ALESSI MUTANTS III
Tom Kovac
Reiner Zettl
June 22nd – July 20th 2012
application open!
ALESSI MUTANTS Application Form
Fees € 1.500,- / 4 weeks
Objectives
In the period between 1979 and 1983, in collaboration with Alessandro Mendini’s metaproject team, Alessi created one of the most important design operations in its history. The name of the design operation was “Tea & Coffee piazza”. Its intent was to discover new avenues of development for design during a time when on one side the Italian “bel design” phenomenon of the 60s and 70s was approaching its end while on the other there was an increasing amount of pressure to internationalise the world described best as Made in Italy.
Students participating in the ALESSI MUTANTS III summerschool are asked to design a Tea & Coffee Breakfast. The intention is to create a set of objects that are decisively extraordinary both in their expressive language as well as in the production methods used to create them. Formal elegance and intricacy of projects are encouraged in this summerschool. But the results will be filtered by the logic of manufacture and the presentation with the Alessi company in Crusinallo with exact focus on the negotiation between design concept and production and marketing.
Tea & Coffee Breakfast 2012
GENEALOGY OF THE OPERATION
In the period between 1979 and 1983, in collaboration with Alessandro Mendini’s metaproject team, Alessi created one of the most important design operations in its history.
The name of the design operation was “Tea & Coffee piazza”. Its intent was to discover new avenues of development for design during a time when on one side the Italian “bel design” phenomenon of the 60s and 70s was approaching its end while on the other there was an increasing amount of pressure to internationalise the world described best as Made in Italy.
Since in Italy design is historically considered to be a child of architecture, Alessi decided to explore this world by inviting 11 international architects with no former exposure to industrial design: Robert Venturi, Michael Graves, Richard Meier, Stanley Tigerman, Hans Hollein, Charles Jencks, Kazumasa Yamashita, Oscar Tusquets, Paolo Portoghesi, Aldo Rossi and Mendini himself. The intent was to offer these architects a place where they could experiment with the typological environment of an Italian design manufacturing firm in the hope to produce favourable conditions that would sponsor the creation of a new panorama for future designs.
The results of the “Tea & coffee piazza” design operation were of extraordinary interest from both a political (it marked the opening of the world of Italian design to foreign designers) as well as a practical perspective: A few of the architects - in particular Rossi and Graves - in later years developed a successful collaboration with Alessi that led to a series of products destined to mark the design language of the 80s.
THE OBJECTIVE OF THE OPERATION
We ask each student designer/architect to design a Tea & Coffee Breakfast. We also ask each student designer/architect to think of their project very liberally: The intention is to create a set of objects that are decisively extraordinary both in their expressive language as well as in the production methods used to create them.
Formal elegance and intricacy of projects are encouraged in this summerschool. But the results will be filtered by the logic of manufacture and the presentation with the Alessi company in Crusinallo with exact focus on the negotiation between design concept and production and marketing.
THE NATURE OF THE OPERATION
As for the operation’s mission, exploring the possibilities of discovering new avenues on the boundary between the world of architecture and the world of industrial design, we do not want to limit the student designers/architects in ways that typically accompany the industrial design process. Moreover, we also would like each student designer/architect to bring forth their own distinctive language and view of the world without being subjected to the limits typically imposed by large-scale industrial production. We want this because our experience has taught us that this method typically leads to the discovery of new roads to travel by.
PRINCIPLE MATERIAL AND METHODS OF REFERENCE
(By principle we mean the material in which the tea and coffee set main parts will be realised, in other words the body. As for handles, knobs, base etc. the rules apply as stated in silver.)
The choice of material(s) is left to the designer: today, Alessi works with practically all-available materials.
From our perspective, since metals pertain to our origins and continue to be the most important material, we suggest the use of metals, which we consider the ideal historic metal for a Tea & Coffee set. Moreover, for this type of operation, it becomes the symbolic metal that absorbs and represents all other metals, particularly stainless steel, brass and nickel silver. Elements can naturally be made in other materials, precious or non-precious such as wood, plastics, glass or hard rock.
After metals, the second material for consideration we suggest are plastics, which may appear less coherent with the exceptional nature of such an operation. However, as we all know, today plastics come in a great variety with qualities, characteristics and values that differ from one type of plastic to the next. This characteristic may spark some interest to some designers.
Porcelain and ceramics are materials used by us on a regular basis.
Glass and crystal are of least interest to Alessi since they do not work very much with this material. The aforementioned materials can be used alone or in combination.
Given the above premises, the production methods used will be prevalently digital and 3D printing technology. By digital we intend to inform materiality and generative processes and the relationship with the traditional hand made methods (for example, if we consider silversmiths, we mean either by lathe or by hammer) and new methods made possible by the evolution of digital techniques and
Reproduction techniques such as electroforming (where one starts off with a wax model on which the chosen metal is galvanised) and vacuum melting (one starts off with a synthetic material mould into which cast metal is poured).
The use of 3D CAD, RHINO, and 3Dmax should be used in proposing the projects.
