ROOMS (STANZE): Novel Living Concepts at La Triennale di Milano.

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Entry to Stanze (Rooms) at La Triennale di Milano. Photo © Andrea Martiradonna.

‘Stories of Other Rooms’ showed a selection of 50 Italian interiors from the 1920s until present day. Photo © Nick Hughes/ Yellowtrace.

‘Stories of Other Rooms’. Photo © Nick Hughes/ Yellowtrace.

‘Stories of Other Rooms’. Left photo © Nick Hughes/ Yellowtrace. Right photo © Andrea Martiradonna.

One of my personal favourite experiences during Milan Design Week came in the form of an exhibition curated by Beppe Finessi titled – ROOMS. Novel Living Concepts at the amazing La Triennale di Milano. Eleven architects, haling from differing generations, design vocabularies and approaches to design, were invited to each conceive their interpretation of a ‘Room’ as a primary living space for today and tomorrow.

Finessi frames the premise of the exhibition with an explanation which states that, of the many design practices, interior architecture is still the primary field of exploration, study and reflection, given its direct impact on people’s everyday lives. We all live in houses, and much of our life is spent inside these spaces. We live there with our families, rest and recharge our batteries, entertain our friends and, increasingly work there. “Interior architecture has this truly particular remit: to define the spaces and rooms in which we will live out our lives, designing the ‘primary’ world around us. As a discipline, it has always been an important field of professional practice, often providing emerging designers with their first commissions and their first vehicles for expression. It is a major part of creating architecture, involving great skills and significant economies, but there have been few occasions for historical research and critical reflection.” Amen to that!

The exhibition opens with an introductory space titled Stories of Other Rooms, which sets the historical scene by showcasing 50 Italian interiors ranging from the 1920s to the present day. The projects feature the work of the great masters like Gio Ponti, Franco Albini, Carlo Mollino, Ettore Sottsass & Carlo Scarpa amongst others, including interiors by contemporary designers like Antonino Cardillo’s House Of Dust in Rome.

ROOMS. Novel Living Concepts runs until 12th September 2016 at La Triennale di Milano. Below is sn in-depth overview of the 11 individual spaces on show (with plenty more images & sketches in the gallery at the bottom of the post).

‘Putting Things Into Perspective’ by Elisabetta Terragni. Photo © Andrea Martiradonna.

‘Putting Things Into Perspective’ by Elisabetta Terragni. Photo © Nick Hughes/ Yellowtrace.

Putting Things Into Perspective by Elisabetta Terragni, literally plays with the viewers perspective through a clever use of tilting planes, cunning openings and captivating anamorphic illusions.

“A design for a room like a microcosm for living and thinking in, into which everything is slowly filtered and distilled. A room that will never be lived in, but which declares its intimacy in the form of absence, of emptiness.

A more or less closed paralleliped; inside the spaces hide and gently mutate in two perspectives: one along the visual axis of the entrance, almost inevitable, the other more private, unwinding along the transverse axis. The perspectival deformation creates a different perception of space, almost imperceptible and at times more marked, sufficiently to make us think. Occupying the resulting spaces between the interior and exterior walls, margins and gaps open and close in a ever-changing perspectival play, generated by light and the movements of the observer. An ethereal image fragments against the walls and becomes whole again from one single viewpoint that the observer can only find by moving around. Fragments of light and space can be glimpsed by peeping through the windows, but can only be reconstructed by going inside. Ideally, two individuals inhabit it, they are close, but can also not see each other, almost miss each other, although they can communicate with and hear each other.”

‘Round and Round’ by Manolo De Giorgi. Photo © Andrea Martiradonna.

‘Round and Round’ by Manolo De Giorgi. Photography © Nick Hughes/ Yellowtrace.

Round and Round by Manolo De Giorgi – rooms that explore the idea of a continuous, fluid space, rather than a more traditional segregated approach.

“Room equals being present, but are we sure about all this being present? Are we still convinced that this, more than any other dimension, represents living? Or wouldn’t a potential new melange be more realistic, combining being present + utilising services + moving about, all in more or less identical proportions? I thought about habitation as guided by the spaces dedicated to movement, strips lined up against each other to form an environment dictated by ‘ongoing operations’. A summation of corridors that ought to produce a continuous, fluid space, dispensing with the rigid, tile-like juxtaposition of rooms. It is not the room that ‘contains’ the functions, but the distribution of spaces that ‘serve’ the functions.”

The Absence of Presence (L’assena della presenza) by Marta Laudani & Marco Romanelli. Photo © Andrea Martiradonna.

The Absence of Presence (L’assena della presenza) by Marta Laudani & Marco Romanelli. Photography © Nick Hughes/ Yellowtrace.

