The prestigious multidisciplinary design and architecture studio Neri&Hu participated as Guest of Honor at the Stockholm Furniture&Light Fair 2019, the biggest international event for Scandinavian design.
Neri&Hu has created an installation that highlights a specific social problem in China: the rapid disappearance of traditional villages. The installation is inspired by the street life of these villages, forming a kind of winding alley that folds and unfolds creating paths and spaces that are slowly revealed to visitors. Divided panels follow one another to create a pavilion that simulates a village. In it, Neri&Hu exhibit their latest creations, including their LAN collection designed for GAN -presented at Salone del Mobile in Milan in 2018 and awarded at NYCxDesign, BoY Awards and Archiproducts Design Awards 2018.
“We wanted to deviate from the conventional ambitions of a furniture fair, which often focuses on showcasing product design. Instead, we wanted to link the objects and products to China’s own social issues.” Recently, we began to analyze the issue of the disappearance of traditional villages and their culture, an alarming trend that has great impact on the traditional notions of community, family and cultural roots “, explained Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu, about their project for Stockholm Furniture&Light Fair.
Nostalgia, family, roots and the relationship between the individual and the community are some of the values represented by Neri&Hu‘s designs. The LAN collection, designed for GAN, is a good example of this. Its name, ‘lan’, means ‘blue’ in Mandarin and it pays tribute to the oriental tradition of using indigo to dye the fabrics used to make the trousseau of a home. LAN combines pure wool and wood in a contemporary design, while, at the same, it remains recognizable as part of a thousand-year-old tradition that fuses elements of the East and the West. It is contemporary and innovative in that it questions the typology of sofa dividing it into interchangeable modules, and it is traditional in terms of its manufacture, inspiration and references.
Both with LAN and with the rest of the installation at Stockholm Furniture&Light Fair, Neri&Hu claims research as a design tool and takes on each project in relation to a specific context.
