Students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago may have been far from their studios when they presented projects in Milan last month, but they were clearly very much in their element amidst the avant-garde designs on show at the annual international furniture fair.
Following an intensive two semester design studio, led by SAIC professors Helen Maria Nugent and Jim TerMeer, 15 students presented the installation Loaded at the most au courant exhibition space of them all, Spazio Rossana Orlandi, a carefully curated gallery of new talent tending to the experimental and the highly crafted.
The students were challenged to find unexplored potential in the marriage of iron and sugar—materials with historically charged meanings of their own. And they did not disappoint as a sampling here of designs shows.