Innholdsfortegnelse for 2022 / 02 i Interni

Can planting a tree change your life? Definitely. Even more so, if the tree in question is a specimen 10 meters high standing at the center of your living room, inside a space specially designed and built for the plant’s wellbeing and your own. Meeting Alma in India, a marvelous 50-year-old Ficus tree (not the ‘sacred’ variety), symbol in oriental cultures of welcome, gratitude and respect, a bridge between heaven and earth, Yin and Yang, meant all this for Francesco Mutti, at the helm of Mutti S.p.A. since 1994, a company known all over the world: a way of writing a new story that makes the love of the absolute beauty of nature its true focus, as a synonym of authenticity, the bounty of the earth and its products, the…

ARCHITECTURE The Sicilian baglio is an architectural type, a courtyard building with ancient roots. Mention is made of the ballium as early as the 11th century, referring to fortifications built to protect castles. The bagghiu, in Sicilian dialect, gradually came to indicate a courtyard building, typical of the farm complexes of the time that sprung up across the territory as productive outposts. A series of constructions that are not camouflaged in the countryside, but at the same time become part of a process of symbiosis with it, in their complex, diversified interpretations as settlements for ‘owners’ and ‘peasants.’ This tradition, together with the reference of the towers that studded the coast to keep watch over the sea (the most famous is the Torre Sveva at Vendicari, not far from this…

To get beyond boundaries, even when the initial situation seems daunting – or perhaps precisely because of that fact. Two words keep returning in the passionate story of Hybrida, as told by Patricia Urquiola, a porcelain collection presented at the latest Edit Napoli and produced in the middle of the pandemic by the designer in collaboration with Istituto Caselli della Real Fabbrica di Capodimonte. The first word is “alchemy,” because there is no better term to indicate the unique, thrilling process that draws man and material into a united destiny when faced with the imponderables of firing in a kiln. The other word is “WhatsApp,” which in Urquiola’s tale embodies the sense of contemporary living and designing, in a dimension that is no longer just analogue, but also draws on…

Not just decoration, fabric can be a way to stimulate synesthetic sensations, starting from interior design, for a more holistic relationship with our environment. Or it can be a tool to experiment with the technical limitations of industrial and artisanal production. It can also become a manifesto for more sustainable and local design. These aspects are represented by three studios that conduct personal research through textiles: interdisciplinary and experimental research, for Buro Belén; expressive research for Front; authentically circular and waste-free activity for Claudy Jongstra. The Amsterdam-based Buro Belén, founded by Lenneke Langenhuijsen and Brecht Duijf, stands out for its pursuit of a holistic vision of space, materials and colors, activated above all through textiles, seen as a surface in relation to furnishings, rooms or even the whole world. Their…

FOCUS Photo Frank Catucci. As we all know, some of the best ideas happen over dinner. And it was precisely at a dinner in Taormina in 2008 that Ferruccio Laviani and Felice Rizzotti (who together with his sister Adele represents the fourth generation of a family that has had a decisive influence on the spread of design culture in Sicily) began to think about the project Not.O, now a newborn Sicilian furnishings brand that made its debut with its first collection in the magnificent setting of Palazzo Biscari, in Catania. The aim of the brand is to become a vehicle of creative based on Sicilian production know-how and the traditions of the territory. “With Ferruccio we were immediately in agreement, imagining a functional design capable of responding to a need,…

PRODUCTS THAT PROTECT HYGIENE AND SAFETY How to protect and care for the artistic heritage in which Italy is outstandingly rich? A good example is the work done by Fila in the Villa Contarini-Camerini at Piazzola sul Brenta (PD): a Venetian villa in Baroque style, built by Andrea Palladio in the late 16th century. Here Fila has formed an important partnership with the Veneto Region for the care and maintenance, both ordinary and extraordinary, of the 6,000 square meters of flooring laid quality materials (terrazzo, cement tiles, wood and marble inlay),and for the cleaning and sanitization of all the areas open to visitors. For routine maintenance it provides Cleaner Pro, the non-aggressive neutral professional detergent, which leaves no residue and does not affect the materials, with excellent results without rinsing.…

Kvadrat goes American: the Danish textile brand opens its second showroom in the USA with a project in Los Angeles designed by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec. Materiality, an integral part of the brand, is the protagonist of the space. The French designers have created a two-story building with outsize beams in untreated wood reminiscent of the houses of the first American settlers. In the company’s vision of sustainability, the structure is made of Douglas Fir from responsibly managed forests. The central E-shaped building incorporates workspaces on the upper floor, a tiered space for socializing and meeting rooms on the ground floor. The walls are covered with textile panels with a knitted pattern created specially by Erwan using a thin metal base that makes them moldable, so that they become “hyper-textures”.…

