Salone del Mobile Triumphantly Returns for its 60th Edition

June 10, 2022 Andrew Ayers KEYWORDS Exhibitions / Milan / Salone del Mobile Order Reprints No Comments

Following numerous delays due to Covid-19, Milan’s mythic Salone del Mobile held its 60th edition this week. After cancellation in 2020 and a slimmed-down event in 2021, this anniversary outing is back up to full fat, the number of exhibitors almost equaling 2019 figures. Though the Chinese are absent due to draconian quarantine obligations, and Russians are thin on the ground, Korea is showing in force at the fair for the first time, the Japanese are present, and Indian exhibitors have made the 4,000-mile trip. 

There is, moreover, a flourishing 2022 fuorisalone (off-fair) scene, with a plethora of talks, events, and exhibitions organized by brands, designers, museums, and galleries all over Milan. The buzziest of these is the second edition of Alcova, an alternative fair founded by Valentina Ciuffi and Joseph Grima for young, emerging talent, set in the melancholy of a half-disused military hospital. Though sustainability is meant to be on everyone’s mind, you’d have a hard time believing it at the official Salone, where the giant glossy stands are pieces of architecture in their own right, packed with a suffocating surfeit of stuff. Attendance figures have yet to be released, but the mammoth halls of Massimiliano Fuksas’s 10-million-square-foot Fiera Milano were swarming with visitors during the opening days. 

Architecture and design are curious bedfellows, highly interdependent yet oddly siloed: few are the designers who attempt architecture, many are the architects who try design. Among them was Aldo Rossi, currently honored with a fuorisalone retrospective of his design work at the Museo del Novecento in central Milan. Rossi monumentalized the rituals of everyday life in his wardrobes, coffee makers, and tea sets, even displaying the latter in a small domestic shrine shaped like a temple. But a temple to what? Bourgeois living? Capitalist accumulation? It was an ambiguous statement from an acknowledged Marxist.

Memphis—also honored with a Salone-timed retrospective, at Milan’s Triennale—did monumentality with wry irony, all paper-thin laminate and inflated dimensions. OMA, on the other hand, is far more ponderously ironic in the impressively monumental marble-veneered pieces they’ve developed with Dutch-Iranian stone company SolidNature, on show at Alcova. A giant cupboard/shelving unit in green marble and orange-veined onyx defies gravity by pivoting, while an equally oversized green-marble daybed with a cantilevering headboard takes the Existenzminimum to its Internet-age limit—a curious paradox, given that anyone with enough cash to pay for this object (at once bed, desk, and table) would surely prefer to buy that ultimate luxury—space. (Dutch designer Sabine Marcelis’s impressive 7-foot-high pink-marble bathroom “sculpture” for SolidNature, also at Alcova, seems far more suited to the classic diktats of the luxury market.) Over at the UniFor showroom, OMA unveiled a workspace collection that is far more traditionally functionalist, developed from the furnishings they designed for the 2018 Axel Springer headquarters in Berlin.

Back at the official fair, among the John Pawson chairs (Passoni), Kengo Kuma rugs (Gandia Blasco), Eileen Gray reproduction collection (ClassiCon), and BIG, Foster, and Herzog & de Meuron lighting (Artemide), not to mention the architect-designed door handles on display at Olivari, monumentality is again on the menu at the Zanotta stand. Not only has the Italian furniture brand just augmented its 1972 Quaderna collection, designed by fabled Italian radicals Superstudio, but the stand itself takes the form of a life-size slice of Superstudio’s Endless Monument, their dystopian celebration of Modernism’s universalizing tendencies. But where Superstudio imagined object-free hippy nomadism in their plug-in white grid, Zanotta’s vision of our itinerant future is high-end aspirational Airbnb. Just as aspirational, though more rarefied, is the Peter Zumthor collection that Japanese brand Time & Style is showing in its Brera space—developed over a period of 50 years, this is slow-food design, a paean to the intemporal.

At the Sawaya & Moroni showroom, on the other hand, Chinese megafirm MAD has unveiled two new metal chairs whose accelerated retrofuturism will no doubt date very quickly. If your concerns are environmental, you might prefer the Forite collaboration between Fornaci Brioni, Studio Plastique, and Snøhetta, displayed at Alcova. Using glass from white-goods waste—discarded fridges, ovens, and microwaves—they have developed a collection of tiling in mottled greens and blacks that, though it’ll cost you more than classic tiles, will leave you feeling smugly virtuous.

 It’s all ironic monumentality again at two other fuorisalone events. First Dropcity—a new architecture center being developed by Andrea Caputo for the arches under the train tracks behind Stazione Centrale—where Berlin-based American architect Sam Chermayeff is showing his galvanized-steel Beast collection. Developed with Barcelona-based Side Gallery, these hybrid pieces subvert the codes of street furniture for use in domestic space: a 5-foot-high ashtray, for example, or a coffee table with integrated overhead street lamp. Meanwhile, Belgian design collective Zavantem Ateliers is attempting to replicate its Brussels production model at a disused print works belonging to the Necchi family (of Portaluppi-villa fame) in Baranzate, 5 miles outside Milan. Beneath the impressively elegant concrete vaults, their Design Week show, intended to entice future investors, includes enormous marble cushions by Ben Storms (part of his Ex Hale series) and Lionel Jadot’s Lost Highway, a dining set made from hefty chunks of asphalt dug up from a Brussels thoroughfare. You can’t get more “street” than that, and it’s responsibly recycled to boot!


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Originally posted on: https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/15719-milans-salone-del-mobile-triumphantly-returns-for-its-60th-edition