Design: Suspension
Even if I don’t want to, | I’m already flying, again. | The blue expanses | and the green lands. | Daring descents | then climbing back up, | into the open sky, | and then down to the desert, | and then up, again | with a mighty leap.
[Lucio Battisti]
Lago
Munari called them useless machines. A paradoxical name that, through the creation of mobiles, hides many years of research on dynamism, kinetics, and suspension.
Suspension, a word that encompasses many meanings. Meanings like floating, typical of a helium balloon, which brings us straight back in time, to village festivals, Sunday walks, and that split second when that same balloon slips from our hand and flies high in the sky.
Little Hands
The numerous pieces of children’s furnishings currently in circulation reflect this tenuous nostalgia. There are lamps like cages – romantic with a retro feel – wall decorations, and even hangers – light and ethereal like a chewing gum bubble. All lifted off the ground. Yet, at times, suspension also means flight… and here, indeed, references to daily life and imagination are numerous.
How many children love nature, and birds and their special, let’s say, magical ability to open their wings and fly away? As light as feathers, blowing in the wind. Suspended is also like an airplane, a symbol of entire generations of children who, beyond the technological changes caused by an incumbent future, keep playing with vintage-shaped toy airplanes. Vintage, like the French wallpaper by Casadeco, decorated with aircrafts, with propelled vehicles more or less defined in shape, and hot air balloons that, in the collective imagination, are still seen as something fantastic.
What if suspension means more than all this? The desire to escape, to not always be in contact with reality. Fly away with your imagination, for a moment forgetting what surrounds us, perhaps in a very private corner, like on the Lake bed in the new Becoming kids collection, at 50 cm from the ground or, instead of a classic bedroom easy chair, on a swing in a relaxing rhythm.
Or else higher, up, among the clouds (Numero 74), beyond the atmosphere, in space, with everything revolving around you. Viewing the stars, imagining astronauts in cardboard rockets (studioroof), busy discovering new planets, but always very light, fluctuating in the blue sky.
Snurk
