The Triennale Design Museum opened in December 2007 and was Italy’s first design museum. A “mutant” museum, it changes its arrangement and exhibition design every year to offer ever new angles and perspectives. The 2018 edition (14 April 2018 – 20 January 2019) is directed by Silvana Annicchiarico and tells the story (or rather Stories) of Italian design from 1902 to 1998 via 180 seminal 20th-century designs, divided into five chronological areas curated by Chiara Alessi, Maddalena Della Mura, Manolo de Giorgi, Vanni Pasca and Raimonda Riccini.
The story of Italian design, writes Stefano Boeri in his introduction, “is that of a group of young entrepreneurs, mostly from major industrialised zones, who set out to find creative talents that could produce comforts for the fast advancing urban middle-classes seeking to up their status (primarily) in the domestic sphere. Each in its own way, these iconic Italian designs convey this mix of aspiration, design and enterprise, and the different social and cultural segments that came together around the idea of a chair, a table, a lamp and a sofa. These iconic designs narrate how these ideas drove cultural, economic and business relations and, partly thanks to this cohesion, generated powerful and lasting symbols – not just everyday objects.”
Completing the catalogue is a themed focus on the links between design and geography, communication, politics, technology and economics, and on the exhibition-design and communication contributions by Calvi Brambilla and Leonardo Sonnoli.

Book design studio Leonardo Sonnoli