Anyway, we are working towards creating a table, which requires no sewing in the moulds, making the rubber mould reusable for each chair. This requires a lot of clamps, bolts, rubber moulds and wooden clamping pieces.
By the end of the day we frantically poured the sewing free chair. We will see how this piece pops out. It may compromise the organic qualities of the piece having a wooden structure forming the edges of the chair leg.
A stand I forgot to mention from Milan Furniture fair was a group called ‘Just Married’. This was a very fitting name considering these designers had travelled from Brittany in France. Anyway, they showed a lot of enthusiasm and determination to display their work. Three designers towed a caravan from Brittany to Milan, to show off there work. They parked the caravan on a prominent walk-way between exhibitions. In the back of the caravan were a number of different products. One was a cast vibrator with a relief print of Jesus on the cross! This was very brave considering the number of Catholics living in Milan! Anyway, I was just impressed by the initiative the ‘Just married’ design team showed, overcoming the expensive challenge of exhibiting at the Milan furniture fair.
I am not to good at keeping up with this blogging business I have a back log of stories in my mind to write about, but never seem to find the time to sit down and stick them on the blog.
Anyway, I will start with the most current event. Yesterday I was determined not to be your typical tourist and arrive in the tour bus to see the tulip fields of Lisse. Instead I was determined to slog it out to get there. I made use of a beautiful summers day and cycled about 70 kilometres from Utrecht to Lisse. It took an exceptionally long time on my clunky old Dutch bike. I am guessing I had lots of old people comment in Dutch about the amount of noise my chain guard was making.
Anyway, the ride was pretty spectacular, I cycled through a lot of small towns, following the canals most of the journey. I did exceptionally well not getting lost until I got to Leiden. You would think it would be straight forward finding a tulip field, but not for old Hol. After many stops pulling out the map, asking for directions I found my way.
By the time I made it to Lisse, my knees were creaking and my thighs were aching. All I wanted to do was see a bloody tulip and my mission would be completed.
However, once I found one field I had a lot of inspiration to keep on riding. The wide expanses of colour were almost like an abstract painting. It was a very spectacular scene, seeing such vibrant colours. The cycling pains disappeared into the back of my mind, over taken by a visual feast of flowers.
The most challenging exhibition I visited during the Furniture Fair in Milan was a stand by Droog Design titled ‘ Make Me.’ Droog are renowned for commissioning innovative and conceptual exhibitions. This is basically the reason that I was drawn to working in Holland with Tejo and Rene who are represented by Droog.
The benefit of this platform for design is that the end user can to some degree manipulate and design there own furniture pieces, it cuts out the large commissions that retail outlets take for furniture pieces, effectively driving the product price down and it reduces the green miles that the piece needs to travel.
- -You are basically limited to very sterile products that only employ cnc/laser cutting techniques in the design.
T They suggest that designers could use 3 D laser printers to create more organic work. However, this technology is so expensive it is not really a viable option.
-T There are a lot of inconveniences placed in the consumer’s hands like… negotiating with manufacturers, transportation issues.
- This style of design does not leave opening for the designer crafts person.
- Maybe it is an egotistical reason this concept from Droog is niggling at me. Basically it devalues the skills that a designer develops over time to create work. We develop the knowledge and understanding of materials and processes. We learn to build relationships with manufacturers to easily translate computer generated ideas into real objects. All of these aspects of design will be compromised for the sake of reducing the products price and making different designers work more globally accessible.
As highly critical as I am, I was impressed that I was challenged on day four of design saturation.
Today I spent the day roaming the Tortona exhibition area. This was a lot more up my alley than the Fiera Milano. The Via Tortona area is an industrial area of Milano. Spaces like mechanic workshops have basically been boarded up partially and turned into temporary exhibition spaces. People have given up there houses and moved every object out to accommodate for hordes of visitors to walk through a temporary exhibition space.
This style of exhibition reaches out to designer maker crafts people. The exhibition felt much less commercialised than the Fiera Milano.
I visited the Domus live at Tortona, which is focused on presenting talks, interviews and design debates. However, it seems that the whole thing was really geared towards posting the event on a social media platform. The speakers were position awkwardly close to the camera, preventing the real audience to really watch and listen to the interview. There was no attempt from the organizers to rally up real live crowds of visitors to the interviews.
It just seemed a little bit absurd not to engage a live audience, when you have a captive audience rearing to rest there weary legs from walking to endless exhibition displays.
Anyway, today I spent the day roaming around the Fiera Milano site. It is pretty overwhelming being confronted by about 22 jumbo sized sheds which have all been converted into exhibition halls that house displays ranging from Student exhibitions (Salone Satellite), to lighting (Euroluce) right through to office furnishing.
I kicked off the day by visiting the student display, placed at the very rear of all the exhibition spaces. Many of the students stood there hopefully handing out business cards, in an attempt to have their work picked up by manufacturers. It was kind of nice hanging out in this area, most of the students lack the pretention that most of the other display spaces had. But at the same time a lot of the work wasn’t particularly impressive and I wondered why you would blow so much money on hiring an exhibition space/transporting the work and then sitting at a stand for 4 days for some mediocre work.
One of the most stand-out student pieces was from Kirsti Taiviola. She has developed blowen glass globes that reflect different patterns onto the wall surface. They were simple but elegant and you could see them adapted in many different architectural situations.
Then I spent a lot of time wondering around Euroluce.. I haven’t scene so many glass chandeliers. The place was sparkling with diamantes, Euroluce was full of Italian bling. There was a lot of bad taste going on in a lot of these stands.
Moving onto the modern furniture stands I was most impressed by the Zietaprozessdesign a Polish design firm. They had developed a collection of works made from inflated steel. I must say I was pretty inspired by this method of creating organic looking metal works. I think this technique could be adapted into sculptural works. It will just take a dam fine welder to weld .5 sheet metal together, and have an airtight joint.
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