area 115+ | relax

In a period as feverish and complex as ever before, where everything seems to happen at once due to the speed of communication, when we are interconnected in every moment by an omnipresent web; a period that is crowded, or rather overcrowded, by events, commitments and initiatives, all of them important and impossible to miss, Area dedicates an issue to relax, to the need to include and appreciate objects and projects that help us to identify, in the midst of all our daily activities, desirable and necessary pauses. It is a matter of a kind of praise of slowness, of reflection, of quiet, of a lifestyle that succeeds, if not to oppose, at least to limit the damages of the stress, the indigestion of fast food, the crammed agendas that are slowly destroying our existence and our happiness.
An exploration of the contemporary production reveals many instruments or gadgets that are ideated, designed and made in order to facilitate the distension of the body and the mind, to aid wellness, play, amusement. And it may probably be a good idea to focus, during the intense days of the Furniture Salon of Milan, our attention to those designers, products and companies that help us to make our existence – which the present-day situation is steering towards objectively unbearable rhythms and habits – less exhausting. In many cases it is a matter of objects vaunting a very long tradition, as the couch, the sofa, the chaise longue, and in others of technologically advanced objects as the new whirlpool baths equipped with lamps for chromo-therapy, sophisticated workout equipment for the care of the body, pocket-size digital devices for listening to music or participating in virtual games (from the (from the Ipod to the playstation), and in yet others of very simple and by now outdated amusements as Frisbees or yo-yos, mementos of a time when mechanic and manual toys forced our fantasy to dialogue with the simple rules of physics. However, the success of remakes, from the Fiat 500 to the new model of the mythical Vespa, the Piaggio PX, suggest that the current imagery seeks refuge in the memory of trips to the country, of walks, as opportunities to get away from the difficult compression of the present. Without any pretence to be scientific, but with an equally useful intention to inspire reflections and ideas for new designs, the editors of the magazine have examined the 1000 objects collected in the volumes of Phaidon Design Classics, choosing the 100 whose characteristics reflected the prioritizing of the need for recreation, relax and amusement that we were looking for. It is only a matter of 10% of the total and, if we consider that owning an object does not necessary imply its continuous use or exploitation, this means that the percentage of attention we dedicate to ourselves is quite reduced, arriving at very low percentages that may be insufficient to allow those quality standards that may make the difference in an advanced society.