Effe is one of the leading companies on the international market in the production of wellness systems, in particular saunas and hammams, developed out of respect for ancient traditions. The brand’s product range also extends to include a tub, a mini-pool and a series of accessories for the spa area. Receiving recognition over the years with numerous awards, the company’s products are made entirely in Italy and bear the signature of designers such as Rodolfo Dordoni, Antonio Citterio and Marco Williams Fagioli. Another of the brand’s strong points is its ability to adapt its technology to the most diverse situations, from large public spaces to small spas installed in some of the most important hotels around the world. This versatility enables Effe to be a partner in significant projects in…

In keeping with the concept shared with the Asti Architetti studio, which designed the building’s architectural renewal, Milano Verticale, the Gruppo Una’s new four-star superior hotel, designed by Vudafieri Saverino Partners in the internal and external spaces, starts from its privileged position between Via De Cristoforis and Via Rosales, in the Porta Nuova district. Business, design, finance, fashion, food & beverage, everything is concentrated in this area. And out of this rich soil grew the idea of the designers to reflect on the renewed sense of inhabiting urban time and space, making the hotel a new device for meeting and socializing, a precise pole of reference. It is much more than a place of welcome that finds its form and meaning in the 173 rooms laid out on 12 floors,…

EXHIBITIONS A house organ in the best tradition of Sixties Italy, when printed paper provided the chance to experiment with new languages. Imago was a periodical that came out at indefinite intervals: 14 issues were published from 1960 to 1971 by graphic designer and photographer Michele Provinciali and Raffaele Bassoli, owner of the Bassoli Fotoincisioni company in Milan, specialists in producing printing plates. The magazine displayed a wealth of texts, images and graphic solutions to explore the potential of layout, paper and bookbinding at the time. With a series of inventions free from preconceptions: the issues presented loose sheets unrelated to each other, a summation of free experiments that arose from the direct relationship between Bassoli and the graphic designers who applied to him – Giulio Confalonieri, Silvio Coppola, AG…

ARCHITECTURE The atmosphere of an authentic Shanghai of the past are still encased in the precious grid of the lilongs, the narrow streets of the historical city. Many have vanished, but others have survived the sweeping changes of urban development, without succumbing to the advance of skyscrapers and temples of luxury shopping. This atmosphere can be clearly grasped in the new headquarters of the international communication agency Attila&Co, which carves out a space inside a typical courtyard building rooted in the Chinese architectural and urban tradition, in the large panoramic historical area of Hengfu. The construction, composed of two merged buildings, was made in 1923 during the period of the French Concession. Across nearly a century, it has conserved its original position and identity, welcoming elements of Art Deco and…

Design no longer represents a bridge connecting large geographical areas. Europe, America, China, Africa, India are instead connected by the void produced by the pandemic. The connective system of automobiles is gradually crumbling, and it seems that only television and computers can cross continents and oceans. Territories seem to have become fragile systems of transports and information, without a precise physiognomy, which only Italy continues to conserve thanks to its figurative high-heeled boot form. Otherwise, animals have begun to invade deserted cities, with crazed monkeys and fleeing dromedaries. What we call international design has become an unreliable system made of slender, fragile bridges, where vacuum cleaners attempt to clean up all the parts of the world. Regions and oceans have become interchangeable, the names of designers have created a transparent…

A step beyond the great masters of Italian design, to lead us into the world of contemporary Italian creativity. This is the objective of “IT is:”, the exhibition curated by Barbara Brondi and Marco Rainò – Studio BRH+ – at the Italian Cultural Institute in Cologne from 17 to 23 January 2022. The idea is not to leave historic design behind, but to focus attention on the shared cultural matrix that brings identity to four contemporary realities: Faberhama, FormaFantasma, Roberto Sironi and Studio Ossidiana. All founded after 1980, these designers or groups, in the view of the curators, represent the front line of Italian research today. Their thinking, like their modus operandi, is on view in “IT is:” and follows the red thread of four key words: Responsibility, Tradition, Invention,…

