Examples: Massimiliano Adami
 

Examples: Massimiliano Adami

March 2017
 

squares

neo~local design

 

Waste and swarf: turning leftovers into key design elements, in the conceptual practice of a design approach combining experimentation with auto-production.

 
 

Massimiliano Adami’s furniture has become an icon of contemporary design, by highlighting the issue of waste: like true fossils of our times, with their hollows opened in the polyurethane mass made of non-returnable voids, set up as niches and drawers, but still capable of recalling their origins.

Modern Phossil, 2006.
Modern Agate, 2013.

More recently Adami started assembling foam rubber and polyurethane swarfs, kept together by resins, shaped by skilled knowledge that directly refers to each material’s technical and behavioral specifications, and with the possibilities that they suggest.

Rubberfoam Décor, two pheses of Adami’s unique approach to production.

Design takes here the form of an experimental and crafted auto-production, resulting inevitably in the contradictory nature of the small series: of the unique artifact for the few. Nevertheless Adami’s work can be also intended as an act that is aware of the impossibility of the quantitative issue of managing waste, and yet capable of playing its role, looking beyond its contradictions. A practice that keeps questioning the essence of things by exploring other possible ways to designing-recycling-producing. A perspective we must confront with today more than ever.

 

Marco Sironi

Designer and scholar at DADU

 

(Graphic) designer and scholar, focused on the idea of place, his background combines design skills and practice in literature. In Milan he has taught visual identity and basic design for graphics; collaborates with our Department (teaching Graphic and Product Design) since the beginning of the Design in Alghero venture.

 
Sironi