The Best of Milan Design Week 2011
We pick ten favorite products from the recent Milan Design Week that are influenced by nature in their design, including furniture recycled to become planters, plaid garden benches, a bamboo lamp, a futuristic bird house, and more.
Salone Internazionale del Mobile, or Milan Design Week, is one of the big events on designers' calendars, showcasing innovative and unusual design from around Europe. Looking through reports from the show, we've picked ten of our favorite designs that are either inspired by nature or would work well as garden furniture (or both).
Shown at left are pieces from "Da Morto a Orto," which means "From Redundant to Abundant," by designers Peter Bottazzi and Denise Bonapace. Made in a partnership with AMSA, a municipal environmental sustainability agency, the historic company Fratelli Ingegnoli, and with the not-for-profit organization Banco Building, the project re-uses old furniture to create wild and fantastic planters—I particularly love the drawers, which are just sprouting with life.
See more of the pieces on Dezeen.
Designed for a kid's room by designer Kostas Syrtariotis, the Booktree doubles as room decoration.
From London artists Raw-Edges, these benches are made up of interlocking pieces of wood to form rainbow plaids. Raw-Edges is made up of Yael Mer and Shay Alkalay, both of whom graduated from the Royal College of Art, in 2006. These Plaid Benches were designed in a collaboration with Italian gallery dilmos.
See how the benches fit together on DesignBoom.com.
From Innovo, this Bamboo Grass Lamp is made from a gathered bunch of bamboo reeds that are split apart to the base and swirled into a puff of a lamp shade.
See more from Inhabitat.
Vogelstad or "bird city" is a grouping of 33 bird houses designed for different species by Dutch designer Eveline Visser. Each bird house is marked with the type of bird it is designed for and the entire structure is designed to hang on the outside of a building.
Italian designer Antonio Aricò used teapots as molds for his watering cans. These are some of the rare objects shown at Milan that are available for sale, through GarageDesign.it.
Neon epoxy resin coats the uneven edges of slabs of wood on these Flat Tables Peeled by Japanese designer Jo Nagasaka from Schemata Architecture Office. The table is inspired by the traditional hassoku dai table, a low Japanese table with eight legs.
This picnic table, made from pressed bamboo, by Dutch designers Wouter Nieuwendijk and Jair Straschnow have adaptable seats that can be flipped into low, lounging chairs that face away from the table or individual seats facing the table.
For more photos of the bench in use, see DesignBoom.com
Formafantasma was comissioned by the Plart Foundation to create their own version of a polymer and the design firm, made up of partners Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin, created a number of objects out of natural 'plastics,' including rubber, rosin, bois durci (a 19th-century material made up of wood dust and animal blood), and copal (sub-fossil state of amber).
Read more at DesignBoom.com.
These rugs are also by Formafantasma in a partnership with Nodus. They are hand-embroidered with images inspired by John James Audubon and button around a circular opening—for what, I'm not sure, but you could use it to encircle around a lamp like a tree skirt.
