The 2009 Milan Furniture Fair was short on Big Bang moments, so it would be easy to overlook a lot of the doings--the preponderance of design made from repurposed scraps, the surge of handcrafted items, the out-of-the-blue fashion for trompe l'oeil, the offbeat marketing hoax with half a dozen big-name designers advertised for an event they had nothing to do with.
What could not be ignored at this year's fair, which ended today, was the ubiquitous Front Design, an all-female foursome from Sweden who presented work with Moroso, Porro and Moooi, and did a special installment for Veuve Clicquot. They were seemingly everywhere, even doing the obligatory celebrity deejay set at one of the hundreds of Milan parties.
Not to detract from their work, but Front got noticed in part because they know how to make an impact. They worked the town dressed more like fashion executives than designers, and they are assiduously media friendly. In Milan, brains and beauty are a potent pairing.
As usual, Front's work relied on a clever tweaking of tradition and technology. Until now, Front was best known for the life-size black polyester Horse Lamp they designed three years ago for Moooi, the Dutch design firm started by Marcel Wanders.
Patrizia Moroso, the creative director of a venerable family run furniture firm, has cultivated leading women designers, and this year she brought Front into the fold. One of Front's strengths is playing aesthetic tricks that are a felicitous balance of lighthearted and serious. Their couch for Moroso is photo-printed to look like a hardwood bench, but in reality is soft and comfortable. It's the kind of trick Front is known for.
To promote the launch of eco-friendly packaging called DesignBox, Veuve Clicquot invited a handful of designers to use their new boxes to create furniture. Front made a chaise lounge with a grid of boxes that adapt comfortably to a person's body.
For Moooi, the Front team digitized a Royal Delft vase with three-dimensional software and distorted it so that it looks like it's blowing away in a gust of wind.
Porro, the Italian manufacturer, played up a black-and-white theme this year, with this two-door bedroom cabinet from Front. Its white surface is scrawled with black lines that fan out the bottom, suggesting the swaying movement of a curtain.
Day three of the Milan Furniture Fair is when fatigue sets in. After a few days at the fairgrounds and nights at Bar Basso, bloggers start tossing press kits to lighten their tote bags, and all those bent metal tables and faceted chairs begin to blur.
Now is when visitors gravitate to new work that matters most. With the pooled intelligence of Twitter, the cool hunters are zeroing in on buzzy introductions from the Bourrellac Brothers, Tom Dixon and Maarten Baas.
Crashing the boy's club this year is Nika Zupanc, a young Slovenian product designer who softened the cutting edge last year with her Lolita Lamps (above) and looks like this year's breakout star. She's showing her distinctive style with Moroso and Moooi, two of the most prestigious brands, and at her own off-site installation entitled "I Will Buy Flowers Myself: Objects Gone Indescrete."
Like the work itself, the title is at once girly and unsettling. Zupanc undercuts the high-end minimalism that still rules Milan with objects of female home life subverted by a touch of Goth. You might think of her as Martha Stewart crossed with "Eyes Wide Shut."
Feeling, as opposed to thinking, is a dominent theme of this year's show. Zupanc is spot on with a style she calls "emotional ergonomics." It isn't enough for an object to fulfill its function, has to hint at a story. It has to seduce you.
Visitors enter her installation through the front door of a monolithic dollhouse sweetened with white polka dots and puffs of faux chimney smoke.
Cocooned by curtains inside the dollhouse are a handful of domestic objects, including these cradles. The Milan show has produced a number of prominent female designers in recent years, most notably Hella Jongerius and Patricia Urquiola. Their success notwithstanding, Zupanc contends that the design field has largely ignored women and their experience in the home, in all its complexity. That's the void she's trying to fill.
Zupanc designed this mini hot plate for Gorenje, a Slovenian appliance maker. She deliberately styled it after a fashion accessory, and named it Mrs. Dalloway, a reference to a Virginia Woolf novel about a woman's party preparations. Like the rest of her work, it is functional and mysterious.
At a gargantuan show like the Milan Furniture Fair, firms are not surprisingly desperate to distinguish their booth from all the rest. It's a game of one-upmanship played out with plywood, wire and staple guns. How the furniture is displayed often ends up more memorable than the furniture itself.
At this year's fair the most noticeable display trend is a jumbled pile in the shape of a tornado or double helix, as with this arrangement by the new French firm Moustache.
In a few cases, like the Overdose Desk by Bram Boo, the jumble is actually part of the design.
You don't have to go to Milan to see a furniture pile. The new Droog store in the Soho,
for example, contains this Maarten Baas pile, called Second Hand, available for shipping to
your home.
