Milan 2013: Dutch designer Bertjan Pot has created lightweight chairs for furniture brand Arco that have wooden seats with edges curved tightly over the aluminium frames.
Designed for Dutch furniture brand Arco, Buzz by Bertjan Pot combines 3D-formed, wafer-thin veneers with tubular aluminium frames in order to make the chairs as lightweight as possible.
The ultra-thin veneers allow the seat to fold closely around the frame in all directions.
Available in beech or oak, the chairs come with legs in a variety of colours.
Buzz forms part of a range called Table Manners that features tables, chairs, cabinets and other small pieces of furniture, all of which were presented at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan last month.
Milan 2013: a coffee table topped with a giant hard-boiled sweet and a white chocolate chair are among items in a series of edible furniture by design studio Lanzavecchia + Wai (+ slideshow).
Designed in response to the current economic climate, the decorative or unnecessary elements of the furniture can be eaten until all that’s left is what’s needed for basic functionality. Lanzavecchia + Wai used a range of food types to build up each item around its pared-down black iron version.
The Hard Candy coffee table has a top made from a huge hard-boiled sweet that leaves one saucer at the end of each leg after it has been nibbled away.
Twenty-four kilograms of white chocolate was formed around a stool to create the Chocolate chair.
Rice bricks glued together with starch form a backrest for a bench, draped with a cotton quilt full of dried beans.
A table top baked into a cracker balances on stacked tins of corned beef, which can be removed as the table is munched to leave a simple tray.
The pieces were shown as part of a series of food-based projects at the Padiglione Italia‘s Foodmade exhibition, located in the Ventura Lambrate district of Milan.
The domestic landscape reflects our culture, our taste and our habits. The objects that populate it absorb the atmosphere that pervades the space through their physicality, functionality and identity.
Ostensibly living intact through good times and also adverse ones, the domestic objects become invisible to us over time with their familiarity.
How can furniture react to times of crisis? The decorational elements that were once appreciated, suddenly become superfluous and should evolve to reflect a new era of austerity; the objects become edible and offer themselves to be consumed when needed.
In four conceptual objects, Lanzavecchia + Wai repropose basic nutrients, carbohydrates, proteins, sugar and chocolate as food reserves which at the same time complement and finish the objects by covering elemental metal structures.
Piece by piece the object is eroded, exposing a soul, the core-function, which will remain over time. This will encourage us to re-think what basic necessities are: a true reflection on the essence of the things that will lead us into the future.
The Austerity collection consists of Hard Candy coffee table, Chocolate chair, Grains sofa and Hardtack table.
Milan 2013: Rossana Orlandi curated an exhibition of work by designers including Nacho Carbonell, Front and Studio Libertiny at the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum in Milan.
Pump It Up by Nacho Carbonell
Spanish designer Carbonell hung loops of silicone tubing from metalwork angled at 45 degrees then filled them with blue LED lights, creating a chandelier commissioned by fashion brand Vionnet (top).
Medium Memoralia by Nacho Carbonell
He also exhibited a chair with wings of steel cubes and marble sculptures that resemble cat-giraffe hybrids.
A cabinet shaped by a mathematical calculation to absorb noises by Dirk Vander Kooij and a yellow mobile prototype lamp from Front’s lastest collection were also on display.
Yellow Mobile by Front
Open for Milan’s design week earlier this month, the exhibition was located in the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum – a 19th century family house converted into a museum to preserve its interiors and display the family’s decorative arts collection.
Bagatti Valsecchi Design Shop by CLS Architetti
A small wire-mesh house designed by Italian studio CLS Architetti was constructed underneath the grand staircase to host the museum’s shop, also curated by Orlandi.
2.0 an Exhibition at the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum – Milan
Two Landlords and two Ladies, plus a magnificent Mansion have created an exhibition that opens up a dialogue between past and present trends.
Desk, chair and printer table by Enrico Marone Cinzano
Like one would do with a flower composition, 16 artists display their pieces in an untouched environment of blissful past beauty developed over the centuries by a generous family who later wished to share their home with everyone.
Medium Mobile by Nacho Carbonell
Fausto and Giuseppe Bagatti Valsecchi, together with patroness Goga Ashkenazi and Rossana Orlandi who provided the creative inspiration for it, are celebrating a new interpretation of a red thread bridging the Past with the Contemporary spirit.
Bust Chair (left) and Martha Hertford Vase (right) by Tomas Libertiny
From Home to Home, the endless and timeless journey of artworks and exquisite pieces that are made to last is marked by a softly inspirational beginning, as Rossana Orlandi did it, almost silently and cosily placing 14 chairs into the rooms of the Museum for the watchmen to rest and proving that beautiful objects never clash but rather nurture each other. Nacho Carbonell’s magnificent Chandelier inspired by Maison Vionnet is one of the multi-faceted interpretations of the concept of mixing forty-five degrees and blue.
Transmission Lamp by Studio DeForm
The rooms host artworks from Front Design, Studio Deform, Paul Heijnen, Niels Hoebers, Tomas Libertiny, Yukiko Nagai, Frederique Morrel, Dirk Vander Kooij, Maarten Baas, Martin Smith, President Von Pelt, Enrico Marone Cinzano, Massimiliano Locatelli Cls Architetti, Manuela Crotti and Giampiero Milella.
Stop Motion Video by Niels Hoebers
A rejuvenating feeling around a family museum and the beginning of a passionate endeavour.
