For Supersalone 2021, ADI Design Museum, in collaboration with I Saloni, presents "TAKE YOUR SEAT Solitude and Conviviality of the Chair”.
Among the Alias projects on display, the laleggera by Riccardo Blumer and kayak by Patrick Norguet chairs, respectively awarded the Compasso d'Oro ADI 1998 and the honourable mention 2016 and the iconic spaghetti by Giandomenico Belotti and seconda by Mario Botta chairs.
From 4 to 10 September 2021 "Take Your Seat / Prendi posizione - Solitude and Conviviality of the Chair / Solitudine e convivialità della sedia", a temporary exhibition organised by Nina Bassoli, with the stands designed by Alessandro Colombo and Perla Gianni.It will be possible to follow, in a single narrative journey starting in 1954 and continuing to the present day, how design has conveyed language and content through the major changes in society and how it has been able to react to new cultural paradigms each time with new inventions and new values.The exhibition, with thirty chairs awarded the Compasso d'Oro Prize and more than eighty honourable mentions, showcases one of the infinite number of stories that can be told through the ADI archive: an inexhaustible wealth of worlds hidden behind the extreme synthesis of objects. With socio-economic and cultural changes as a backdrop, the chair recounts the languages and, at the same time, the ways in which human beings have found to isolate themselves or to stay together in order to find concentration and individual personality or aggregation and opportunities for sharing.The exhibition's deepest reflection is dedicated to the relationship between isolation and conviviality: a reflection on the history of design, but also and above all on the most pressing challenges of our present and future. Located in the four pavilions of the Supersalone exhibition centre, it is divided into as many thematic sections, with the addition of an "extra" section in the ADI Design Museum, the ideal conclusion - or beginning - to the itinerary. This collection, which is unique in the world for its quality and historical-scientific coherence, is continuously cross-referenced in four thematic sections (plus one), each focusing on a particular way of using the chair that can be also considered as an ideally autonomous exhibition. What does the action of sitting produce? What thoughts, mechanisms and relationships do we trigger while sitting? How do we relate to other individuals and to space? How, from being a strictly individual object, the chair, when set up in a system with other items, is able to generateexchange and sharing. Grouped together on the basis of a series of behaviours, rather than classified according to typological and compositional elements, the items on display take on a new life, characterised by a strong impact on reality and topicality, regardless of their date of birth.The specific themes are assigned to as many designers who have developed research on specific themes. In section 3, dedicated to Cook Set Share / Cucinare Apparecchiare Condividere, inside pavilion 3 of the SuperSalone the chairs on which we eat around the dining table are exhibited. These chairs represent the heart of domestic life and of family and emotional relationships. The place where food is served, in relation to the place where it is prepared (the kitchen), offers a cross-sectional view of the evolution of domestic space, the relationships between its inhabitants and the degrees of privacy or sharing of this activity beyond the family unit.Here is where laleggera designed by Riccardo Blumer, and kayak by Patrick Norguet find their place.The first one, the highest expression of technology applied to design, is a stackable chair that is the result of the combination of a solid traditional material, solid wood, and the more contemporary and lightweight expanded polyurethane with which the structure is filled. The external shell in glued wood veneers or multilaminate wood veneers is finished with a transparent varnish or lacquer in various colours. Laleggera can be interpreted as a reinterpretation of the modernist motto "fidelity to materials". Without openly proclaiming the technique with which it is made or attempting to camouflage it, the laleggera chair suggests comfort by combining the old and the new, without forcing the user to consciously experience it. Wood is also the leitmotif of kayak, the chair developed with traditional technologies to create a project of great elegance and comfort. Kayak is a technically complex product, characterised by a welcoming seating, with great aesthetic appeal and stability. The section "The Fifth Quarter/Il quinto quarto" brings together a limited number of chairs that have gone through this long and very rich history without, however, officially becoming part of it: chairs that have not been awarded or mentioned in the various editions of the Compasso d'Oro, but which nevertheless represent fundamental objects for the story, precisely because they have been excluded. The selection of "antagonistic" objects - metaphorical, anti-modern, symbolic, radical chairs - is displayed inside the ADI Design Museum, demonstrating that the history of the institution has always been intertwined with the parallel histories of culture and society, and that these journeys continually feed off each other. Two chairs that are part of the history of Alias are on display here: Giandomenico Belotti's spaghetti chair, which is a symbol in the history of design, is the first of the Alias chairs, in the collection since 1979. The structure is in painted or chromed steel; seats and backrests are produced in the characteristic PVC rod weave, which suggests unexpected tactile and visual experiences. The seconda, designed by Mario Botta in 1982, is characterized by geometry and essentiality. The painted steel structure coexists with the perforated steel sheet seat, while the backrest is made up of two simple cylindrical elements in black polyurethane.