From September 14th to 21st, Como hosts the seventh edition of the Lake Como Design Festival, which confirms itself as an international event capable of intertwining design, architecture, and art with the history and nature of the Lake Como area. Exhibitions, installations, and meetings portray Como as a crossroads of design cultures, a widespread laboratory where the fragment becomes an opportunity for reassembly and shared visions for the future, through the theme Fragments.
The new edition of the Lake Como Design Festival 2025 is titled Fragments and places the concept of fragment at the center as a metaphor of contemporaneity. In a society marked by crises and discontinuities, fragmentation becomes an opportunity for rebirth and resistance, a regenerative gesture that allows us to reinterpret memory and reconstruct new connections between people, objects, and places.
At the epicenter of the event, Villa del Grumello hosts the collective exhibition Fragments of Memory. In dialogue with this year's theme, the exhibition gathers works and archives of great contemporary masters and designers. From carpets inspired by Bruno Munari to ceramics by Enzo Cucchi, from transformable furniture by Vico Magistretti to the poetic modernism of Claudia Moreira Salles, each project becomes a living trace capable of reconnecting past and present.
The narrative expands with the contribution of DEDAR, which reinterprets Anni Albers' legacy through jacquard fabrics, and with the Vico Collection by Campeggi, which reintroduces transformable furnishings resulting from the collaboration with Magistretti. The dialogues between Mario Radice and Nanda Vigo, the visual research of Dayanita Singh, the set design by Archivio Mantero, and the experiments of WonderGlass build a mosaic in which the fragment is the material of memory and design.
The Contemporary Design Selection returns to the Kilometer of Knowledge park, curated by Giovanna Massoni. An open-air path, like a dispersed kunsthalle, that combines historic villas and landscapes by the lake. Designers from around the world reflect on fragility, regenerative acts, and memory as an archive of fragments: works that transform waste and forgotten materials into design narratives, linking design, society, and the environment.
The city of Como pays tribute to Aldo Rossi with the exhibition Architecture for Fragments, curated by Chiara Spangaro and hosted in the former church of San Pietro in Atrio. Drawings, texts, and photographs illustrate how the architect interpreted the fragment in his work, from the Monument to the Partisans in Segrate to the urban projects in Berlin. An intimate setting that invites the visitor to move freely between eras and ideas.
The film dedicated to Aldo Rossi
On September 14th, the Chamber of Commerce of Como-Lecco hosts the screening of the documentary Aldo Rossi design by Francesca Molteni and Mattia Colombo. Archive materials, testimonies, and unpublished images make up the first cinematic narrative dedicated to his legacy in design, including collaborations with Alessi, Artemide, Molteni&C, and Richard Ginori.
The festival also inaugurates the new headquarters of the Ico Parisi Design Archive in Via Diaz in Como, with the first solo exhibition dedicated to the pictorial series Edifying Collapses - Tables of Provocation. Created in the 1970s and 1980s, these works depict fragmented images as a tool for criticizing contemporary living. The Archive opens to the public as a place for study and consultation, preserving materials, works, and a rich library.
As every year, the Studio Visit program allows visitors to enter the creative spaces of the area, opening studios, archives, and galleries. The program also includes a tour dedicated to the Rationalist architecture of Como, offering a fresh perspective on the city's architectural heritage by connecting historical memory with contemporary practices.
