64
THE ESSENCE
DESI B&B ITALIA
POLIFORM
The culture of beauty has a home, a genius loci. Over the centuries it has unleashed its subversive inspiration and uplifted its potential, enhancing the concept of design. This place is Italy. “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” confessed Isaac Newton. If Italian design could speak, it would affirm the same thing, because it legitimately stands on the shoulders of the giants of art and the arts. Undoubtedly it also possesses the special touch of thousands of artisans whose craft interprets the very best in Italian manufacturing for the home. This superior quality is consecrated at Milan’s Salone del Mobile, the annual international furniture fair, this year scheduled from 8 to 13 April. Any attempt from our side to retrace, in the space of these few pages, the conquests achieved on behalf of mankind by our heroes would be as impossible as ridiculous. From ancient Rome to the Renaissance, from Baroque to Futurism, Italian ingenuity has created universally accepted and imitated tenets. The art of proportion that immediately turned into function. And what indeed is design, if not the quest to find the point where beauty meets purpose? A quest that starts with aesthetics as a means of determining ethics, for which the home is both its ideal destination and its most stimulating
063-073DESIGN9ENG.indd 64
10/03/14 20:15