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During Milan Design Week 2025 Molteni&C is hosting Letters to Milan, an installation by Studio Klass at Museo Poldi Pezzoli that explores the company's intimate connection to its home city.
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A summoning, a chant, a prayer, a tribute, a plea, a celebration. Letters to Milan is all of this and more. Milan, a global city, a laboratory of unconventional yet pragmatic culture, in which modernity generates works that are both fleeting and unforgettable. A city shaped by master builders who project it into the future. “Milan is a metaphor for love, for everything that changes, for life as it goes on,” sang Baustelle. A cosmopolitan city, with a widespread heritage that is constantly changing.
And so, Molteni&C – which has found a new home in Via Manzoni, the beating heart of the historic city – presents an installation in the courtyard of the Poldi Pezzoli Museum for Design Week. The project is a homage to Milan “and its ever-evolving ideals of modernity”, as Fulvio Irace describes in Milano Moderna. Architecture, Art and the City 1947-2021, expressed through the power of words and images.
Palazzo Molteni | Via Manzoni 9 - Milan
Palazzo Molteni | Via Manzoni 9 - Milan
Designed by Studio Klass, the installation tells the story of the deep connection between Milan and Molteni&C, a dialogue built over time through architecture, design and the very way that we live.
“The space welcomes visitors into an intimate atmosphere, evoking the elegance of a domestic setting,” writes Studio Klass. “Here, tradition and innovation intertwine: a suspended metal mesh plays with transparency, tracing a fluid boundary between public and private, while a central totem, inspired by the city’s architectural skyline, reinterprets the concept of the skyscraper as an iconic element of Milan’s landscape and a symbol of its evolution.”
Skyscrapers – or rather, tall buildings – appear in black and white in the video installation. They look like photographs, but they are images in motion.
Unità Residenziale al Monte Amiata | © Fondazione Aldo Rossi
They look like photographs, but they are images in motion. The stars, however, are the architects who, in collaboration with Molteni&C, have shaped the language of design, weaving together past and present: the master of modernity, Gio Ponti, with his iridescent façades of Palazzo Montedoria (1968–71) and the Torre e Casa Rasini in Porta Venezia (1933–34); Angelo Mangiarotti, who, together with Bruno Morassutti, designed the house in Via Gavirate 27 and the building in Via Quadronno 24, both based on a single compositional principle, yet repeated in multiple variations; Aldo Rossi, with his residential unit in the Gallaratese neighbourhood (1969–70),
“the red dinosaur”, where "the building’s walkway embodies a way of life that is immersed in everyday events, domestic intimacy and countless personal interactions"; and Herzog & de Meuron, designers of Porta Volta’s Fondazione Feltrinelli (2008–2016), the gateway to Milan’s historic centre that has redefined an entire district.
“Milan is like the tip of an iceberg. Beneath lies its vast history. You can say ‘Milan, Milan’ over and over, you can try writing it again and again.”
So wrote Aldo Nove in Milano non è Milano (Milan is not Milan).
To capture the city’s multifaceted array of voices and perspectives, Doppiozero (a magazine, publishing house, network, and research community), has selected three authors to present the words of other writers regarding Milan. They are Umberto Fiori, musician, writer and poet; Federica Fracassi, actor, author and curator; and Giorgio Fontana, Bagutta Prize-winning novelist.
“A city of stone at first glance, hard and unyielding, yet softened by hidden gardens, cultured and contemplative.” These are the words chosen by Alberto Savinio to describe Milan in his sweeping portrait of the city, Ascolto il Tuo Cuore, Città (I Listen to Your Heart, City).
The Power Station of Art (PSA) is the first – and currently only – state-owned contemporary art museum in mainland China.
For UniFor, design has always been about more than just a product: each object the company creates represents a dialogue between the user and maker, and embodies its vision for how a space should make you feel.
A two-dimensional representation, both visual and graphic, of a story spanning almost a century: this is the essence of the Museum 2D exhibition, curated by Ron Gilad.
