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Redesign Tradition

Fabio Petronilli

Urban furniture inspired by the rural productive landscape.


The ingredients of this story are a creative commission, a group of architects interested in making and participation, and their interest for some iconic structures in the old rural productive landscape of the Azores Islands. We are in Sao Miguel where the Walk & Talk Street Art Festival Takes place. For its 4th edition, the curators invited Argot ou La Maison Mobile together with Mezzo Atelier to design some temporary pieces of urban furniture.

The two groups took inspiration from three iconic typologies related with the rural and agricultural economy: the wind mill, the "cafuão" which is an old structure used to dry corn, and the green house conceived for a specific local pineapple cultivation. The traditional and recognizable forms of such structures are transferred to the new urban furniture, so the windmill is transformed into a bench associated to an observatory, the cafuão becomes a multifunctional structure for plants or a table, and the green house turns into a platform-bench to be placed along the seaside. The architects produced the structure holding a participatory workshop involving citizens and students.

The short film tells us this story. Fabio Petronilli, filmmaker often collaborating with Argot ou La Maison Mobile to feature their projects in moving images, retraces the entire design and production process, from the very first idea to the participatory making. Starting from the idea of the festival’s curators to involve a designer group to produce something useful for the citizens, the film shows the architects studying the chosen structures and then follows the construction process. Old memories and new functions convey into a piece of urban furniture.

Credits

Mentioned project: Redesign Tradition (2015)
Project location: Sao Miguel, Azores Islands, Portugal

Portugal 2015
Duration: 15'17''