The Triannale Design Museum of Milano held a series of free special exhibitions to coincide with the Salone Internazionale del Mobile and Milan Design week. After seeing hundreds of chairs, tables and bedroom sets at the Salone, it was a welcomed change to see something different.

According to the museum’s own website  >>here:

Opened in 2007 as the first museum of Italian design. Located in the Triennale of Milan offers the visitor the chance to discover the excellence of Italian design through unedited points of view. No chronological order or by author, each year the Triennale Design Museum is renewed, transformed, changing the topics covered and composition.

A decent bookstore with a small collection of design objects.

Floor mosaics in the main lobby.

The regular exhibition (“Italian Design Beyond Its Crisis”) and its permanent collection required a ticket. As all the special exhibitions were free, I started with the freebies first. See later posts.

I had lunch at their cafeteria –  it was a communal table (hence, the 6 bottles of mineral water) and I sat on the most uncomfortable stool in my life. The design effectively kept people from sitting around taking up space.

But the cafe also had some interesting antiques in a corner for patrons to use. While they might be design classics, they do not exactly look comfortable.

The museum is located in Parco Sempione and it has a nice small garden in the back.

Looking back at the museum from the park. The white boxes were exhibition spaces temporarily erected during the week.

A dry pond can be found at the back of the garden. I wondered what it looks like when filled.

There were a podium, a lighthouse and several items in the pond – indeed a very strange or surreal set – a “swan” and two guys (from torso up only), both situated inside something that can only be described as a ring of yellow triangular wavelets – one guy waving or pointing at something and the other blonde one staring (with a frown) at the first guy. There must be some subtext here.

The rest of sculptures in the garden was nice but unremarkable.

Since I had a train to catch in the afternoon, I could not see the rest of the museum with its permanent collection. What I saw in that half-day, however, was very viewable and enjoyable – they will be covered by a post or two in here.