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Cesare Correnti 14
Via Cesare Correnti, 14
On the occasion of Milan Design Week 2023, Anotherview in collaboration with Nature Squared presents VIEW 20, a limited edition custom architectural installation that reframes views of conceptual art, material design, nature, and travel.
This creative collaboration brings together Swiss-based Nature Squared’s innovation and expertise honed over two decades of carefully sourcing natural waste materials, including tree bark, egg and seashells, and feathers, which they transform meticulously into sustainable luxurious surfaces, furnishings and accessories for leading architects and designers, with Milan-based collective ANOTHERVIEW’s exclusive 24-hour ‘digital nomad window’ into another time and landscape.
Each window tells the story of a day in the life of a different place, captured from a specific point by continuously filming for 24 hours in very high resolution, reflecting on each landscape and its beauty at a fixed moment.
“We are constantly looking for new ways to repurpose and reinvent our relationship with natural waste materials, and our new collaboration shows how designers, craftspeople and creatives can find practical yet beautiful design solutions to the issue of waste,” says Nature Squared co-founder Lay Koon Tan. “VIEW 20 is a natural evolution of our bespoke surfaces into archi-tectural applications for indoors and out.”
Installation imagery available to download here VIEW 20 is a 24-hour window on a mature banyan tree in Ranakpur, India, recorded by ANOTHERVIEW during an extensive 2018 tour through Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh in the month of August, the middle of the monsoon season.
On this occasion they “rented” the tree, and invited the inhabitants of a nearby village who do not usually have the opportunity to go there. The outstanding natural beauty of the tree attracted both people and a delightful menagerie of animals throughout the course of oneday and night, so that ANOTHERVIEW could paint a portrait of the daily life of a rural Rajasthani community.
Banyan trees, known for their extremely wide canopies and aerial roots, live for two to three hundred years and symbolise immortality. Banyans grow throughout India, where they are the national tree.
The frame designed by Hong Kong textile artist Elaine Yan Ling Ng - Nature Squared’s Chief Material Innovator - pays tribute to this humble yet captivating natural world in its hand-woven PASTORALE textile wall covering edged with strips of baked eggshell. PASTORALE is Elaine’s first textile collection designed exclusively for Nature Squared, and also features, along with bamboo reclaimed from discarded construction waste, on a tent-inspired canopy.
The columns, which pay homage to temple architecture in India, comprise TERRAMIQUE, a new moul-ded material made of sustainably sourced crushed eggshell; shown at Milan in architectural form for the first time. A 2.8-metre curved viewing bench with bamboo inlaid by hand in a starburst pattern, a signature classic Nature Squared technique, completes the installation, extending the viewing experience by connecting tactile materiality with another world.
“Here we wanted to think beyond the traditional frame, to reflect the significance of Indian architecture, rituals and its extraordinary landscape and people,” Elaine says. “Our new installation is born out of the desire to reinvent, rethink and reimagine materials, to create a completely new perspective.”
The collaboration is a spontaneous coalescence of ANOTHERVIEW’s window into the beauty of landscape, nature and culture, and Nature Squared’s sustainable surfaces which are hand-made at their own production facilities in the Philippines. The team of skilled craftspeople create a wide range of materials and products that are sought after for commercial and residential settings, and architectural projects.
“Our design creates a dialogue between the digital and physical through a shared material experience. We hope it inspires others by showing how design, research, science and creativity can come together to enable us to produce and live more sustainably,” Elaine adds.
