Superdesign Show 2019: The Design Science Behind Tortona’s Best Season

ART & CULTURE · MILAN

Reading time: 11 min

A kaleidoscope built from the same optics as a laptop screen. A sculptor’s zipper cut into a Milanese facade a few streets away. A vase made by pouring concrete over an empty beer bottle, in a tradition with roots in mourning rites brought across the Atlantic. At Superstudio’s Superdesign Show during Milan Design Week 2019, the decoration kept turning out to be research.

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Every April, Milan’s Salone del Mobile spills far beyond its fairground at Rho and into the city itself, in a sprawl of installations, showroom takeovers and temporary pavilions known as the Fuorisalone. Brera has long been one hub. Tortona, a former industrial quarter south west of the centre, is the other, and in 2019 its anchor venue was Superstudio, running its annual Superdesign Show across roughly 13,000 square metres of converted exhibition space.

That year’s edition took “Innovation and Tradition” as its organising idea, rendered in a stark black and white identity, and it pulled together a genuinely wide field: Lexus working with the digital art collective Rhizomatiks, LG showing its rollable OLED television inside a Foster and Partners-designed setting, Giulio Cappellini’s invited “Superhotel” project bringing together Jasper Morrison, Antonio Citterio, Tom Dixon and Alessandro Mendini, and Normann Copenhagen marking its twentieth anniversary with a collection of artist-made objects.

Transmit the Tone to the World – Koizumiya 

Threaded through that programme were five installations that, looked at together, made the strongest case for what the show was actually arguing: that craft and material science are not opposite instincts but the same one, applied at different scales. A giant kaleidoscope clad in wood and lined with a reflective optical film. A pair of drinking vessels engineered to ring like a bell. Concrete poured over discarded bottles as a form of memory-keeping. Coloured wood behaving like a meteor shower. And, a short walk from Superstudio’s halls, a building that appeared to unzip.

Superstudio and the making of a design district

Superstudio’s own history explains a great deal about why Tortona became a Fuorisalone destination in the first place. The organisation was founded in 1983 by the journalist and editor Gisella Borioli and her husband Flavio Lucchini, initially as flexible production spaces for fashion and communication work. In 2000, Borioli took on a set of former General Electric warehouses at Via Tortona 27 and reopened them as an exhibition venue with a specific ambition: to move design out of the trade fair and into the city, the way fashion had already colonised Milan’s streets during its own week.

The idea worked because it had a willing first tenant. Designer Giulio Cappellini agreed to show his own collection in the unfinished space just before the 2000 Salone, and the response was strong enough that neighbouring workshops, showrooms and studios followed. By 2005 the surrounding streets had become known simply as the Tortona area, formally organised as a design district in its own right. The venue itself changed name and format as the format matured, running as the “Temporary Museum for New Design” from 2009 before adopting the Superdesign Show title it has carried since 2015, art directed by Cappellini and produced by Borioli.

By the 2019 edition, Superstudio had expanded to two connected sites, Superstudio Più and the nearby Superstudio 13, together forming the physical core of the district for the week. What had been a scatter of disused industrial buildings twenty years earlier was, by then, one of two design capitals inside the same city, sitting alongside Brera as the second pole of the wider Fuorisalone circuit.

A pinnacle of reflections: 3M and Matteo Thun

The installation that best summed up the “Innovation and Tradition” brief sat inside Superstudio itself. A Pinnacle of Reflections, made by materials company 3M with the Milan practice Matteo Thun & Partners, took the form of a large kaleidoscopic structure, its exterior clad in wood and finished with a highly reflective surface designed to merge visually with the sky above it. Inside, visitors found the opposite register entirely: a chamber of mirrored surfaces animated with a swarm of butterfly forms, referencing the blue morpho, whose wings inspired the optical film technology at the centre of 3M’s presentation. 3M summarised the piece with a line that captured its two faces exactly: outside, it reflects nature; inside, it mirrors the visitor’s imagination.

