Historical Collectible Design

What does it mean to collect historical design?
Perhaps, before collecting, it means selecting.
To select is to look beyond a name, a period or an established icon. It is to recognise why certain objects continue to feel relevant long after the moment in which they were conceived. Historical design is not simply design from the past. It is a vocabulary of forms, materials, techniques and ideas, objects that belong to their time and yet continue to live naturally in the present.

For the new installation at Antiqua, we bring together lighting and furniture by figures who shaped twentieth-century design, moving beyond the most familiar names and established icons to present a more personal language of selection. There is no chronological order and no hierarchy. The installation is not intended to tell the history of design, nor is it built around a single curatorial concept. Instead, pieces from different periods are brought together simply because they work together through the way they occupy a space: a lamp from one decade can sit beside a piece of furniture from another. Different designers, periods and approaches meet, creating connections that are sometimes immediate and sometimes unexpected. The result is a free and non-linear journey through design, where the focus is not on chronology, but on the objects themselves and on the relationships created between them. Selection, in this sense, becomes a way of creating relationships.

As Ettore Sottsass observed: “It is important to realize that whatever we do or design has iconographic references, it comes from somewhere; any form is always metaphorical, never totally metaphysical; it is never a ‘destiny’ but always a fact with some kind of historical reference” (Barbara Radice, Ettore Sottsass: A Critical Biography, Rizzoli Int. Publications, 1993).

Perhaps this is precisely what makes historical design collectible: its ability to belong to a specific moment in history and, at the same time, continue to speak to the present.

Selected works by: Tito Agnoli, Franco Albini, Gae Aulenti, Marcel Breuer, Ignazio Gardella, Gianfranco Frattini, Max Ingrand, Angelo Lelii, Vico Magistretti, Ico Parisi, Sergio Mazza, Gino Sarfatti, Afra & Tobia Scarpa, Ettore Sottsass, Philippe Starck