During Milan Design Week 2026, the rooftop of BASE Milano will again be transformed into a place to experiment with multiform practices of radical conviviality.
Twenty students will travel from the Royal College of Art in London to build a temporary community: for seven days, they will act as sensible observers and embodied researchers, experiencing and at the same time investigating the peculiar, trans-territorial and, for many reasons, controversial inhibiting processes that characterise the city of Milan during such a peculiar moment as its annual Design Week.
Once known as the “Salone del Mobile” (Furniture Fair), today the Milan Design Week is no longer just a place to exhibit the latest design products, but a sort of “week of the weeks”: a global space that literally takes over the whole city, capturing and symbolizing the connections between multiple design world(s) and innovative technologies, business models and (un)sustainable living.
RCA Students will engage, both with the city and with the building they’ll inhabit, as embedded architectural journalists. With the aim of discussing and unpacking unconventional living conditions, they will collectively re-activate “The Camp”.
This year, the terrace that overlooks via Tortona from the top of BASE’s industrial premises will be reconfigured by Lemonot with a new spatial layout and a series of deployable elements: tribunes and itinerant table topographies will be placed within a U-shaped landscape of tents – enhancing the convivial nature of the campsite, fostering spontaneous exchanges and conscious interactions between participants.
This tridimensional ground will be playfully colourful : tents and vegetation will emerge almost seamlessly from a red, yellow and blue topography. A constellation of architectural components: wooden platforms, textile surfaces and soft rubber carpets will reinforce the heterogeneity of the palette, while constructing a calibrated balance between privacy and collectiveness.
Campsites – historically and typologically – have always been places to test practices of adaptation, where routines are intuitively discussed, challenged and subverted. What does it mean to construct and activate a campsite on a building’s rooftop, during the Milan Design Week?
Live Camp-ing won’t only be a space to sleep and co-live, but also a place for social and cultural production, where ordinary acts become exceptional and convivial cohabitation augments processes of creative collaboration.
While assembling their experiential week-long journal – through firsthand spatial reports, designed interviews and inspiring chance encounters – students will take over the RCA’s Instagram account: every post will act as both documentation and interpretation – showing what is happening while also reflecting on its significance.
They will reflect on how contemporary practices build international alliances to interweave design, architecture, art, research and performance – using them as devices to operate within today’s societal challenges.
Reaching the RCA’s global network, this Instagram takeover will offer insights into selected ideas, conversations, processes of production and display: aligned with BASE’s 2026 conceptual framework, RCA students will report live from the Milan Design Week programme to identify multiple notions of “DARKNESS”. They’ll frame it consciously yet optimistically – as a construct that does not limit itself to a single interpretation: it is a field of tensions and possibilities, a fertile condition, a place of resistance and a construction site for desirable futures.
Furthermore, each day at 4 pm the campsite will be animated by curated dialogues between the RCA temporary community and the artists that participate to Temporary Home – a project that transforms the rooms of the casaBASE guesthouse, five temporary studios: living quarters, sites of experimentation, platforms for personal research, and exhibition environments.
The week will then culminate with a convivial roundtable on Saturday 25th April: a polyphony of voices including RCA fellows and tutors, where imagination meets critical thought and a genuine interest in how architecture becomes a situated practice – challenging contexts, events and audiences.