Alessi Spring/Summer 2011 Collection

Less is more or More is more?
"Oggetti e Progetti", the exhibition
that was inaugurated in May 2010 at the Die
Neue Sammlung museum in Munich, has travelled
to the U.S. where it opened last November at the
Philadelphia Museum of Art with a new title:
"Ethical and Radical". The title alludes to the two
extremes between which we plan to direct our research
in this new decade that has just begun. On one hand,
as we here at Alessi understand it, "ethical" is the
search for a new simplicity, modesty, and sometimes
even austerity, in design. On the other, "radical"
is understood as a continuation, perhaps even an
acceleration, of the search for highly expressive forms
and decorative elements that, at least from a certain
point of view, might be considered a bit 'over the top',
as the saying goes.
This latest series of projects is a good example of
the duality we nurture here, and it seems reasonable
to me to assume that these will remain the two
most interesting trends in the current decade. The
new projects with a "radical" imprint: Wanders,
Mendini, Rashid, Clotet, Trimarchi (La Stanza
dello Scirocco), Manferdini, Fuksas, Gooris, Chiave,
Kontouris and Dror. And those marked by "ethics":
Fukasawa, Chipperfield, Lissoni, Gasparini, Lassus
and Trimarchi (the Cross). Taken all together, they
can certainly be read according to this dichotomy in an
attempt to categorise them for the international design
scene. But they also represent something more, and in
the diversity of their languages they invite us to reflect
on the relativity of classifications and on the nature of
the design itself. Basically, the discussion could easily
be whether the "radical" Tableware by Wanders
grounded in a search for expressiveness that is perfectly
consistent with ethos --meaning the customs of today's
society-- might be more properly classified as ethical,
and whether the Cookware by Fukasawa and the
Cross by Trimarchi, given their rigorous, pure language
might just as easily be described as radical.
I encourage you to take these categories as partial
attempts, an easy way out as it were, in trying to
define the much more complex reality of design as a
creative discipline born of a purely artistic and poetic
nature. It seems to me that dogmatic assertions like
those of Mies van der Rohe in the '20s (Less is more),
and Bob Venturi in the '60s (More is more) are not
very useful when they claim to set immutable rules of
what design should be. Who today would claim the
right to determine how a poem should be written, or
how to create a work of art or compose a song? It would
be far more useful to be convinced that Beauty, in all
of its facets and contemporary complexity, can still save
the world!