MILAN, DESIGN WEEK 2012 / SUPERSTUDIO Temporary Museum

Milan, April 2012: Antonio Pio Saracino has been selected to design an object associated with MAXXI Museum in Rome. He designed a fruit bowl in recycled paper. The MAXXI Museum building by Zaha Hadid was inaugurated in 2010. It accommodates the “MAXXI Arte” collection with works from the 1960s to today and is the first national museum of architecture in Italy. Thanks to its development of prizes, grants and commissions for projects, the MAXXI puts itself forward as the driving force for avant-garde artistic production.

Saracino designed the Pythagoras Bowl, a fruit bowl that can be made using a kit with certified recycled paper triangles. The kit consists of a series of 64 laser-cut paper triangles that are numbered and easy to assemble into a 3D puzzle design sculpture. The Pythagoras Bowl was designed with a 3D modeling system that allows the paper to be cut and reassembled into an architectural vessel.

At a time of economic travails in Italy and for its rich artistic heritage, and Superstudio Group is promoting an investigation and exhibition dedicated to Italian museums.

The encroaching of commercial activities within museums is currently quite widespread and accepted as a necessary aid to the financial health of the individual institutions. One of the more difficult aspects found over

the years is in choosing what products to offer alongside the books and catalogues, and how they could relate to the exhibited works. Aliantedizioni and Superstudio Group have therefore sought to set out the conditions for a reflection on this theme and for an opportunity to investigate, in cooperation with the world of Design, some possible alternative proposals for those responsible for museums and their internal sales points. So, a study and show that are meant to be a small homage to Italian art, its history and its precious treasures.

Some interesting designers, selected also on the basis of the sensitivity in their work to themes of a cultural nature, have been invited to reflect on what might sell in Italian “museum stores” and to provide innovative ideas. Each designer has been matched with one of the most major national museums so that every project proposed would immediately be relevant. The list of museums was compiled by following a logic that considered some important factors contemporaneously: the prestige of the collections; an appropriate representation of the various artistic periods; visitor numbers per year; as equal a spread around the country as possible.

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