In the world of contemporary furniture, the boundaries between disciplines are becoming increasingly porous. The big names in design, accustomed to thinking about seating, lighting and interiors, are now allowing themselves the luxury – and freedom – to step outside their comfort zones and explore new, often surprising, territories. The result? Objects and projects that remind us that design is never just about function, but also about expression, narrative and identity.
Projects that show how design is not a fence, but a key to open doors. A way of thinking before it is a discipline. Because everything, really everything, can be designed. Even that which we do not expect.
The project conceived by Formafantasma for Cassina to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Le Corbusier®, Pierre Jeanneret®, Charlotte Perriand® Collection is somewhere between an art installation and a theatrical act. The designers have conceived a performance that tells the story and the spirit of these iconic furnishings, combining the language of performance with a critical reflection on time and design (with texts by Emanuele Coccia, André Jacques and Feifei Zhou).
The Formafantasma duo also signed the bottle for Olfactory Series 1, Jil Sander’s first perfume collection. Six unisex fragrances that blend botany and technology, in an organically shaped container where the white aluminum cap becomes a cloche, enveloping the perfume and protecting it from light.
Piero Lissoni designed the limited edition bottle that Ginarte, the premium dry Italian gin dedicated to the art world, unveiled during Milano Design Week. An essential shape in etched glass, with only a central porthole left transparent. Formal rigor, essentiality, tactile sensuality: Lissoni’s design lexicon is found in an unexpected, collectible object.
Children’s design is often limited to a playful, but ultimately superficial or purely technical dimension. Naoto Fukasawa subverts this with Playful Sculptures, a collection of furniture (for the Japanese company Jakuets) that are at once toys, micro-architectures, and exercises in balancing functionality and poetry. Each piece is an invitation to discovery that appeals to children and adults alike.
Then there are those who have gone even further, touching the intimacy of a complex theme: this is The Last Pot collection, the second chapter of the Il Tornitore Matto by Alessi project, the brainchild of Alberto Alessi and Giulio Iacchetti. Ten international signatures, including Michael Anastassiades and Philippe Starck, took up the challenge of designing funeral urns. An object dense with meaning, transformed into a container of memory through forms suspended between sacredness and design.
Omer Arbel designed a series of sockets for 22 System; India Mahdavi asked for them in neon yellow, a color not in the catalog, to make the ironic Smiley armchair, also designed as a power point for electrical or electronic devices. And always in the spirit of pop, Karim Rashid designed a T-shirt for the NYCxDesign x Souvenir exhibition-shop (one of the events of the upcoming Design Week in the Big Apple), reinventing the slogan ‘I Love New York’ through a play of graphics and words.
Finally, there are those who go the other way, from the world of art or cinema to the world of furniture. This is the case of director Pedro Almodóvar: he collaborated with Roche Bobois on the Cromatica furniture collection, which looks like it came straight from one of his sets. With bright colors and an iconography made up of fetishes and the faces of actresses/muses, his visual taste becomes a liveable set design that perfectly embodies his style.
