Triennale, Milan Italy, The Permanent Collection

Italian Design Triennale, Milan Italy, The Permanent Collection

The Permanent Design Collection is unique in Italy for the quality and quantity of the objects constituting it.

It represents the starting point for exhibitions on Italian Design, held by La Triennale and by other galleries all over the world, which aim at proposing a constantly fresher re-analysis of the history of the Italian industrial production.
The pieces of the Collection are evidence of the heterogeneity of the history of Italian Design, of the innovations as well as the experimentations that made it famous and distinguishable, through its creations and its masters.

Created and opened in 1997, the Design Collection is composed by more than 600 pieces.
Since 1998, the curator and manager of the Permanent Collection as well as its relating initiatives is Silvana Annicchiarico.

100 declinations of an archetype
100 different ways of interpreting what, in the thirties, Le Corbusier defined as "the seating machine".

When we say the word chair, folding chair, desk chair, seat, tool, armchair, throne, bench, sofa, we do not intend to simply describe a kind of seat. Indeed, in our unconscious a far more comprehensive image, liasing the archetypical figure of these models to different ways of seating, arises. However, different kinds of seating do not necessarily correspond to the dimensions of the seat or to its padding. As a matter of fact, experience teaches us that there can be as many of them as the objects meant for this use are, depending both on their formal characteristics and, especially, on the historical and social context in which they were born or in which they become popular. In this sense, chair design in Italy has indisputably made school in the world by researching new types and "countertypes" of that archetype that, in the thirties, Le Corbusier defined the seating machine.
This exhibition of 100 models of seating, coming mainly from the historic Collection of the Italian Design of La Triennale di Milano, and partly from new acquisitions, not only does it tell us of the formal evolution and aesthetic taste of the Italian society of this century, but it aims particularly at taking the visitor through the customs and social models that have designed our way of living and, we could say, the "shape" of our time.
The exhibition is divided into seven sections corresponding to different historic periods:
1933-1943 For rational and modern seating
1943-1948 The Imperative and the practicability!
1948-1960 The reconstruction of the bourgeois universe
1960-1972 Informality prevails
1972-1980 Between casual and high-tech
1980-1990 The post-modern condition of the prêt à porter seating
1990-2000 Transitive design. Searching for emotional sittings

The exhibition design has been entrusted to art director Giancarlo Basili who has worked for directors such as Amelio ("Così ridevano"), Salvatores ("Nirvana"), Moretti ("The son's room") and Luchetti ("Piccoli maestri"). Using his highly expressive style and historic rigour, he will set the sittings attempting to subtract the single objects to a purely "archaeological" or "cultural" vision and recreate their life within a sort of environmental and gesture simulation.

Triennale di Milano - Galleria -
May 23 - July 30 2000
Cured by Giampiero Bosoni
Installement Giancarlo Basili

Fuori Serie
Despite the ambition of exhibiting connotations of uniqueness and exceptionality, the "one-offs" are crafted products that cannot but being collocated within the boundaries of a domain governed by the standardisation and hegemony of mass-production.

Curators of the exhibition:
Silvana Annicchiarico,  Giuseppe Raboni, Marco Zanuso jr
Progetto dell'allestimento: Giuseppe Raboni, Marco Zanuso jr
Consulenza illuminotecnica: Piero Castiglioni
Graphic: Studio AR.CH.IT  Daniele Mastrapasqua
Collaborazione alla ricerca degli oggetti:
Luca Cipelletti, Alessandro Pedretti, Rosanna Monzini

website: http://www.triennale.it
 

Permanent Design Collection second edition

A second edition that updates the selection carried out up till the years 2000.
A narration liasing the 100 selected objects which does not follow a linear and neat thread, arbitrarily deprived of contrasts and contradictions, but rather a fitful one, with gaps and comparisons aimed at isolating fragments, perceiving poetics and aesthetics and relating them with the technological research and development.
The exhibition opens with an object that does not exist anymore, that nobody uses or produces anymore and that has become an archaeological find of a vanished culture (the Lexikon 80 typewriter by Marcello Nizzoli, realised in 1945 by Olivetti) and closes with an object that does not exist yet, that almost nobody uses in daily life, which seems to belong to the future (The Transformables of 2000 by Moreno Ferrari for C.P. company).
Perhaps in the short-circuit liasing the beginning with the end of exhibition, it is possible to read, between the lines, much of what has changed in contemporary Italy.