Located in the historic center of Milan, the Brera Design District is a densely packed neighborhood with design showrooms. galleries and stores all vying for attention. Check out our gallery of noteworthy highlights including work from Tokujin Yoshioka, nendo, Raw Edges, Patricia Urquiola, and Studio Job.
As always, the graduate projects from Design Academy Eindhoven had quite an impressive showing this year with everything from material explorations to animal habitats and repurposed tooling machinery. Check out our quick snapshot of some of our favorite student work from this year’s presentation.
Design Academy Eindhoven
curated by Ilse Crawford
Studio Zeta
26, Via Fruili, Milano
Massoud Hassani, “Mine Kafon” a wind powered anti-landmine ball
Roel de Boer, “Mouse Ates,” suspended mouse habitat
Curated by a group of young Venetian designers, Edition of 6 took the simple idea of pairing Italian artisans with six young international designers to create a limited edition collection highlighting the traditions, materials and high-quality finishes of Italian craftsmanship. Each object plays to the strength of the pairings between design and craft. Master glassblowers, rare and precious marble processing, hand-wrought metalwork all find a place in contemporary design pieces. Check the jump for more images!
Edition of 6
Wannabee Gallery
Via Massimiano, 25
Ventura Lambrate, Milan
“Crystal Ball,” Mateo Zorzenoni with Pietro Viero + Sartori Marmi
We’ve finally found out exactly what “releasing infinitive light rays in white space, creating a scene as if light breaks through the cloud” means. The quote is how Tokujin Yoshioka described his then upcoming exhibition design for Moroso in our preview post. The result is more or less exactly that: a foggy, diffuse space strewn with his new Moon chairs and pierced with bright theater lights. Fog machines encased in white boxes were tuned just right, and the carpet had a velvety texture to dissipate light and reflection in a variegated way. For most visitors, the experience is slow and somewhat dazed—see above.
Hit the jump for more photos.
From unorthodox one-offs to traditional furniture and product, a wealth of new work sat in the small interior quarters and object-lush courtyard at Spazio Rossana Orlandi. Known for housing emerging and established talent, Orlandi featured familiar top names such as Jasper Morrison, Jaime Hayon, and the Campana brothers alongside both new designers and students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts, and Design.
Dutch designers Kiki van Eijk and Joost van Bleiswijk are showing a mixed series of several large sculptural objects for Dilmos, using Murano glass.
Kiki’s series, “DRINK! EAT! FUN!! REST! THINK! DREAM! LOVE!” mixes traditional techniques like filigrane, mother of pearl, incalmo, and mirroring to create objects with a narrative quality—”still life” totems for things we forget. For example, without FUN! there will always be a dull moment. Kiki’s stories follow each objects in the series, pictured after the jump.
DREAM!
To dream or to have a dream is the most enchanting phenomena in life. This is what makes it a paradise. The upside down basket with refined wire structure combined with a mirrored bottle full of transparent bubbles from which shines a light symbolizes the dream.
“You can tell a lot about a society by whom it chooses to celebrate.” —Woody Allen
When we heard that Belgian gallery Z33 was holding a “sustainability summer school” during this year’s Salone del Mobile in Milan, we were interested in finding out more about these New Heroes. Thomas Lommée’s OpenStructures project is one of five-presentations from the New Times New Heroes show. A global dialogue four years in the making, the Project has steadily grown to encompass a variety of parts and objects all scaled according to an open-source grid system. We sat down with Lommée to learn more about the origins of the OpenStructures project, chat about learnings from the beta model and hear more about new models for adaptivity.
New Times New Heroes
April 12-17
Privata Oslavia 8, Ventura Lambrate
Milan
Core77: So, what sparked the start of the OpenStructures project in 2007?
Thomas Lommée: The OpenStructures project was a personal project that started with a sketch at the Institute Without Boundaries, in Toronto. I was looking for a more sustainable way of building, constructing and designing. On one hand, modularity is one of the core principles of sustainable design because it allows for flexibility in your design. It allows for objects to shrink and to grow and to adapt. And then on the other hand, there’s this development of open source thinking and open source development within software, which allows for people to build further on other people’s designs.
And then there was a third development which was laser [cutting] and 3D printing. It allowed for people to design and build at home. And then Sketch Up was coming out, which is a very accessible 3D software. These four trends merged into the OpenStructures project. How can we make objects that are easy to adapt, grow and shrink, and that also the consumer can build further on, repair and fill in. It was basically about generating a new relationship between the consumer or the end-user and the computer.
In this video, Max Lipsey, once of Colorado and now of Eindhoven, introduces us to his new Acciaio Chairs, made from super light and super thing steel bicycle tubing. The color palette is inspired by vintage Italian bicycles and named after their makers.
More pictures after the jump!
A beautiful intersection of craft and design, the Story Vases pair Swedish design collaborative Front and a collective of South African women to tell their personal stories through beadwork and glass. South African women’s organization Siyazama Project empowers traditional craftswomen in the KwaZulu-Natal province to address concerns about AIDS through their beadwork. Recorded by Front, the Vases are a rare document of daily life of women in rural, post-apartheid South Africa—dreams and hopes for self and family collide with stories of poverty, gender, HIV and unemployment.
“Each woman formed their own story into text by threading glass beads onto metal wires. These wires were made into vase-shaped moulds, into which glass was blown,” explains the designers. “Bead craft is an important part of Zulu tradition, not only as a means of expression but also of communication and telling stories. In the past, patterns and colours were woven into beadwork, symbolising feelings and ideas to lovers and friends, in a way similar to written language.”
Alongside his Series 28 Chandelier at Spazio Rossana Orlandi, Omer Arbel presents Series 19, produced by his design and manufacturing company Bocci. The copper trays are romantic, severe and volcanic, combining a high polish with a rough, imprecise and unrepeatable edge.
As Arbel explains in the video, he works by designing systems that give way to form rather than chiseling away at the form itself. In this project, he explores sandcasting, spilling molten metal between a tool (forming the basin of the bowl) and a sand pit. The rough copper piece is then polished in the basin only, showing two properties of one material.
Click through for more images.
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