A prolific architect, urbanist and critic curates his top picks for Forbes India, direct from the world's largest design fair
Milan, the design capital of the world, witnesses the highest flux of creative milieu in the spring of each year. At the Salone del Mobile, the world’s largest design fair, prominent design brands, visionaries and studios showcase their annual collections and indulge in new launches, exhibits, parties, pop-ups and cutting-edge installations spread out in the city. About 375,000 attendees from 181 nationalities made it to this year’s edition of Salone (as it is popularly called) at the Rho fairgrounds, held from April 9 to 14.
Here are our picks of the most inventive designs from the mega-fair. Raw Material by Hermès Hermès comes back to La Pilota this year, entrenching itself thick into materiality. Charlotte Macaux Perelman explores materials in their raw state to create branches of dry stone walls as she plots the layout of the exhibition space. Out of this year’s Hermès collection, what has left a mark includes the beautiful bulbous Hecatre and Halo lamps by designers Barber & Osgerby in black granite, and super white Limoges porcelain respectively. The cable is sheathed in velvet cow hide. The Coulisse is another geometric lamp by designer Tomas Alonso. With the use of materials such as bamboo, Japanese paper screen and copper with an embedded LED source, the delicate assembly is reminiscent of modernist sensibility. The gorgeous throws and plaids showcased are creations of Studio Hermès, which are hand spun, hand woven and hand overdyed cashmere and yak wool. They appear in immersive colours of indigo, mint, charcoal, fuchsia and coral. Interlude by Apparatus The New York-based studio, headed by former fashion designer Gabriel Hendifar and a public relations professional Jeremy Anderson, came about in 2012. Apparatus seems to take a measured approach to pick their material palette –often offbeat in its choices, like with matte python, horsehair and patinated brass. “Things feel modern, but not modern for the sake of being modern,” quips Handifar, who draws creative inspiration from his personal life as a first-generation American born after the Islamic Revolution in Iran. ‘Interlude’ forms part of ‘Apparatus Editions’—a run of limited production, which indulges in craft to produce a suite of furnishings for an ‘imagined modernist concert hall’. Musical references inform the aesthetic and design sensibility of the collection. Interlude uses exotic materials with restraint like alabaster, hand embroidery, Carpathian burl, and eel skin, lending an intricate light and shadow charm to the collection. FAR at Nilufar Depot Nina Yashar is often seen exploring new territories that push the traditional limits of design. This time around, the large exhibition space at the Nilufar Depot gets curated by Valentina Ciuffi and Georgia Cranstoun of Studio Vedèt – a Bologna-based visual identity practice. The project got initiated in 2018 and culminated in April 2019, and attempts to showcase emergent designers in what it describes as a temporary ‘collective of collectives’. The inflatable installation celebrates the radical trajectory that design undertook in the 20th century in architectural and design disciplines. The materiality of the objects on display is futuristic, with the use of 3D velvety polymers to second skins of silicon and car body sprays, to interact and communicate with the audience in a visceral manner. The exhibit design is by Italian architectural practice Space Caviar. Knoll celebrates Bauhaus The exhibit marks the centenary of the celebrated German school of design, The Bauhaus. Envisaged as a series of four interactive clusters, they encourage the audience to participate in the spirit of the German school’s tenet of ‘Learning by Doing’. Entering the four settings, visitors can have a direct experience of the objects and furnishings that take the leading roles, creating narrative compositions that vary in the experience of each participant. The show is curated by OMA- the celebrated Dutch design studio headed by Rem Koolhaas. The work of icons of design like Marcel Breuer, Mies van der Rohe and Florence Knoll are showcased as three clusters. The fourth cluster offers an analytical look at the legacy of the Bauhaus in contemporary design.