One variation on the pile: furniture upended as if waiting for the moving van, shown in this recent press photo for a Tom Dixon.
I can only guess that this trend derives from the preponderance at last year's show of designs composed of piled objects, like the Stack storage trays by Shay Alkalay.
According to Google translator, this is how you say "Yes We Can" in Italian: sì, siamo in grado di. But don't expect to hear any Obama slogans shouted from the rooftops at the Milan Furniture Fair.
It may be the most important showcase of new design, but more than anything the fair is about business. Earth Day be damned. Old-line Italian manufacturers like Poltrona Frau and Cappellini are in no rush to embrace sustainability or other initiatives, especially while business is lagging. And the Dutch are too preoccupied with their poetic musings, much of which looks like the work of children dosed with ecstasy, to contribute to pressing issues of environment and infrastructure.
On the other hand, the fair acts as a sensitive barometer of culture shifts, and design for social and environmental change is inevitably popping up on the margins. Here's a sampling:
Pandora Design, which grew out of a Milan catering service, is exhibiting a disposable glass tapas plate and other hors d'oeuvres tools made from a biodegradable corn compound. They're handmade, and the resulting imperfections distinguish them from anything you'd find at a condiments station.
Nicolas Cheng of Studioroom906, compresses discarded eggshells to make this stationary set (pencil, pencil holder, eraser and paper). It takes 100 recycled eggshells to make one set.
The most conceptual Obama Design comes from his hometown of Chicago, appropriately enough. Exhibiting at the Salone Satellite, an exhibition hall reserved for student work, a group young designers from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago are showing household objects created "through the lens of the Obama promise and its problems." The Thrift Potbelly Piggy by Mingli Change represents our new appreciation for savings. As the coins accumulate, the pig grows fatter. To spend the coins, a person must "slaughter" the pig by cutting the stitched along its belly.
Another student concept: News is New by Chin-Yu Fu is a stool made of recycled newspaper and two leather belts.
Crisis is supposed to kill irony, but irony nonetheless endures at the Milan Furniture Fair even as the industry slides into a low-grade panic over the downturn. The fair, which opened today, has been divided in recent years between rationalists like Konstantin Grcic, who view furniture as a straight engineering challenge, and an ironic faction, which includes just about every designer with a Dutch name.
Team Irony appears to have selected the Bible for special attention this year. Religion in all its iconic variety may now be in the mix because, for obvious reasons, design's sardonic streak is getting darker. Or it may simply be a shrewd maneuver for notice, like rock stars who deliberately cause scandals for their own promotional benefit. Whatever the case, Job Smeets and Nynke Tynagel, the Dutch design duo known as Studio Job, have put aside their droll treatment of luxury goods from previous years and produced stained-glass windows with explicit Christian imagery, including a baby and Virgin Mary, mixed with extraneous objects, like rocket ships, lobsters and soap bubbles.
They're also showing enormous rusty cast-iron services with a vaguely ancient Aramaic posture that will be produced by Royal Tichelaar Makkum, the Dutch porcelain manufacturer. To top it all off, the collection, called Gospel, is shown at the Chiostri di San Simpliciano, a cloister attached to one of Milan's oldest churches.
Not far away, at the ancient Basilica of Sant'Ambrogio, is an exhibition called Prophets & Penitents: Confessions of a Chair. Sponsored by Damn, an art and design magazine published in Brussels, the show contains no religious imagery. The notion of confession is just a set-up, like a party theme, for exhibiting 30 prototypes for chairs, some of which are in production. Though most of them, including the Identity Disorder chair by Arik Levy (above), will never be seen by the public outside the Basicila. What unites them in the show is the organizer's conceit that sharing prototypes is like baring one's soul in the confession booth. Beneath those layers of irony may lie a kernel of sincerity as design begs for forgiveness for past excess.
In his memoir, the screenwriter William Goldman famously made this appraisal of Hollywood: "Nobody knows anything."
The same might be said of the design field. The Milan Furniture Fair opens tomorrow after two years of bleak sales and withering competition from cheap imports. And yet, confoundingly, optimism rules the day, at least at the outset. The first incoming tweets are giddy over the wealth of new work and the sprawling exhibition halls known as the fairgrounds at the end of the metro's red line are full to capacity. More surprising still, three ambitious new design brands will launch at the fair. It will take some memorable designs to get them above the white noise. Do they have what it takes?
The boldest of the new ventures is a $16 million startup called Skitsch (as in kitsch, with an extra "s"), which hits the ground with a site for online sales, a flagship store that opened earlier today in the heart of Milan and a collection of furniture and accessories from the Campana Brothers, Philippe Nigro (above) and 21 other heavyweights. Skitsch launched with considerable firepower by Renato Preti, a home furnishings financier who formerly owned part of the luxury brands B&B Italia and Bulgari. "It is a terrible climate," he told The New York Times. "But this is an underdeveloped market, and there are still opportunities for new companies with interesting ideas."
