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I Saloni is the Cannes festival of furniture fairs. Everyone who’s anyone in contemporary furniture design, from head honchos to students and wannabes, converge on the italian city of Milan like it’s Mecca. When it’s on you could be forgiven for thinking the Pope was in town.
A month-long event held every April, this year, I Saloni 2008 attracted a record number of visitors: 348,000, in fact, almost 30% up on the previous year. Held over 230,000 square metres in Milan’s new purpose-built fairgrounds, I Saloni – incorporating six main exhibitions and two groundbreaking art installations – hosted 2,450 exhibiting companies showcasing the latest in domestic and commercial furnishing. Among the big themes this year were bright colours, one-off bespoke designs, and eco-sustainability.
One of the more colourful highlights was the purpose-built home for the CORIAN® loves MISSONI display. A project filled with sunny personality, this visionary residential interior expressed the design versatility of DuPont Corian solid surfaces through the style of MissoniHome. From the entrance hall to the bedroom, the exhibit exploded with unexpected colour combinations and iconic design pieces, showcasing the extraordinary creativity that’s made the Missoni style so distinctive for nearly 50 years.
Extraordinary creativity was also on display in the new component of the biennial Eurocucina kitchen furniture exhibit, FTK [Technology For the Kitchen]. In line with the motto underpinning the Saloni – originality and innovation – companies displayed novel products and prototypes for the electrical appliances of tomorrow. Whirlpool had a hit with their Eco-System kitchen, which uses 70% less energy than a traditional kitchen. Inspired by natural Eco-System cycles, it uses heat from the fridge pump to warm the dishwasher, for instance, and recycles 60% of the water.
Speaking of water, over in the Bathroom Furniture Exhibition, Newform Design’s Lounge shower rose stood out – not for its eco cred but for the way it adds colour and music to its water flow, offering a tantalising, fun vision of future hygiene!
Clouds also inspired New Zealand eco-designer David Trubridge’s Spiral Island collection of lights and seating. Created specifically for Milan, where it was one of the most popular pieces shown in Zona Tortona, Spiral Islands re-interprets the Maori koru spiral: delicate cloud lighting forms float over, and echo, island seats below, like the long white clouds that give New Zealand its Maori name [Aotearoa] hovering over the nation’s islands.
The Spiral Island seats are made from government-controlled plantation wood and recycled cardboard, non-toxic glues and solvents, 100% pure wool coloured by non-toxic dyes and wool felt made from wool scraps. Even the manufacturing process is environmentally friendly, with 70% of the electricity used while making the collection provided by renewable hydroelectric sources, and all waste sorted and sent to separate recycling facilities!
Zona Tortona was also home to Spanish artist/designer Jaime Hayon's Jet Set installation for Bisazza. Made from fibre and silver mosaic, with a crystal cabin and leather wings, it’s a luxurious and humorous version of a serious, functional object; a living room plane or a work of art showing the potential use of Bisazza materials. Ever prolific, Hayon presented three other projects at Milan’s Rossana Orlandi Gallery in conjunction with I Saloni, including the Fantasy Collection for Lladró.
Fantasy and green design were the go at this year’s SaloneSatellite, I Saloni’s fringe event devoted to up and coming designers. The 570 new designers featured were asked to apply their ingenuity to the installation’s 2008 theme – viva il verde! Go Green! – by creating a project dedicated to ecologically sustainable design.
Like Spiral Islands, clouds provided inspiration for Taro & Sarah’s light containers, exhibited in SaloneSatellite. Working with magnetic contacts, which provide the electricity to the light emitter in each container, the lights were designed to replicate clouds, says designer Taro Gragnato, adding that “you can always change the structure – you can add more light, or less light, with each container.”
A similar concept, Foscarini’s Tropico by Giulio Iacchetti, is a modular lighting system that blurs the line between designer and consumer. The lamps are built from individual clips, and any passerby can reshape and resize each light, one clip at a time. Carlo Urbinati, Foscarini’s co-founder, says the idea behind the Tropico is to highlight individuality, and personal designs.
In addition to the designs on show, I Saloni 2008 showcased innovative art with British artist and filmmaker Peter Greenaway’s pioneering new take on Leonardo’s Last Supper. Greenaway merged visual arts, cinema, poetry, music and cutting-edge new technologies to give new life to the work via a multimedia event in front of a “clone” of the painting. Despite a hiccup that saw the location of the event moved from the Cenacolo Vinciano to the Sala delle Cariatidi at Palazzo Reale, it was greeted with acclaim and sold out each performance.
Likewise, Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Art Sign Offices project was a crowd favourite. Part of SaloneUfficio, this installation featured eight “office rooms”, each symbolising some realm of human life [education, politics, economics, communication etc], surrounding a large mirrored cube/room, decorated with religious symbols – squarely placing spirituality at the centre of human activity, and serving, perhaps, as a reminder that the best designs are those that encompass the whole human. I Saloni 2008, with its emphasis on individuality and sustainability, was an innovative fit. |
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Iconic Canadian designer 