Flos at Palazzo Visconti

The Flos Fuorisalone 2024 is a three-stage journey, a sort of "design triangle". In the centre, the eighteenth- century Palazzo Visconti in Via Cino del Duca, with the Flos at Palazzo Visconti installation featuring the anniversary editions of the IC of Michael Anastassiades and the new collections by Barber Osgerby and Formafantasma. A few steps away, in Corso Monforte, two other installations: the Golden Hour by Michael Anastassiades in the historic flagship store window, and Out of Office, an interactive experience at the Flos Professional Space.

Flos at Palazzo Visconti: a concept inspired by a Maria Mulas photo

The concept that inspired this journey was born by observing an archive photo of Maria Mulas from 1988. The image portrays, in the hall of Palazzo Visconti in Milan, a group of people - architects, designers, art critics, journalists - gathered for the presentation of the then new Flos collections, including the first lamp created by the first international designer for Flos: Philippe Starck. He is at the center of Maria Mulas' photo, surrounded by Achille Castiglioni, Afra and Tobia Scarpa, Fabio Lombardo, Gillo Dorfles, Italo Lupi, Cristina Morozzi, and many others industry figures, all enthusiastic and smiling.

“That photo is Flos’ soul: its past, its present and what it wants to be in the future,” explains Barbara Corti, at her first Fuorisalone in her new role as Chief Creative Officer. “In those smiles you can read lightness, courage to dare, a small dose of imprudence mixed with the desire to accept the designers’ responsibilities,” she explains. “Those faces exude an atmosphere but above all a collective energy: the cohesion of dreams, intentions, visions among many men and women who placed great trust in the design culture.”

With the installation at Palazzo Visconti, Flos therefore wants to rediscover the atmosphere of that Maria Mulas photo, the affective dimension of design which is not a detail but the basis for doing things well. “However, there is no nostalgia in this operation,” says Roberta Silva, CEO of Flos. “On the contrary, Flos at Palazzo Visconti represents the company's desire to always look ahead by continuing to leverage its historical identity and interpreting it in a contemporary way. Rediscovering that atmosphere today means renewing our focus on the great sense of responsibility that doing design. Where by design we mean a discipline that is generated and generates collective intelligence, creative short-circuits between people and meaningful relationships between humans and things. We are well aware of our responsibility as producers of objects: we need to know how to creatively manage increasingly challenging situations - technological, economic, productive ones -, make informed decisions on increasingly complex issues, evaluate the environmental and social impact of each of our design and industrial actions. Being radical today means knowing how to manage complexity and doing it every day, on every detail, always".

Today, as back then, Palazzo Visconti represents what Flos is and wants to continue to be: for Corti, "a design playground, a terrain of exploration on which the genius of the designers, who are our family, can be ex- pressed". The journey starts in the entrance hall on the main floor. Visitors will be welcomed by an array of Emi lamps by Erwan Bouroullec that will accompany them along the entire route of the staircase. Set up like candelabras they create a cozy environment. It is here, in fact, that it will be possible to take a moment’s break and immerse oneself in the short film that serves as a prelude to the exhibition. The movie is about a conversation between the five designers whose work is featured at Palazzo Visconti: Michael Anastassiades with the IC 10 Anniversary, Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby with Bellhop Glass, Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin of Formafantasma with SuperWire. To make the short film, the designers spent a day together chatting, playing board games, answering ques- tions about their present and past daily lives. The film crew created one of those situations that normally arise when creative people share a space and time together. The behind the scenes which is inaccessible to most but represents great value - in terms of exchange of ideas and inspirations - for those who design. The affective dimension that we often forget to celebrate as the foundation of every design gesture. The central hall presents an immersive installation that tells the story of the three new products, all in glass. “To develop the concept, we started from the nature of the space: a bombastic Milanese Baroque palace, full of architectural digressions, mirrors, balconies, real and fake niches, in which the illusory dimension plays a fundamental role within the architectural experience” explains Corti. The installation takes up the illusionism of the environment and, drawing inspiration from artistic experiences (such as the famous installation by Veronica Janssen at the Panthéon in Paris) and the material of choice of the three projects presented - glass -, uses mirrored glass to create an architecture within architecture. A series of reflective surfaces divide the central space in parts, each dedicated to one of the three new prod- ucts: IC 10 Anniversary, Bellhop Glass and SuperWire. The impact on the space is deliberately very light and the language of the building is perpetually told by the games of visual references and mirrors, including the three lamps in this narrative. It is interesting to compare this setup to the 1988 one.

Thirty-six years ago, Achille Castiglioni had chosen to 'protect' design from the excesses of the baroque, cre- ating a series of wooden and thin white canvas cocoons in which he placed his Taraxacum 88, Arà by Philippe Starck and other products from the collection of the time.

For the Fuorisalone 2024, Flos followed a reverse process, increasing the communicative power of architec- ture and making design - with its purity and essentiality - a central protagonist in the history of space. Bellhop Glass, in the suspension and table versions, IC10 in the new gold finish and in the maxi version, and SuperWire, in the suspension, table and floor versions, are also the protagonists of the exhibition which con- tinues in the adjacent rooms, designed to illustrate the design characteristics and show the quality of light of the collections.