today, you deserve a new pair of shoes as a gift." The shoes were black.

George Sowden From day one in Milan I was under siege from being told how wonderful Italian food was and how I, an Englishman from England where the food was terrible, would eventually have to understand this and learn that Italian food is the best food to be found anywhere in the world.

Always the same story, whether it was with my coffee and brioche in the morning, lunch in the trattoria or dinner with friends, the endless conversations about food and inevitably, to the point of tedium, how bad was the food from the country of my birth; an argument that I found a bit irritating. Even though I agreed, of course, that Italian food is good, I could never bring myself to acknowledge publicly that English food was awful.

At the same time as I fell in love with Italy and working here, I also fell in love with the Fiat 600 Multipla, the only car I have ever loved in my life. It was used predominately in Italy as the chosen car of taxi drivers and I would take a taxi only (or especially) if the cab was a Multipla. One day I was sitting in the back seat admiring the details of clever engineering and exchanging a few polite words with the driver when he said, “You are not Italian!” An easy guess, I was learning the language.

“No, I am English.”

“My God!” said the driver. “The food is terrible in your country!”

“Well,” apologetically as if it were my fault, “it’s getting better, when were you there?”

Driver: “1943 for two years, I was a prisoner of war.”

Hella Jongerius My career started in Milan 22 years ago. I had just come from school and went there with Droog Design as part of a generation of designers working on self-initiated projects. I was curious and excited, and also a bit a naive; I was so surprised that people were queuing up to see Droog. I couldn't believe it! It was overwhelming, because you can only dream of something like that. We were a rabble: I was with my friends and we shared a conceptual approach to design. There was less responsibility.

That was a long time ago, however, when the design world was not so big and when being in Milan didn’t come with so much commercial pressure. After a few years my practice grew and I had to start moving faster and faster to the tempo of assignments. Milan today feels like a giant cake where the dough is fermenting and always rising; it has started to feel like a pressure cooker. There is no time to enjoy it because I have to fulfil duties like attending events and giving interviews.

Besides it’s becoming harder to find quality during the Salone, with all the businesses that have rushed in. We need good reasons for producing designs, because the simple fact of a design being new does not grant it validity. Everybody knows that Milan and the design world needs to refocus; we have to find a new discourse for what’s behind the commercial context and empty marketing phrases. What to design in a world of plenty?

But one year I did enjoy was 2005, when I launched the Polder sofa with Vitra. It was my first industrially designed piece and we made it in under a year, which was such a short amount of time. Nobody was convinced by it, not even Vitra. I remember the evening before we were due to show it we got cold feet, so we changed the fabric to calm it down a bit. But in the morning, we just thought “Come on! Let's go for it!” and changed the colours back to the more collaged approach we ended up with. It was so unexpected when everybody liked it. It was a really magical experience.

N 45°27'26" E 9°10'6" Via Andrea Solari.

Alberto Meda There are hidden aspects of this city, in which a good ghost lives. Milano is very secretive, and does not reveal itself easily, even to a Milanese like me.

Yesterday, for example, I was on via Santa Marta at the FabLab. It’s a 200sq m workshop in the centre of Milan, that combines educational activities with an open lab that provides the best technologies in digital fabrication. It’s warm and welcoming – a place where you can bring friends, curiosity and expertise and ideas to share with others – and is run by an architect, a designer and a physicist. Milan is a city of these hidden relations, a network that produces interesting and unpredictable results.

Milan is a place of magnificent accidents. When the Domus Academy was founded in 1983 I worked for a few years as a professor of industrial technologies with Ezio Manzini. It was a very stimulating experience which circulated thoughts shared from teachers such as Andrea Branzi, Antonio Petrillo, Mario Bellini, Ettore Sottsass and Clino Castelli, culminating in Ezio’s book The Material of Invention, the design aspects of which were curated by me and Denis Santachiara. But good students came out from that experience too, like Francisco Gomez Paz whom I later worked with on the Solar Bottle project. It’s a bottle that uses sunlight to disinfect water and which won an INDEX Award in 2007 in Copenhagen. A magnificent accident!

