The glory of the world capital of design Milan owes its competent development program after the Second World War. All the components necessary for success were concentrated here at once - design, production and a developed sales network. Since then, this city has continued to bring creators and implementers together, uniting all the links into one chain. The Salone del Mobile exhibition, one of the most significant events in the design world, was held here for the 53rd time this year.
For a whole week of sunny April, Milan turned into a seething anthill. It attracted thousands of visitors from all over the world. And the "Salon" cannot be kept within the framework of the exhibition center, by the way, not at all small, built by Massimiliano Fuksas Rho-Fiera: parties, presentations, exhibitions and special events did not cease throughout the city. The city has become a unified exhibition space.
According to Claudio Luti, president of the Cosmit company, which organizes the Salon, its main task is to create a culture, which then serves as a reference point for object and interior design, intended primarily for the home. After all, it is the house that is the center of the whole event. Therefore, the exhibition “Where Architects Live”, a special project of Salone del Mobile 2014, was no coincidence. It opened the doors to where many would like to look.
What do the most successful figures in the world of architecture choose for themselves? House or apartment? Do they live in houses designed by them? Are there right angles in the homes of Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind? The exhibition "Where Architects Live" answered these questions and satisfied the natural curiosity of the public. But equally important, it also aimed to broaden the vision of architecture itself.
Shigeru Ban, Mario Bellini, David Chipperfield, Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas, Zaha Hadid, Marcio Kogan, Daniel Libeskind and Bijoy Jain from Studio Mumbai - 8 names, 8 houses, 8 stories, 8 paradigms of modern life. Dialogues between architects and their interiors against the backdrop of radically changing metropolises: Tokyo, Milan, Berlin, Paris, London, Sao Paulo, New York and Mumbai.
The curator of the event, Francesca Molteni, known for her Design Dance and A Celestial Bathroom projects for Salone del Mobile in 2010 and 2012, was admitted to the holy of holies - the own homes of these eight luminaries of architecture. After that, at the Salone, she, together with renowned set designer David Pizzigoni, developed a project for an installation that symbolically recreates the personal "house-rooms" of these architects.
The curators set themselves the task of conveying the atmosphere of the home of each of the participants, their perception of space and the connection between life, home and things in it. Drawing inspiration from real houses, the architect and theatrical artist created 8 pavilions. The work took 9 months. Painstakingly collecting the elements necessary for the project, the authors were also able to film the houses on video and record interviews with the owners, which they showed at the exhibition. The result is an interactive space in which both “individual” pavilions and eight heroes of the exhibition tell about the house.
The curators of the exhibition managed to convey the atmosphere of each home. All of them are an accurate portrait of their masters. The spaces talk about ideas that have already been approved many times by architects in their projects. And it doesn't even matter if the house was built at the very beginning of a career or at the height of fame. According to Zaha Hadid, an architect needs to build his own house either first of all, as the first statement of his own ideas, or when approaching the end of his career. But Shigeru Ban believes that this is an endless process, and the house is created throughout life.
Introducing the dwellings of the masters of architecture, the exhibition actually acquaints us with their work much deeper than a simple exposition of their work would. It’s a pity that it didn’t last long. But all the materials have now been collected in a book - the 176-page edition of the same name has been published for the exhibition, which presents interviews with architects and photographs of their apartments.
Above the clouds and among the trees. Shigeru Ban
Shigeru Ban spends most of his time on airplanes, but still sometimes returns home to an apartment among the trees, which is located in his own and designed in 1997 Hanegi Forest - an apartment building in a quiet residential area of Tokyo.
The structure of the Milan pavilion is reminiscent of the structure of this house: at the heart of Hanegi Forest is a triangular grid with carved ellipses, in which the trees on the site have been preserved. At the exhibition, these ellipses became well windows into the world that surrounds the architect. Here you can see pictures of Tokyo: hurrying pedestrians, roads, bridges, forest and mountains. Geometry, design and nature are Bahn's favorite mixes and is reflected in most of his work.
Home for Shigeru Bana is the sum of many things. The phenomenon of home is eternal for those who have everything, and temporary for those who have nothing. The architect does not create a hierarchy with residential architecture, considering expensive villas and dwellings for victims of disasters, privileged customers and victims of the disaster to be equal. Since 1995, when he founded the VAN: Voluntary Architects' Network, to this day, he works where nature or military conflicts have deprived people of their homes, while following the elegant minimalism of form and the age-old properties of materials.
This principle is confirmed by his own housing. To some, an apartment in Hanegi Forest may seem empty: a round table on paper columns, chairs designed by Terragini, an old leather sofa and copies of "Cycladic idols" - ancient figures that are so reminiscent of the work of modern minimalists.
