For the Milan Design Show, design titan Moroso will preview new products from their 2010 collection “developed together with some of the world’s most interesting designers.” The exhibition is “the culmination of a lengthy process of dialogue, discussion and interpretation”—a process that relies heavily on aesthetic philosophy. Besides Urquiola’s contribution, which Moroso terms Territory, and Front Design’s Well-being, you’ll also find Memory, Intimacy, and Lightness. It is Gesture, however, that will stretch the parameters of what we term furniture.

Gesture takes the form of Memory Chair, the work of Japanese designer Tokujin Yoshioka, who, incidentally, has designed the Milan show’s Swarovski Crystal Palace, a brilliant replication of a celestial body entitled Stellar. His organic Memory Chair is all about transformation, making it the exemplar for Moroso’s showcase: “A multifarious journey among some extraordinary items, an invitation to discover the nodal points in the new conceptual map of industrial design.”

Memory Chair is the Bermuda Triangle of this design universe—an area that invites speculation and generates theories. We will all get sucked in if we visit, and some of us will stay away altogether. Yoshioka developed Memory Chair by “conducting experiments and verifications by making more than 50 actual scale models with aluminum.” These failures (crumpled heaps of abandoned metal like so many drafts in a waste basket) eventually yielded a working prototype using a fabric with recycled aluminum. The result is a beautiful mess, with the visible shadows of its creation on display. The name of the chair says much about its raison d’etre. It is as much a memory of its metamorphosis as it is a final object: “Memory has a deliberate loose form… I believe that the chair could be called a chair without a design. At the same time, this is a chair that has an unlimited variety of forms.” Final prototypes of Memory Chair include both silver and black versions.

http://www.moroso.it/home_moroso.php?n=1121