Or think about the Triennale museum, which is not only a place for exhibitions but also for meetings, some of which are completely unexpected. Last year, I met the design curator and retailer George Beylerian from New York on the steps of the Triennale, coming out of the TVS-Ghianda exhibition. He must have seen the wok and tongs that I’d designed for TVS-Ghianda, because he asked me to take part in his Design Memorabilia initiative for the Milan Expo. I ended up creating Medamade, an oil dispenser that automatically opens its lid when you pour from it.

But that is Milan: an intersection of creative energies and talents. Here in Milan, a good ghost continues to live.

N 45°26'51" E 9°10'23" Via Giosuè Borsi.

Giulio Cappellini One of the Milan Design Week events I remember the most was a presentation at Superstudio Più in Zona Tortona in 2000.

At that time Fuori Salone events were not very numerous and Zona Tortona was not famous. But Cappellini decided to open the day before the Salone started, so we had almost 10,000 visitors. The soundtrack for the event was a selection of Rolling Stones songs, beginning with ‘Start Me Up’. Looking at the number of people queuing outside was an unforgettable experience.

The exhibition space was very big, about 4,000sq m, and realised with Jasper Morrison’s help. We created a very colourful floor with rope rings to contain the new products, while the ceiling was made up of thousands of fake silver clouds.

We put all our energy and passion into that presentation and our efforts were rewarded. That year was the definitive consecration of Cappellini as a global trendsetter and we showed prototypes by designers from all over the world: from Marcel Wanders to Jasper, the Bouroullec brothers to Patrick Norguet.

In the years that followed we’ve made many other presentations, but 2000 remains a major landmark in my career and personal life.

N 45°27'40" E 9°11'19" Piazza Giuseppe Missori.

Arthur Arbesser Being a young fashion designer is hard in Milan, especially when I started three years ago. The thing that changed it all for me was a presentation I did in the house of my friend Luca. Of course, I didn’t know him at the time.

I was looking for a place to show my second collection during Milan Fashion Week and I was at a dinner with a group of Milanese acquaintances at this legendary dancehall, Sala Venezia. I asked the whole table if anyone knew of a place, a home of some sort, where I could show my collection in an intimate milieu. Luca invited me to come see his place. It was a very Milanese setting, in this great 1920s building, and his apartment was filled with treasures from Italian design history.

Originally we planned to do the presentation for two days, but we ended up staying open for the whole fashion week and it just became crazier and crazier. One day the fashion writer Suzy Menkes came to visit and wrote a piece about it for the International Herald Tribune. The next day everybody came.

It was a significant moment because it showed me that there is a massive will to give someone young a chance and to give them the necessary attention. All it took was a beautiful apartment and a few mannequins. It was all super budget, but all the editors from the magazines were there. It was bizarre that they were willing to come to the apartment of somebody they didn’t know and take an elevator to the 6th floor of a block of flats on via Benedetto Marcello. But it does prove how curious people are.

N 45°29'7" E 9°12'7" Piazza Duca d'Aosta.

Jaime Hayon When I was a student, I put Milan on a pedestal. What city in the world could be more innovative, high-tech, stylish, or unique than Milan? Certainly not Madrid, Barcelona or any other city I knew. But when I visited for the first time, I was completely shocked - everything was a disaster!

From the airport to the train station, the city looked old and dated. Coming from Madrid, with its relatively modern and well-functioning system, Milan's subway system seemed positively ancient to me. Instead of a design city, Milan turned out to be quite the opposite of what I expected.

What I’ve realised is that what makes Milan special are the people who live there, and the ideas and work created there. That’s what sets Milan apart from other cities; not, thankfully, its infrastructure.

Introduction Johanna Agerman Ross

Photographs Florian Böhm

This article was originally published in Disegno #10. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.

The Spectre of Milan

Milan Diaries 2023: Day One

Design Line: 8 – 14 April