The Quarterly Journal of Design #10 Spring 2016
This issue includes: Jasper Morrison’s memories of Tsukiji fish market; 13 ghosts of Milan’s past; the fictitious femmes of Erdem; Jane Thompson on mid-century design journalism; Felipe Ribon’s necro-functionalism; Sanaa and the utopia of transparency; OMA in conversation about the perils of preservation; and Pritzker Prize-winner Alejandro Aravena explaining the theme of the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale.
p.97 Reflections on Transparency
p.145 The Spectre of Milan
UK £8 US $19 p.113 19th-century Modern
photography by Rahi Rezvani
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The Quarterly Journal of Design #10 Editor-in-chief, Publisher Johanna Agerman Ross johanna@disegnomagazine.com Deputy editor Oli Stratford oliver@disegnomagazine.com Editorial assistant Anya Lawrence anya@disegnomagazine.com Staff writer Joe Lloyd joe@tack-press.com Subeditor Ann Morgan Creative directors Florian Böhm Annahita Kamali akfb.com Designer Anna Holden anna@tack-press.com Commercial director Chris Jones chris@disegnomagazine.com Junior sales executive Farnaz Ari farnaz@disegnomagazine.com Creative services manager Nina Akbari nina@tack-press.com Project coordinator Elizabeth Jones elizabeth@tack-press.com Circulation manager Stuart White stuart@whitecirc.com
Words by Johanna Agerman Ross, Matthew Allen, Shumi Bose, Ilona Gaynor, Owen Hatherley, Takamasa Kikuchi, Aileen Kwun, Tiffany Lambert, Magnus Larsson, Anya Lawrence, Joe Lloyd, Siska Lyssens, Jasper Morrison, Leila Karin A. Österlind, Riya Patel, Lemma Shehadi, Oli Stratford, Jane Thompson, Ian Volner, Will Wiles and Alex Wiltshire. Images by AKFB, Florian Böhm, Daniel Brown, Fabian Frinzel, Albrecht Fuchs, Julia Grassi, Dean Kaufman, Jasper Morrison, Cristóbal Palma, Bas Princen, Leonhard Rothmoser, Sølve Sundsbø and Guido Vitti. Colour management Terry Smith Complete Creative Services completeltd.com Paper and print This issue of Disegno is printed by Park Communications on Arcoprint Milk White 100gsm and Symbol Freelife Gloss 115 gsm. The cover is printed on Arcoprint Extra White 250gsm. Fonts Disegno uses Tiempos and National from Klim Type Foundry, and Aperçu from Colophon Type Foundry. klim.co.nz colophon-foundry.org Contact us Disegno, Tack Press Limited 7 Ability Plaza, Arbutus Street London E8 4DT +44 20 7249 1155 disegnodaily.com
Thanks Thank you to all our contributors to ‘The Spectre of Milan’ for their wonderful anecdotes; Jasper Morrison for his diligence in early-hours documentation of Tsukiji fish market; Fabrizia Vecchione and Jeremy Higginbotham for making the OMA roundtable possible; Monika Brandmeier for letting us shoot in her studio; Siska Diddens for helping with the jacquard shoot; Anne Holtrop for showing us around Bahrain twice; Aileen Kwun for making so many trips to Cooper Hewitt to unearth old IDs; Atelier Clerici in Milan for being so welcoming; FW Media for letting us republish six of Jane Thompson’s editor’s letters; and Florian Böhm, Annahita Kamali and the AKFB team for their incredible work in redesigning the magazine. We are very grateful to our contributors and everybody who has helped make Disegno No.10 happen. Not least Chris Tang, the unsung hero of Tack Press, and Huxley, the great dane with the sensitive stomach who kindly visited us in our office. Finally, we would like to thank Colin Christie for his peerless work as Disegno’s art director for the past nine issues. We miss him and wish him luck with his new projects as part of Plumplum Books, Ten to 10 and Christiechristie. Content copyright The content of this magazine belongs to Tack Press Limited and to the authors and artists. If you are tempted to reproduce any of it, please ask first. Tack Press Limited Disegno is part of Tack Press, along with men’s fashion magazine Jocks&Nerds and creative agency Tack Studio. tack-press.com tack-studio.com
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Masthead
The Memory of Place Words and photographs Jasper Morrison
View towards the outer curve of the halls, on the left a typical Tsukiji business.
