Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and Knoll present "Knoll Celebrates Bauhaus" in honor of the legendary art school's centenary during this year's Milan Design Week. Curated by OMA partner Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli and Milan-based curator Domitilla Dardi, the exhibition aims to tell the intertwining history of the Bauhaus and Knoll centered around one of Knoll's founders, Florence Knoll Bassett.
The exhibition is divided into four different interactive "clusters" which are set up "like theatrical stages," according to the press release, and each tells a different part of the story of the Bauhaus and of Knoll. The four installations are "Florence Knoll;" "Ludwig Mies van der Rohe;" and "Marcel Breuer"—which feature objects and furnishings designed by Knoll, van der Rohe, and Breuer, respectively—and "Complexity and Contradiction," which takes its name from Robert Venturi's 1977 essay "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture" and examines the legacy of the Bauhaus in the context of contemporary design.
“This installation is an attempt to give theatrical form to the multiple relations that connect the emblematic histories of the Bauhaus and Knoll," Laparelli said in the release. "We have imagined true sets in which different objects exist in an ideal domestic scenario—a meta-interior—offering the visitor the possibility of activating and discovering them."
