2011 Mini Sintesi Design Installation

(from Mini Press Release)  MINI at Milan Design Week 2011. Impressive installations take visitors on an invigorating journey through time.

Milan. MINI is showcasing its flair for design with two impressive exhibits at this year’s Salone del Mobile in Milan from 11 to 17 April 2011. As last year, MINI is using installations at Milan’s Università degli Studi and the Triennale Design Museum to highlight the brand’s “Creative Use of Space” philosophy. The glue holding the two works together is a time travel concept covering everything from the roots of the brand to the future of mobility.

MINI@INTERNI Mutant Architecture & Design: “MINI Sintesi”

The Mutant Architecture & Design exhibition initiated by renowned Italian design magazine INTERNI under the watchful eye of Gilda Bojardi, places MINI at centre stage through its design installation “MINI Sintesi”. The exhibit is on display in the magnificent Cortile d'Onore at Milan’s state university, the Università degli Studi di Milano, as part of the Fuori Salone 2011. Also participating in the show are Zaha Hadid Architects for Artemide and Ingo Maurer for ENEL. “MINI Sintesi” is a 3-D sculpture created by Head of MINI Design Anders Warming and his team. It embodies the evolution of the MINI Family – “from the original to the original” – using the contour lines of various cars’ profiles. The outlines of the individual cars use cylindrical extensions along various axes to produce a three-dimensional picture of MINI Design through the ages across a 6.5 x 6 x 2.7-metre surface. The contours of the classic Mini, framed by the silhouettes of the MINI Hatch, MINI Clubman, MINI Countryman and MINI Coupe Concept car – the most recent arrival – represent the centre point of the installation. The MINI Coupe Concept represents a foretaste of an innovative vehicle concept which is set to come onto the market before the year’s end.

“MINI Sintesi” expresses the iconographic design language of the individual family members through the colouring of the contour lines. When it came to the colour scheme for the sculpture, Anders Warming turned to the original exterior paint shades of the individual models. The structure of the futuristic installation is a reference to a fundamental design principle of the MINI family: all family members emerge from the same core and share the same genes. However, they also display some very different and individual characteristics. And so the overall form of the installation changes as you move around it, encouraging the visitor to view it from various angles.