From Thursday 1 October to Saturday 17 October
Tuesdays to Saturdays, 10.00 am - 2.00 pm, 3.30 pm - 7.00 pm
Free entrance
The interior design gallery Via Garibaldi 12 will set up an exhibition of items designed by French architectural star Jean Nouvel - certainly a well-deserved tribute for the great architect, since this year's Genoa Boat Show will be hosted, among others, in the new, now finished, Pavilion B, an internationally-renowned building that will be officially opened just during the Boat Show. The title of the exhibition draws inspiration from a famous statement by Ernesto Nathan Rogers on the peculiarity of architects' job, a statement which is extraordinarily reflected by Nouvel's careers, entirely devoted to the search for sober essentiality: as he himself asserts, "too simple to be so simple".
The exhibition aims to focus on Jean Nouvel as an industrial designer and will include a selection of items and furnishings designed by him over the last twenty years. Visitors will undoubtedly be pleased to find Jean Nouvel's distinctive architectural style in the various items on display. The armchair "Milana" - a tribute to Mies van de Rohe's "Barcelona" - was created in 1994 as a result of his cooperation with the Milan-based company Sawaya & Moroni: it is a steel and saddle-leather frame reinterpreting Mies van de Rohe's model. For Sawaya & Moroni Nouvel also designed the "SCC" silver Champagne bucket, where he experimented the double-wall solution to achieve better thermal insulation. Among other creations for the home is a series of objects designed for Alessi and related to the all-Italian "cult of coffee". The 2003 "Coffee Towers" creation is in fine mocha-coloured tarnished silver, where double-wall insulation ensures that coffee is preserved at the ideal temperature at all times. A stainless steel version of this item was also produced, no longer to be admired in museum collections, but to be used on a daily basis by design lovers. "From the museum to the spoon" could instead be a way to describe Jean Nouvel's installations in Paris Musée du Quai Branly, where the architect even placed the tableware he designed in 2004 for the Danish company Georg Jensen on the tables of the restaurant "Les Ombres" (the panoramic terrace overlooking the Tour Eiffel