WORDS Nadine Botha
Every year the Milan fringe festival, the Fuorisalone, seems to take over more and more of the city.
Milan Design Week 2017 will go down as the first year of Ventura Centrale in which disused railway workshops of the central station became exquisite showrooms, and the year the festival almost came to a standstill during a half day public transport strike.
Lifestyle brands continue to present the most impactful experiential installations. Studio Swine’s bubble machine for fashion label COS, Yuri Suzuki’s Sonic Pendulum for car brand Audi, and Nendo’s Invisible Outlines for fashion store Jil Sander got all the Instagram love. Wallpaper exhibitions by Missoni and NLXL were also conceptualised to make the most out of social media coverage.
COS x Studio Swine
Yuri Suzuki
Nendo
Missoni
Brutalist forms
The tail-end of last year’s digital-flavoured Memphis resurgence was still visible. Stripping the geometric solids of the candy-flavoured colour scheme and recasting them in monochrome stone, however, advanced the trend into the architectural revival of Brutalism.
British designer Paul Cocksedge’s range was created by literally mining his London studio. Evicted from the building after 12 years, the work represents the impact of the real estate boom on the creative industries as Londoners are increasingly driven out of the city by high rental costs.
Paul Cocksedge
Paul Cocksedge
Dutch duo Rens showed its Black project in the Transitions II exhibition by Baars & Bloemhoff at Ventura Centrale. Lee Broom’s new grandfather clock was also to be seen here, alongside a 10-year retrospective of the British designer’s work displayed on a fairground carousel.
Rens. Photo Ronald Smits
Lee Broom
Minimalist lighting
On the back of the Euroluce exhibition that takes place every second year at the Salone Del Mobile, there was a strong emphasis on lighting. Italian designers Formafantasma’s restrained exhibition at Spazio Krizia was the talk of the town, with its ingenious incorporation of electrical cords into the form and using an iPhone as light source.
Formafantasma
Formafantasma
The exhibition also showed the key lighting trends of the year: halo and circle shapes also prominently purveyed by Sabine Marcelis; extremely slender forms enabled by LED technology as also used by Michael Anastassiades for Flos; using colour and shadow for sculptural effect as with Studio Thier&vanDaalen; and hanging tubes by Tom Dixon, Ingo Maurer and others. Another lighting trend was the totem-like forms, in particular by Luca Nichetto for Salviati.
Sabine Marcelis. Photo Ronald Smits
Studio Thier&vanDaalen. Photo by Noortke Knulst
Ingo Maurer
Tom Dixon
Smart furniture
After the Bouroullec Brothers showed that even the television can be redesigned, this year it was Yves Béhar’s turn to make good. The California-based Swiss designer’s The Frame has transformed the Samsung screen into a mounted artwork that can disappear into the home’s decor. When turned off, it goes into “art mode”, displaying a curated collection of artworks and photos.
Yves Béhar
Tokujin Yoshioka’s Senses of the Future installation for LG’s 70th birthday created an immersive reality saturated with screens. Even chairs were made of screens, which indicates just how much more digitisation of furniture lies ahead.
Tokujin Yoshioka
Bang & Olufsen released a range of hexagonal speakers and acoustic panels. Covered in Kvadrat wool textiles of various hues and working with wireless technology, the BeoSound Shape system can be arranged in creative wall formations.
Bang & Olufsen