Why do we miss certain buildings and places when they get redeveloped? Could it be something to do with our attachment to the physical and atmospheric patina that places acquire with time and use? Or part of the grieving process which a separation from the familiar usually triggers? In November this year, the Tsukiji fish market will move from the central Tokyo site that it has occupied for more than 80 years, and relocate to a new space in Toyosu, an area of reclaimed land further out from the city centre. The old market, through which more than 2,000 tonnes of seafood pass each day, will be
bulldozed and redeveloped. The value of the land, on the banks of the Sumida river, made this inevitable. A small part of the old market will be retained, but the business will be gone and it will probably be more for tourists than trade. In truth, there is nothing of beauty in the existing structures. What draws the crowds is the well-endowed authenticity and raw nature of the Japanese fish trade, combined with the resulting bustle of the market. Tuna are auctioned for big money in the middle of the night, and by 8am they have been filleted with the world's sharpest knives and the best
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Small tuna steaks freshly cut and ready to be sushied, sashimied or seared.
cuts sold to sushi chefs who are already back in their bars preparing for lunch. But that is not the whole story. There are endless other supplies to be found by the discerning shopper. The market stalls are arranged in halls that curve around a 90° angle of the site, a feature which allowed for speedy and efficient unloading of the freight trains that used to pull up at midnight, six nights a week, with the national haul. These days it all arrives by truck to the centre of the curve. Yet the Tsukiji market is not the first iteration of the fish market. When the former version, which spread out along
the river near Nihonbashi bridge in the centre of old Tokyo, was destroyed by the great Tokyo earthquake of 1923, it was no doubt much missed. Perhaps someone wrote a similar article about it then. And when the new one was finally built in 1935, it was probably considered characterless and ugly. The question is whether in 50 years or so from now, when the new market gets replaced by an even more sanitised facility, anyone will bother to write about it.
Photoessay
Ghosts and Other Functionalities Words Oli Stratford Photographs Albrecht Fuchs
An exhibition of tools to aid communication with ghosts at Bordeaux’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs et du Design was the starting point for a series of conversations about form and function in contemporary design with its creators, designer Felipe Ribon and curator Constance Rubini. 38
Felipe Ribon at home in his apartment‑cum‑studio in Paris, surrounded by models.
Corps Subtils. Elevator pitch (version one) “Hello Constance. I’m working on talking to the spirits.” How to sum up Corps Subtils? It’s an exhibition of tools for talking to the dead; a display of modern-arcane devices created by Felipe Ribon, a Franco-Colombian designer who is leading the discipline into a realm of Ouija, seance and ectoplasm. Commissioned by Constance Rubini, director of Bordeaux’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs et du Design (MADD), the project is a meditation on death and the hereafter, watched over by the level gaze of the iridescent evil eye. It’s Corps Subtils! A necropolitan plunge into objects adrift in the afterlife! Or that’s one interpretation. “What’s going on after death? Is it life? Can you communicate?” asks Ribon. “Design is the most accurate discipline for asking how objects can help us create a link between worlds.” Let’s begin at the beginning: Corps Subtils is about the nature of objects. Fittingly, MADD is something of a haunted house. It’s based in l'hôtel de Lalande, an 18th-century, central Bordeaux mansion with white stone walls, arched arcades, and peaked roofs à la française, set around a crescent-moon courtyard. The original owners met with untimely ends. Chevalier Pierre de Raymond de Lalande, its first resident, died a few years after the house’s 1779 construction and his son Jean was guillotined during the Terror. After 1880 it became the headquarters for the police, with a prison added later. The mansion, reformed as an arts museum in 1955, is now a depository for objects connected to the deposed House of Bourbon; a paper encrusted with the blood of Louis XVI, dripped from the guillotine, is among the showpieces. “It would have been quite different,” Ribon ponders, “to have held the exhibition in a white-cube gallery.” Corps Subtils’ nominal subject is spiritism, a 19th-century doctrine devised by Hypolite Léon Denizard Rivail, pen name Allan Kardec, that claimed to study incursions of spirits into the physical world. It’s a hokum theory, but one that Ribon and Rubini insist profitably engages with