A Standing Affair With Designer Seats
MILAN, Italy — It had been rumored long in advance that if you hadn’t already booked a hotel room in this city for April 4-9, you would not find one. If you didn’t have your dinner reservations, you wouldn’t be eating at Savini. If you didn’t have your tickets, you wouldn’t be seeing Leonardo da Vinci’s recently restored “The Last Supper,” and if you didn’t have your business cards, you wouldn’t be entering the Salone Internazionale del Mobile (also known as the Milan Furniture Fair) that would swell this city of 1.5 million by more than 10%, drawing an expected 165,000 visitors from 144 countries.
Now celebrating its 40th season, the Salone has grown from a small consortium of Italian designers to the signature event of the international furniture design season, an annual rite of spring with a signal-to-noise ratio of one to one, as a vast chorus of soloists competes to be heard in a very crowded design theater.
In the first hours of the Salone last Wednesday, an army of men and women descended on the fairgrounds in a wide colonnade, pushing through the entry gates and accelerating its pace as long lines began choking the entrances. Very quickly, the sly, the impatient and the well-dressed elbowed their way to the front, hoping to be the first to gain entry to the 26 pavilions housing 1,605 exhibitors covering the 2 million square feet of the fairground, which is located at the end of a train line in a mostly residential neighborhood. Tempers flared among those who found the long waits to be more than their important stature could bear, expressing their utter disdain at the Italian organization system with arms opened wide to the heavens, exclaiming, “Non si fa cosi!” (“It just isn’t done!”).
Whether it is due to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s so-called wealth effect, the strength of the U.S. dollar or the sheer dominance of Italian design, statistics provided by the fair’s sponsoring entity say sales of Italian furniture to the U.S. rose 38% last year, to $1.45 billion, making the U.S. second only to Germany as the premier consumer of Italian furniture exports. So--looming recession or not--if it was hard to buy a chair at L.A.’s Pacific Design Center last week, it’s probably because everyone was in Milan.
Despite the Salone’s international name, the fair’s exhibitors were overwhelmingly Italian, with the international component supplied by the polyglot buyers, fabricators, journalists and architects lining up to inspect, for example, a group of tables from Antonio Citterio’s collection at B & B Italia that were so low to the ground as to seem impossible to reach by anyone with lower back pain. They also sought out William Sawaya’s Calla chair at Heller, which looked like a cross between a white molded plastic calla lily and a crab. Or Francois Bauchet’s bright red Yang sofa at Ligne Rosset, which formed three-quarters of a square by nestling three interlocking pieces, cut with a curving yin-yang line.
Viewers poked, prodded and inspected a wide range of molded, poured and sculpted gels, foams and plastics that were making an appearance in brightly colored tables and lamps. Violet, fuchsia and apple-green were used to amplify the clean shapes of rectilinear upholstered sofas, with a 1960s-inspired shade of tangerine orange making a particularly ubiquitous appearance.
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Exhibitors were divided into three categories. The “classic” section was dedicated to the manufacturers of crystal chandeliers and historic and semi-historic reproductions of all shapes and sizes. The other two categories were somewhat confusingly divided into “modern” and “design” in a relationship that even the fair’s information booths had difficulty articulating. Upon inspection, “modern” seemed best described as the furniture industry’s equivalent of the generic drug marketplace, with research and development being done by the firms occupying the fair’s “design” sector. Even so, work in the latter sector would be best described as reviving classic Modernism.
The temporary showrooms were often full-fledged architectural environments replete with raised wood floors, subterranean illumination and private cafes lending an air of a highly animated cocktail party. Some favored invitation-only gatherings for their preexisting clientele, using quiet exclusivity to amplify their elite status as if they were beyond caring about the hungry marketplace. Italian manufacturer Driade so emphasized the cafe environment that the actual furniture--a minimalist refractory table made from three wide planks of cherrywood by English architect John Pawson and bright-green painted-glass Jelly Slice Tables by French designer Philippe Starck--seemed abandoned in a nether region more appropriate for busboys than buyers.
As the fair’s first day wore on, the elegant aficionados became increasingly weighted down, roaming the seemingly endless lengths of the vast fairground in search of a lighting bolt of inspiration, looking for clues from the bags and books carried by their compatriots and competitors. Cries of eureka and hallelujah greeted a whisper-thin tangerine silhouette of a Le Corbusier-inspired chaise longue at Molteni, yet turn the corner to a competitor’s showroom and a variation on the same theme appears with a slightly thicker profile and a magnetic white leather pillow reminiscent of the color scheme of a vintage Courreges suit.
The Salone’s premier sidebar, the Salone Satellite, broke away from the market’s homogeneity, with the work of 400 emerging designers from 26 countries chosen by a jury of seven world recognized designers, including Philippe Starck, Giulio Castelli and Rodrigo Rodriquez. In it, the next generation exhibited work that ranged from the purely conceptual to the elegantly realized and production ready, pushing CD-ROM press kits and seeking notice from trawling company representatives. In the last two years, lighting manufacturer Fontana Arte has put into production eight pieces from designers seen at the Salone Satellite.
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Outside the fairgrounds, but timed to profit from the Salone’s juice without being obliterated by it, were a series of events around Milan that truly embraced the leading edge of furniture and architectural design. An exhibition at the Prada Foundation of new store designs for Tokyo, Los Angeles and San Francisco showcased works-in-progress by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and his Rotterdam, Netherlands-based OMA studio, as well as designs by the Swiss studio of Herzog and De Meuron who earlier in the week were awarded the Pritzker Prize, the prestigious international architecture award. Models of the proposed Prada buildings and blocks of sample materials to be used in the interiors were laid out on trestle tables and labeled with captions scribbled onto Post-It notes. The look of freewheeling, gestating creativity stood in contrast to the not-so-freewheeling prohibition on photography.
On Via Manzoni, Sawaya and Moroni’s packed gallery displayed London-based architect Zaha Hadid’s ice-blue, fire-varnished “Glacier” bench, which undulated and then crested precipitously, leaving sharp edges that appeared to have fallen away like an avalanche of snow. Also shown in a red horse-hair variant, Hadid’s benches are her first in a series of interlocking components that eventually will include a pair of “Stalagmite” and “Stalagtite” end tables with similarly geologic forms. These were shown here only in computer-generated drawings.
As a constant stream of visitors took turns testing Hadid’s sculptural furniture, exhausted showroom assistants collected business cards in an attempt to mete out the press kits and catalogs to advantageous recipients while avoiding idea thieves and doe-eyed Portuguese design students wielding press cards from dubious publications.
In the after-hours of the Salone, crowds spilled onto the sidewalks, blocking traffic outside an art gallery yet again celebrating the omnipresent Philippe Starck with a minor modification of the classic American aluminum office chair of the 1940s.
Down the street, an opening for veteran German lighting designer Ingo Mauer at Spazio Krizia had as many people in the street as inside the building, forcing the city’s old guard to elbow their way through the crowds, shouting “Permesso,” so that they wouldn’t miss their curtain for the premiere of Roland Pettit’s ballet of “Carmen” at the famed La Scala opera house.
Even long after the A-list had moved on to late-night dinners, architects and designers knocked on the doors of a gallery that had cleared out its usual selection of Sottsass’ Memphis designs to show a rhinestone-encrusted daybed by Francesco Binfare and Enzo Cattelani’s rolled-wire “Fil de Fer” lamps, rumbling down a cigarette-strewn staircase to eye an enormous Saint Bernard sleeping next to the furry sofa he seemed to inspire.
