WHEN ARCHITECTURE MEETS THE DESIGN

 

Have you ever seen buildings acting on a stage or chairs dancing in a square?

This is what happens with the Village Chairs project designed by Carlo Malerba.

A collection out of the ordinary, able to find a clear meeting point between design and architecture. The chairs appear as capable of moving freely in space, in a triadic ballet as in the choreographic works of Oskar Schlemmer. Their realization is the result of a constant research for the architectural past and possible future relationships.

 

Malerba presents a reflection on the themes of architectural design, perspective, socialization and meeting through an extreme change of scale: the skyscraper, the station and the theater change shape and become design objects. A series of products that are not just furnishing elements but are much more: they are buildings around a square, people around a table.

In this work of craftsmanship and design, for which we are famous all over the world, the designer leads to the reasoning on how important relationships are and incite to the conversation about the poetics of semantics represented by architecture.

 

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THE SPEAKING CHAIRS

 

There are elementary archetypes that, depending on the historical epochs, have firmly established themselves in the collective perception by means of Art, the main chain of transmission towards the future, but also through works of genius or revolutionary characters for their inventions. The Village Chairs series chooses to represent revolutionary architectures and characteristics of different historical eras, to make them usable and bring each user to knowledge.

 

The Torino Porta Nuova Station, designed by Alessandro Mazzucchetti and Carlo Ceppi, is transformed and becomes a chair. Just like a station, it is ready to receive an incoming visitor or to stop a departing traveler. It is made in two formats, not only as a chair but also as a bench, ready to hold more "travelers" in an act of collective happiness.

Aldo Rossi's Teatro del Mondo, an architecture that stands as the main "actress" in the context of the Adriatic Sea, transforms itself and changes its script to become a furnishing object, flexible in the family space.

Leon Battista Alberti who, hundreds centuries ago, modified the façade of Santa Maria Novella, today winks at us before his work, which has become a stylized back, in memory of a cultural trasformation.

Like Le Corbusier with the Unité d'Habitation, he imagines a new model for living, in a more cooperative and innovative way for the time, the Unité chair wants to bring innovation at home and rediscover the pleasure of living. In a similar way, the Condominio chair proposes, in a stylized archetype, the facades of a hypothetical palace.

The Village Chairs family is made up of a rocking chair, representing the Chrysler Building by William Van Alen which, due to its similarity, swings up and down like the New York Stock Exchange and which, by contrast, in swinging you uplift your days.

The High-Tech style of the Piano & Rogers Center Pompidou becomes a symbolic chair, an recognizable sign in the Parisian skyline, an image of a container of art and culture that can be brought into our homes.

To honor the craftsmanship and the creation, another original chair, the Fabbrica, takes care of it: the place of creation, where ideas become reality, where even the Village Chairs come to life.

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THE STORY CONTINUES: THE FORMATS

 

Each chair "tells" a story linked to an architecture that is part of the collective memory, creating an opening that tends to graft a cultural topic of dialogue into our homes.

The structure of the chairs is in laser-cut beech blockboard. It has a comfortable polyurethane seat, lined with a screen-printed fabric that echoes the geometry of the backrest as if it were a projection of the shadow of the building, different for each type.

Formats created by the Carmadesign studio are three: the smallest in the house, S; a discrete and medium format, M; the largest in the family, L.

                                                                                                        

                                                                                                          Andrea Di Cinzio

 

(Photo Credit: Marco Tacchini)