Design

Imbucati di Sky arte HD – That’s all folk’s

Monday April 15th, 201313/05/2013Daniele Devoti

The Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan is finished, leaving me a bit ‘longing for the huge circus that wound through the city.

The most beautiful memory is undoubtedly the moment when I gave a Venetian boule à neige to Toyo Ito immediately after interviewing him.

Wandering through the area in Milan, literally filled by designers, companies, creatives, curious, and students was beautiful, but I still have etched in my retina the figure of the little 71 year old Korean spinning my glass ball, with fake snow and the rialto bridge, amused.

Life is beautiful.

Imbucati di Sky arte HD – Eatable furniture

Sunday April 14th, 201313/05/2013Daniele Devoti

Saturday and Sunday the Fuorisalone is always plenty of people and to infiltrate is really undertaking given the high competition.
Despite my obvious logistical difficulties in moving during my visit to the Italian Pavilion in via Oslavia, it was the most enjoyable and fun visit I made yesterday.

FoodMade

There were young designers with very interesting proposals.

useDesign with their project necessary becomes unnecessary and useless becomes useful. They have created a series of objects made with bread crumbs mixed with a natural resin “The mixture of flour and salt on one side and dry bread crumbs on the other, properly mixed with natural resins turn these simple ingredients into an easily malleable dough with a strong structural strength and refined textures.”

Leonardo Talarico with his chair completely made of Tofu goes almost unnoticed inside the pavilion, we need to pause and read the legend to understand that it was built with small pieces of dried tofu and stained with natural products.

Lanzavecchia+Wai ssociates crisis with the food, and in fact you can eat their furniture, but you don’t have to thrown away the non eatable part because it takes on new functions.

I found very impressive their table with a caramel top with a support of iron; the support becomes a candle-holder once you ate the caramel.
. “Piece by piece the body of the object is eroded, exposing a soul that will remain over time. Their aim is to encourage a return to the most basic necessities: a true reflection on the essence of the things that will lead us into the future .”

CTRLZAK Art & Design Studio offer highly symbolic containers for food consumption, as they are made of the material that makes up the host as a basis for the creation of mystical designed dishes and bowls.

Cucurbita propose the reuse of the pumpkin from Mantua, giving it new life by creating durable and beautiful furniture using that widespread and economic vegetable “a natural product, made by the ‘ mixture of starches, sugars and pumpkin pulp joined thanks to chains of starches that enter between the fibers of pumpkin and the porosity of the wood, thus avoiding the use of adhesives.”

Imbucati di Sky arte HD – Fuorisalone at via della Spiga and Monte Napoleone

Saturday April 13th, 201318/04/2013Daniele Devoti

I consumed the soles between Via Tortona and Lambrate Ventura looking for something new and curious, this part of the city is new to these events and it was interesting to note how old tumbledown buildings have been occupied with installations and exhibitions for Fuorisalone.

Curiosity prompted me to see how the quadrilateral of luxury Milan, in particular via della Spiga and Via Monte Napoleone, got themselves involved into the mechanisms of Fuorisalone.

There you can find exclusive showrooms and shops. That is the area where the bourgeoisie like walking and shopping and the first thing you notice is that nothing has changed from the normal routine of the place. There are some timid attempts to involve the Fuorisalone in this area, but they are very little compared to the revolution occurred in other places.

Via della Spiga is always a delightful place for a walk, at the end of it there are two electric cars and along the way there are some small posters indicating the presence of an exposure in the store next to the poster. The whole area is covered by wi fi connection and it is pleasant to be able to enter these prestigious stores that host fragments of Fuorisaloni.

Tiffany & Co stands out with the work of Elsa Peretti with her molecular shaped glass objects from the Bone Collection and the Padua Collection too. A joy to touch, they are all sensual and organic forms that enchant the senses of all of us.

Majestic setting up of Gessi in Via Monte Napoleone, the apotheosis of wealth and luxury.
This company is the top of the wellness world and knows how to present and, especially, how to involve people in this world. A must see.

Funny their carpets with embedded stones for foot massage.

+Imbucati di Sky arte HD – Fuorisalone at via Ventura

Friday April 12th, 201313/05/2013Daniele Devoti

The Milanese Fuorisalone includes a galaxy of events, exhibitions and promotional activities ranging in all directions and it is interesting to visit them as an unofficial reporter Sky art HD .Sky arte HD.

Via Tortonais definitely the most popular and famous event linked to the Salone Internazionale del Mobile, though my favorite is certainly Via Ventura: much more lively, less rigid in setting out ideas and, especially, not entirely covered by sponsors.

There Fuorisalone occupies unusual spaces such as a garage, or the typical abandoned buildings quickly whitewashed and much sought by creatives/designers. At Ventura Lambrate there isn’t the compact crowd that is located in Via Tortona due to the size of road, the spaces are wide and the atmosphere, relaxing.

