50 objects that have made the history of Salone del Mobile of Milan

Aug 04, 2023

Beyond all predictable and irrelevant revivals, it seems at any rate impossible or at least forced to find any connection between a Float armchair from the 60s, a sofa by Zaha Hadid and a lamp-strip by Formafantasma. Still one, multifaceted, branching connection exists, made up of all the eras, emergencies, and trends layered within the objects with which Italian and international design has filled homes, streets, individual spaces and shared spaces. In more than 60 years, Salone del Mobile with its event offspring has represented all these eras, emergencies, trends; and Domus has always been there to narrate, criticize, analyze and deconstruct as many.

Stretches and stretches of reviews, previews, interviews, discussions, selections – even a dinner party – have carried out a double mission through the years: by the moment of their release, they aimed at orienting taste, thought, and purchases; but just a moment later, they would immediately crystallize new steps of history, like mosquitoes inside amber. And it is History we are talking about, collective history, far beyond our individual stories: history by objects.

After all, in the orgy of decluttering, the escapist craze about getting rid of objects that has monopolized today's mainstream – as much as it may seem to be fading away more recently – how could we seriously claim that history and stories do not depend on objects? If the existence of an entire discipline – material history – were not enough to convince us, we could then plunge back into the individual realm and think of that Kemal, Orhan Pamuk's character I often enjoy recalling, who collects and hoards all the objects touched by the episodes of his obsessive and suffering love -– from a crashed Chevrolet to cigarette butts – to collect them in a Museum of Innocence. Or perhaps we should think more of Pamuk himself, who then actually realized that museum, but that is another matter.

Moving from these questions, we embarked on the rather unlikely endeavour of identifying in our archives 50 objects that could be able to narrate more than six decades of Saloni, of Domus, but above all of history. The result is a partial landscape, in the two meanings that Italian language attributes to this word, parziale: partial because there is only a part of the whole design market is covered (the source was strictly the Domus archives, so, as it happens in the most important archives, very often objects that we would take for granted are actually missing); partial precisely because of this fact, because an archive is in itself a witness and product of a critical work, of a choice.It is a product of the thousand different components that generate an era, just as objects are.

These 50 objects are therefore 50 stories, milestones of the Salone as either they debuted at the Salone, or their success was validated at the Salone – they might have been born just a little before and not so far away – or it was deemed necessary, on the pages of Domus, to prefer them, albeit outsiders, to the whole plethora of their colleagues who were instead exhibited at the fair, seeming however not to be incisive enough, at that moment, on issues that were recognized as priorities for the contemporary.

This is the main purpose of these objects, selected from our archive: to represent themes, issues that have from time to time shaped the present trying to show a way for the future. First of all that "thing" we call home, becoming an increasingly hybrid “living space”, deconstructed by radical design in the '60s, rearranged and staged in the '80s, disintegrated and atomized by the digital 2000s until it no longer had a physical connotation in the nomadic and virtualized millennium of the multiverse; what is industry, then, what is craftsmanship and what is art; and again, as the scale of the issues expanded to the global scale rather than the specific of the object, questions pushed to cross the walls of the Salone and the streets of the Fuorisalone to draw attention on social and environmental emergencies and changes, which objects had, and will have to, confront, in an increasingly close, and hopefully less and less toxic, relationship.

50 objects to recount the privilege of being able to interact year after year with the world of materia – hopefully beautiful materia, we already hoped 40 years ago, by the dawn of the “event” season of the Saloni – and above all the need and importance of always being able to embrace these objects and watch them grow from the privileged (and way far from responsibility-free) position of critical freedom.