contemporary design. “When I look at the field of young designers, I think Felipe is one of the most interesting,” says Rubini from her office at the top of the museum. “He’s actually bringing the subject somewhere. Of course I said yes to spiritism.” So why aren’t more young designers trying to speak to the dead? “Because people are frightened,” says Rubini, grinning. Frightened? Of what? Ribon doesn’t seem frightened; in fact, he doesn’t even believe in ghosts: “Either you believe or you don’t,” he says. “But that’s not really the point.” A graduate of Paris’s ENSCI design school, Ribon is a longterm protégé and collaborator of the Bouroullec brothers, for whom he oversaw all exhibition design between 2008 and 2012, and with whom he continues to work on a freelance basis. He’s also a multiple prizewinner. Ribon won the 2012 Audi Talent Award, the Grand prix du public at Design Parade 4, and Fondation Bettencourt’s prix pour l’intelligence de la main. So why play around with spiritism? And, to add to the charge sheet, Ribon isn’t simply playing: his devices actually work. At least, they do after a fashion. Ribon’s Ghostbusters detectors are nested constructions of glass Ouija tumblers that ping and trill in response to atmospheric changes, while his 40
Osmos perfume diffuser, silver, 2015.
Osmos was produced by the Parisian silversmith Nicolas Marischael, who determines when the silver is in its correct shape through subtle variations in sound audible when he strikes the metal with his hammer.
Per-mutation mirrors use Narima glass to create stereoscopic reflections. “If the spirit appears as a manifestation of light, these mirrors will open your senses,” says Ribon. “They help you see the manifestation.” As we tour MADD, its rooms preserved in the fashion of its 18th-century owners, the mystery deepens. Ghostbusters hang above the sumptuous silk beds and peep from the drawers of bureaus; seance tables are set out, waiting for resonances of electric spectral communication; automatic writers are poised on the credenzas, pert and quivering. For a man who doesn’t believe in ghosts, Ribon does a good line in suggesting he wants to catch one. But post-tour in the courtyard, he’s in the mood to demystify. “There are some levels in the exhibition that I didn’t explain well,” he says. “I never said it before, but this project is really about function. Talking with the dead? I mean, come on.” Corps Subtils. Elevator pitch (version two) “It’s about a non-functional function that we don’t know if it’s functioning.” Ghostbuster, ectoplasm detector,
When I next see Ribon it’s at his home near the Bastille, a Parisian apartment-cum-studio above a lighting showroom. It’s small, neat and very white, with a daybed for a bed and no sign of curtains or other concessions to homeliness. “I’m all about emptiness and whiteness,” he says, busily preparing biscuits and coffee (it may not be homely, but Ribon is faultlessly hospitable). “I can’t live with things, so I’m always cleaning and taking things out. Some of the objects here I put in just for today.” Which is surprising, because Ribon is fascinated by objects in use. His graduation project from ENSCI was Another Bathroom (2008), a plan to recalibrate porcelain basins and baths as metal frames, around which nano-technic fabrics could be stretched to form waterproof, bacteria-free receptacles. His most recent creation is Osmos, a silver perfume diffuser hammered into a shape so complex as to be impossible to helpfully describe. (It’s a super-ellipsoid that undergoes a 90° lateral twist about its central point. This, admittedly, does not paint a picture.) In between came S.OS – a proposal to create products using cow bones from slaughterhouses – and Mind the Gap, a series of objects to facilitate hypnosis. A seriousness of intent unites these projects. “Creating an object is always about making a statement,” he says. “But a lot of statements are empty. I’m nervous about saying this, but much of what is produced by the design world is empty. I don’t necessarily know what it’s empty of; it just feels empty.” What Ribon may be getting at is a response to Louis Sullivan’s 1896 dictum “form ever follows function”, a proto-modernist slogan memorably described by Paola Antonelli of MoMA as being “responsible for a great deal of soulless and lobotomised design”. Sullivan’s idea was that style ought to reflect purpose – which proved productive for much of the 20th century – but it’s a vision of design that is now under threat from the functional complexity of contemporary objects. What does form follows function mean in the case of technologies where use is defined by digital interfaces rather than physical appearance? And what would it mean, in any deep sense, for the form of an iPhone to follow function when the entire point of an iPhone is that it clusters functions to create a pool Profile
blown glass, electromagnetic sensor, mirror, stainless steel, 2015.
