Fair Weather: A Snowy Installation in Milan
By
April 15, 2010
KARTELL’S TOKUJIN SNOWFLAKE
On my second day in Milan, I told my taxi driver to head towards the traffic jam at the corner of via C. Porta and via Turati, in the Brera neighborhood of Milan. Meanwhile, everyone else’s cars were turning away, as a pile-up of slowed-down vehicles rubbernecked in wonderment at the Tokujin Yoshioko installation that’s taken over the entire ground floor of the city’s Kartell flagship. Nested amongst, and in some cases enveloped by, a dense prismatic jungle of 50,000 triangular acrylic sticks is a small collection of highly polished polycarbonate furniture pieces in extraordinarily crisp box-like shapes. The translucent forms are camouflaged in the snowy scape of the acrylic sticks. The installation itself is called “snowflake” and the pieces aptly titled “the invisibles.” The fluorescent-lit floor bounces white light against all the acrylic in the room, creating a cloud of built-up milky white modulated light amongst the millions of snowflakes.
RAFAEL DE CARDENAS IS ARCHITECTURE AT LARGE IN NEW YORK
