ALTARI UMILI.
(Humble Altars, For Lay Religions). Street Food Furniture for Milano EXPO 2015.

Developed for the common areas of Milano EXPO 2015, Altari Umili is a street food furniture project conceived to celebrate the lay spirituality embedded in food production and shared consumption.
Rather than functioning as a neutral object, the table operates as a conceptual device that frames everyday acts of eating as collective and symbolic practices.

The table is constructed through the combination of two ash wood elements. Massive wooden boards are locked together to form both the table and bench supports, without the use of carpentry joints or glues.
This constructive logic emphasizes simplicity, reversibility, and direct assembly, aligning material practice with the project’s symbolic intention.

Activate - Altari Umili activates forms of lay rituality associated with food by reconfiguring a functional object into a shared symbolic surface. Through its presence in a public context, the table transforms everyday gestures—eating, gathering, resting—into moments of collective recognition, temporarily suspending the separation between utility and meaning.

The project does not propose a new typology of furniture, but activates a condition in which material simplicity becomes a vehicle for shared symbolic experience.