The Temple of Design: New Places of Worship for a Multiethnic Society

Marking the Milan design week, IED is presenting an event entitled "The Temple of Design", a modern place of worship to cater for the needs of a multiethnic society.

Five projects are going on show in the Spazio Teatro IED Moda Lab, presenting a temple as a place of worship, but as a meeting place as well, that also features a library, a conference hall, a canteen and two museums, one temporary and the other permanent.

Here the students hope that eleven major religions will be able to cohabit peacefully: three of them descended from the religion of Abraham (Jewry, Christianity and Islam), three derived from Hindu origins (Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism), three from the Far East (Confucianism, Taoism and Shinto) and two that are located between the areas of Islam and Hinduism (Sikhism and Zoroastrianism).

Custom designed around the five models, the installation expresses the elements shared by all these religions, elements whose meaning remains unchanged in the various different traditions: water as the purifying element, the numbers from 1 to 10, the four elements and their symbols - earth, water, air and fire - and four colours: brown, dark blue, light blue and orange.