All eyes are on Milan for the upcoming 60th edition of the Salone del Mobile 2022, the Milan furniture fair that is the largest trade fair of its kind in the world.
Celebrating 60 years of spotlighting the best of design, this year’s Salone del Mobile will be held from June 7- 12 at Fiera Milano Rho and will focus on the themes of beauty and designing sustainability.
The prestigious event will celebrate all the beauty produced thanks to the companies, brands, and designers who are the heart of its success and who, today, contribute to creating an event capable of reflecting the commitment to the ecological transition of the furniture system.
An important goal to be honored through the key values of the event: quality, innovation, beauty, and, today more than ever, sustainability. After two difficult years due to the pandemic, the Salone is now looking ahead, aware of its long history. The goal is ambitious: to demonstrate that it is possible and necessary to return to the creation of major international events in presence, merging the criteria of sustainability and environmental care with the production of furniture.
“Salone del Mobile has always been a catalyst for creativity and energy. It is a generator of beauty, inclusion, new opportunities. We have always been a place of dialogue and construction, in Milan just as in other editions. Today, shocked like everyone else by the war in Ukraine, we believe even more in the value of our being a crossroads of cultures and styles open to the world – says Maria Porro, President of Salone del Mobile.Milano. – This is why we are committed to putting the work of exhibiting companies back at the center. The event becomes a ‘blank sheet of paper’ available to all its protagonists to design their own identity, enhance their content, and tell their stories.”
At the Salone del Mobile 2022 there will be many companies committed to creating furnishings with a view to the well-being of the environment and of people. “The Salone – continues Porro – supports the need for a real and immediate ecological transition: this is why it has decided to be an accelerator of ethical and virtuous paths by investing in a major project curated by architect Mario Cucinella. Companies and creative people will be able to get hands-on with alternative materials that have already been industrialized, be inspired by the vision of urban areas as possible “mines” of raw materials, and reflect on the function of the home as a cell of a more complex organism: the city”.
The Salone del Mobile 2022, in fact, has launched and disseminated a series of guidelines aimed at helping exhibitors and those who design and build the stands to follow basic criteria of sustainability, suggesting that they prefer the use of reusable materials (such as wood), upcycling, low environmental impact or FSC and PEFC certified, and avoid waste.
Environmental and social wellbeing will also be the theme of Design with Nature, the installation designed by architect Mario Cucinella for the “birthday” of the Salone del Mobile 2022 and hosted in pavilion 15 of S.Project: 1,400 square meters that will tell a virtuous ecosystem that would ideally represent the future of living, the urgency of the ecological transition, the house as the first urban piece and the city as a mine.
Salone del Mobile 2022 Celebrates 60 Years
The Salone del Mobile 2022 will bring together more than 2000 exhibitors, including over 600 young designers under 35 – all of whom will be able to express their identity to the full, in complete creative freedom, creating an immersive experience for the visitor.
The Salone Internazionale del Mobile, the Salone Internazionale del Complemento d’Arredo and Workplace3.0 will offer numerous aesthetic paths, where the protagonist is a product of quality and research. But that of June will also be the edition of the biennial EuroCucina, its collateral event FTK (Technology For the Kitchen), and the International Bathroom Exhibition.
The kitchen, in particular, will be confirmed as a multifunctional space at this year’s Milan furniture fair, an expression of contemporary living, whose boundaries with other domestic environments are becoming increasingly blurred until they disappear: a fluid, hybrid, integrated space and the barycentre of the home, a social aggregator and not just a provider of essential needs.
More than 600 protagonists will part in the 23rd SaloneSatellite, the theme of which will be “Designing for our future selves/ Designing for our tomorrows” – an edition that will invite reflection on design that “includes” encouraging autonomy, comfort, movement, usability, interaction and safety for all.
After the experience of Supersalone, an interesting program of talks returns, enriching the kermesse with conversations and debates held by the brightest voices on the contemporary design scene, with one of the meetings dedicated precisely to the Salone del Mobile and the celebrations of the sixtieth.
The Salone del Mobile 2022 will also cross the borders of the Fair to arrive in the city: from June 7, in the Sala delle Cariatidi of Palazzo Reale, a monumental site-specific film installation will be staged dedicated to 11 values that have always been imprinted in the DNA of the event. There will be a screening of 11 art films made by 11 great Italian directors who have interpreted, according to their own stylistic style, a keyword, transforming it into a short film.
After illustrious predecessors such as Massimo Vignelli, Pierluigi Cerri, Guido Scarabottolo, Lorenzo Marini, it is Emiliano Ponzi, one of the most appreciated and internationally awarded Italian illustrators today, to create the image of the communication campaign for the 60th edition of the Salone del Mobile. The artist, famous for his essential and precise strokes and for his almost metaphysical atmospheres, has been commissioned to create six posters – one for each decade of the event’s history – to celebrate its heritage and illustrate its fundamental link with the city and with the evolution of design, lifestyles and the needs of the social agenda.