Porta Venezia Design District 2025

During the last edition, after only 2 years since the birth of the Porta Venezia Design District, the main streets of the district have hosted 45 installations and 300 designers from all over the world, registering an estimated passage of more than 60,000 visitors, 50% more than the first year. The district also hosted some of the most important projects of Milan Design Week, winning the Fuorisalone Award with the Re-Creation installation by LASVIT, a leading glass processing company. For the 2025 edition, the Porta Venezia Design District presents No Boundaries Design. To Create, one must first question everything. In an age when the boundary between physical and digital reality is dissolving, when the boundaries between art, science, technology and nature are constantly renegotiating, design is an act of radical questioning, a field of tension between what exists and what could exist.
No Boundaries Design is not just a theme, but a manifesto: to create, one must first question everything.

Inspired by the visionary legacy of Eileen Gray, a pioneer of modernism and an erratic figure on the design and architecture scene, this year's concept is a detonator of new expressive possibilities. Just as Gray rejected clear-cut categorizations between art, design and architecture, No Boundaries Design breaks down disciplinary barriers to redefine the role of the contemporary designer: no longer a mere performer of functions, but an activator of questions, a builder of narratives, an explorer of hybrid spaces.

“Design can no longer be confined to one function, one material, one kind: it is a fluid language, a speculative process that embraces uncertainty: design becomes liquid, permeable, dialogic. No Boundaries Design is an invitation to rediscover the revolutionary power of doubt and to rethink the very perimeter of creativity: no longer traced by physical or semantic constraints but redefined as a space of ever-evolving freedom.” Comments Carlo Barbarossa Co-founder and Creative Director of the Porta Venezia Design District, continuing, “Overcoming boundaries means questioning matter and its ability to mutate, the geographies of thought that shape spaces, the invisible barriers - cultural, social, political - that design can and must break. The real creative act is not to build, but to dare to think what does not yet exist.”

In a context dominated by formal conventions and established paradigms, the Porta Venezia district develops as a diffuse immersive path, in which the language of design becomes a tool for deconstruction, re-signification, and cultural and social exploration. Through innovative installations, materials and processes, the exhibition narrative translates Gray's thinking into experience: the object is never static, the space is never definitive, the user is never passive.

“In the third year of the Porta Venezia Design District, the district manifests itself as a living organism in constant metamorphosis, where historical stratifications and new visions intertwine in a dynamic ecosystem of ideas and designs. The evolution of the district is the result of an increasingly dense relational fabric, built through careful study and sensitive reading of the urban and cultural context.” Enzo Perego Co-founder and Relationship Manager of the district continues. “Design, with its innate power to connect, becomes the language through which the district tells its story and renews itself, generating new synergies and transforming space into a palimpsest in continuous rewriting, capable of welcoming the unexpected and redefining the cultural map of the city.”

The works on display challenge the idea of boundaries - between interior and exterior, between functional and poetic, between memory and future - and take the form of visual and tactile interrogations, capable of stimulating new ways of interaction and perception. Design, therefore, frees itself from all dogmatic constraints to become a gesture of research, a critical act, an exercise in possibility. The Porta Venezia Design District proposes itself as a laboratory of ideas in perpetual movement, an open ground for experimentation, where the concept of limit dissolves to leave room for possibility, questioning, discovery: to create means, first and foremost, to question. Only by breaking down the boundaries of thought is it possible to redefine the meaning of doing design today.

In a virtuous dialogue between renewal, transformation and design, PRIMA ASSICURAZIONI, the tech company that has revolutionized the Italian insurance industry through technology and digital, chooses to dress Porta Venezia Design District as Main Partner for the 2025 edition of Milan Design Week, collaborating with the visionary creative studio TOILETPAPER, founded by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari. The artistic intervention will reinterpret urban spaces through the recognizable and impactful visual language of TOILETPAPER's iconic snakes to represent the tale of a fast and dynamic reality that “changes skin” but remains consistent with itself. Just like Milan's urban spaces and like PRIMA itself, which in ten years of activity has been able to rapidly impose itself in a traditional market such as the insurance one, with more than 4 million active customers, without ever losing the innovative charge that has always characterized its technological DNA. Moreover, in an age in which experimentation and contamination become sap for new visions, technology is not only the engine of the future, but also that one thing destined to permeate all people's activities, an element, indeed, that knows no “boundaries”.

“We chose to support Porta Venezia Design District not only because it is the place where the beating heart of PRIMA lives, our headquarters in the center of Piazzale Loreto, but above all because it represents an innovative and disruptive reality, in which we identify ourselves. For the very same reason, we strongly wanted to collaborate with TOILETPAPER. A creative studio that is unmistakable for its visionary stylistic signature, which we feel akin for its ability to redraw the rules of the game.” Commented Fabia Bernacchi, Global Head of Communication at PRIMA ASSICURAZIONI. “In fact, the choice of their visual encapsulates the essence of the collaboration: PRIMA ASSICURAZIONI is a dynamic reality that has been able to become an important reference point in the Italian insurance market in a very short time, with unprecedented growth, and it has done so by remaining faithful to its initial mission to innovate and to bring, thanks to technology, added value to the entire insurance supply chain, all the way to our customers, who can count on competitive prices and an excellent user experience”

“The snake pattern envelops the Porta Venezia district as a pulsing symbol of metamorphosis, a flow of energy in constant evolution. We were fascinated by the synergy created with the district and the confrontation with a reality such as PRIMA, outside our usual field of action until now. And this is precisely the strength of design and creativity: the ability to dissolve boundaries, weave unexpected connections and transform each encounter into an unprecedented visual and conceptual tale.” - comments Pierpaolo Ferrari, founder of TOILETPAPER.