Prenati will spin his new brand as innovative and inexpensive furniture for everyday use with a high-design sensibility. The company calls it "emotional contemporary design," whatever that means. Blogging for T Style, Monica Khemsurov described Skitsch as a cross between Ikea and Moss. The collection includes tabletop ceramics by Kiki van Eijk decorated with micro-reliefs based on historical table settings and tableware; a sofa made by Marc Sadler from polyurethane foam lashed together with string; and a line of porcelain tableware (above) from Maarten Baas based on crude and spontaneous drawings.
The fairgrounds will contain 1,496 exhibitors from 318 countries--an Olympic-sized quorum. With the exception of Philippe Starck, who is capable of taking over the fair by himself, the French have historically had a small showing. This year they'll have at least a little more visibility, due to the launch of Moustache, a collection started by Stéphane Arriubergé and Massimiliano Iorio, who also own Domestic, a vinyl wall-covering firm. Their debut line is colorful and photogenic, and it will likely get noticed by the design press. I expect to see lots of photos of the modular storage with corrugated sliding doors by Inga Sempé, a young Paris designer, and an inflatable lamp she made of Tyvek, the insulation used in building construction. The Moustache design most likely to generate talk, however, is a foldaway room (above) for working or houseguests with pink felt walls by Matali Crasset.
The last big launch of a design brand came five years ago when Established & Son restored wit and glamor to British design. This year one of its co-founders, Mark Holmes, will introduce a new brand called Minimalux, that presents stripped-down, Shaker-simple desk accessories (above) and dinnerware in solid brass and gold plating. Holmes is betting that austerity and luxury are a potent pairing for this cultural moment.
The first wave of buyers, bloggers and flacks stepped off their all-night Alitalia flights a few hours ago in preparation for the 48th Milan Furniture Fair which opens Wednesday. These early birds will have time to settle in with espresso and speculate over how severely the global downturn might sour the week ahead. The design field's stocktaking is upon us.
The fair started in 1961 as a trade event to promote the venerable Italian furniture industry, but in recent years it has grown into a high-blown designapalooza with hundreds of parties and marketing spectacles for all manner of products from Turin to Tokyo--prefab homes, textiles, and the new genre of design-art. Elegance and daring could be found seemingly in every palazzo courtyard, and crowds thronged the cobblestone streets of the Zona Tortona looking for the next free Pironi.
But the giddy fascination with design that fueled the fair for so many years may be dissipating. Much of the world's furniture is made in Asia, and the global slowdown threatens to return the fair its roots as a conventional trade show. "The years 2008 and 2009 will go down in the history books as one of the worst selling periods of all time for the furniture industry," Warren Shoulberg, editor of the trade magazine HFN wrote earlier this month. As an indication of how bad things may be, Cappellini, Poltrona Frau and Cassina, three of the biggest names in Italian furniture, opted out of the fair's official venue, confining themselves instead to their downtown showrooms.
On the other hand, Milan is still the premier showcase for new design. Hotel rooms are reportedly all but sold out and Cosmit, the organizer, says every square foot of booth space is rented out to 1,500 exhibitors, with a waiting list of almost 300 companies. Other design capitals have cultivated their own shows, most notably 100% Design in London and ICFF in New York, but Milan is still where important new work debuts. For bloggers and editors it's the best place to look for tipping points and one-upmanship.
Last year, amidst the recessionary onset, I asked a designer if she expected the fair's mood to darken. She looked at me as if I were crazy. "The show must go on," she said.
Next week, at the Milan Furniture Fair, the world's premier modern furniture show, all the talk will be about the design field in crisis. Who can save it? It won’t be Philippe Starck, the bloviating Frenchman who has loudly declared his intention to retire from design, which he now regards as irrelevant and wasteful. It’s won’t be Marcel Wanders, the clown prince of Dutch design whose baroque follies will now look badly out of tune.
I’m going to make the case for Tom Dixon, the versatile and trenchant British designer, as most likely to play the role of design hero and badly needed anti-designer. In fact, there’s something Obama-like about Dixon. Here’s my reasoning:
1. His modernism grows gracefully from the past. Dixon’s new work, like the club chair and sofa above, are comfortable in their own skin. He never produces needless reiterations of existing trends. They are unmistakeably contemporary, but also mindful of what came before: these pieces were made with George Smith using joinery, hand-sewing and other techniques passed down for more 250 years.
