Milan Diaries 2023: Day One
Shaped by Water by Google Design Studio in conjunction with Lachlan Turczan (Image: courtesy of Google).
The Disegno team arrived in Milan today for the city’s annual Salone del Mobile and wider Milan Design Week. Over the coming days we’ll be sharing our reflections from the festival and picking out some of the installations, exhibitions and launches that stood out. The first dispatch follows below.
OMG-GMO by Robert Stadler for Carwan Gallery, curated by Nicolas Bellavance-Lecompte (Image: Filippo Telaro).
Reductio ad absurdum
OMG-GMO, the work of designer Robert Stadler in collaboration with Bitossi Ceramiche, is very silly, in the best possible way. Executed in moulded and thrown ceramic, the collection recasts the form of fruit and vegetables into furniture forms: aubergines become table wheels, a stick of celery the housing for a strip light, and ripe courgettes assemble into elements on a furniture system. The results are gleeful and preposterous, and revel in a series of winking homages to design history: the aubergine table (naughtily titled Gay Gae) recalls Gae Aulenti’s Tavolo con Ruote, while Juicy Josef riffs on the work of Josef Hoffmann, replacing the wooden balls that appear at the joints on his furniture with cheeky walnuts. Stadler’s pieces are delightful, but there is a serious reflection behind the merriment too: the manner in which humanity has tacitly designed produce through programmes of agricultural domestication, selective breeding, and bioengineering. Commercial lemons have become more oval and less rounded over time to aid easy stacking and packing, for instance, while carrots and bananas have been selected to prioritise pure, bright orange and yellow tones respectively. This, Stadler points out, is part of wider (and deeply questionable) efforts to bend the natural world to human tastes and fancies, and his collection uses the precision of Bitossi Ceramiche’s work to wittily push this tendency to a preposterous extreme – produce that has been perfectly calibrated to serve as furniture elements. Witty, silly, and smartly incisive, OMG-GMO is a delightful collection – one that uses charm and humour as a Trojan horse for its more serious reflections.
OMG-GMO: via Zenale 3
One of Lachlan Turczan’s Sympathetic Resonance basins (Image: courtesy of Google).
Fluid dynamics
Installations during Milan Design Week often fall into one of two camps. There are those that seek to elucidate the design process and provide insight into the ways in which designers work: for a classic example of the genre, see Anniina Koivu and Andrea Caputo’s U-Joints – Equations of universal lifestyle from 2018. Shaped by Water, presented by Google Design Studio, take the opposite approach: an exhibition less focused on explaining design, than on utilising it to provide a memorable sensorial experience. The show is devoted to the work of artist Lachlan Turczan, with Google having provided him with the funding to extend and expand his experiments in creating stainless steel basins of water, through which he passes infrasonic tones that prompt wave patterns across the surface of the liquid. The results are fascinating (some pools are staticky and fidgety, others slower and more glitch-like), and the depth of Turczan’s work on display would not have been possible without the support of Google. This is particularly clear within the second element of the exhibition, Wavespace, in which the artist has fed music into one of his basins, with the resulting distortions casting shadows overhead. Visitors are invited to lay down on soft seating to watch these kaleidoscopic waves variously bulge, vibrate, shimmer, collapse and pop in accordance with the ebb and flow of the sound. It amounts to a visually spectacular show, and one that requires little design justification beyond Google having used its enviable resources to support the creation of something beautiful and thought provoking. Yet for those who favour a more elucidatory approach, Shaped by Water does make a late concession. The third room presents a series of Google’s consumer electronics, with an explanation that their curving forms (and particularly the bubble-like glass on the brand’s Pixel Watch) drew their radii from the design team’s experiments with water bubbles – illuminated by in-person displays of water being dropped from pipettes to bubble up into the requisite forms. It is, admittedly, only a passing connection to Turczan’s work, but an undoubtedly interesting curio and one that offers an insight into Google’s design work. Nevertheless, the delicacy of Turczan’s aquatic choreography is sufficient in itself. Sometimes, no pedagogical element is required – beautiful design is enough.
Shaped by Water: Garage 21, via Archimede 26
U.F.O.G.O. by ECAL (Image: Marvin Merkel).
A breath of fresh air
Student shows are one of the highlights of Milan Design Week (stripped of any commercial imperative, they tend to offer more thoughtful reflections than their professional competitors). Happily, Switzerland’s ECAL, which has had a strong exhibition record in recent years, has delivered just this in the form of U.F.O.G.O.: a display of eight speculative wind turbines that could be built on Fogo Island off the coast of Newfoundland. In the spirit of full disclosure, Disegno was involved in creating the project’s accompanying publication (which is available as part of Disegno #35), but U.F.O.G.O. stands tall regardless of our own bias. The project saw students tasked with changing the design of wind turbines to make them more socially and environmentally acceptable (given that these would be the key barriers to their installation on Fogo Island, whose geography and climate is well-suited to the technology), while still abiding by all engineering, logistical and legislative constraints that would accompany their actual construction. The results are thought-provoking and ingenious, with the students having explored ideas for turbines that variously play on ideas of the island’s sense of community identity, ways of reducing the depth of concrete foundations required by the structures, and techniques to tie their designs in with the energy demands of local initiatives so as to make the benefits of wind power more tangible to those who live with its infrastructure. Led by tutors Camille Blin, Aniina Koivu and Anthony Guex (and assisted by Maxwell Ashford), the students have tackled a topic that could easily have become dry and technical with flair, imagination and an understanding of the benefits that can emerge when speculation is anchored in reality. Highly recommended.
U.F.O.G.O.: Spazio Orzo 16.