Milan Design Week is an enormous annual affair with Fuorisalone spread across the majority of the city and Salone del Mobile on the outskirts of town. Parties, pop-ups and major exhibitions are held to showcase the latest developments in design, as well as more than a few design classics, with the latter serving as a reminder of what many of the designers on show might aspire to. The show is synonymous with furniture, lighting and installations and whilst I can in no way claim that I managed to see everything, here are my favourite pieces in each category:
Formafantasma
With a solid reputation for investigating materials and elegantly utilising them within its products, Formafantasma has now chosen to focus upon developing a range of lighting with Flos, called the Delta Collection . As a concurrent showing, the design studio also decided to take the opportunity to showcase some of their workings out and development pieces at the Spazio Krizia.
Whilst the lights from the Delta Collection are beautifully formed and engineered with industrial precision, the ‘3D sketches’ shown alongside them exuded a playful and insoluble air. Part sculpture, part functional object, each piece had a concern with material and light with the latter generally reflected upon or off of the former, some of which included coloured glass that created a chromatic glow upon the wall.
The materials used included metal rods, LED strips, pencils and erasers, and all felt very deliberately selected, yet their presence was almost indiscernible as attention was drawn to the light that emulated around them.
Le Refuge by Marc Ange at Wallpaper Handmade
It might have been the beaming sunshine and perfect coming together of powder coated pink and deep blue sky, but Marc Ange ’s Le Refuge bed, shown as part of Wallpaper’s Handmade exhibition, blew my mind! Teeming with lavish pomp the immense recliner is framed by life-sized metal jungle leaves that cast dappled shadows upon the colour matched pink foam mattress, all of which rests upon a crisp concrete base. As well as this outdoor version there are indoor options that come in deep shades of green and blue, although I’m not quite sure who has the size of home required for them to fit!
COS x Studio Swine
Since its Milan debut in 2012, fashion brand COS has employed design and architecture studios including Nendo and Snarkitecture to create stunning immersive installations that increasingly have little, or in fact, no direct reference to its clothing.
It’s a clever, and in many ways rather generous, piece of marketing. The environments created offer unique multisensory experiences that are far more akin to the joyous distractions one might find in a contemporary gallery, and as such the brand associates itself with something viscerally memorable for it’s spectacular beauty and other-worldly quality.
This year, London duo Studio Swine was invited to create something within the same disused cinema space as last year. There were further similarities to the environments created by Sou Fujimoto; as with then, visitors entered the blackened space through heavy curtains and were met with an interactive, purely white coloured feature.
Similarly, ephemerality was once again an integral element within the piece, only this year, instead of encountering smoky white light, visitors were met with a tree-meets-chandelier structure that dispensed smoke filled bubbles that burst in a swirling cloud when coming into contact with skin. Having been given a pair of fetching knitted gloves, visitors could catch the gently floating spheres as they bobbed their way towards the floor. As the studio explains, the installation was:
“Inspired by the famous cherry blossom festival in Japan, the installation is designed to create a special moment that brings people together. A fleeting shared experience that evokes a sense of the changing seasons.”
Still more of my Milan picks to come this week - watch this space.