It’s Corps Subtils! A necropolitan plunge into objects adrift in the afterlife!
Erdem MoralÄąoglu shot backstage at the catwalk show for his autumn/ winter 2016 collection, which took place at the Old Selfridges Hotel in London in February 2016.
Fictitious Narratives Words Johanna Agerman Ross Photographs Sølve Sundsbø
The mannequins in the window of fashion label Erdem’s new Mayfair store look out onto one of South Audley Street’s oldest institutions: Thomas Goode and Co – a china, glass and silverware merchant. Although the two stores sit within different trades, they are both strategically placed to cater to a well-heeled clientele, Goode since 1875 and Erdem since autumn 2015. The store’s launch marks a shift for Erdem and although the dummies faces are blank, there is a certain anticipation in their poses; perhaps it’s the gentle tilt of their heads. Profile
Accompanying this article are reproductions of a series of gelatin prints shot by the photographer Sølve Sundsbø for the new book Erdem X. Sundsbø’s prints show the model Guinevere van Seenus wearing 10 years’ worth of Erdem dresses.
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The proprietor of Erdem is Erdem Moralıoğlu, a 38-year-old Canadian womenswear designer who started his own brand 10 years ago. His studio is across town, in the less genteel surroundings of Brick Lane, in a building whose corridors smell of popcorn: an unexpected outcome of working above a cinema. While the Mayfair store has bespoke brass and glass chandeliers and walls painted in a custom‑mixed, light-blue emulsion, the Brick Lane studio is fluorescently lit and painted bright white. Moralıoğlu sits at his desk with a cup of tea, carefully mulling over his answers. “Wait a minute…” Midway through the interview, the bespectacled and casually dressed Moralıoğlu disappears into the main space of his studio where members of his team are laughing about something. He reappears a few seconds later and silence is restored. “You know, it’s so funny because the studio is usually so quiet whenever I’m here working and then the moment I do an interview or something it’s suddenly…” The corner of his mouth twitches a little. It’s clear that he takes this seriously. The differences between Erdem’s offices and store are startling, but they perfectly reflect an observation made by the sociologist Joanne Entwistle in her book The Fashioned Body: “In a world saturated with images, the image of a fashion house or label has to be carefully manufactured across a number of economic and cultural sites – advertising, marketing, magazines, shop design.” It is the new store, rather than the studio, that has become the embodiment of Erdem’s carefully curated brand image, one cemented in the pleasantly retro-looking surrounds of one of Mayfair’s finest addresses. “The approach was kind of residential,” says Moralıoğlu. “Everything was made to a level of being someone’s home and we often get people saying, ‘Oh, I’d quite like to live here.’ Women tend to spend a long time in there.” The store was created with the help of Moralıoğlu’s partner, the architect Philip Joseph, and features a chequered marble floor from Belgium, brass hand rails and custom-built furniture, all mixed in with mid-century vintage. There are trinkets and books on the tables and sideboards, a collage of photographs by David Hockney on the wall, a large painting by Axel Geis, and potted plants and a small fern garden that work together to create an informal atmosphere. It’s a luxury retail space for the Wes Anderson generation: “I like the idea that culturally you’re not stepping into
