We’re scouting the latest products, concepts, and more at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile and related design events in Milan, Italy, this week. Stay tuned.
Tokyo- and Milan, Italy-based Nendo studio—whose name means "modeling
clay" in Japanese—and its reining genius, designer Oki Sato, have turned Milan’s Museo della Permanente into a
pristine white shrine loaded with their signature exercises in understatement.
Among them is the Fragment screen, which was originally conceived for manufacturer
Glas Italia. Shimmering with patterned,
vapor-deposited mini-mirrors set at 90-degree angles, it is perhaps the most
beguiling. It’s a bit more sparkly than Nendo’s typical offerings but its
effect is extraordinary, with angled planes reflecting the rest of the room with the sole and uncanny exception of the viewer.
London architects and brothers Joni and David
Steiner originally developed their Edie Stool (named for the pair’s niece)
in response to a call from design group OpenDesk inviting students and
practicing designers to develop simple, open-source digital furniture designs.
“The students won,” notes the Steins’ collaborator Scarlett San Marín, who was
on hand to show off the results at an exhibition at Milan’s Palazzo Clerici.
Edie comes flat-packed in a CNC-cut wood block. Users need only pop out
the parts and fit them together like Lincoln Logs. So easy a child could do it.
There’s
been a lot of talk in the design media of late about a
PoMo revival—the resurgent interest in the work of Memphis, the late
Italian architect Ettore Sottsass, and the garish, kitschy–ironic design of the
1980s. With so many young designers revisiting the period, it was nice to run
into the real thing at the Residenze
Litta, part of the Fuorisalone
offerings. Italian architect Aldo Cibic was a
founding partner of the Memphis Group and an associate of Sottsass for years. His
new Paesaggio Italiano, created as part of the De Gustibus
collection on the occasion of the food-inspired Milan Expo 2015, recreates an Italian
landscape in bone china complete with a smoke-stack flower pot and
salt-and-pepper-shaker houses.
Ever
since it paired with furniture giant Poltrona
Frau in 2004, Cappellini has felt a
little like the Company that Ate Design: its guiding light, Italian architect Giulio
Cappellini, has always had an adventurous taste for emerging practitioners, and
with Poltrona Frau behind him he’s been able to expand his purview
tremendously, working with pretty much whomever he pleases. And when it works,
it works. One of the company’s latest collaborations is with 37-year-old
Matthew Zorzenoni, a Treviso, Italy–born dynamo whose newly-released Frac armchair
is front and center in Cappellini’s Salone booth. The plastic piece can be used
for indoor and outdoor seating.
