Alberto Meda's playful design on show at Triennale Milano

The exhibition 'Alberto Meda. Tensione e leggerezza' at Triennale Milano's quadreria explores the decades-long career of engineer-designer Alberto Meda (born 1945 in Lenno). Curated by Marco Sammicheli, director of the Museo del Design Italiano, with a set design by Riccardo Blumer, the show presents seven sections where Meda's iconic pieces are disassembled and reinvented—such as the Longframe chaise longue (Alias, 1994) transformed into a playable harp, and the Fortebraccio lamp (Luceplan, 1998) shown as a puppet. The immersive, ludic narrative treats design as a device activated by human presence, a founding concept of Triennale's Design Platform. Prototypes, drawings, notes, and sketches highlight Meda's blend of functionalism, technique, formal purity, and intuition. The display emphasizes the tension inherent in serial production, where material contracts and expands beyond function. Stefano Boeri stated the exhibition is a fitting recognition of a designer-engineer who masterfully united elegance with technical precision, creating objects of lightness, efficiency, and wonder.