Milan Design Week has become a behemoth—ontologically bursting at the seams and drifting from its original purpose as the world’s primary agora for innovations in furniture and furnishings. Today’s citywide happening has not only expanded in scale—spilling into every possible palazzo, church, and derelict industrial complex—but also in scope, incorporating a slew of “society of the spectacle” installations mounted by luxury and mid-market brands across nearly every sector. All shell out exorbitant sums to get in on the action.
A daily deluge of flashy showcases—often overpowering actual product or concept launches—alongside tightly gatekept cocktail hours, who’s-who dinners, and increasingly exclusive parties tends to culminate in late-night drinks at the legendary Bar Basso, famous as the birthplace of the Negroni Sbagliato, a cornerstone of the Milanese aperitivo, and the annual gathering place for the global design industry’s confirmed and aspirational elite.
Over the course of five or so nights, they converge on the relatively compact watering hole, crowding into its time-capsule interior, awning-covered terrace, and adjacent traffic circle. The requisite social media post—proof of attendance—has become a marker of acceptance, a confirmation of a pilgrimage completed.
For a crowd so attuned to the aesthetic makeup of furniture and furnishings, it’s curious—almost funny—how rarely anyone looks down to see what they’re actually sitting on, that is, if they’re able to do so at all. That degree of attention is reserved for, and often depleted by, the overly staged showrooms and sprawling fair booths found elsewhere in the city, where an avalanche of luxury goods is unveiled. At this year’s Milan Design Week, German designer Thilo Reich set out to poke at this paradox—perhaps also to challenge the growing triviality of the event itself, and the increasingly detached, occasionally frivolous posture of the industry at large.
Less a direct critique than a more transcendent reflection on cycles of presence and temporality, Reich’s site-responsive tables and chairs carry the recycled cast aluminum imprint of the worn, timeworn pavement beneath them. The ground plane itself has been shaped by years of use—the repeated placement, removal, and dragging of furniture leaving its own quiet record.
“The pavement is approached as a form of skin. Cracks, seams, repairs, compressions, and transitions appear like inscriptions of time,” the designer explains in an artist statement. “Positive and negative experiences leave equal traces. What was damaged does not disappear but becomes part of a new whole.”
Rendered in the same recognizable, mass-produced tubular frames as the furnishings typically found in situ, these idiosyncratic surfaces are introduced as subtle interventions, gently skewing expectations of what one might encounter in such a context.
The provocation—what Reich dubbed the “quietest show at Milan Design Week”—extends from his ongoing Urban Tissue project. “For many years, I have developed a continuous artistic practice centered on the transformation of urban materials and the exploration of social and spatial structures,” Reich says. “My work focuses on the characteristic surfaces of places and the ways they are shaped by social, cultural, and economic influences.”
To learn more about the designer, visit thiloreich.com.
Photography by Giorgio Garzella.
