The new artisans

digital pioneers

While classic craft skills safeguard the city's historical memory, a new generation of urban pioneers is rewriting the rules of Milanese DIY culture. Inside former factories and regenerated courtyards, cast iron and sealing wax give way to biodegradable filaments, robotic arms, open-source code, and 3D modeling. This is the birth of Manufacturing 4.0: an ecosystem of shared spaces and high-tech workshops that look like they came straight out of Silicon Valley, yet remain deeply rooted in local heritage and tradition.

These new artisans aren't abandoning manual labor; they are enhancing it through digital ingenuity. From robotic arms shaping ceramics to the 3D restoration of fine art, these labs are proving that it is possible to produce in a sustainable, circular, and zero-kilometer way right in the heart of the metropolis.

Exploring their workshops means looking into a visionary Milan where design meets ethics, and technology becomes the new raw material waiting to be sculpted.

Housed inside the former Ansaldo engineering plant in the Tortona district, BASE Milano is a creative hub where fashion, graphic, and furniture designers converge. By sharing machinery, workspaces, and expertise, they form a unique cross-disciplinary ecosystem where AI meets 3D ceramics, finding an internationally renowned showcase each year during Milan Design Week.

BASE is a vibrant multidisciplinary space blending culture, art, music, coworking, and entertainment. It features an event venue, a bar & bistro (Un posto a BASE), and casaBASE, a boutique hostel and artist residency tailored for travelers, creatives, and exhibitors.

Just steps away from the Cimitero Monumentale, a finely restored 19th-century stable has been transformed into the city's first outpost for circular, zero-impact urban manufacturing.

LOM incubates creative micro-businesses utilizing robotics, clay 3D printing, and artificial intelligence, proving that cutting-edge fashion, jewelry, and furniture can be produced at zero kilometers while doing away with warehouses and pollution.

However, LOM is more than just this. This urban regeneration project also hosts “Dopolavoro”, a cocktail bar and vegetarian restaurant; Berto Studio, an interior design studio and D-House, the Urban Laboratory of Dyloan Studio, a Milan-based division specializing in new technologies for the established Italian textile company Bond Factory.

In the heart of Lambrate, amidst the red bricks of a Milan that excels at turning its industrial past into creative avant-garde, stands Fonderia Artistica Battaglia. Founded in 1913, this establishment is one of the oldest lost-wax casting foundries in Italy—a place suspended in time where fire, earth, and metal take shape through the mastery of artisans and foundrymen.

What makes Fonderia Battaglia a unique benchmark in Milan's "new artisans" scene is its extraordinary ability to reinvent itself. Far from being a mere museum of memory, the foundry has opened its doors to contemporary design, figurative art, and conceptual experimentation. Here, the ancient technique of lost-wax casting is no relic of the past, but a living, constantly evolving language.

OpenDot is a research and innovation hub, a Fab Lab dedicated to rapid prototyping and digital fabrication that is open and accessible to everyone.

The Fab Lab is divided into specialized work areas and equipped with an electronics lab, a woodworking shop featuring CNC machinery to process wood, metals, plastics, and textiles, as well as tools for experimenting with biomaterials.

One of the city's historic FabLabs and maker spaces. It is a true hub for digital fabrication, sustainable fashion (open fashion), technological interaction, and craftsmanship open to the community.

WeMake applies the open-source philosophy to material production: knowledge sharing, democratic access to machinery, and collective experimentation. Inside the space, computer numerical control (CNC) routers, 3D printers, laser cutters, and electronic boards coexist with sewing machines and manual workbenches.

A pioneer in the fields of Open Fashion, sustainable fashion, wearable technology, and inclusive design (with projects dedicated to healthcare and accessibility), WeMake demonstrates how new technologies can reconnect people with the manufacturing dimension.