a gallery space. You’re stepping into a lovely, quiet world where you can really take your time.” Moralıoğlu is a master of visual narrative, both in his research, design process and the catwalk shows that accompany his collections. His creative process is akin to story writing, where an idea for a character and a plot develops over time. For example, his spring/summer 2015 collection took the Victorian biologist and botanical artist Marianne North as a starting point, but evolved into something otherworldly – a character that slowly metamorphosed into the very plants that she depicted, with dresses made up of guipure lace in the shape of large leaves, petals and plant tendrils that envelop the wearer’s body. Now that same exploration of narrative extends to the store as well. “What I found so interesting is that objects – inane objects, like a desk or a notepad or a chair, stacks of books or magazines – can have a narrative. They can imply something,” says Moralıoğlu. But if all these things can be read as stories, what exactly does Erdem’s own narrative imply? Brought up in Montreal, Canada, Moralıoğlu attended a fashion BA course at Ryerson University in Toronto. He came to London in 2000 to study an MA at the Royal College of Art (RCA). “The reason why I chose the RCA over Central Saint Martins was because I loved Ossie Clark,” says Moralıoğlu. It’s hardly surprising. Clark, a British fashion designer who studied at the RCA, used flowers as a recurring motif in his overtly feminine designs from the 1960s – just as Moralıoğlu has come to focus on femininity, although more on that later. After graduating in 2003, Moralıoğlu worked at Diane von Furstenberg in New York for a year, but returned to London to set up Erdem in 2005. He won first prize in the second Fashion Fringe competition for young designers in 2005: a free studio space and business mentoring from the Centre for Fashion Enterprise. “It was a great thing and it was also quite difficult because a lot of people were like, ‘Who’s this guy?’” says Moralıoğlu. “I remember when I first got my studio, I had one pattern-cutting table, a sewing machine, a computer and I shared a communal fax. That was it. I had one intern. That’s where I did my first collection. I stayed for over three years.” The brand has grown organically since then and while its east London studio is modest, it doesn’t speak of Erdem’s commercial success. The brand
Profile
A.M. Stern (the dean of Yale’s school of architecture for nearly two decades). For all that, the only sign of Johnson’s house from the road outside is an old stone wall that is a little taller than the others. Johnson’s formula (which is very different from Sanaa’s) seems to be that extreme transparency requires extreme privacy, with the public gaze always mediated by the camera, or, nowadays, the tour guide. The predominant sense is that the Glass House is an arrangement to be seen, not touched. Except – and here’s the twist – familiarity and enjoyment are essential to the spirit of the place.