I get into a tyre shop, an unusual space for a design exhibition, inside it you can find Curtimetallo & Youtool that presents interesting, ironic and iconic metal objects. Going on there is a graffiti signed Cape, that surprises for the way in which synthesizes a thinking done by many: “Thanks Starck”. That grafffiti represents the famous juicer with a roll of toilet paper leaning over it, a concept known to all those who have tried to use that famous object to prepare a juice (mission impossible ).

A brand and a signature are in some way harmfu for designl, it is used to identify an author and then certify its quality and originality, but it turned out as one way to justify the cost of that item. As Duchamp had predicted at the beginning of 900 signature of the author / designer will be enough to give birth to a work of art / object, the difference is that today the producers have been able to charge a lot to us consumers.

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Imbucati di Sky arte HD – Fuorisalone at via Tortona

Thursday April 11th, 201318/04/2013Daniele Devoti

As one of the Sky Arte HD infiltrator, I walked through Via Tortona Yesterday and it was really interesting to notice how things change in Milan.

A simple space where artisans and small producers present their work becomes the Arts and Craft space, throughout the rest of Italy it would be called just a craft market.

P.S. For the ones who don’t know it, Arts and Crafts was an artistic movement of the second half of the 800 which proposed handicraft work as an expression of man in opposition to the rising industrial production.

Times change, but the problems don’t.

Imbucati di Sky arte HD – Meeting Toyo Ito

Wednesday April 10th, 201314/05/2013Daniele Devoti

As an SkyArte unofficial reporter #imbucatoSkyArte (Sky arte HD) I managed to ask a few questions to Toyo Ito. For those who do not know Ito, he is a world-renowned architect, he won the Golden Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012 and was awarded the prestigious Pritzker Prize (the Nobel Prize for architecture in 2013).

Toyo Ito is the rock star of architecture and design.

Thanks to being at the same wonderful event Lexus I could join the Master and, with the help of a talented interpreter, exchange a few words and make a couple of questions.

Toyo Ito was really very willing and witty in response, he explained to me that in his installation for Lexus we cound’t see their car because in that way people ask themself some questions and feel some emotions. When young japanese people buy a car, he said, they don’t pay much attention to the shape, but they are attracted by the technological concept intead.

Then we entered the realm of the history of architecture, analyzing, in a quick bird’s eye view, the figure of the man in the architectural design of the last 100 years.
It is not common knowledge that during early ‘900 Le Corbusier revolutionized the design of buildings requiring human measures as a measure to build the city. According to Ito architectural philosophy of our day relativizes man and places him into a natural process, as an evident result also buildings and cities must be sustainable and a man is just one of the many natural elements that form our universe.

After thanking him for giving me so much time, I gave him a classic souvenir from Venice bought a few days ago in a stall.

Toyo Ito

Lexus – Design Amazing 2013

Monday April 8th, 201308/04/2013Daniele Devoti

It happens!

It happens sometimes to be lucky and to steal a march on television and magazines.

Here I am, at the Museo della Permanente in Milan, the day before the opening of Design Week 2013 – Lexus Design Amazing.

I’m sitting alone amidst an intricate installation created by Akihisa Hirata supervised and produced by Toyo Ito(winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012 and the Pritzker Prize in 2013). The structure is 5.5 m high and has an area of about 330 square meters, it is huge, beautiful and fascinating.

I’m sitting under the structure, admiring it but I’m also a little confused: it looks like a marble track made by the giants. The first question I ask myself is “Why?”, But then the second one, a little ‘more complex, prevails, “What happened to ‘Architecture if one of the most innovative and influential architects in the world wanted to keep some giants happy with marbles?

It has been nearly 100 years since Le Corbusier published a book entitled Vers une architecture, theorizing his architecture on a human scale, well represented by his famous drawing The Modulor

They were glorious years for the architecture: design was focussed on man. Every single space and each room were designed according to human measurements (and never mind if the measures used by Le Corbusier were his own).

A little less than 100 years later I find myself thrust into the midst of this strange maze at the Museo della Permanente in Milan during the Design Week 2013 – Lexus Design Amazing. What has happened?

Villa Savoye

From the aesthetically perfect architecture, where the human dimension was the unit measurement of the spaces and prospectus, where order and discipline prevailed, we have reached an intricate, chaotic and seemingly useless tangle of trails.

Toyo Ito and Akihisa Hirata tell us that the man is no longer the center of design, but that streams, network and connections have become the focus of our spaces and our cities, it’s not a new concept, but it’s become the primary one, I can even say a Law in creating both private and collective spaces.

Cars, people, wind, water, life forms are all connected together and this installation is the space in which visitors can experience this variety of sensations.