MANIERA

MANIERA commissions architects and artists to develop furniture and objects for use, offering them an excursion beyond their usual practice. At ALCOVA, the gallery presents new furniture pieces designed by two young architecture studios: Mexico City based PRODUCTORA and the Milanese duo piovenefabi.

PRODUCTORA’s Columbus Table is a direct outcome of the research the office did for MANIERA in the little town of Columbus, Indiana in the summer of 2017. For an intervention in the public realm, circular elements were introduced, adapting and adjusting themselves to the surrounding context. This small side table is likewise conceived. It is based on a limited combination of geometric shapes and basic material operations – a 6 mm thick aluminum plate is simply cut and bent twice – and acts as an element that explicitly seeks relations to its immediate context.

Metrò by piovenefabi reinterprets the architecture of Milan’s first subway stations, designed in the 1960’s by Franco Albini and Franca Helg, together with graphic designer Bob Noorda. As an act of appropriation, components of the original project are removed from their context and transformed into one-material objects. The furniture collection uses materials designed especially for the subway stations such as the Silipol, a colorful stained concrete developed by Fulget, and evokes idiomatic architectural elements such as the metro’s familiar curving handrails. The metropolitan project is dismantled and recomposed into a new domestic landscape.