likely that there is a connection between the reality of being stuck in a single large building through the long winters and the sense (illusory or not) of being trapped in utopia. But once everyone has the freedom to come and go as they please, the fiction of utopia becomes hard to sustain. It is no coincidence that the great wave of utopian experiments in the 19th century ended with the rise of rail transportation. And that is the problem with contemporary utopias: keeping people in. It’s not hard to restrict access, but it’s much more difficult to keep visitors from leaving: people can always hop in a car and go, or else glance down at their phones and be somewhere else, virtually. This is why Grace Farms is so remarkable. Disconnecting, retreating, being anonymous, being invisible – this is where the utopian impulse seems to be directed these days. Although it is counterintuitive that this would take place in a transparent building, it makes sense when you realise that it is only by refocusing attention on ourselves and the minutiae of our actions that our connections to what surrounds us become apparent. It’s a new-age idea, but once the rhetoric is pared back – as it is so insistently at Grace Farms – it’s possible to see it as an architectural effect. The important thing, for those who choose to, is simply to live in a space and follow its dictates. And to do so with others. This is Sanaa’s brilliance: to make a public spectacle out of a personal lifestyle choice. Grace Farms offers the platform to make a particular utopian sensibility communal. The architectural historian Antoine Picon suggested in his essay ‘Learning from Utopia’ that utopia is idealism plus architecture, but when I pose this formula to Prince, it falls flat. She comes back with a statement about how the design of Grace Farms was “purpose driven” and “goal orientated.” This is certainly the minimalist stance as well: do as little as possible to produce the desired effect, and stop there. “When you ask Sanaa for a bench,” muses Thatcher, “you get a plank of wood with little steel legs.” That’s it. And it works both functionally and aesthetically, but maybe socially, culturally and politically also. Like grace, maybe socio-cultural experimentation sneaks up through other means. Utopia can’t be approached directly. Rather, it’s a by-product of living with design. E N D
The view continues over the stage and down the hillside to meadows and a forest beyond. During my visit, no one seems to be stopping some kids from climbing on Johnson’s Lincoln Kirstein Tower and the Glass House Foundation even plans to host freestyle picnics to let visitors wander the grounds as they please. The Glass House, like Grace Farms, is becoming an odd sort of cultural centre. “We want to help people remember that they are living in the middle of this stuff,” says communications director Christa Carr, my tour guide for the day. Do the Glass House and Grace Farms work through vision, order and stasis, or familiarity, play and change? This is a question without an answer and something that has to be negotiated through experimentation. Yet, one thing that sets Grace Farms apart from the more eclectic Johnson complex is the uniformity of its glass design. “It’s like a UFO landed,” Carr opines, adding that the totalitarianism of Sanaa’s design reportedly made one critic feel claustrophobic: “After a few minutes, she had to get out.” Small shifts in scale can completely change the outcome of a utopian experiment. Seen in isolation, Grace Farms is an example of total design, but compared to earlier utopian communities, it has very little power over those who visit or work there. In the past, it was possible to be stuck in utopia. Imagine moving to New Haven, Connecticut, when it was founded as one of America’s first utopian communities in 1638. Or think about a more extreme case, the Oneida Community, a utopian experiment started in upstate New York in 1848 that infamously instituted a practice of communal marriage. It seems
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19th-century Modern Jacquard textiles photographed in the studio of artist Monika Brandmeier Words Joe Lloyd Photographs Florian Böhm Styling Annahita Kamali Hair/Makeup Anna Neugebauer Model Sidney Williams
Gallery
For many, jacquard textiles carry the garishness and mustiness of the pre-modern. Yet this is a curious fate for a technology that once symbolised innovation and progress. The jacquard loom was created in 1801 by the inventor Joseph Marie Charles dit Jacquard. It was the first automatic machine for weaving patterns of any great complexity. The loom’s innovation lay in a series of punched cards that determined the rise and fall of warp threads to create brocades, brocatelles and damasks with previously unheard-of accuracy and efficiency. More than 200 years on, contemporary designers still make hay with the technology. Mary Katrantzou, Hella Jongerius, Nike and Bertjan Pot have recently used jacquard to create upholstery, ball gowns, trainers and outsized pendant lamps. But what draws people to a 215-year-old technique? The versatility and complexity of the method? Or the sense of history and heritage it bestows? The photographs that follow – shot in the Berlin studio of artist Monika Brandmeier and incorporating a series of Brandmeier’s sketches – reveal something of the enduring beauty of these fabrics. Jacquard’s invention remains amongst the most modern of timeworn techniques. 114
Knitted sweater by Jacquemus, jacquard skirt by Miu Miu, and sketches by Monika Brandmeier.
Right page: 4 Rßckspiegel, z.B., 2014, private collection, Munich, ŠVG Bildkunst, Bonn.
Jacquard coat and skirt by Miu Miu, bag by PB 0110, and drawing by Monika Brandmeier.