Inspiration comes to him when he steps on the plank floor - material from childhood, the material of the first sculptural works, when he still dreamed of becoming a carpenter. Then came the time to experiment with other materials, new projects, and the use of paper and cardboard as a structural element. In a small room in the corner of the pavilion, Ban from the screen talks about his house, which, despite its tiny size, is full of light and inspiration, which, like its owner, is friends with Issei Miyake and remembers Shiro Kuramata. Ban shares his philosophy, and in this space, it is really felt.
House of the wind and all modernity. The couple Fuksas
Entering the pavilion of Massimiliano and Doriana Fuchsas, visitors are immediately confronted with huge statues from Mali - the guardians of African houses and apartments of architects in the Place des Vosges in Paris.
This house bears the imprint of one personality. Before Massimiliano and Doriana moved here, the French architect and urbanist Fernand Pouillon lived here. Everything here belongs to him, and today's residents feel the spirit of eroticism of his work. They practically did not change anything after the move: “Everything that we love is here,” says Doriana. The house is full of works of art: works by Fontana, Boetti and furniture by Jean Prouvé.
The second part of the pavilion is a room with a screen, in front of which is a long table with chairs, like in an apartment in Paris. There is a long wooden table with 10 chairs around it, reflecting the atmosphere of the community that reigns in the house. Here you can feel the spirit of modernism that flourished in Paris in the 1980s, the catastrophic change of eras, the painstaking restoration of the Berlin Wall area and the creation of La Défense. The home of Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas is a home made up of many other homes and lives, the frequent travel of its owners for business and pleasure.
Oddly enough, an apartment on a square in the city center creates the feeling of a country house. And this house is dissolved in a great history, it is outside of time - and, at the same time, in the past, present and future. This is the home of all modernity that can be found in the world, the home of all friends and acquaintances. “The house of the wind, as in French films, the wind that mixes smells and brings change,” - poetically describes its owner.
Among languages, books and memories. Daniel Libeskind
“The center of the world is where you live, wherever you live, there will be your center,” says Daniel Libeskind. For him, there were six such centers: Lodz, Tel Aviv, Detroit, New York, Berlin and Milan. In the pavilion with a bright red broken wall inside, there are 6 window stops, each dedicated to its own city. Here, the screens turn over pages telling about different stages of the owner's life. The red symbolizes awareness, dynamism and change, while the pavilion's centric structure represents concentric circles of memory. In the very center - Manhattan, where the architect now lives and works. Although he also has a second apartment - in Milan, where there is also a studio run by his son.
Libeskind lives among languages, books and memories. Here, echoes of the Holocaust and communism, memories of the Bauhaus and the Saarinen Academy, the reunification of East and West Germany, Italy in the 1980s and the abundance of New York are mixed in the air. This is the reality of a person who is constantly on the road.
All his life he has been balancing between the old and the modern world: Polish Lodz and Israeli Tel Aviv, as opposed to the "City of the Big Apple". And, although the architect's apartments are devoid of sharp corners, the only two private houses built by him in all the years of work turned out to be exactly like this pavilion - with perspectives of interiors and broken surfaces.
A good home is one where you can sleep well, but at the same time it creates tension, there is something in it that is not entirely harmonious: things that disturb, things that remain unresolved, a person who feels like a stranger. For Libeskind, there is no hierarchical relationship between the house and the objects in it, just as there are none between the screens in his pavilion. Everything in the world is equally important. “There is a table in my New York apartment that I wanted to get rid of all the time. And this is the first thing I designed when we first moved to Milan. We had nothing and slept on the floor,”says the architect. Libeskind's house is a house of memory. And the table there is not simple, but with red legs.
A house of several houses, nature and a small reading room. Studio mumbai
Water flows in Studio Mumbai's dark pavilion, making the air humid and sound like none of the eight. Here it seems that you are in a rainforest. In reality, the house-studio of architects is located in the suburbs of Mumbai, on the seashore. And water is its integral element. On several screens in the pavilion, nature flickers, on others - the colorful landscapes of Mumbai: skyscrapers, textile factories, colorful linen on stretched ropes, people on the streets.
The pavilion tells the story of not one house, but several at once, which have become one whole over 17 years. Bijoy Jain says that he is just one of many here. They wanted to create a small working community - Studio Mumbai. Therefore, this common house consists of several, it is complemented by the nature around and a small reading room, which is hidden in a huge banyan tree. Separate volumes are connected by passages from a mosquito net. And the tree is also an integral part of the house: the banyan tree enters into a "dialogue" with it, constantly swinging the curtains with its branches.
The studio house breathes with those who live in it, together with the projects and energy of those who work here - masons, carpenters, weavers, artisans. Their knowledge, experience, memory fill the space around. This is a rented house, but people live in it with love and care; it is temporary, but its residents believe in an eternal cycle - from the origins to the degeneration of the ruins into a new civilization. “Our water will continue to exist even after we are gone,” Bijoy Jain writes, recalling Piero della Francesca's Resurrection of Christ, a work in which the perception of time is enduring.
