Mondadori Duomo
The new flagship bookstore is an iconic place to disseminate culture, ideas and emotions, bringing a new light to Duomo Square.
Duomo Mondadori flagship bookstore in Milan, is a unique place, where the book returns to be the true protagonist.
Year:
2023Architect:
Il PrismaTypology:
High/end ExperiencePhoto:
Vito CorvasceLocation:
Milan, ItalyWhat is a book today? And what does the Duomo Square represent for the Milanese and the city’s guests?
A project that contains a fascinating challenge: not only to tell, through the spaces of the new flagship store, the values of Mondadori as a disseminator of culture and ideas for the wider audience of readers, combining history and tradition with innovation and development, but also to enhance the Duomo Square as a unique and iconic location of Milanese culture.
Three key ideas for the design concept developed: bookstore and book, Duomo Square, history of Mondadori.
The final result is a new destination for present, past and future culture — a unique flagship bookstore, which spreads over three floors, one of which is underground, for a total area of about 1,800 square meters. An emotional and experiential place, capable of generating surprise and amazement, curiosity and pleasure, a sense of discovery and reward — in a nutshell, emotions without limits.
Experiential areas on three levels: Ground floor
The bookstore’s ground floor featuring a system of arches, a recurring archetypal element in the project, generates amazement. Natural light filters through ample glass skylights emphasized by an installation of suspended sheets that conceptually invite you to fly high, to dream and stretch beyond your limits. A place for discovery and gathering, where readers, authors and books share the stage. Thanks to its flexibility, it can host Mondadori events that are completely open to public and mingle the experience in an all-encompassing way, while creating iconic and engaging moments. On the raised ground floor, a balcony has been built to create a second display level inside the bookstore, capable of generating visual continuity with the ground floor and stimulating a multidirectional visitor flow.
The Kids area
The Kids area, conceived as a kid-friendly world — with wooden trees, reading platforms, soft seats carved into the bookcases — invites the visitor to live an immersive experience of books. After entering the circular room, the child finds her/himself catapulted into a story, in an immersive and embracing space. The settings become dynamic and interchangeable thanks to a projection system that projects images and videos of stories in 360 degrees on all the internal curved walls of the room.
Underground floor
There are different thematic areas, designed as immersive, experiential and sensorial spaces, within which specific and imaginary worlds of reading are exploded — analogically and digitally. They are places that stimulate emotions, imagination, amazement and discovery, also by integrating different types of non-book products.
The Mondolibri area
Colored in blue and featuring a luminous installation of hanging lamps that resemble books with pages outspread like wings, inspiration comes from the logo — is an area where customers feel part of an exclusive club and where the bookseller takes on a key role in guiding them through a range of choices.
First floor
An immersive corridor amplified by mirrors that extend the experience of the luminous portico to the first floor, leads the visitor to the Comics and, in particular, to the Manga world — a meeting spot for teens and young adults. Glazed lunettes host 1:1 scale reproductions of comics heroes. The environment of the Comics area is characterized by an installation that starts from the back wall and expands to the ceiling, becoming lighting and backlit comics fragments. The heroes and their details become protagonists of the space, involving the visitor.
In the design, great attention was paid to energy improvement and the quality of the interior spaces, the quality of lighting and air, water management and the type of materials used with low-environmental impact, but also to the quality of the experience of the customer's visit to the bookstore. All this allowed the new bookstore to undertake the process of obtaining LEED certification for Interior Design & Construction (ID+C), the coveted Gold level.
