Destruction Vs Experimentation

Wandering around design fairs and events you often get the impression that many of the pieces showcased are so elegant, refined and perfect that they were probably created in sterile environments where nothing was left to chance. The result is that these pieces often leave you cold.

There were genuinely interesting things during Milan Design Week, but there was also the feeling that most people, especially many famous fashion houses, just jumped on the bandwagon displaying a fake interest in interior design and architecture, perfectly knowing that design brings designers and consumers into a closer relationship with each other and that, since consumers are tired of clothes and accessories, it’s maybe not such a bad idea trying to engage them with cocktails and fun events that attract people in shops and then try to sell them something.

Yet at times there was something missing during Milan Design Week, maybe a sense of randomness, that left you yearning for something more original and less contrived, in a nutshell for something inspired by themes such as destruction and experimentation.

Let’s step back into the past to 1979 with a couple of examples that can generate inspirations for art, fashion and interior design projects.

In 1979 the exhibition rooms of the Haus Industrieform, a display centre for industrial design products built into the former main synagogue in Essen, were completely destroyed by fire.

At the time the rooms hosted an exhibition of products – including telephones, record-players, television sets, slide projectors and so on – of West German industrial design.

While the walls were blackened by fire, the flames didn’t reach the display cabinets, but the heat deformed their contents.

The flames or rather the heat, unintentionally re-designed the objects in dramatic ways, melting the plastic and creating new shapes and forms, at times characterised by liquid pleated and draped motifs.

In the same year of the fire, the first collection of furniture and lamps by Studio Alchimia came into public consciousness thanks to the Milan Triennale.

The pieces were characterised by bright colours and formal contradictions that shocked the visitors.

Maybe it’s because destruction and experimentation are considered as forms of artistic protests that we don’t see them so much at mainstream design events, but I’m sure that they would entice better reactions in the visitors and even shock them a bit (I have seen people with no interests in interior design/architecture pretentiously walking around Milan's city centre in their designer clothes passively pretending they were enjoying every kind of event they were taking part in…).

If that principle saying that only what impresses itself upon memory counts, we should maybe try and look for more original and even extreme pieces of design following also more anarchic principles such as destruction and experimentation, rather than bombarding people with things they tend to forget soon after seeing them.

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