An endless collection of everything in the world. Marcio Kogan
Marcio Kogan's favorite place was his childhood home, built by his father, a modernist architect. Everything there was fully automated and controlled at the touch of a magic button.
Now his home in the unattractive but vibrant São Paulo neighborhood is the result of a fusion of hasty development in the 1980s and the ideas of Kogan, a recent graduate of the Mackenzie University School of Architecture. This house is one of the first works of the architect. Here, in an apartment on the 12th floor, he cannot imagine himself outside the bustle of the city and says that he could never live in a quiet, peaceful place. The energy of the Latin American metropolis gives it inspiration.
Both in the pavilion in Milan and in the apartment in São Paulo, everything points to the distinctive features of his projects: clean lines, dialogue between the masses, windows linking the interior and external space. The blinds on the panoramic windows give transparency to the space: this makes the common space intimate. An important element of the apartment - the balcony - was also recreated at the exhibition: at the very end of the pavilion, around the corner of a massive wall, a blue sky suddenly opens up.
Kogan's house is an endless collection of everything in the world: sketches, letters from friends, autographs of football directors and philosopher writers, subway tickets, souvenirs and fragments of events.
Home is a bookshelf. Mario Bellini
“I'm a city man. Living in Milan, I acquired an urban culture. And when I was looking for a place to live, it didn't even occur to me that I could build it myself,”says Bellini. The house where he lives was built by the renowned Italian rationalist architect Piero Portaluppi. This is a beautiful villa of the 1st half of the 20th century - very "Milanese": the interior spaces of the house are interspersed with a garden. Bellini's workshop is also located here.
The heart of the house is a huge library. It is housed in a bookcase 3 stories high: it is a huge shelf with a staircase hidden behind it. To make it easy to get books, a system of scaffolding is arranged, along which it is easy to get to the desired shelf. This rack was recreated in the pavilion - a wall-staircase, consisting of many square cells. Climbing the steps, visitors find themselves in the next room, on a balcony that opens onto the architect's world: the walls show a video of his house with abstract wall paintings by British artist David Tremlett.
This is another treasury apartment: books, records, architectural projects, design objects, cameras, magazines, publications about music, people, projects, stories, travels, "Arcology" by Paolo Soleri, MOMA monograph about Mies van der Rohe, Ron's first table Arada, exhibited in Milan, a piano and violin that once belonged to his wife's Jewish family.
A house that fills the void. David Chipperfield
The complex of the New Museum in Berlin brought the author not only the prestigious Mies van der Rohe Prize, but also became, in a sense, his home. The museum is part of a massive renovation undertaken in the Mitte area after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was impossible to resist not introducing a residential function into this project. As a result, a house appeared on one of the many empty lots, a symbolically light gray concrete volume with huge windows. This is where David Chipperfield's apartment is located, combined with his workshop.
The pavilion, like the house, is just a background for the projection of the history of Berlin. On the outer walls there are windows - screens, and so the image of the New Museum appears both inside and outside. The interior of the pavilion conveys the atmosphere of the apartment. The red and green walls dividing the space into three are a nod to the architect's living room: two green sofas are placed opposite each other in the center of the room, and behind them are red shelves of books.
In this space, you feel that home is just a thin barrier between personal comfort and the environment where we meet other people.
Perfect white in the midst of red brick Victorian buildings. Zaha Hadid
Her house is perfect for walking barefoot. In Zaha Hadid's London house, the floors flow into the walls and then into the ceilings: this is a single wave, as in all her projects. It is perfectly white and develops around an impluvium pool - like a Mediterranean house.
There are no relics, but architecture in all its manifestations is felt: read, studied, thought out, realized, built, defeated, desired and experienced; one can feel the engineering and mathematical education received by Hadid in Beirut.
In a polycarbonate home built among red-brick Victorian buildings, iconography, landscape and decoration culture are expressed in unpredictable ways. Home is a capsule, a spaceship cabin from sci-fi movies, with flowing surfaces typical of Zaha Hadid's astonishing parametric architecture. But right angles are still there too.
Her real home was her home in Baghdad, inspired by the Bauhaus style, with 1950s and 60s Italian furnishings chosen by cosmopolitan parents. Ever since she left him, she felt like a gypsy, constantly changing temporary housing. And now she also travels and spends a lot of time outside the home.
The pavilion telling these stories became a synthesis of these two houses, equally important for the architect: in a simple rectangular volume - a curved table-screen, like a large common table in her London apartment. The canopy over it is the embodiment of Hadid's idea of the absolute importance of home for every person.
