A project conceived by Simona Finessi in collaboration with Studio Caarpa as part of the Genova Design Week 2025.
For the first time, the Genova Design Week leaves the historic centre and lands in Sestri Ponente, one of the city’s most vital and identifiable districts, transforming via Sestri into a 700-metre immersive itinerary dedicated to design, architecture and creativity. From 21 to 25 May 2025, the Sestri Ponente Design Radar project will give life to a transformed urban landscape: a widespread experience made of shapes, thoughts and relationships.
The concept was conceived by Simona Finessi, born in Genoa, founder of Platform Network and co-director of Platform Architecture magazine, in synergy with the Caarpa studio, an emerging Genoese reality committed to research between landscape, architecture and urban reactivation.
The event is part of the official calendar of the Genova Design Week, organised by DiDe – Distretto del Design, and has been strongly supported by the City of Genoa.
Two installations, one story.
Sestri Ponente Design Radar is a single narrative organism articulated in two complementary installations:
– the display buoys, vertical and luminous, symbols of orientation and collective narration
– the Annie water lilies, horizontal and poetic, devices for stopping, contemplation and connection between centre and periphery
The buoys: mapping Genoa’s creativity
Physically designed by Studio Superluna, the six decagonal buoys are light and scenographic structures inspired by marine signage buoys. Each buoy hosts exhibition panels dedicated to 4 creative studios, for a total of 24 emerging Genoese studios in the fields of design, architecture, photography and graphics.
The curatorship and selection of the studios is entrusted to Simona Finessi, while Simona Finessi and Angelo Dadda, a founding partner of Platform Network and creative director of Platform Architecture magazine, designed the overall layout.
Annie: water lilies by Studio caarpa
Between one buoy and the next are the Annie Water Lilies, public seating inspired by the Amazon Victoria, the enormous tropical water lily that featured in the 1851 London World’s Fair. The name is a tribute to Annie, the architect Paxton’s daughter, who was portrayed on one of those gigantic leaves at the time.
Made of Valchromat, these installations become visual and tactile symbols of a temporary urban landscape. The water lilies will also be present in the heart of Design Week – in Piazza San Lorenzo – shaping a fluid gesture of creative pollination that symbolically connects centre and neighbourhood.
A navigable landscape
The project moves between metaphor and reality. The buoys and water lilies – vertical and horizontal, communicative and contemplative – are part of a single urban installation that transforms Genoa into a navigable garden, capable of inspiring, orienting, welcoming.
SESTRI PONENTE DESIGN RADAR is a journey between memory and future, between design and community. A project that expands the perimeter of Genoa Design Week, making it more inclusive, relational and profoundly identity-driven.