PHOTO BY ADRIANNA GLAVIANO “I believe that today the theme is about putting people back at the center, with their passions and individuality.” This statement by Giuliano Mosconi, president and CEO of Zanotta, clarifies the model that underlies and identifies the company’s new exhibition and communication spaces: Zanotta House New York and Zanotta: Lab, the latter with an original setting designed by Calvi Brambilla. Created by Tihany Design, Zanotta House New York is set in a historic building with a typical brick facade at 23 Cornelia Street, Greenwich Village. Built in 1912, the house – which preserves original features such as the three fireplaces and wooden floors – is divided into five levels and has nine rooms, an indoor pool, two terraces on the second level and two other panoramic…

Museology has been wondering for more than a century how to deal with the most critical point of an art collection: visibility. Museums have larger collections than private individuals but, despite their public nature, they can only exhibit a small part of their holdings. “An excessive capital and therefore unusable,” wrote Paul Valéry in 1923, calling the museum a temple but also a cemetery. Depot Boijmans in Rotterdam, the storage facility of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the city’s largest collection, is seeking to refute this opinion by opening its collection to visitors. Designed by MVRDV to hold 151,000 works, the new facility has a structure that enables visitors to move between the rooms, drawn to the paintings that are all presented together, without an exhibition layout. Conservation coincides with exhibition.…

PROJECTS Reopening the city to young people: the new student residence opened in a phase of recovery and revival of the Milanese quarter of Ortica, long connected with the world of design and art. Aria Hub is the cohousing project by Dainelli Studio, which involved a makeover of a whole early 20thcentury building laid out on four levels with eight apartments of different sizes and floor plans, a common room with sofas and tables and a laundry room. The goal was to create personal and customizable accommodation, settings with a marked aesthetic value that respect the constraints of a low-budget project. The surfaces, designed in a conservative perspective, present a mix of stone, parquet and original period tiles together with the new collection of Monoscopio ceramic surfaces by Dainelli Studio…

EXHIBITIONS Artists, painters, sculptors and set designers (not architects) have the curious and happy habit, in their homes, of transforming the domestic setting into a workplace and their workplace into their own domestic setting. And even, as in the case of Anna Piaggi, workspace, home and dress may all coincide perfectly in the artist’s own body. I recall, among others, the Roman home of Bruno Caruso, an eclectic and highly cultivated artist and militant communist, a dedicated desecrating and polemical spirit. He converted part of his studio home into a memento mori, an obsession with the skull shared by the late Federico Zeri, a frequent guest of his death room, where he often locked himself up in absorbed meditation on the fatuities of fashionable life. The same was true of…

The exhibition organized by the Consulate General of Italy in Miami, curated by Luisa Bocchietto, held in Miami, and again live at The Wolfsonian–FIU, discussed the green world on the occasion of SustainabItaly- People, Planet, Prosperity, devoted to the awareness of beauty and knowhow, with respect for the environment and the circular economy. At the meeting, held last December 4 on the occasion of the official opening, the themes of the “sustainability of Made in Italy” were at the center of the discussion by Dan Gelber, Mayor of the City of Miami Beach, Casey Steadman, director of The Wolfsonian-FIUmuseum, Robert Graboski, president of the American Institute of Architects – Miami, the curator Luisa Bocchietto, Marva Griffin, founder of SaloneSatellite, Piero Lissoni, founder of Lissoni & Associati, Fabio Pietrella, president of…

ARCHITECTURE It’s one of the most famous works of Italian postwar reconstruction, visited and studied by architects from all over Europe as an innovative example of a residential building: the apartment house built by Luigi Caccia Dominioni in 1960-61 on Piazza Carbonari, in a northern district of Milan between the Maggiolina and the Villaggio dei Giornalisti. For the architect – who in those years was rebuilding large portions of the historical center – this was an important opportunity for experimentation on a peripheral zone: an area that was emptier, free from encumbrances, but also quite disorderly. Caccia Dominioni interpreted the residential typology in terms of bourgeois luxury, while at the same time managing to bring urban order to the busy piazza and the nearby public park. The lot – resulting…

MASTERS Carlo Mollino, a versatile genius and a man ahead of his time, never ceases to pique our curiosity with his works, even today. The latest opportunity was the exhibition curated by Marco Sammicheli of furnishings for the Albonico house, held at the Milan Triennale in the fall. These are items mostly made in 1944, by the craftsmen of the firm Apelli, Varesio & C., for the Turin home of Mollino’s friend, the engineer Paolo Albonico. What makes these creations eloquent is not the eccentricity displayed in some of Mollino’s masterpieces, like the Arabesco table, a true ode to the bending of wood, on an innovative par with the research of Charles and Ray Eames or the great master Aalto; nor is it the accent on Surrealism of the Milo…

