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MODERN TIMES

Italian Design on Display

Surprising as it may sound, Italy has never had a museum dedicated to Italian design. That changed recently with the opening of Milan’s Triennale Design Museum last December. Designed by Michele de Lucchi and Italo Rota, it is housed in renovated portions of the 1933 Palazzo dell’Arte, which it shares with the Triennale di Milano art museum. The design museum is on the second floor, while downstairs is a design library, archives and documentation center. The museum’s inaugural installation, “Obsessions of Italian Design” (through April 2009), is a collaboration between Rota and filmmaker Peter Greenaway. It places 100 20th-century Italian design objects by Ettore Sottsass, Vico Magistretti, Gaetano Pesce and others within the context of Italian culture and history by displaying them with projected films by Greenaway and six contemporary Italian film directors. “This museum aims to show that the history of design is in many ways independent of, and an alternative to, that of art and architecture,” says architect Andrea Branzi, the museum’s scientific director. “Because of its unique nature…related to everyday life, it provides precious cultural and anthropological information for understanding the history of our country.” For more information visit www.triennale.it.
-Stephanie Bakal

Real Modern: Pull up a Chair
We often get inquiries from readers seeking modernist furniture and accessories that fit today’s spaces, lifestyles and budgets -- especially smaller apartments and condominiums.

In the early 1950s, Danish designer Hans Olsen (1919-92) anticipated the shrinkage of living spaces, creating one of his most sought-after designs: a round teak dining table and chairs that took up no more space than the table top itself. The table’s apron had cut-outs sized to admit the top rail of each chair’s back; the three-legged chairs’ seats were triangular, fitting beneath the table like wedges of a pie. Now discontinued by its manufacturer, Frem Røjle, the design has become highly sought-after, commanding anywhere from $1,500 to several times that amount, depending on condition.

For the budget-minded, two alternatives exist. Sears, Roebuck made a line-for-line copy that was featured in the 1967 Spring and Summer catalogues; it can be instantly distinguished from the original by its wood-grained Formica table top and elm wood framing. Examples don’t turn up often enough to determine pricing, but this version should cost far less than Olsen’s original. The most accessible variation is at IKEA. Designer Sandra Kragnert has riffed on Olsen’s idea by putting chairs with shaped backs at each gently curved corner of a rectangular table to create the Fusion dining set in ash veneer and chrome, with an Arne Jacobsen feeling ($299, www.ikea.com).
-Sandy McLendon
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