The conference series Unfamiliar Places investigates the multiple relations, which exist today between architecture, contemporary art and other disciplines. Relations that enable todays design culture to create unique experiences, structures and spaces. Some of the most innovative results from the fields of various contemporary inventive practices are presented to investigate the phenomenon of contamination that often defines today’s most interesting works: a scenario where architecture encounters visual art, installation art encounters music and vice versa.

A series of conferences and discussions with architects and artists who regularly collaborate with other disciplines, who are active in several creative areas at the same time or who produce works combining inputs from different fields, provide an opportunity to observe possible parallelisms between different practices. Focus is put on disciplines, which engage space and matter.

A selection of architects, artists and musicians from different countries such as Germany, Italy and Spain present their work in a series of Werkschauen. The encounters of the edition 2017 were organized together with the Architectural Association of Milan, the Institute Cervantes and the Goethe-Institut Mailand, and were held during the months of May and June 2017 at the School of Architecture of Politecnico di Milano.