Lake Como Design Festival 2024

Now in its sixth edition, Lake Como Design Festival continues its journey from 15 to 22 September 2024 in the city of Como and around its lake. Lightness is the principle underlying this new event, which takes visitors on a multi-venue tour of exhibitions and site-specific installations to explore the theme from different perspectives. We need lightness now more than ever, the same lightness described by Italo Calvino in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium that “goes with precision and determination, not with vagueness and the haphazard”. 

The Form of Lightness, staged in the rooms of the Palazzo del Broletto, a symbol of medieval Como in the city’s main square, is inspired by a quote from architect and designer Alberto Meda: “Lightness can be a contemporary way to strike the right balance between nature and artifice. Lightness that is not only physical, with a reduction in the material used, but also visual. Lightness that makes it possible to obtain a discreet object, which does not impose itself and which respects the environment.” The 28 seats on display – made between 1924 and 2024 with different techniques and materials and from different movements and countries – include two iconic pieces by Alias.

Alberto Meda’s lightweight and comfortable Armframe (1994) features an organic design with an extruded aluminium structure and seat and back made of PVC-coated polyester mesh. Like the entire FRAME collection, this armchair epitomises the Italian designer’s approach, combining product design and engineering, while adopting modern and innovative technologies and materials that aim to minimise the project’s components. From the Alias archive, Latonda is a chair designed by Mario Botta in 1987 (discontinued). The bent metal tube traces the silhouette of a circumference arching upwards in space. 

The two inclined circles are interrupted in the centre to make room for the slim perforated sheet metal seat, which balances on the two tubular elements that conclude the continuous development. This chair features a minimalist design that strips away different elements until it is reduced to a single, strict geometric outline that moves through space. Within the site-specific installation, Alias products fully embody technological lightness, a key value of the brand that has distinguished the shapes, materials and design of its collections since 1979.