Milan Furniture Fair 2013

This year Milan Furniture Fair completes 20 years of activity.

Throughout the city of Milan a series of events have been set up by Cosmit, the organizer of the fair, chaired by Claudio Luti, also president of the prestigious brand of plastic furniture, Kartell.

The space of the fair was divided into 3 distinct areas dedicated to furnishing accessories, lighting and office furniture. In parallel, there was the Salone Satellite, an opportunity for young editors and designers to show what they are doing.

Under the title "Il mondo che abiteremo" the international fair of Milan mobile invited one of the leading exponents of international architecture, Jean Nouvel, to undertake an innovative project: to create an office for living. The architect responded to the challenge by creating an area of ​​1200 m2, an exhibition comprising five unique and exclusive workspaces to demonstrate that a workplace should provide creativity, inspiration and pleasure.

Nouvel criticizes not only the concept of classic office, divided by sector, but also the open-space impersonal. "I propose a little disorder, in which individual expression resolves the subject of privacy in the workplace. This involves a new space colonization. I suggest a contradiction: the joy of 'living' in the office. "

Salone Satellite: Every year at the Milan fair an exhibition takes place, allowing young creators and small publishers to submit their proposals to the market.

This year, the Salone Satellite featured 700 designers who responded to the theme "Design and Craft: Together for the industry" and showed creative ideas within the theme. There were also conferences, wherein one of the invited Giulio Iacchetti was one of the most prominent contemporary designers. According to the designer, the skill of craftsmen who transform the matter with their hands is the same all over the world and this creates a universal language. It is possible to integrate the tradition of craftsmanship with modern technology. There is a need to restore the value of what is behind the objects and establish a direct relationship not only with those who design and those who produce them, but also with those who build them.

This year as always, was awarded the 2013 Satellite Award, only this time it was for a young Portuguese designer, Tânia da Cruz who received from Cosmit a prize worth € 10,000. Tânia Cruz made ​​a module called Braque a sound insulation system based on a tridimensional model in cork. The designer, who was born in Portugal but lives in Italy for many years, held the project thinking about Portugal and the potential for industrial development linked to cork, one of the traditional Portuguese materials, sustainable and with high strength and durability. Due to its extremely simple geometric shape, these modules can be customized to walls or ceilings, creating both decorative and graphic impact.

The Spanish brand Mecedorama received honorable mention for a double rocking chair "Hobbs Twin", created by the designer Lys Villalba. The chair is part of a collection that celebrates the marriage between old craft techniques, acquired by the designer through the contact established with a Caribbean craftsman.

"Fuori Fiera" continues to be the major attraction at Milan Furniture Fair. The city fills up with complementary activities to the main exhibitions, some of them quite exceptional, which help contextualize and understand the problematic of design today. At the end of the day, the city streets fill up with people wanting to know more about Milan and take the opportunity to visit parallel exhibits.

Interni magazine, which fosters such events, organized once again in the Cloister of the University of Milan, an exhibition entitled "Interni Hibrid architecture & Design".

Architects, Designer and creators in general were challenged by their incessant search for solutions to address the problems of the contemporary world. The proposed method towards the search for innovation was the hybridization through contamination, identity, culture, etc.

Hybridization signifies a mixture of cultures and methods, among technique and technology. Authors like Akihisa Hirata, Christiphe Pillet, Steven Holl, Dean Skira, Michele di Lucchi, Mario Cucinella, Daniel Libeskind, among others, realized ephemeral structures in the spaces of the university.

The gardens of Milan Triennale always host parallel manifestations. This year under the theme "UNOPIU 'IN WONDERLAND" the Triennale presented the glamorous design from an Italian brand specialized in outdoor furniture.

The exhibition space, designed by Massimiliano Fuksas, is one of the largest and most important works of architecture and engineering in Europe built in recent years, stands out for its colossal structure which refers to the forms of a volcano, was the venue for this capital of international design. 

This year was characterized by the influence of design from the 60s and 70s but also reissue designs from authors who have marked the history of contemporary design.

The Italian company Meritalia, known for the extravagance their works, reissued an unprecedented project from the brothers Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni. The armchair "CUBE" idealized in 1957 summarizes how we usually sat down. With this project the designers demonstrated their ability to use innovative materials to create objects whose shape is different from the usual. In 1956 regarding “CUBE” Achille said "when a material is soft, the shape can be rigid."

That is why Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni thought a new concept of chair at the time and created a prototype to test new materials. The Cube was introduced for the 1st time in the exhibition "Colors and shapes of the house today," in 1957, at Villa Olmo in Como.

The armchair was built with cubes of foam of different densities. The seat is made from a softer material and an armrest from a material more compact. The cubic shape of the chair, when it is not subject to any weight keeps its initial shape. With the body weight, the seat lows allowing the arms to comfortably support at the sides with higher density foam, surprising the user.

With this new concept, the Castiglioni brothers developed a new product in which the design expresses the use, as it is written in the book of Sergio Polan Achille Castiglioni, "the form is not understood a priori, but it can be through action, by sitting.”

CUBE armchair is provided with two wheels that allow mobility and flexibility for interior space.

Also from Meritalia the big news was the couch "NEWCASTLE", designed by Giulio Iacchetti. When he began to draw its first lines, the designer was suggestible by the thought that a sofa, for each child, it is a safe harbor, a castle where they find comfort and protection. Like the song that does not change when we become adults, the sofa is also always our safe haven, our soft castle ... This was the reason that led to these monolithic geometries, a sofa with backrest designed as a large buttress and armrests designed as stone blocks, strongly characterized and highly recognizable lines, also due to the use of  DuraForm ® coating, an artificial fabric similar to cardboard, usually used for jeans labels: washable, durable, breathable, capable of providing strong character to the new Meritalia sofa, Newcastle.