Maharam x Tent Typologies by Sam Chermayeff Office at Milan Design Week 2024
Maharam is proud to support Tent Typologies: A Working Study – an exhibition by Sam Chermayeff Office on view at Dropcity during Milan Design Week 2024. The result of the Berlin-based architectural studio’s recent research into tensile structures, the study presents twelve typologies that explore the multivalent properties of tents.
Guided by an interest in how we relate to and inhabit built environments, Sam Chermayeff Office has undertaken a wide range of design-driven residential and furniture projects that challenge convention while exploring consistent concepts across varied scales and mediums. Tents represent a natural extension of the studio’s inquiry related to both furniture and spatial design. Through its research, Sam Chermayeff Office explored a breadth of tensile structures across history, utility, and significance to identify twelve typologies that could be expressed as singular architectural forms. Chermayeff worked closely with Maharam’s design studio to select textiles that would meet physical requirements for tension, suspension, shelter, shade, and flame-resistance with experiential qualities of warmth, opacity, reflectance, and colour.
Familiar yet distilled structures including A-frame, desert, market, and circus tents find contemporary expression in aluminium, steel, and Maharam textiles such as felted wool, reflective polyurethane, and semi-sheer woven textures. Others explore ancient and modern experiences of enclosure including arched, domed, and geodesic structures realised in steel, aluminium, and textiles like Prompt, a sleek polyurethane that recalls the protection and durability historically provided by tents made with animal hides. The study broadens categories of tensile forms in its inclusion of an awning fashioned in Valor – a tightly woven worsted wool; a substantial square tower enlisting luminous Cotton Velvet; and an umbrella composed of aluminium challenging the elemental form of shelter carried as early as 500 BCE.
For the exhibition’s setting, Sam Chermayeff Office chose a characteristic arcade of the Magazzini Raccordati, a series of connected train tunnels distributed across 40,000 square metres alongside Milan’s Central Station. Abandoned for decades, these spaces have found new purpose as part of Dropcity – a large-scale design project dedicated to creating opportunities for new generations of designers, architects, researchers, and curators through cultural programs in support of emerging practitioners and independent projects.
Given the spirit of the exhibition’s subject and location, Maharam welcomed the opportunity to support both design inquiry and an unexpected application of textiles by way of a public project.
Photography by Jeroen Verrecht