Habitare Materials
Habitare Materials
Habitare Materials is a new kind of interactive material library at Habitare, where visitors can explore surface materials and experiment with combinations of different materials for their projects and purchases. As a visitor, you can choose, combine, and arrange the displayed material samples to create your own collage on the collage table, which you can capture and share. Additionally, you will receive product information from manufacturers for the materials you like, helping with future purchases.
The goal is to provide a participative exhibition experience for the visitors, increase material awareness and enable a new way of participation for material manufacturers.
Habitare Materials & Objects Exhibition at Milan Design Week 2025
The Habitare Materials exhibition will be shown in spring 2025 at the world’s most important design event, Milan Design Week, 7-13 April 2025. Being present at Milan is a follow up of Habitare Materials’ successful debut at Milan in spring 2023.
This time, alongside Habitare Materials, the event in Milan will feature Objects, a display presenting Finnish products from furniture to light fittings. The Habitare Materials & Objects exhibition will be featured as part of the Alcova showcase, which has become a hit in Milan in recent years.
Behind Habitare Materials are NEMO architects Jussi Laine and Maria Klemetti Laine
“Habitare Materials is a material library that is available to everyone, letting people touch the samples, experiment, and create something new. The exhibition offers visitors space and freedom to browse through materials and explore their own tastes by experimenting with different combinations of surfaces and colours. The materials are attractively presented, and there is product information on each sample that visitors can photograph and take with them for making purchases,” say Jussi Laine and Maria Klemetti Laine of NEMO architects.
“Although we encourage playfulness, experimentation, and having fun in our booth, we want to challenge the trade fair visitors to think beyond the surface of materials,” Maria and Jussi explain. NEMO architects will be present at the booth throughout the entire fair to engage in discussions with visitors about materials, their effects, and characteristics.
The selection of building and interior materials is vast, and information is only available if one is willing to make an effort to seek it. Habitare Materials aims to provide information about the possibilities of materials to trade fair visitors and hopefully inspire people to reflect on their material choices and their reasons, the impacts of choices, and to make conscious decisions for their homes.
In 2024, the Habitare Materials exhibition featured imperfection and incompleteness
Maria Klemetti Laine and Jussi Laine of Nemo Architects, who designed and curated the material library, believed in respecting the layered nature of spaces and highlighting old. “Combining new things with something old, worn and patinated – which may have been cared for, repaired, renewed and painted over – formed layers of eras and cultures.”
Nemo Architects also encouraged embracing imperfection, whether it was with natural materials, DIY colour experiments, or wallpaper installation. They revealed that the 2024 exhibition also featured incomplete and unfinished elements. The design had something of a construction site feel to it.
In 2024, the exhibition architecture of Habitare Materials gained new layers and was more spatial than the previous year. There were room-like spaces featuring larger pieces of materials, both hanging and fixed, adding a spatial collage element to the exhibition.
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