The Absence of Presence (L’assena della presenza) by Marta Laudani & Marco Romanelli – a beautiful project that highlights the relationship between concealing and revealing.

“When organising internal spaces our time is spent debating alternative dichotomies between revealing and concealing, or rather between presence and absence, and between ‘gymnasium’ and ‘stage set’. Homes are not merely machines à habiter, but stages for our daily lives to play out. This duality conceals the ‘raw nerve’ of 21st century design. Machines à habiter actually make for perfect distribution, carefully evaluated climate conditions and generous fixed furnishing systems.

‘Stages for daily life’ serve to show off objects and materials that testify how far we have come financially and culturally: from large screen televisions to original paintings, from large amounts of books to elegant drawing rooms still protected with plastic, from hydromassage tubs to brass-effect finishings, from hyper-technological kitchens to mega sofas. People throughout the ages have attributed specific ‘powers of representation’ to different and particular objects. This therefore means that when tackling a design for a ‘novel living concept’, the value of ‘absences’ needs to be analysed.
It is no longer simply a matter of modifying the ‘presences’ in terms of taste and culture, but of building a room to be lived as an ‘absence’ (an empty space for coming and going and contemplating works of art). The ‘presence’ will return, transformed into experiences for ‘lone’ activation within well-defined areas, earmarked for individual human activities: reading a book, getting undressed or eating.”

D1 by Francesco Librizzi. Photo © Andrea Martiradonna.

D1 by Francesco Librizzi. Photography © Nick Hughes/ Yellowtrace.

D1 by Francesco Librizzi was a personal favourite. This project describes a void – an open space that creates an outline and generates a field.

“D1 is a room that spells out the discovery of the domestic space. In an elliptical space formed by concentric rows of coloured narrow metal columns, the viewer gradually sees the threshold between interior and exterior become defined and include the role of the architecture in the mediation between landscape, domestic space and objects. The concept is drawn from a fascinating experience of hospitality in several private interior spaces in Beirut and illustrates a timeless way of living, rooted in the collective memory of the entire Mediterranean basin. An empty space positioned in the centre that acts as the cornerstone for a series of satellite spaces orbiting around it: the home and the city we can all remember or imagine. D1 leverages the mythical imagination of an original moment in which, for the first time, a person has paused because they are fascinated by the quality of a place and decides to stay there.”

My Prisons by Alessandro Mendini – an introverted room where Mendini serves a life sentence for the crime of ‘ornamentation’

“For a long time, forever in fact, I have felt as though I were living shut inside a prison. Serving a life sentence for the crime of ‘ornamentation’. I find myself in an introverted room, a blockaded perimeter, an insurmountable mental space. Small yet also enormous, completely confined, in any event. My ideas, my style, my atmosphere, my mirage: everything is in there. It is the isolation cell inside a romantic and privileged Alcatraz. Imprisoned by nightmares, by torture, by hallucinations, by the abyss of decoration.

It’s like the methodical self-building of walls and surfaces destined to deny me my freedom. I often think about ABET laminate. It was the first material I fell in love with. Cold, flat, high-tech, geometrical, amorphous yet erotic, up for anything, prepared to lose and make me lose our purity. My conventions, my desires have smoothed it, painted it, stroked it, illuminated it, polished it and softened it. Laminate seduced me so completely that it must have been the source of the decorative obsession with infinite signs, styles and colours that wrapped me ever more firmly inside the cocoon of my sins, my terrible thirst for ornamentation. If I try to locate the true, distant beginning of my design life sentence, of my prisons, I find it in the emptiness of the drawings produced by hand or on the computer, above the superficiality of the surfaces, not in the depth of space and form.”

INTRO by Fabio Novembre – a room that ironically draws a parallel between architecture and the human body.

“If you think about it, an egg is like a solidified uterus. If we then tried to plunder our remotest amniotic memories, it would be easy to demonstrate that our first perception of space occurred while we were floating about in the warm hollow of an ovoid form and that every concept of domesticity is geared to recreating that condition.

Mankind has always been fascinated by its shape, art has celebrated its iconic value, and architecture – especially when endeavouring to predict the future – has seen its ovoid shape as the perfect formal synthesis. My design is for a room in which to dream, made of leather with high-end saddlery fittings inside a spherical shell, the outside of which is completely covered with mirrors, as if it were an enormous ballroom. Its spherical shape and reflective power are selling points, but then, welcomed by two golden vestal virgins, the colour and warmth of the leather literally engulf the visitor, who finds himself inside himself, looking at himself from within. Free thoughts drawn from Fellini’s ‘8 1/2’ and from my book “The design explained to my mother” reverberate in the hollow of the great head, like scattered drops of consciousness that surface while we drowse.”

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