The choice of collaborator was not incidental. Matteo Thun was born in Bolzano in 1952 into a family of ceramicists, the Thun workshops, and trained in architecture at the University of Florence before moving to Milan in 1978. There he met Ettore Sottsass, and in 1981 became one of the founding members of the Memphis Group, the collective that spent the following six years dismantling the design orthodoxies of the period with lacquered laminate, saturated colour and deliberately ungainly proportion. Thun contributed ceramic pieces to several Memphis collections before setting up his own practice in 1984. The firm he leads today has since built hotels including the Vigilius Mountain Resort above Merano and the Waldhotel at Bürgenstock in Switzerland, alongside product work for Bulgari, Illy and Artemide. A pavilion built from optics and reflection, for a Milan design week, sits comfortably inside that trajectory: an architect who came up through a movement built on treating materials as argument, still doing exactly that four decades later.

The butterfly wing that is already in your laptop

The blue morpho reference inside the pavilion was not a decorative flourish borrowed loosely from nature. It described, with reasonable precision, the actual science behind the optical film 3M makes and has made for decades.

A morpho’s wing carries no blue pigment at all. Its colour comes from the physical structure of the scales on its surface: stacks of chitin, arranged in regular layers a few hundred nanometres apart, that reflect and cancel out wavelengths of light through interference, in the same way a soap film or an oil slick throws off colour without containing any dye. Move the wing, and the angle of the layers relative to the light shifts, which is why the blue appears to travel across the surface as the insect flies. Biologists call this structural colour, to distinguish it from colour made by pigment.

Normann X Brask Art Collection – Normann Copenhagen

3M’s engineers, led by the company’s longtime optical scientist Andrew Ouderkirk, spent years studying exactly this effect, alongside the equivalent structures in peacock feathers and the scales of certain fish, while developing what the company calls multilayer optical film: plastic sheeting built from hundreds of microscopically thin layers, arranged to reflect light with almost no loss, up to 99.5 per cent by the company’s own figures. The technology is not a research curiosity. A single laptop or phone screen typically contains close to nine hundred of these layers, brightening the display without drawing more power from the battery. Variants of the same film cool buildings by reflecting solar heat before it enters through the glass, and a dichroic version, sold at a fraction of the cost of dichroic glass, produces the same shifting rainbow effect directly on a coloured surface. The kaleidoscope in Tortona was not simply inspired by a butterfly. It was built from the same underlying optics that already sit, unnoticed, behind the glass of a great many ordinary screens.

Astral Bodies – ENORME Studio X VITAMIN-ARTE

Elsewhere in Tortona: Alex Chinneck’s unzipped facade

A few streets from Superstudio, at Spazio Quattrocento inside the Opificio 31 complex, the British sculptor Alex Chinneck produced one of the most photographed images of Milan Design Week 2019: a Milanese building facade that appeared, at one corner, to have been pulled open along a giant zip, its aged plasterwork and shuttered windows peeling back to reveal a lit interior beneath. Chinneck’s team studied the surrounding streets closely before building the piece, reproducing the tone of the district’s stonework and even its graffiti with enough conviction that the illusion read as a real building rather than a stage set. The facade, around seventeen metres wide, was fabricated across three factories in Germany from steel, stone and timber, then assembled on site over roughly three weeks. Inside, the zip motif continued through a partially opened wall and a circular hole cut into the floor, both lit from behind.

The piece was staged independently of Superstudio’s own programme, but it belonged to the same week and the same district, and it extended a body of work Chinneck had been building for most of a decade. His breakthrough pieces used the same trick of near-total structural conviction paired with total physical impossibility: a Hackney factory front built from over a thousand pieces of deliberately shattered glass in 2012, a Southwark Street house cast in seven and a half thousand blocks of paraffin wax designed to melt slowly across its run in 2014, a Covent Garden building appearing to float clear of its own foundations that same year, and an unzipped 1960s office block in Ashford the year before Milan. Seen against that run of work, the Tortona piece was less a one-off spectacle than the latest application of a method Chinneck had spent years refining: build the illusion with the same rigour a real building would demand, so the eye has nothing to disbelieve.

The sound of a toast: Koizumiya’s Kanpai Bell

Inside Superstudio, the Japanese metalware maker Koizumiya presented an installation built around a much smaller idea, expressed through Kanpai Bell, a pair of drinking vessels engineered specifically for the sound they make when they meet. Cast in lead-free brass and finished with a protective coating, each glass rings with a clear, sustained tone when clinked against its pair, a note closer to a small bell than the dull clink of ordinary glassware.

