Patricia Urquiola & Cassina

For Patricia Urquiola, taking on the role of art director for Cassina has been like returning home. For this year’s Salone, she has celebrated the company with an installation in the showroom in via Durini that treats it as an art gallery.

It’s like entering into an art gallery, just a few pieces, not mass-produced but presented as if they were one-offs. They are put together with style and with enough space to speak for themselves, with the necessary irony. “For me ‘design’ means ‘designing’, in other words giving value to something, distinguishing it. Here we describe the objects, we look at them and decide which ones interest us. And the objects come into the home, articulated in the language of the house of Cassina” explains Urquiola.

Among the many products presented, that also include reissues of a number of classics as part of the C90 programme – a programme that celebrates Cassina’s 90th birthday that will be completed next year in 2017 – one of the most important is Beam. It is a modular sofa structured around a beam – hence the name – to which are added a series of different elements such as a side table and a seat. The interesting part is the supporting beam and the mechanism for adjusting the back and arm that makes it more comfortable to sit on. The adjustment mechanism makes a clear reference to Maralunga by Magistretti where the comfort is provided by a movement that is not emphasised as a technological feature and the mechanism is concealed.

Also by Patricia Urquiola is Gender, an armchair made up of two elements: one a supporting structure with a rigid, curvilinear form, the other the cushion, a soft element with a different shape. The coming together of these two elements gives rise to the chair.

Both designs give rise to a vision of the contemporary habitat as a space that has to be articulated according to each person’s individual needs. Spaces are created that change according to the behaviour and attitudes of those who inhabit them, evolving quickly even within the same day.

The second project that features in the window of the via Durini showroom is by Konstantin Grcic: a landscape of
“space-objects”, objects created for open-planned spaces, for “liquid” and flexible spaces, with an uncertain and changing identity. From screens and space-dividers to consoles and entrance tables, elements of furniture that relate to domestic changes, typical of contemporary life.

12 – 17 Aprile
Cassina
via Durini 16, Milano