2. His work appreciates honest materials. Dixon’s design training began when, as an art student, he learned to weld his motor bike in a friend’s garage. His first design work came in 1983 at Titanic, a London nightclub, where he performed on-stage by welding scrap metal into seating. That sense of craftsmanship--and showmanship--has stayed with him, as you can see from the pressed light pendants above.
3. He democratizes design. In his new book, “Interior Worlds,” published this month by Rizzoli, Dixon treats design as a pursuit we all constantly engage in by selecting clothes, books and other everyday surroundings. "It's about trying to avoid preconceptions about what design is and what good taste is," he told The London Independent.
4. He subverts conventional business. Three years ago he delivered 500 injection molded chairs to Trafalgar Square in London and gave them away to passersby. (It took seven minutes.) The giveaway pleased his sponsor, the Expanded Polystyrene Packing Group, and hinted at a new way of selling. “The Great Chair Grab was a think-through of how old-fashioned and lame the furniture business had become,” Dixon told The New York Times. “What if furniture could be a modern business the way Google is?"
5. He’s an original thinker on green issues. As creative director of Artek, the Finnish firm founded by the architect Alvar Aalto in the 1930s, he led a campaign to recycle furniture: two years ago the company began buying back its own chairs and stools from flea markets and junk shops and, to reduce the waste stream, resold them with all their dents and blemishes intact.
Ninety-eight years ago Frank Lloyd Wright launched a pioneering scheme to build prefabricated homes with pre-cut framing, cabinets and other factory-made parts.
Based on building practices he’d seen in Japan, Wright called it (ironically enough) the American System of Housing. World War I intruded, and he built only a handful.
Earlier this year Taliesin West, the Frank Lloyd Wright school outside Phoenix, returned to prefab with the Mod.Fab Home, a 960-square foot home designed specifically for desert living.
The project resulted from a class taught by Jennifer Siegal, a leading prefab practitioner based in Venice, Calif. A prototype was built almost entirely by students on the rolling desert campus. It’s now used as a guesthouse with furnishings loaned by Design Within Reach.
Mod.Fab may be the greenest prefab to date. It was designed for use on or off the grid. Unplugged it relies on rainwater collection, reusable greywater, and photovoltaics. Solar panels are placed on a garden wall, which allows builders to use it as a power source during construction.
Taliesin has received inquiries from prospective buyers, Siegal said, but no orders will be taken until an arrangement has been made for manufacturing. It will sell for roughly $100,000, which makes it half the cost of the the most widely promoted modernist prefabs. I have to believe Frank would approve. “I would rather solve the small house problem,” he said, “than build anything else I can think of.”
When the Milan Furniture Fair opens next week in the preposterously grand fairgrounds on the city outskirts, 200,000 designers, editors and buyers with iPhones at the ready will prowl in buddy-system teams among half a dozen exhibition halls crammed with polycarbonate chairs, laser cut tables and other mass-produced furniture. Northern Italy prides itself on its furniture industry, and selling it is what this fair is largely about.
But in the absence of a driving design movement, visitors will see a conspicuous increase in stitching, embroidery and other hand-crafted items as designers react against mass-market globalism and tune into a new appreciation for homespun virtues. Tiring of stylistic tricks with a glossy sheen, the design community is gravitating to simpler qualities with a personal touch, like the traditionally woven poufs (above) by Donna Wilson.
The trend has been quietly building for some time, as designers’ passports indicate. Over the last two years Patty Johnson made papier-mâché vases out of tobacco with Haitian women; Tord Boontje designed cookware (above) made in Colombia, Guatemala and Brazil; and Stephen Burks, an African-American designer, helped develop hand-production methods with craftsmen in South America and Africa. He will get a coveted spot to show off some off his findings next week when his installation of African objects and furnishings opens in the Moroso showroom on Milan’s via Pontaccio. More about that later.
I spotted an inkling of the craft revival at the Milan fair two years ago where newcomers Nipa Doshi and Jonathan Levien, an Anglo-Indian couple based in London, showed an Indian daybed (above), known as a charpoy. It was made by Moroso, an old-line Italian furniture firm, and embroidered by Indian seamstresses.
Earlier this year Hella Jongerius, the Dutch designer, made three textile wall hanging designs for Ikea depicting animals drawn from Swedish fairytales. The hangings are woolen felt, printed cotton and polyester stitched together in India under the auspices of Unicef.
Lastly, Patricia Urquiola, a Spanish designer who has been among the fair’s foremost stars over the last five years or so, clearly anticipated the fashion for handiwork and worked up her own rendition, a modular sofa called Fergana with fabrics woven in the ancient weaving techniques from Uzbekistan.
Crisis is supposed to kill irony, but irony nonetheless endures at the 
