Porte, Doors, at Rossana Orlandi Gallery – Photos by Marco Menghi.
Design. Rossana Orlandi has always had a talent for spotting what others overlook. During Milan Design Week, she turns her attention to one of the most taken-for-granted elements in architecture: the door. Not as a functional afterthought, but as a charged symbol of possibility and passage. “We live in a moment so difficult and troubled in which, I believe, the meaning of a door — and what it can tell us — is fundamental. I translate it with two simple words: open and close,” she told Archipanic.
Maarten Baas and Joost van Bleiswijk at Porte, Doors, at Rossana Orlandi Gallery.
Doors divide and connect, shelter and expose, signal welcome or refusal. And yet “they have become one of the least interesting elements in design. The tendency is to make them neutral, technical — or, at best, invisible — at the cost of their aesthetic and symbolic potential,” Orlandi reflects. Her response was direct: “I invited architects and artists to rethink them, and push into a new frontier of spatial personalisation and collectible design — an unexplored territory ripe for experimentation.”
The exhibition that grew from that invitation — Porte, Italian for doors — is now on show at the Rossana Orlandi Gallery, Via Mandello 14 [Map]. What greets you inside is not a survey of hardware, but something closer to a meditation: portals and thresholds that slow you down, make you look, and ask what it truly means to cross from one space into another.
Door by Maarten Baas.
Each designer arrived at the brief differently. Maarten Baas shapes his door from industrial clay, finished in vivid colour and accompanied by domestic objects — a bed, a mirror, a broom. Spontaneous and quietly vulnerable, it wears its emotional weight on its surface. Kiki van Eijk takes a warmer temperature: her door, pastel-hued and ceramic-surfaced, draws on the looseness of childhood imagination — tactile, slightly unpredictable, stitched from sinuous shapes and shifting textures.
Door by Kiki van Eijk.
Joost van Bleiswijk pitches his contribution at a higher volume entirely. A saloon-style portal built on bold material combinations, it announces itself through sheer force of colour and form — punk, joyful, and unashamedly whimsical.
Joost van Bleiswijk’s door.
Where van Bleiswijk throws the door wide open, Luca Cippeletti makes you question whether one exists at all. His Socchiusa mimics a door left ajar through graphic design alone, hovering between two and three dimensions, presence and absence — the interpretation left entirely to you.
From left: doors by Luca Cippelletti and Patricia Urqiola.
Patricia Urquiola grounds the show in material intelligence. Her portal — developed with Scrigno and surfaced in Cimento, a lightweight cement-based material of organic character — treats the door as architecture in miniature, where substance is the statement. Michele de Lucchi, in a similarly purposeful register, offers a wooden portal oriented toward sustainability and whatever lies on the other side.
The Shift by Draga & Aurel at Galleria Rossana Orlandi – Photo by Federica Lissoni.
Draga and Aurel created atmospheric glass sliding doors. Washes of colour drift and overlap across the surface, producing something closer to painting than product. An artwork frames the scene, quietly dissolving the line between disciplines. “The Shift explores layering as both a visual and conceptual device in art and design,” Draga Obradovic told Archipanic.
Porte features designs by 19 architects, artists and designers, including Anotherview, Piet Hein Eek, Alessandro Ciffo, and more. The exhibition is, in the end, about what doors have always been about: the charged moment before the crossing, and everything that changes once you’re through.
All photos are by Marco Menghi, courtesy of Rossana Orlandi Gallery.
