Milan Diaries 2023: Day Three
IKEA launches its new collection of old designs (Image: courtesy of Ikea).
It’s day three of Disegno’s time at Salone del Mobile and the wider Milan Design Week, which takes in visits to Knoll, Ikea, Habitare Materials, and an exhibition about Droog.
Ikea’s Nytillverkad range (Image: courtesy of Ikea).
A fine vintage
Walking through the yellow archway to the Ikea exhibition, Assembling the Future Together, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d accidentally stepped into one of its furniture stores. The space has all the hallmarks: the tall shelves full of display products with those iconic long tags in practical plastic sleeves; a one-way route that takes in the whole space; a café serving Swedish delicacies. But a closer look reveals a Salone twist on everything: the shelves are full of vintage midcentury furniture on loan from the Ikea Museum in Älmhult; the route takes you past fantastical installations; and the café is actually a bar serving lingonberry spritz. The vintage section is one to linger in, with each piece in good condition without having been restored to within an inch of its life, and informative panels contextualising the decades that produced the designs. Particularly refreshing is the part of the display titled “2000s: Great Mistakes”, which admits that not every Ikea product was a hit. Swedish designer Jan Dranger created a range of inflatable furniture – all the rage in Y2K – but costs ballooned and customer opinion deflated. Clearly aware that there’s a solid trade in second-hand and vintage Ikea, the brand has decided to tap into this desire with a range of, uh, new vintage. Called Nytillverkad, the collection marks Ikea’s 80th anniversary with a reissue of old designs in contemporary colour ways. While making more old stuff seems counterintuitive considering the framing of the vintage display as an example of sustainable design (Ikea will be selling some of the vintage pieces at its San Giuliano store), the social media-friendly pops of zesty orange and Gen-Z purple of the Nytillverkad range are admittedly highly covetable. The fantastical element-themed installations of Assembling the Future Together also raise questions about the contradictions of a behemoth furniture producer such as Ikea positioning itself as a force for environmental good. Earth is a towering mound of dirt (thankfully more grassy than the debacle that was MVRDV’s The Mound) against a disco backdrop of LED lights and cheap white bowls made to look like speakers, which is meant to represent responsible materials sourcing. A silver sculpture that blasts mist into the air at regular intervals represents water and demonstrates a new water-saving nozzle from the brand. Ikea almost jumps the shark with a wishing tree, transplanted indoors for the sole purpose of being continually wafted by a barrage of its new smart fans. But when it comes to building a fun and buzzy exhibition, Ikea clearly understands the brief.
Assembling the Future Together: Padiglione Visconti, Via Tortono 58
NEMO Architects has created the Habitare Marerials sample library (image: Disegno).
Checking out the library
Finland, famously, has a lot of public libraries, and a population renowned for its commitment to borrowing from them. So it is fitting that Finnish design week Habitare Fair’s presence at Alcova takes the form of a temporary library of materials, called Habitare Materials. Each of the samples of wood, stone, textiles and metals is drawn from 14 Finnish companies, displayed on sculptural platforms and plinths designed by Maria and Jussi Laine of Helsinki-based NEMO Architects. Visitors are very much encouraged to pick up and touch the samples, then arrange them in a collage of their choosing. As well as making for a pleasing Instagram flat lay, the installation is a rare chance to appreciate the physicality of materials that, in this digital age, are often viewed only through a screen. The materials represented in the library were chosen because they embody responsible values from an environmental and ethical standpoint. There are some exciting, innovative pieces in the mix, including wood with a natural lingen-based finish with a marvellous iridescence when it catches the sun, created by Structural Colour Studio in collaboration with Noora Yau and Konrad Klockars. Look out for StalaTex, panels of 90 per cent recycled stainless steel with a delicate pattern that looks hand-etched, but is in fact lasered on with a system powered by wind. Touchingly, the monolithic plinth that forms the backdrop for your collages carries a slice of Finland’s design past with it. Made of rammed earth that could be shipped over to Milan in three parts and joined using only water, the terrazzo top is inset with chips of marble recovered from the demolished facade of an Alvar Aalto building. Unlike a real library, you can’t take anything away with you except photos, but the creators are sanguine if some pieces go AWOL. After all, it must mean someone really loved the material.