Milan 2013: Foster + Partners has designed a coffee table made by stretching a perforated disk of steel upwards to form a metal-mesh base.
The Teso table by Foster + Partners for Molteni&C is pressed and twisted into a tapered cylinder by a robotic arm.
A circular transparent glass top allows the structure to be seen from any angle. It’s available in a brushed stainless-steel, brushed brass or bronze-painted finish.
Milan 2013: French designer Jean-Marie Massaud has created chunky grey seating resembling the jagged forms of an iceberg for Swedish furniture brand Offecct.
Massaud’s Airberg collection for Offecct comprises a long sofa and a chunky chair, both with an asymmetrical backrest.
“Airberg consists of a structural case that gives the impression of being filled with a vacuum, but is in reality filled with a flexible padding material,” explained Offecct.
The collection, currently still in prototype form, is one of the first results from the new Offecct Lab research and development initiative.
Airberg by Jean-Marie Massaud is an innovative piece of furniture that breaks with conventions.
Airberg is one of the first results to come out of the work at Offecct Lab, a strategic initiative designed to concentrate Offecct’s efforts in the development of new solutions and new products. Airberg is not ready for production yet, but should be seen as a result of an ongoing R&D process where Offecct and Jean-Marie Massaud dared to develop a piece of seating furniture for the meeting places of the future.
The inspiration behind the form of Airberg is a combination of a comfortable, inviting piece of seating furniture and an iceberg filled with vacuum. The furniture’s abstract form is light in its expression and Airberg is contemporary both in its design and in the technique used.
“Offecct is prominent in offering the market a strong and varied product selection. This means that with Airberg I could take a step further and break with conventions and question existing norms of what a piece of seating furniture usually looks like,” says Jean-Marie Massaud.
Airberg consists of a structural case which gives the impression of being filled with a vacuum, but is in reality filled with a flexible padding material. The unique craftsmanship used in the production of Airberg makes it possible to create a deconstructed piece of furniture that is more defined in its asymmetry. Jean-Marie Massaud has created a piece of furniture that is comfortable, sustainable and competent, making it highly contemporary.
“Offecct has always worked continuously with product development and lately we have intensified our efforts to taking yet another step in creating innovative and challenging products for the international market,” says Kurt Tingdal, CEO, Offecct.
“With Airberg, Offecct, together with Jean-Marie Massaud, take a great leap in that direction resulting in a unique piece of furniture that has to be experienced,” Kurt Tingdal concludes.
Milan 2013: Spanish designer Patricia Urquiola unveiled a chair with a backrest wrapped in rush for Italian brand Moroso in Milan this month.
Patricia Urquiola’s Mathilda chair for Moroso has a curved plywood backrest, which comes encased in woven rush or in fabric and is bound to the A-shaped wooden legs with a contrasting colour.
Milan 2013: Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa has designed a set of minimal dials to monitor air temperature, pressure and humidity for Italian brand Magis.
The Meteo barometer, thermometer and hygrometer come with a special stand to display all three together on a desktop, but can also be separated and mounted on a wall.
“There is a certain appeal about gauges that we find on cars and air planes,” says Fukasawa, who added clear grey markings and a bright green needle to each simple white face.
Dezeen and MINI World Tour: designer Ron Arad launched a range of 3D printed eyewear in Milan earlier this month. In this movie he discusses his pioneering 3D printing experiments in 1999 and his views on the technology today.
The glasses feature one-piece frames of printed polyamide with flexible joints instead of hinges. “It’s the first pair of glasses that I know about that is one component,” says Arad. “It’s monolithic.”
The frames are the latest concept designed by Arad for new brand pq eyewear, of which he is co-founder. Yet he says the fact that they’re printed is uninteresting: “Who cares?” he says. “What we care about is does it work well? Does [printing] give you freedom to do things you can’t in other techniques? Not the fact that it’s printed.”
Arad was an early pioneer of 3D printing as a way of making finished products rather than prototypes. His 1999 show Not Made by Hand, Not Made in China, which featured lights, jewellery and vases, was several years ahead of other designers’ experiments in with a technology that at the time was called “rapid prototyping”.
“There was a lot of excitement in the technology,” says Arad. “It was obvious that it would be embraced by lots of people, and then that technology would be less exciting. You could do more exciting things but the technology would be, and should be, taken for granted.”
“If you ask my studio to send you a movie of how say [the A-Frame] glasses are made you’ll see there’s so much manual work around it and so much fiddling,” says Arad, explaining that the glasses require a skilled workforce to assemble. “I don’t want to take the jobs from these people, but [printing] is a different way of doing something.”
Arad helped come up with the pq logo and brand name, which refers to the spectacle-like forms of the letters p and q. “It’s a new brand that we started from the ground up,” Arad explains. “We had to invent a name for a brand of eyewear, we had to do the logo. [It’s called] pq because when you write p and q you draw glasses, and they are palindromic, so you can look at it from [the other side].”
The glasses are featured in Print Shift, our one-off, print-on-demand magazine about 3D printing.
Milan 2013:Zaha Hadid folded a round sheet of plastic to create this chair for Italian brand Sawaya & Moroni (+ slideshow).
The single indigo-coloured sheet has been creased along two lines so the edges almost meet at the back, then bent in the middle to create the seat and backrest.
Edges that touch the floor have been levelled to stabilise the chair.
Scored bands follow the shape of the seat and curve around droplet shaped holes in each side.
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