Ron Gilad reimagines works by Aldo Rossi in a surreal and perspective-challenging installation at the Milan showroom of UniFor, marking the brand’s reissue of four key designs
Ron Gilad’s installation at the UniFor showroom in Milan reimagines furniture designs by Aldo Rossi in a surrealistic urban piazza.Contemporary office-design company UniFor has explored its past, searching through historical notes and sketches to present ArchivioUniFor, a series of re-editions, with the inaugural project dedicated to Aldo Rossi.
The pieces are reinterpreted by Ron Gilad with an installation that typifies an urban piazza. ‘I’m always happy to accept challenges, yet this installation was actually a tough challenge, because the pieces have been on display as table, library, chair, armchair so many times since the 1990s. That is why I wanted to find another meaning in showing them,’ explains Gilad.
Detail of the installation, in which the fountain created by Ron Gilad reimagines Aldo Rossi’s Monument to the Partisans in Segrate, Italy, and rests on the ‘Consiglio’ table.Designed in 1989, the ‘Parigi’ armchair made its first appearance in Paris, on Designers’ Saturday, at the UniFor showroom on Rue des Saints-Pères. The generous shape of the ‘Consiglio’ table was originally intended by Rossi for his own Milanese design studio.
The result is fully theatrical, vaguely surrealistic, and quite befuddling. The chairs lie in front of a large pool gently filled by a fountain – a petrified ode to Rossi’s Monument to the Partisans in Segrate, Italy – that is set on the ‘Consiglio’ table.