One of Milan’s iconic nightlife spots has been redesigned thanks to additive manufacturing. This is Terrazza Aperol, overlooking Piazza Duomo, which serves as the setting for an interior design project that blends aesthetics, sustainability, and technological innovation. Behind the project is eXgineering, an Italian startup specializing in 3D printing, which created the key design elements using recycled polycarbonate and RAM technology (Robotic Additive Moulding).
The intervention, led by the architectural firm Vudafieri-Saverino Partners, stands out for its design language featuring vibrant colors, sustainable materials, and fluid shapes. All of this expresses the Aperol brand’s values of togetherness and sharing, conveyed through an immersive visual narrative.
Within this concept, eXgineering created the most exclusive components of the bar: the entrance wall and the lamp screens. These structures share a three-dimensional texture inspired by wave-like movement, made from recycled polycarbonate and 3D printed. The RAM technology used by eXgineering, with controlled melting and cooling processes, allows for shaping complex, multilayered, and non-coplanar geometries. This helps preserve the material’s mechanical properties, including strength, transparency, and crystallinity.
The choice of polycarbonate is no coincidence. “This isn’t your typical cheap plastic, but a material that offers lightness and transparency, safety, and mechanical strength. It holds great potential both in terms of creative freedom during the design and development phase and in terms of safety and environmental sustainability,” explains Simone Maccagnan, Business Development Director at eXgineering. In fact, polycarbonate can be recycled multiple times, as long as it is properly treated and collected. “This project demonstrates how 3D printing, combined with the characteristics of polycarbonate, is redefining the limits of contemporary design, offering new creative and productive opportunities.”
Large-scale 3D printing, applied here to interior design, allows for a seamless blend of craftsmanship and industrial production. It creates unique formats that are difficult to achieve through traditional methods, bringing them to life through computational architecture and the morphological freedom of additive manufacturing. The result is a distinctive, customizable, scalable, and sustainable design, perfectly integrated into Milan’s urban identity and the Aperol brand’s aesthetic.
With previous projects also completed in Venice, eXgineering confirms its innovative capabilities. Furthermore, it opens new possibilities for using 3D printing in the food design and interior decoration sectors.
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