Design Awards 2025: Formafantasma revisits modernist codes

Formafantasma's ‘La Casa Dentro’ exhibition wins a Wallpaper* Design Award, which took to task the inherent masculinity and conservatism at the heart of modernism

Formafantasma's ‘La Casa Dentro’ exhibition, which ran from April to July 2024, took to task the inherent masculinity and conservatism at the heart of modernism – and now wins a Wallpaper* Design Award 2025

(Image credit: Courtesy of Formafantasma)

By Hugo Macdonald

published 15 January 2025

in Features

The presence of Formafantasma within the design industry reached levels of near-ubiquity in 2024. Cynics might say the breadth of their involvement demonstrates a lack of courage and imagination on behalf of brands. We heartily object. The rigour and quality of Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin’s work is consistently relevant, always fascinating, urgent, even. They stand apart and, excitingly, their mode of critical digging into the systemic forces of life is inspiring a new generation of design progeny to follow suit. For brands, working with Formafantasma is like therapy: the past is mined and overturned to pave the way for a leaner present and a cleaner future.

So Formafantasma’s place on the Wallpaper* Design Awards podium this year was never in question. The project that we have chosen to award was a curiously moving exhibition at ICA Milano, curated by Alberto Salvadori. ‘La Casa Dentro’ (The Home Within) took to task the inherent masculinity and conservatism at the heart of modernism, no less. Modernism was celebrated for its radical departure from what came before; a post-war world needed a new ideology and it had the appetite, imagination and industrial capability to realise it. Modernity meant efficiency, sobriety, rationality. At the crux of ‘La Casa Dentro’ was the question: what was left behind?

Formafantasma's ‘La Casa Dentro’ exhibition wins a Wallpaper* Design Award 2025

Formafantasma’s ‘Chair 2’ juxtaposes tubular steel and wooden planks with floral motifs and pleated fabric, referencing the designers’ childhood memories of home

The answer was presented as decoration, ornamentation, idiosyncratic detail and sentimental charm. Across furniture and lighting, constructed principally with tubular steel – that enduring emblem of modernism – Formafantasma introduced wooden planks and silk upholstery, embellished with surprising colour, in places embroidered with dainty floral motifs. These moves represented the intrinsic warmth of domesticity, holding space (if you will) for the personal within the essential or universal that those modernists strove to achieve. The designers described their impetus to ‘queer the codes of modernist design’. The juxtaposition was powerful: emotional, intellectual and profoundly memorable.

formafantasma.com

A version of this article appears in the February 2025 issue of Wallpaper* , available in print on international newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

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Hugo is a design critic, curator and the co-founder of Bard, a gallery in Edinburgh dedicated to Scottish design and craft. A long-serving member of the Wallpaper* family, he has also been the design editor at Monocle and the brand director at Studioilse, Ilse Crawford's multi-faceted design studio. Today, Hugo wields his pen and opinions for a broad swathe of publications and panels. He has twice curated both the Object section of MIART (the Milan Contemporary Art Fair) and the Harewood House Biennial. He consults as a strategist and writer for clients ranging from Airbnb to Vitra, Ikea to Instagram, Erdem to The Goldsmith's Company. Hugo recently returned to the Wallpaper* fold to cover the parental leave of Rosa Bertoli as global design director, and is now serving as its design critic.