‘The main question that I was asking myself is, what is the purpose of a design museum?’ says the Israeli designer Ron Gilad, standing in front of his newly reimagined ‘Teorema’ drawer units at the Molteni Museum on the brand’s campus in Giussano, a glass-walled tea house-like structure in the middle of a sprawling field, where for the past seven years he has served as curator. ‘I realised that at a certain point we have the same rhythm and the same approach, which is always digging in the archive, trying to dust off the past and highlight it in a different way, and I wanted to be a little bit more radical this time.’

Gilad is describing the premise of his newly opened exhibition, ‘Materialized: Ideas in Matter’, for which he invited ten designers and studios to revisit some of their best-known pieces for the Molteni Group, often to playfully surreal effect. ‘This brief was sent to the participants with the specific piece that they already designed,’ says Gilad. ‘As the assignment, we chose the pieces that show a variety of typologies that the company is producing, from a wardrobe to a chest of drawers to a table to a sofa.’

Materialized: Ideas in Matter’ at the Molteni Museum

Among the participants are Spanish designer Patricia Urquiola, who remade her ‘Diamond’ table in cedar from an old-growth tree in the Molteni family’s garden that had died naturally several years ago; Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa, who reworked his ‘Cinnamon’ armchair in finely woven rattan; and Molteni&C creative director Vincent Van Duysen, who recast the soft contours of his upholstered ‘Paul’ sofa in reflective, folded sheet metal.

For the Swiss architecture team at Herzog & de Meuron, reimagining its ‘Porta Volta’ armchair meant seeking out suppliers beyond the realm of furniture. The architects replaced the leather seat cushion and backrest of the wooden-framed chair with transparent inflatable cushions in bright red and blue. Working with a manufacturer that specialises in inflatable pool toys, they were able to adapt the construction of an air mattress to the frame of an armchair.

‘The idea of doing it inflatable and transparent, you would see more of the structure. It would still have a bit of a playful character and take away the seriousness of it,’ says Ascan Mergenthaler, a senior partner at Herzog & de Meuron. ‘It’s interesting because you think it’s such a simple idea, but then translating it was not so easy.’

‘We shifted the museum from a didactic, educational institution into some kind of contemporary art gallery,’ says Gilad, who was struck by how far some of the architects had departed from their original designs. ‘It feels like youngsters who are presenting experimental art rather than products.’

Gilad points to AMDL Circle’s reinterpretation of Michele De Lucchi’s ‘MDL System’ table – whose repeated feet and undulating form give it the appearance of a crawling centipede – as a particularly clear example of what he hoped the exhibition would achieve. ‘He completely eliminated the function of the table he designed for UniFor 25 years ago,’ he says. ‘And for me, as a curator, that was my aim.’

The exhibition also gave Gilad the opportunity to realise an idea he had long wanted to put into production. ‘I was trying to challenge myself as well,’ he says. ‘I was walking on the line of being true to my own brief, while trying to fantasise something that I always wanted to put in the catalogue.’

The result was a new version of his ‘Teorema’ drawer system, in which each drawer in the freestanding unit is stacked in a floating checkerboard pattern, without the use of an internal structure. ‘We changed the scale and the proportions, not the materials at all,’ he adds. ‘It’s a variation that I always wanted.’

The exhibition, he admits, gave him room to pursue the idea without having to make it commercially viable. ‘As a designer, these are the moments where I feel most alive.’