Described as “the most anticipated and talked about exhibit of 2019” by Elle Decor Magazine, Broken Nature – Design Takes on Human Survival at the Milan Triennal Museum, Italy is curated by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of the Department of Architecture and Design and Director of the Research and Development Department at MoMA New York.

Part of the US Pavilion at the 2019 International Milan Triennial, the RECKONstruct exhibition tells the story of how a revolution in innovative design and new materials is dramatically remaking the built environment in response to mitigate waste and environmental pollution.

Using a combination of immersive media and physical displays, the exhibition documents how New York-based furniture company Humanscale reimagined a simple stool through three different approaches to sustainability—using naturally grown materials (bio-fabrication), harvesting unused waste (closed loop), and mimicking nature’s engineering solutions (biomimicry).

A centerpiece of the RECKONstruct exhibiton is an immersive film by Pacific Virtual Reality together with global engineering firm Arup’s Los Angeles team.

Working with the Arup curating team in Los Angeles, Camilla Andersson and Anders Hjemdahl of Pacific VR created an immersive ultra-wide angle film in English and Italian which was projected on three contiguous walls at the exhibition, RECKONstruct logotypes, social media content, a trailer video, and conceptual, script, and technical consultancy.

In the film, the impact of the stools are brought to life through animations, MIT-researched facts, surround sound and 360-degree scenes from locations including the Los Angeles harbor, a rock quarry in Kansas, a Pacific coastal oak forest, a southern California reclamation yard, the Humanscale factory in New York City a landfill in southern Russia, and a California beach.

RECKONstruct invites you to immerse yourself in this new economy, experiencing its activities in spatial, audial, and temporal terms, exposing the hidden realities of the material life cycle as a call to both collective and individual action.

The RECKONstruct experience is featured at the Palazzo dell’Arte in Milan, Italy from March 1 to September 1, 2019.