Common Archive – The White Night of Design

There are cities that tell their stories through monuments. Milan, more subtly, tells its story through its archives. Not the institutional archives of official memory, but those in which a design takes shape before becoming an object, a space, a shared image. Drawings, laid out or folded; models and maquettes, both perfect and imperfect; photographs, notes, variations, trials: everything that precedes a finished work and preserves its potential. A heritage that is unique in both value and richness. 

As part of Common Archive – The White Night of Design – an initiative organised by the Salone del Mobile.Milano Observatory, supported by the Lombardy Region and the Municipality of Milan, in collaboration with the School of Design at the Politecnico di Milano – these places are being made accessible, in a single programme of guided tours and free events. From 6.30 pm to 11.00 pm on 24th April, during the most international week of the year, Common Archive will transform this network of knowledge into a framework for interpreting and sharing a heritage, which is also – and perhaps above all – a method, underscoring archives as active spaces: critical infrastructures in which design is deposited, organised and made accessible for renewed perusal.  

For this first edition, through an open call, Common Archive has involved the main nodes of the city’s archive system, which represents one of the highest concentrations of design memory at international level. From the Cittadella degli Archivi, with its almost industrial scale of conservation, to CASVA – Centro Alti Studi sulle Arti Visive in its new premises designed by Piero Bottoni, and on to institutions such as Triennale Milano with the Centro Cuore and the Politecnico di Milano, the itinerary also takes in association and museum archives, such as the AIAP Centre for Graphic Design Documentation and the Compasso d’Oro Historical Collection at the ADI Design Museum, the vast Fondazione Fiera Milano Archive, and culminates in the treasures held in the Bertarelli Print Collection at the Sforzesco Castle. These institutions conserve, study and make accessible over 150 collections and archives.  

The programme for the first White Night of Design would not have been complete without the studio-homes, archives and foundations of the leading figures of the 20th century – from Achille Castiglioni to Franco Albini, Vico Magistretti to Gae Aulenti, Giovanni Muzio, Gio Ponti, Giancarlo Iliprandi, Bruno Danese and Jacqueline Vodoz – figures whose spaces reveal a more intimate dimension of design, in which practice intertwines with daily life and the narrative is sometimes entrusted to the younger generations of the family, through anecdotes that no printed monograph can convey.