Lightness and transparency are not exactly terms usually associated with wardrobes. Yet they are far from out of place in the case of the Storage system, which is an (also conceptual) update of the dressing room. Piero Lissoni and the R+D division of Porro created it in 2000, and with ongoing evolutions it has become a bestseller for the company. The project is still ready for further developments, such as the latest constructive revolution of the electrified post that brings light into the system, calling into play the identifying principles of the brand itself: purity, research, architecture, in the words of Maria Porro, marketing and communication director of the family business. “Storage is architecture inside architecture, but it is very light, because it thrives on transparency, like a window inside…

“Kristalia was founded in 1994 at the behest of a group of young Friulian jazz enthusiasts who relied on a new rhythm, capable of intercepting design innovation.” This is how Ruggero Magrini, the company’s CEO, recounts the period when Kristalia developed, drawing strength and inspiration from the region where it was established (in Prata di Pordenone) and initially choosing aluminum as the material of choice for its first products. Over the years, the brand came to embrace new materials and formed successful relations with various designers, such as Carlo Bartoli, who designed best sellers like the Sushi, Nori and Maki extendable tables, and the 1085 Edition chair, among Kristalia’s most iconic products. Fully covered in leather, it is produced through the expertise of another local excellence in leather working, the…

Terratinta Group is a company that styles, creates and distributes designoriented ceramic products through its five brands, including the newly founded Atmosfere which, under the guidance of art director Francesco Lucchese, marks its entry into the world of furniture and accessories. Another important novelty of the Group is its new headquarters covering 45,000 square meters at Fiorano Modenese. “Finally our Group has a definitive home, in the heart of ceramics made in Italy,” commented its CEO Luca Migliorini. “We’re happy with the work done, but we’re already thinking about developments in the coming months, including the photovoltaic system that will make us energy independent.” The expanded sheet metal cladding that is a feature of the access to the headquarters keeps the industrial appearance of the building recognizable while distinguishing it…

Welcome to Castello Del Nero, an estate from the 12th century, once the home of the Florentine family that gave the place its name, on an area of 300 hectares in the wine region of Chianti. Intact in terms of structure and its historical background of stuccowork, frescos and vaulted ceilings, in 2019 the location became part of the COMO Hotels and Resorts chain, a well-known hotel group based in Singapore, operating all over the world. “Christina Ong saw it in 2007 during a family vacation, and she fell in love. In 2018 she acquired the entire property, and asked me to give concrete form to her first Italian dream in just 72 days, the time set aside for the worksite,” says Paola Navone, who with Studio Otto has designed…

WINE&DESIGN The Langhe, a land of revolutions. Not just oenological, as when in the early nineties a handful of rebellious winemakers announced the creation of “modern Barolo”. The same disruptive spirit dwells in Sandra Vezza, who is Langarola DOC (DOCG, we should specify) and the “penitent teetotaler” in the name of her estate. After acquiring Gufram, she decided to expand her business interests to take in winemaking. And to found a winery, in her own image and likeness. “I didn’t want to call in architects or interior designers for the project. I wanted to design everything myself in detail, including the styling of the bottles. I’ve always been passionate about art and design and I meant my winery to recount everything I like and my love for this land.” The…

On November 28, 2021, towards evening, some terrible news came through: Virgil Abloh had died. Within a few minutes, scores of fashion designers began to post images of their American colleague on social media. Designers from every field did the same, demonstrating the impact of his work across all distinctions of field and product categories. Abloh was a master of sensibility, deeply rooted in his time, gifted with a sharp eye and an ear attentive to planning both the coolness and the duration of each of his projects. And underlying his work we find research, that ability to name things that is equivalent to knowing them. Good design starts from this awareness to create new objects, new meanings, new names. Virgil Abloh’s work exploited research not only to point to…

HOSPITALITY Today the Grand Hotel Fasano at Gardone Riviera is a 5-star luxury resort in the collection of The Leading Hotels of the World. But its history goes all the way back to 1888, when it was built as a hunting lodge for the Austrian Imperial family. The hotel – which has hosted illustrious cultural figures such as Klimt and D’Annunzio, to name just two – has been extended several times over the years. The careful upkeep of the interiors and integration with advanced systems have always enabled guests to take advantage of all the pleasures of contemporary hospitality, as well as reliving the fascination of times past. Significantly, in 1989 the neoclassical building was listed as a National Monument by the Ministry for the Cultural Heritage. The Grand Hotel…