Making the Best of It

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/18/garden/making-the-best-of-it-at-the-milan-furniture-fair.html

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MILAN — The dog had spots.

At the International Furniture Fair, which ended Sunday, the Italian company Magis showed a stylized plastic puppy that is a signature of the Finnish designer Eero Aarnio. In the new version, though, it had Dalmatian-like markings. Gesturing at reinvention — and only barely at that — the speckled dog summed up the malaise haunting the biggest and most influential trade fair in the furniture industry.

Milan is where designers and dealers come for new ideas. An exhibitor’s vitality is judged by its ability to produce those ideas, and for some years now, the fair has presented an energetic face to the world, responding gamely to the global recession. Crowds thronged to openings, prosecco flowed and visitors found silver linings in dark economic clouds as they took in furniture collections that were edited more thoughtfully than in the anything-goes boom years.

But this year, despite the festivities and free-drink seekers, many exhibitors were showing strain. And what passed for innovation was more often a reinterpretation of greatest hits. While Magis had its Dalmatian, the Swiss company Vitra presented the classic Eames Hang-It-All coat rack in new palettes created by one of its star designers, Hella Jongerius. And the Italian company Edra, working with Fernando and Humberto Campana, made beds in the style of well-known chairs that the Campana brothers had designed in wire, wood slats and leather.

Another coping strategy was the move toward smaller products. There were fewer sofas, and more accessories and other items that cost relatively little for producers to ship and consumers to buy.

To put it another way: 2013 may be the year of the pouf.

The challenge of making design that is fresh and commercially viable without investing heavily in research and development appears to have yielded a mob of the small, cushiony seats. On display in the fairgrounds as well as in exhibitions throughout Milan was a United Nations of poufs: wool poufs with handles from the Swedish office furniture company Offecct; velvet poufs from the French luxury house Hermès; poufs with knitted pastel upholstery from the Spanish textile brand Gan; asymmetrical poufs from the Italian furniture maker Casamania; and harlequin poufs from Normann Copenhagen.

Speaking in his flagship shop on the Via Manzoni the day before the fair, Alberto Alessi, the third-generation leader of the 92-year-old company Alessi, noted that smaller-size items are a natural response to a depressed market. “There’s a big crisis in Europe for all furniture producers,” he said. “Selling big pieces overseas is very expensive because of transportation.”

And this year, Alessi, which is known for its home accessories, introduced Kompas, a group of sunglasses and eyeglass frames by Frédéric Gooris, a Belgian designer. “I was a bit tired of designing the next fruit bowl or breadbasket or tray or even coffee maker or teakettle,” Mr. Alessi said.

Then the conversation turned to his next venture, wine, and he brightened. He was preparing to bottle his first vintage in May, he said, as soon as he could smooth over problems with the bottle’s design.

It didn’t help morale that it rained for much of the week, or that the sodden weather failed to create the usual havoc in taxi lines. It seemed to be a clear indication of a decline in attendance that even at dinnertime, in a cold drizzle, you could find a cab in downtown Milan in less than five minutes. Cosmit, the organization that runs the event, reported 324,000 visitors this year, only 6,500 fewer than last year. But Claudio Luti, the chief executive of Kartell, who recently became Cosmit’s president, speculated that visitors were economizing by attending only a fraction of the fair’s six days. That would account for the additional elbowroom.

Of course, the sheer number of exhibitors — more than 2,000 in the main fairgrounds alone, plus some 700 more in the Salone Satellite show of emerging talent — guaranteed more than a smattering of excellence. And even recycling can be accomplished with panache and deviltry. Magis, for instance, presented Folly, a plastic bench by Ron Arad that puts a literal twist on the Victoria and Albert sofa Mr. Arad designed in 2000 for Moroso. And Vitra translated Jean Prouvé’s plywood-and-steel Standard chair into plastic without introducing an ounce of cheesiness.

In addition to bringing back familiar pieces, companies continued to resurrect the work of neglected masters. Such was the case with five charming lamps by Gino Sarfatti (1912-1985) that are being revived by the Italian lighting company Flos and updated with LEDs.

The frontier of lighting technology is a bracing place to wander, especially now that lamplight can be mixed with materials like polystyrene, feathers and soap bubbles. Among the arresting products at Euroluce, the lighting exhibit held every other year: Odeon, a leather-covered, low-energy floor lamp by Studio Klass for FontanaArte; Paragon, a table lamp that bends into an arc, by Daniel Libeskind for Artemide; and Hulotte, a crystal hanging lamp by Paola Navone for Saint-Louis.