Koizumiya built the presentation, designed with the engineer Hideki Yoshimoto, around that single acoustic idea, letting visitors strike and combine the vessels to hear the range of tones the metal produced. The reasoning behind the object draws on two separate traditions that happen to agree with each other: the belief, found in various forms across East Asian ritual, that sound can clear or purify a space, and the older Western custom of clinking glasses at a toast, said to have originated as a way of frightening off evil spirits with noise. Kanpai Bell treats both as a design brief rather than folklore, engineering the metal and its wall thickness specifically so that an ordinary social gesture produces a genuinely considered sound.

A concrete memory: Normann Copenhagen and the Dermody Vase

Normann Copenhagen used its twentieth anniversary presentation at Superdesign Show to step outside its own product catalogue, inviting ten artists to contribute to the Normann x Brask Art Collection, a series that treated Normann’s showroom as gallery space for a week. Among the contributors was the Danish artist Vincent Dermody, whose Dermody Vase took its form from an older piece of folk practice: the memory jug.

Memory jugs are an American vernacular tradition, most strongly documented in the early twentieth century South and widely believed to descend from Bakongo funerary customs carried across the Atlantic during slavery, in which water vessels and personal effects were placed on graves to help a spirit on its way. Their surfaces were built up from broken crockery, shells, buttons, coins, keys and small keepsakes, pressed into wet cement or putty until the original jug disappeared beneath a crust of fragments, part memorial and part scrapbook. Dermody’s versions kept the method and updated the materials: bright, saturated concrete poured directly over an empty beer bottle, still visible beneath the surface, with found objects worked into the mix before it set. The result reads less as an object than as a private archive made physical, each vase carrying its own unrepeatable set of small anxieties and souvenirs inside a single melted-looking form.

Nine meteorites indoors: ENORME Studio and VITAMIN-ARTE

The Spanish practice ENORME Studio, working with the digital art studio VITAMIN-ARTE, used Superdesign Show to test a new coloured board from the manufacturer FINSA: fibracolour, a medium-density fibreboard produced with pigment worked through its full depth rather than applied as a surface coat. Cut and layered, the coloured core reads as a striped cross-section wherever the material is carved, which the designers used to build a series of large, rough-edged forms modelled on meteorites, several of them finished as usable furniture: tables and benches that visitors were invited to sit on and touch rather than view at a distance.

Above the sculptural pieces, VITAMIN-ARTE suspended thirty-five slender pipes from the ceiling, wired with light that could flash and travel along the installation to suggest a meteor shower crossing the room, with the intensity building toward moments meant to read as impact. Sensors let the lighting respond as visitors approached particular pieces, so the installation stayed in motion for the length of the show rather than settling into a fixed tableau. Between them, the material and the staging made the same argument twice: that FINSA’s coloured board could carry genuine sculptural weight, and that a design week installation could still hold a room’s attention on the fourth or fifth day of a very long week.

Final thoughts

It would be easy to describe Superdesign Show 2019 as a season of striking installations and leave it there: a kaleidoscope, a zipped-open building, a room of falling meteorites. That version is not wrong, but it misses what tied the strongest pieces together. A butterfly’s wing has no pigment in it at all, and neither does 3M’s optical film; both get their colour from structure rather than dye, and one genuinely grew out of studying the other. A memory jug and a Dermody Vase are separated by a century and an ocean, yet they solve the same problem with the same gesture, pressing found objects into a setting surface until the vessel becomes a private record. Even Chinneck’s zip, built a short walk from Superstudio rather than inside it, worked for the same reason the pavilions did: because the illusion was constructed with the rigour of the real thing, not the shortcuts of a stage set.

Tortona itself makes the same argument at district scale. It became a design week destination not because a fair moved in, but because one gallerist reopened a set of abandoned warehouses and asked a single designer to fill them properly. Twenty years on, Superstudio’s own history and its 2019 programme were telling the same story from opposite ends: that the most convincing design, whether it is a building, a district or a piece of drinking glass, tends to be the kind that has actually done the research.