In Milan, an exhibition (actually two, at the Palazzo Reale and the Triennale) is paying tribute to Gabriele Basilico. The title is Le mie città (“My Cities”). This ‘my’ is full of feeling: it is a declaration of love, sometimes of pain. But never of indifference. My favourite images by Basilico are those of war-ravaged Beirut, its elegant buildings collapsed, its streets deserted. They are beautiful and unforgettable pictures.
Cities are like big houses, seen without inhabitants, they lose their meaning. The life that flows through their streets is energy, and the people are the words that together write the history of that place. In his essay Metamorphosis, the philosopher Emanuele Coccia puts cities and ecosystems on the same level, calling them “spaces of metamorphic conspiracy, places of transformation, where forms come together to allow a greater metamorphosis of the Earth, that is, to give Gaia a more intense and richer life”.
Speaking of cities. One of the most beautiful projects seen at the first edition of Design Miami/ Paris in October was the street furniture by British designer Samuel Ross, functional sculptures designed to stimulate thought and interaction. Useful objects that are the opposite of banality. Three versions will be permanently installed in Miami, in the Design District, which is currently preparing for the most culturally dense week of the year, Art & Design Week.
Ross’s is a beautiful approach to design, capable of holding together rationality and irrationality, function and emotion. Always with the end user in mind. A phrase by Achille Castiglioni comes to mind: Objects must keep you company. And indeed, Castiglioni loved to surround himself with objets trouvés, his ‘oggetti anonimi’ (anonymous objects). His studio is full of them. To visit it – it has been open to the public since 2006, thanks to the passionate work of the Fondazione Achille Castiglioni – is to understand his work a little better. It is sad to think that this place is threatened with eviction. In these four rooms there has been a continuous and powerful ‘metamorphic conspiracy’ of ideas (I hope Coccia will not mind if I adopt and transform one of his definitions) and it would be nice to be able to continue to feel the energy. Who knows if that will be possible. Long live creativity.
