The new Triennale Design Museum finds its raison d’être in the fact that the models circulating among design museums are usually imperfect, and that Italian design possesses such a large corpus that it could be displayed in almost endless cycles and rotations. The museum has thus based its operational principle on exhibiting objects that will then leave the premises (avoiding the burdensome and problematic issue of storage space, which can take on exponential proportions) and on the decision that exhibitions must have multiple keys of interpretation and polyphonic reverberations (avoiding the kind of monospermous exhibitions typical of curators with big ideas).

The Triennale is last on the scene, but could it be the first to actually get there? Indeed, a walk through the current exhibition on 60 years of Italian design history (the show is set to be replaced by a continued version after a period of 12-18 months) gives an indelible impression of what the museum will become over time. The first new element is the absence of a space reserved for a permanent collection (but this type of downsizing is happening in museums everywhere). The second is more avantgarde: lacking access to appreciable public funds, the Triennale Design Museum gets around the problem of collection ownership (a tough nut to crack for any museum in its initial phase) by turning the rotation of loans into an endogenous motor of its own existence. The third new characteristic is that even inside these loans, the selected pieces are those that most directly make part of our contemporary world, and thus most available on the market. They are also the most up to date in a technological and typological sense.

No dust, no peeling lacquer, no crumbling polyurethane foam, not a screw too many holding the structure together, no designer’s sketches. The plastics exhibited in the Triennale’s courtyard are fresh from the presses at Kartell and marvellously glorious even in the rain, saving us from the forlorn spectacle of yellowed ABS and doubts on the consistency of 20th-century industrial materials needing to be restored. The Triennale’s formula, in short, contains not a hint of danger. A past is explored that can be reused the very next day, a past that has already been extensively reused by manufacturers (see the Antropus chair by Marco Zanuso, put back into production ten years ago; the 2097 lamp by Gino Sarfatti for Arteluce (1958) now produced by Flos; the 1967 Eclisse by Vico Magistretti with a new plastic ring that prevents burning fingers; the Bitossi vase by Sottsass that is from 2003 instead of 1958; Ponti’s updated Fato made by Artemide). All are proposed in an identical way to the design centres in London and Copenhagen that supported high-quality design in the late ’70s. Manolo De Giorgi

https://www.triennale.it