Habitare Materials: L4, Alcova, Ex Macello, Via Molise 62
Chest of Drawers by Tejo Remy at Droog30. Design or Non-design (image: Gianluca Di Ioia).
Cacophonous display
Droog30. Design or Non-design is nothing if not ambitious. Commissioned by Triennale Milano and Het Nieuwe Instituut to mark the 30th anniversary of the Dutch design collective Droog’s debut in Milan, the exhibition is simultaneously an exploration and celebration of the objects produced under Droog’s umbrella (think pieces such as Tejo Remy’s Rag Chair or Marcel Wanders’ Knotted Chair – object that frequently used everyday, recycled materials, and which utilised humour to communicate their ideas around social and political systems), as well as a reflection on the environment in which designs are created and digested. Curated by Richard Hutten and Maria Cristina Didero, the exhibition manifests in a single room, with a small number of the original Droog objects on display, and others represented through imagery. But the centrepiece of the show is a series of snippet texts that fill the walls and floor of the exhibition. These texts – variously descriptions, comments, and WhatsApp-esque back-and-forths between designers and curators reflecting on their memories of Droog – have been crowdsourced through social media, with the idea being that the fragments they offer will come together to tell the collective’s story. The results are visually compelling and fascinating, but also dense and overwhelming – unless significant time is spent in the space, the format does not lend itself to easy elucidation (although it is undeniably interesting to see the idea that exhibitions must be straightforwardly elucidatory challenged). Contrastingly, the display’s approach feeds beautifully into its secondary aim. The exhibition’s opening wall text describes Droog as “the last of what might be considered a movement in design – a claim predicated on the fact that what soon followed was the rise of the internet and its decentralising effect on design discourse”. As such, Didero and Hutten have fractured the story of Droog into a format that recalls the mess, noise and omni-directional input of the internet, contrasting a nostalgic story of a group of 90s designers who worked in the same place to the hyper-networked realities of design today. It is an ingenious move and one that means that Droog30. Design or Non-design really takes flight when you stop viewing it as an exhibition and judging it by conventional criteria of curation and museological display. Instead, it is most compelling when seen as a design project in its own right – a spatialised reflection on how design has changed in the last 30 years.
Droog30. Design or Non-design: Triennale Milano, Viale Alemagna 6
The Knoll pavilion at Salone del Mobile (image: Bas Princen).
New Knoll
One year ago, designer Jonathan Olivares joined American furniture brand Knoll as its senior vice president of design, charged with heading up the company’s identity in the aftermath of its acquisition by Herman Miller. The reset feels welcome. Knoll’s design history and pedigree is unimpeachable, but the company’s more recent output has remained in the shadow of its iconic mid-century works by Mies van der Rohe, Harry Bertoia and Eero Saarinen, with Olivares noting that the former creative tension and competition between Knoll and Herman Miller had unfortunately given way to catalogues that had begun to somewhat mirror one another. Given the acquisition, he argues, there is an opportunity to reinstate clear, distinct identities for the two brands so as to avoid cannibalisation of the market. It is the kind of thoughtful observation that is typical of Olivares, whose work within the field as both a writer and designer has been characterised by its investigative quality, depth of analysis and rigour – he will, you suspect, have a clear idea of how he wishes to position Knoll and interesting reflections on what its place in today’s market might be (moreover, it is a pleasure to see Knoll turn to a designer whose career it helped launch – with the 2012 Olivares Aluminium Chair –to help establish its own 21st-century identity). It is too early in Olivares’s tenure at Knoll for the new designs commissioned and developed by him to have emerged, but this year’s Salone did give an early insight into his ideas. Previously, Knoll’s stands at the fair have been designed by OMA, but the 2023 iteration has instead been given over to Kersten Geers and David Van Severen of Office KGDVS, who responded with a pavilion made from aluminium extrusions and glass. The structure is beautiful, lending a domestic scale to the looming vastness of Salone, while reiterating Knoll’s historic ties to architecture: a key reference, Olivares explains, was architect Eliel Saarinen’s famous observation that it was best to “always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.” An impressive start to Olivares’s tenure, then, and one that hints at much to look forward to in the years to come.
Knoll: Hall 4, Booth D11 and E12, Milan Fairgrounds, Rho