MILAN: Furniture Fair - Spazio Rossana Orlandi

Spazio Rossana Orlandi. Every year the Spazio Rossana Orlandi hosts a variety of exhibitions, new and not so new designers scouted by her over the years provide one of the best selections of talents on the market.  The Spazio, is the place to be and is a thriving hub for creativity and never before has it been so full and busy with visitors, making it nearly “impossible” to view the exhibition.

Above: Rossana Orlandi and her P.A. Marco Tabasso.

 

Spazio Rossana Orlandi – Nacho Carbonell. The Spanish artist, Nacho Carbonell, unveiled a wall installation in the restaurant “Pane e Acqua”. Silent Landscape, is the title of the wall, it is made of 40.000 colored pebbles made of noise absorbing foam.

 

Nacho Carbonell – The Silent Wall.  The tapestry wall is an installation of 6m x 3 m. More than 30,00 pieces made out of foam, each of them with different pigments representing a horizon from the earth stretching to the sky, which is also sound absorbing.

Spazio Rossana Orlandi - Piet Hein Eek. The Dutch designer, Piet Hein Eek, presented new pieces of his collection including a collection of desk table designed for the Danish company Munio, a bookshelves made of glass and wood, a set of boxes made in wood, a new LED lamp and the Aluminum armchairs pictured above first designed in 1993.

  Spazio Rossana Orlandi - Jeanine Eek Keizer - Color Tableware. The life of a potter and that of a collector come together and mix with reservations about excessive consumerism in the colored crockery by Jeanine Eek Keizer, Piet’s wife. By applying a simple trick, it turned out that existing pottery could be glazed anew. By using uniform shade variations of colors, it was possible to put together complete sets of tableware from a collection of odds and ends of crockery found in charity shops, jumble sales and auctions.

 

Spazio Rossana Orlandi - Enrico Marone Cinzano. Rossana Orlandi discovered the furniture of Enrico Marone Cinzano during a visit to his apartment in London for which they were originally designed.  The nobleman descends from the world-renowned eponymous vermouth business created in 1757.  It was the first time the un trained designer presented his collection of luxurious design pieces made of re used industrial iron and woods.

 

Enrico Marone Cinzano

 

Spazio Rossana Orlandi  - The Romantic Rubelli Room by Li Edelkoort. The Venetian company of fabrics and silks presented an installation curated by Li Edelkoort using avant-garde design pieces upholstered with luxurious fabrics from the Rubelli Collection. The design on display included a special edition of Maarten Baas Smoke! armchair produced by Moooi and dressed in Rubelli’s Les Indes Galantes fabric, a chandelier by Piet Hein Eek, re-upholstered modernist armchairs by Gio Ponti and Franco Albini, furniture by Donghi.

 

Spazio Rossana Orlandi  - The Romantic Rubelli Room by Li Edelkoort. Edelkoort feels that black resonates in today’s world, “becoming the order of the night, the guardian of dark humor and the romantic troubadour of cynical songs. Whether dozing upon a daybed, draped against a male torso or piously kneeling on a Gothic chair, it is all more beautiful in black. The Rubelli family of brands is conscious of the newest societal trends exploring the darkly romantic and sometimes even surrealistic side of interior design… Design will embrace black and faux-black in every texture, for a black-on-black celebration of glorious gloom and doom, in an audacious and eccentric enactment of the night, where all is a majestic somber monochrome of soft shadows lit by the full moon.”

 

Spazio Rossana Orlandi  - The Romantic Rubelli Room by Li Edelkoort. The installation also included a mysterious new flock of birds by Guus Kusters and Maarten Kolk, an audiovisual presentation illustrated a freshly-curated look at Rubelli, as launched this year in an inspiring magalogue that has been art directed by Edelkoort herself.

 

BCXSY – Sayaka Yamamoto and Boaz Cohen

 

Spazio Rossana Orlandi – BCXSY. The designers Couple from the Netherlands presented Origin Part III: Contrast a collection of furniture and accessories made in collaboration with Irish boat makers.

 

Spazio Rossana Orlandi - 1616 Arita Japan - Scholten and Baijings.   Based on extensive research on Arita ceramics and an analysis of historical local masterpieces, Scholten and Baijings created a series named Coloured Porcelain for 1616 Arita.  Typical Japanese colors, such as acquarelle-blue, light green, red-orange and ochre, are re-contextualized and applied in new combinations on a set of contemporarily functional tableware that in its entirety still reflect the typical Arita color spectrum.  Made with a delicate sense for local crafts and industry, Colour Porcelain shows an original European perspective on Japanese tradition.

 

Spazio Rossana Orlandi - 1616 Arita Japan – Teruhiro Yanagihara.  For the Standard series, Teruhiro Yanagihara developed a special kind of clay that makes the pottery items extremely strong and heat and stain resistant, even without glaze.  A special agent added to the clay provides the series with a characteristic light grey, mat tone.  The items don’t have pre-determined functions but allow various combinations and usages in different environments and good stack ability among the 1616/TY products.  Square plates, for example, can be used as trays and small round plates double as lids.  The small cup is made for Italian Espresso, but also perfectly serves Japanese sake.

Spazio Rossana Orlandi – Jo Nagasaka.  Flat Tables designed by Japanese architect Jo Nagasaka are sculptural. Reminiscent of strange shining volumes in space they connect us with the history of the table. For Options, a new contemporary department store in Amsterdam he produced a series of outstanding tables with a local Dutch craftsman.  The centerpiece of the store is the biggest Flat Table in the world, a combination of six antique tables, topped off with a thick colored layer.

 

Spazio Rossana Orlandi – Booo Studio.  Booo Studio is a new company based in Holland and composed by a team coming from different fields and countries to work between avant-garde design and  the mass production industry. LED light bulbs is their first challenge and for the occasion they asked Nacho Carbonell, Front Design and Formafantasma, considered amongst the most interesting design creatives on the scene, to re-design their idea of light bulbs. 
Above:  Booo Studio - Front Design – Surface Tension Lamp. A bubble is brief, and bursts at your touch. But while it lasts, it catches the light and reflects the room like a multicolored temporary structure. Front Design wanted to create a constantly changing lamp that combines the most ephemeral of lampshades with a LED light source that will last for 50000 hours. In the time it takes the LED to burn out, the lamp will have had 3 million different globe shades.

 

Spazio Rossana Orlandi – Booo Studio – Formafantasma – Light Species.  The organic reference is explicit in the light designed by Studio Formafantasma, which looks as if a traditional bulb has been stopped in the process of transforming itself into a leaf. Unusually asymmetrical the light is meant to be used as a single piece or as a flock of glowing leafs.  With the limited edition the organic world is not anymore only a formal reference. As a continuation of the previous work of the studio Formafantasma’s ‘Botanica’, the vessel of the bulb is produced with a 19th century material re-developed by Formafantasma and is composed by a polymer extracted from insect excrement that colonize trees mixed with wood powder.