Last week Milan Design Week 2026, Smarin Studio did something unusual in the Milan BASE: they opened a workshop, invited strangers in and gave them tools to make the facility’s furniture.
Over several days, more than 200 people, including students, local workers and community members, collectively gathered again Ua modular furniture system now in daily use in BASE’s common areas. The project not only produced something useful for the site community, but also the experience of making something together that none of the participants could have made alone.
re-U © Smarin
re-U © Smarin
re-U © Smarin
re-U © Smarin
re-U © Smarin
re-U © Smarin
re-U © Smarin
How it works
The format, developed by Stéphanie Marin’s Nice studio, is simple yet radical. For several days in April, two sessions were held daily, in the afternoon and in the evening, each open to anyone who wished to come. The system is called re-U and is made of U-shaped solid wood modules cut from offcuts of oak.
The units are combined through steel links and magnetic rods in an open series of configurations: seats, desks, partitions, shelves, platforms, micro-architectures. Everything can be disassembled, because the point of the system is not permanence but adaptability, furniture designed to support whatever the space needs to become the next.
“Project Culture”
One of the studio’s key references in creating re-U is Enzo Marie‘s Autoprogettazione, the 1947 manual in which the Milanese designer distributed free plans for making furniture from basic materials, teaching people how to make their own objects. Mari named the knowledge she imparted “project culture”the culture of projection, which is not just a skill, but an understanding, an intuition of why things are formed as they are, what produced them, what intelligence lives in their form.
Planning sessions take this principle and extend it to a collective. If Mari’s work focused on the experience of a single person, what happens if you combine 200 of them? They create commons, a shared experience and the construction of something that could not be done otherwise.
Collective construction and participatory design
This is why Marin proposes the participatory design model to wider institutions: schools, public offices, theatres, hospitals and the whole landscape of public space furniture. While furniture normally arrives in a space fully formed, selected by the highest and disconnected from its surroundings, a design session can reverse this logic.
“This type of process would allow institutions like public schools or social security offices a new kind of presence—a way to restore a relationship with the people they serve.” says Marin. By building the furniture together, learning about it and being able to fix or modify it as needed, a space like BASE it becomes truly shared as well as functionally.
Design locally
Smarin has described the design effort behind the sessions as an effort to see: to see the intersections that define a location and figure out what object needs to be produced. The form can travel, but everything in it is local. Each session produces furniture that could only have been made in that place, for a specific reason, by specific hands.
In recent decades, we have learned to ask where our food comes from: who grew it, where, from what soil. This knowledge changed the way we eat. We are just beginning to ask the same questions about the objects that inhabit our lives: where the wood grew, who shaped it, why it is there. And in the same way, the simple act of seeing and asking questions can change the way we move furniture that surrounds us and the functionality of the spaces we live in.
