Model Ideas: 40 Young Designers

Model Ideas
40 model ideas show off the work of 40 young designers
For the 44th Edition of the Salone Internazionale del Mobile di Milano
ONEOFF presents an exhibition of pure design.

A model idea is a poetic gesture with which the designer begins to shape something. It may never become a product, but will nevertheless act as a signpost for his future development or even the future development of others.

When thinking of a chair, a vase, a lamp or of any kind of known object, everyone has a general idea of the thing they are thinking of. In other words, there is a sort of archetype, a simplified original image, to which the mind refers when it encounters something or the word that represents it: vase, glass, teddy bear. This doesn't mean that we all have the same lamp, the same bicycle or the same biscuit in mind. In fact, the different ways in which objects take shape is connected to the creative force of the archetype that resonates within the object and makes it recognisable, perhaps strange, unusual, disconcerting, yet nevertheless intelligible.

Anyone involved in design may have a very matter-of-fact attitude to their ideas and be primarily engaged in finding ways of turning them into products that might gain pride of place beside all the other products already on the shelves. Yet, it may also be that the designer has a more poetic approach, less constrained by the need to make, produce and sell. He may be on the look out for a suitable formal solution through which to express a feeling, an inspiration or a belief. In this case his model idea becomes a way of suggesting a different story, a shifted perspective.

Some of the designers taking part in this exhibition of MODEL IDEAS have seen the model idea as a variation on the concept of the purposeful object, others have endowed their model idea with ironic or absurd connotations, while others have explored the boundaries between form and function in their quest for meanings that have yet to be listed in the dictionary of things.

In fact, the functional aspect of the model idea is little more than a suggestion that is promptly denied in a game where the incomplete, the unusual or even decoration are just updated variations of an aesthetic of the unfinished: works in progress.

In this infinite play of ideas, the model ideas are brave enough to stand for what they are: slight gestures that do not pretend to add clutter to houses, streets and offices, but are nevertheless firmly intent on telling stories with words made of dust, glues and numeric information. In the vast dictionary of design, model ideas live on, from A and well beyond Z.

Giuliano Corti

The exhibition is supervised by:
Guillaume Delvigne
Maurizio Meroni
Tomàs Ortiz Ferrer

In April of 2004, during the Salone del Mobile ONEOFF presented the exhibition IN DUST WE TRUST ( http://www.industreal.it ).

Exhibition April 13 - 18, 2005
c/o ONEOFF - via Luigi Nono, 7 - Milano
Fabbrica del Vapore
(close to Cimitero Monumentale, tramway 12, 14, 33, 29, 30, MM Moscova)
Free Entrance - Opening Hours
April 13 / 16 from 4:00 pm to 9:00 pm
April 17 / 18 from 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm
Friday April 15, 2005 - cocktail 6:30 pm

Samuel Accocéberry, Guntram Bechtold, Laurent Bloedt, Tim Boyce, David Lucca Caon, Will Carey, Chou Caillou, Stefano Citi, Christopher Coombes, Guillaume Delvigne, Elle & Lui: Julie Boyer and Pierre Breut, Pierre Foulonneau, Jim Hannon-Tan, Shunsuke Ishikawa, Johannes Klein, Marie Leblanc, Alexander Loehr, Julia Maendler, Maria Elena Martinez Fayo, Tomàs Ortiz Ferrer, Pervisioni: Paul Kogelnig and Gabriel Heusser, Apostolos Porsanidis, Michaël Radix, Giordano Redaelli, Céline Steelandt, Irina Maria Suteu, to22: Todd Bracher, Efe Buluc and Mark Goetz, Carlo Trevisani, Ionna Vautrin, Cynthia Viale, Niko Xanthopoulos.

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