Mini launches the “Inhabit Sound” project and it entails the renowned brand’s collaboration with SOS – School of Sustainability, the professional post-graduate training school founded in 2015 by architect Mario Cucinella, and since 2021 in the Milan headquarters of the architecture studio. The school was set up to train professionals in architecture and sustainable design, and the partnership with Mini confirms, first and foremost, the company’s interest in continuing, after the research projects carried out between 2005 and 2010, to explore themes linked to the future of the city, its communication, and ever more, today, towards sustainability and the search for well-being. Because, as Renzo Vitale, Sound Creative Director of the BMW Group who is supervising the educational project, says, sound can be a bearer of well-being. Again, he explains that a collective auditory awareness should be built: “This can be achieved by relating to cities as sound entities, understanding their weaknesses in order to redesign them acoustically through different levels of expression and complexity”.
Obviously, there is yet to be a clear design outcome of the research, on which students from nine countries enrolled in the academic year that has just begun; however, the devices are referred to as a “historical archive of the sounds of a city” and the connectivity aspects belonging to the Mini universe are, rightly, emphasised. Without foregoing a virtual output that involves the Metaverse. Historically bound to the urban domain, Mini will hence investigate the sounds of the city: the hypothesised plan aims to create sustainable spaces for listening, contemplation and sharing in various cities around the world, through the transformation of sound into a tangible and liveable form – almost as if it were a sustainable three-dimensional sculpture. These are interesting and ambitious goals that the school and the brand will pursue under the guidance of the designer Lorenzo Palmeri, an SOS teacher, who is also active in musical composition and production, and the collaboration of Caimi Brevetti, a leading company in acoustic sustainability that will make its facilities available for the research.