Gallery
photography by: Harry Fricker
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The Spectre of Milan
Via Mozart
N 45°28'9" E 9°12'7"
Introduction Johanna Agerman Ross Photographs Florian Böhm
Milan’s position in design lore is legendary. Ever since the Salone Internazionale del Mobile was launched in 1961, the city has been a natural hub for design on an international scale. It is comfortably the world’s biggest furniture trade fair, with around 300,000 visitors attending each year from more than 160 countries. And yet, over recent years, the supremacy of Milan’s Salone has been questioned. “Isn’t it odd,” asked the design critic Alice Rawsthorn in a 2015 column for Frieze, “that a furniture fair should exert so much power throughout design culture, not just in its chosen field…The problem is that the Salone faces growing tension between its official role as a trade fair (-cum-branding bacchanale) and its unofficial one as a general design forum.” Add to this Jasper Morrison labelling it the “Salone del Marketing”, a statement he later retracted, as well as Hella Jongerius and Louise Schouwenberg criticising its never-ending slew of new products in their 2015 manifesto Beyond The New, released on the eve of the fair: “We advocate an idealistic agenda in design, as we deplore the obsession with the New for the sake of the New”. The fear for the Salone is that marketing exercises for big corporations risk taking over a space where critical discussion and reflection should reign. The criticism the fair has received is fundamentally tied to a shift in the importance of furniture design to the wider industry. Furniture is no longer at the cutting edge of design, as ably demonstrated by the standout event of last year’s Salone (at least in terms of setting tongues wagging) being a dinner hosted by Marc Newson and Jonathan Ive to celebrate the arrival of the Apple Watch. Elsewhere, Las Vegas’s Consumer Electronics Show now generates nearly as much design news as it does technology, while South By Southwest in Austin, Texas, is increasingly considered a must-visit for design curators and writers. By comparison, furniture can start to seem somewhat old hat. Similarly, intellectual discussions around design and its role in society play out just as well at less vaunted events such as Ljubljana’s Biennial of Design or the Istanbul Design Biennial, which this year is being curated by academics Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley. “For me, design should be a discussion of life, society, politics, food and the design itself,” the Italian designer Ettore Sottsass once said. Today
more than ever, the discussions that Sottsass had in mind seem to happen more naturally in places outside of the fundamentally commercial agenda of Milan. But it is nevertheless impossible to deny the collective experiences that still take place in a city like Milan, as well as the accumulation of those experiences over the Salone’s fifty-something lifespan. Most people within the design world know about the 2,500 guests who turned up to the Memphis launch in 1981 – even if many of those people weren’t actually there to experience it firsthand – and they know what a launch like that communicated about design at that time in history. The same can be said for countless other occasions: the debut of Droog Design in 1993, the Established and Sons events between 2007 and 2010, or the crowds of people who regularly fill the streets outside Bar Basso late at night. For this issue of Disegno we decided to tap into these shared experiences. While it is clear that Milan needs to rethink its value to a world where furniture plays an ever decreasing role in critical discussions around design, what cannot be taken away is the city’s past. It is these stories that cement Milan’s position within the design world. The stories on the following pages are personal experiences that reveal a layer of Milan invisible to the eye. They are experiences that have remained in people’s minds and which are embedded in the fabric of the city. They are stories that linger, regardless of the Salone’s commercial interests or the changing focus of the design world. Alongside these oral histories is a photography project from Florian Böhm, which depicts layers of Milan from a street-view perspective, capturing aspects of a city where, to quote the designer Alberto Meda, “a good ghost still lives.” “An object has a great potential to exert an influence upon the individual,” the Milanese designer Vico Magistretti once said. “While it might be indirect and almost imperceptible, this influence can still be enduring and effective. It can provide the individual with a different understanding of the relationship between space and object in the home and of how one chooses to live.” We hope that Milan can remain just such an object.
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Piazza Cavour
N 45°28'22" E 9°11'42"