Hasta La Ideas

Along with the nearby ECAL exhibition, Studio Formafantasma’s “De Natura Fossilium” at Palazzo Clerici was one of the most buzzed-about projects in the Brera District this year—after all, Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin consistently present excellent work during at the Fuorisalone, and this year was no exception. The Eindhoven-based pair often look to their Italian heritage for inspiration; this time around, they took inspiration from the November 2013 eruption of Mount Etna, creating a beautiful collection of tablewares, textiles and small furniture items from the byproducts of volcanic activity.

The project page for “De Natura Fossilium” does a far better job of explaining the work than I ever could, including striking photos by Luisa Zanzani; the “Process” section in particular illustrates the depth of Formafantasma’s practice.

Volcanic glass, procured by remelting Etna’s rocks, has been mouth-blown into unique vessels or cast into box-like structures that purposefully allude to the illegal dwellings and assorted buildings that have developed at the foot of the volcano. Drawing on their own vocabulary, these solitary glass boxes and mysterious black buildings have been finished with such archetypal Formafantasma detailing as cotton ribbons and Murano glass plaques.

In homage to Ettore Sottsass, the great maestro of Italian design
and an avid frequenter of the volcanic Aeolian islands, this new body of work takes on a linear, even brutalist form. Geometric volumes have been carved from basalt and combined with fissure-like structural brass elements to produce stools, coffee tables and a clock.”

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It’s an increasingly pressing question in this day and age, and one that has certainly seen some interesting responses—including this interdepartmental collaboration from Switzerland design school ECAL—as an evolving dialectic between two closely related design disciplines. Exhibited in Milan’s Brera District during the Salone del Mobile last week, “Delirious Home” is comprised of ten projects that explore the relationship between industrial design and interaction design. (Naoto Fukasawa, for one, believes that the former will eventually be subsumed into the latter as our needs converge into fewer objects thanks to technology.)

Both the Media & Interaction Design and the Industrial Design programs at the Lausanne-based school are highly regarded, and the exhibition at villa-turned-gallery Spazio Orso did not disappoint. In short, professors Alain Bellet and Chris Kabel wanted to riff on with the “smart home” concept—the now-banal techno-utopian prospect of frictionless domesticity (à la any number of brand-driven shorts and films). But “Delirious Home” transcends mere parody by injecting a sense of humor and play into the interactions themselves. In their own words:

Technology—or more precisely electronics—is often added to objects in order to let them sense us, automate our tasks or to make us forget them. Unfortunately until now technology has not become a real friend. Technology has become smart but without a sense of humor, let alone quirky unexpected behavior. This lack of humanness became the starting point to imagine a home where reality takes a different turn, where objects behave in an uncanny way. After all; does being smart mean that you have to be predictable? We don’t think so! These apparently common objects and furniture pieces have been carefully concocted to change and question our relationship with them and their fellows.

Thanks to the development of easily programmable sensors, affordable embedded computers and mechanical components, designers can take control of a promised land of possibilities. A land that until now was thought to belong to engineers and technicians. With Delirious Home, ECAL students teach us to take control of the latest techniques and appliances we thought controlled us. The students demonstrate their artful mastery of electronics, mechanics and interaction, developing a new kind of esthetic which goes further than just a formal approach.

The ultimate object—still missing in the delirious home—would be an object able to laugh at itself.

Photos courtesy of ECAL / Axel Crettenand & Sylvain Aebischer

“Delirious Home” was easily a highlight of this year’s Fuorisalone and was duly recognized with a Milano Design Award. The video, which features all of the projects, is well worth watching in full:

Additional details and images of each project below.

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Alessandro Mendini reflects the playfulness of Alessi in a miniature town set on a backdrop of futurist painter Gerardo Dottori’s work.

In this year’s deep-dive into Italian design history, Milan’s Triennale Design Museum staged The Syndrome of Influence a three-part exhibition asking contemporary designers to reflect and interpret the work of historic Italian designers and brands. Progressing from post-war Italian designers to the continued work of current Italian manufacturers, the exhibition’s emphasis was more on exhibition design rather than the showcase of specific objects.

ZANUSO stamped aluminum plates litter the gallery floor.

Beginning with the period immediately following the second World War, curator Silvana Annicchiarico tapped and impressive roster of young Italian designers to create homages to the giants of post-war Italian design. Of the ten installations, which also included work by Martino Gamper/Gio Ponti, Italo Rota/Joe Colombo and Studio Formafantasma/Robert Sambonet, my favorite was from Blumerandfriends. In their installation for the editor, designer and architect Marco Zanuso, they ask attendees to push a button, a trigger that starts a short video loop on a television—soon a countdown clock starts up and the strange industrial box mounted on the wall lights up. An explosion of compressed air accompanies the expulsion of a thin sheet of stamped aluminum with the word ZANUSO. As aluminum plates mound on the floor of the exhibition, the critique is clear: although Zanuso and his contemporaries were huge proponents of industrial production as a means for creating a better world, the limits of this perspective are now quite clear.

In Alessandro Scandurra’s ode to Ettore Sottsass, Scandurra wallpapers a room with the boldness of Indian iconography. Focusing on Sottsass’ transformational experience in India, Sottsass projects a flash of totemic inspiration between stills of Sottsass’ work.

Matilde Cassni and Francesco Librizzi’s tribute to Bruno Munari’s Useless Machines was a crowd favorite—attendees would traverse the room, hanging on rods, and becoming part of the installation.

Paolo Ulian interprets the work of Vico Magistretti. The shadows on the wall assume the, “threadlike appearance” of Magistretti’s work.

Studio Formafantasma’s tribute Roberto Sambonet’s tableware and kitchenware.

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As people travel from around the globe to Milan for the annual design shows, Tom Dixon and adidas have teamed up to show us “everything-you-can-pack-neatly-in-a-bag-for-a-week-away.”

The timely launch of The Capsule collection during the busiest travel season on the design calendar, heralds a two-year partnership between the product designer and the sportswear company. The first apparel collection from Tom Dixon, The Capsule premieres new typologies of bags, apparel and footwear. The foundation of the collection is two travel bags—a hard and soft case—”an experiment in capsule thinking in which luggage unclasps, unzips and unfolds to reveal multiple layers.”

As with Tom Dixon’s design ethos for his furniture and lighting collections, removing a layer often reveals the pieces of a kit of parts—in this case, unzipping the luggage reveals foundation apparel that can be layered as a complete wardrobe for every possible occasion. Workwear and technical sportswear are clear influences on the collection. Reversible shirt-jacket, Work trousers, jumper and a boiler suit were favorites. Accessories including a folding camp bed, down coat sleeping bag, traveller wallet and compartment bag round out the collection. Suede and canvas boots, shoes and more traditional espadrilles give a traveler four-seasons of footwear to choose from.

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I’m not sure if any of our readers are so attentive as to note that I’d promised a follow-up post about Dutch designer Jólan van der Wiel‘s booth at Ventura Lambrate, but before we all completely forget about that wonderful week in Italy in anticipation of the forthcoming ICFF, I’d like to share photos and a video from Milan.

While the original “Gravity Stool” dates back to 2011, he’s refined the process a bit and branched out into other semi-crystalline objects such as a candle holder and a basin for the Salone.

Of course, the highlight was the series of daily demonstrations of his unconventional fabrication process. Where RISD’s Taylor McKenzie-Veal made his “This Little Piggy” banks by subjecting a mundane material (per the theme of their show, “Transformation”) to a series of simple processes, van der Wiel’s self-produced machinery was impressive in and of itself.

Instead of attempting to describe the apparatus, I’ll refer you to the video, as promised, after the jump…

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