And you couldn’t get away from the many wondrous visual mashups in Milan, whether you were peering at eclectically dressed mannequins in the boutique windows of the Via della Spiga or entering the nearby Museo Bagatti Valsecchi, a 19th-century house museum filled with the Renaissance-era treasures of an aristocratic Milanese family. There, glowing at the threshold of a terrace was the Spanish-born designer Nacho Carbonell’s velvety-looking tubular light, an adaptation of the signature color and draping of the fashion house Vionnet, which sponsored it.

Meanwhile, much grumbling was heard about the decline of Lambrate, the warehouse neighborhood touted as a candy store of experimental design. The word was that the Dutch organizers who initiated the Ventura Lambrate show four years ago had raised the price of exhibition space beyond what many experimental (which is to say, young) designers could afford. In fact, the district was relatively subdued this year, and a larger proportion of exhibitors left one cold.

But there were many exceptions, including PlusDesign gallery, which featured a modular cabinet system in wood and aluminum by Studio Minale-Maeda, and “Mindcraft,” a returning show of new Danish design, accompanied by videos illustrating production methods.

Far stodgier venues were equally absorbing. Back at the fairgrounds, in a show of office furniture, the French architect Jean Nouvel built “Office for Living,” a stunning 13,000-square-foot exhibition offering myriad ways to envision the workplace. The installation had the spatial organization of a dream: eight sections surrounded a rotunda, with each part given its own size and character, from a six-room prewar apartment converted into an office to an industrial warehouse where a dot-com might thrive.

As impressive as the installation was, though, the content offered few surprises. An exception was a unit created by Ron Arad with color-changing tiles, thanks to a new technology called Active True Colour with a cholesterol-based solution that can be wirelessly controlled so that an entire wall or countertop can assume any color.

You could see why Cosmit would embrace “Office for Living.” The project positioned residential furnishings in work environments, opening up potential new markets for the manufacturers. Elsewhere at the fair, many goods were clearly intended to work on both sides of the home/office divide, including Clap, Patricia Urquiola’s new upholstered plastic armchair for Kartell.

Categories like home and work, said Andrew Cogan, chief executive of Knoll, “are becoming meaningless.” Specifically, Mr. Cogan was talking about Tools for Life, furniture designed by Rem Koolhaas’s architecture firm OMA in commemoration of Knoll’s 75th anniversary.

The first pieces in the collection, unveiled to journalists in Milan, seemed like a throwback to the pre-2007 days of unbridled ambition and half-baked ideas. The centerpiece was a sculptural partition called Counter, with three parts that can be aligned to create a low wall or splayed at any angle. Benjamin Pardo, Knoll’s design director, described the object as “a piazza of form, an area where people can come together.” He said he could see it in an academic setting or dividing the living room from the dining room in a New York apartment. Clearly, it would not be good for blocking views or sound, or even for displaying objects, what with the swinging arms dislodging anything in their path.

It’s hard to fault Knoll for its ambition; a 75th anniversary certainly calls for a splashy gesture. Next year, the kitchen and bath company Boffi will turn 80, and it is saving its efforts for the occasion, a representative said. (Practically the only product the company introduced at this year’s fair was a sink.)

Still, many believe that trade shows like Milan put an excessive demand on home furnishings companies to create novelty. Furniture is not fashion; industrial products require time to be properly refined and tooled. It’s not just new technology that makes Euroluce worth seeing, but also the schedule (it’s held every other year) that gives lighting companies time to deliberate before issuing new works.

Speaking about the rigors of constant innovation, Rob Forbes, the founder of Design Within Reach and now head of Public, a company that designs and sells urban bicycles and accessories, said: “You can’t do it every year. You just can’t. You can’t come up with new stuff.”

Were the fair to reduce its frequency, however, Milan would be robbed of its biggest event. Three hundred thousand fewer people would be hailing cabs, and residents of a country with an unemployment rate of nearly 12 percent would suffer.

Antonio Rossi, a taxi driver here, confirmed that business was slower than usual this year, though he admitted that even so, it was a great improvement over the weeks when the city was not hosting a fashion or design extravaganza. But no trade show, Mr. Rossi insisted, could provide the solution to his country’s economic woes. What Italy really needed, he said, was another leader like Mussolini.

Even though Mussolini was a Fascist?

“Everyone has problems,” he said.