All the prototypes are on show until October 31 at the Aether Space Art Gallery in Beijing. After "Tea & Coffee Towers" from 2003 and "Tea & Coffee Piazza" from 1983, (Un)Forbiddden City is the third act in Alessi's "meta-project" exploring contemporary forms and languages deriving from the encounter between a part of the world moving towards the future with great speed—and not without contradictions—and the Italian way of thinking about and doing design, which has always seen the industrial object as a place for expressing a point of view and never just as a means for fulfilling a function.
With (Un)Forbidden City, Alberto Alessi asks a bit provocatively whether there is a line between thinking and producing, between the designer and industry; and if we can incorporate into that complex, elusive and, to some extent, (un)forbidden area of Italian design such names as Gary Chang, one of twenty-two architects who took part in the "Tea & Coffee Towers" meta project, Chang Yung Ho, Chinese-American architect who teaches at MIT and who designed a steel lotus flower for Alessi, Wang Shu, designer of the Ningbo Historic Museum or the Xiangshan campus in Hangzhou, Zhang Ke, Zhang She, Urbanus and Ma Yan Song.
Pierfrancesco Cravel