Highlights from Madrid Design Festival 2024

Now in its 7th edition, Madrid Design Festival 2024 takes over the Spanish capital for 6-weeks, showing visitors that design has become an integral part of this historic city. Through historic design exhibitions, brand collaborations, showroom presentations and public events, the Festival gathered 700 professionals, 55 exhibitions and installations and 200 brands, highlighting Spain’s engagement with design in a variety of disciplines and themes such as urban design, community, collaboration, craftsmanship, AI, graphic design and hospitality. 

This year, the Madrid Design Festival gave awards for outstanding achievement to Miguel Milá, whose retrospective exhibition is a highlight of the festival, Piet Hein Eek and Irma Boom. The winner of the professional design category was the Office for Political Innovation for the Reggio School, while Angela Maria Manegual Roselló, a student at the design school in Mallorca, received the Young Talents award. 

Fiesta Design at the ILE

The ILE (Institución Libre de Enseñanza) serves as a central exhibition and gathering space for the MDF, hosting both the Madrid DesignPRO talks, which took place the opening weekend of the festival (February 14-17), and Fiesta Design exhibitions, which offer an experimental platform for brands and designers to collaborate on a project connected to design solutions to everyday living. A selection of this year’s presentations included ‘Weaving Networks’, a group exhibition curated by Mario Suárez with work by Spanish artists and designers who have chosen to establish their studios outside of major cities, preferring remote or rural settings as sites of creativity, community and inspiration. 

This idea was explored further with ‘Designing Repopulation’, an experimental project proposed by Andreu Carulla in partnership with Amazon. The project aims to address the problem of depopulation in Spanish rural villages, suggesting that with the opportunity of remote work, the Internet, and Amazon delivery services, living in smaller villages is a realistic possibility. For ten days, he moved his studio to Gistain, a remote mountainous town in Huesca, where less than 50 people currently live. Along with the tools he needed delivered by Amazon, Carulla set about creating a series of work using a felled tree. He connected with local residents, most of them elderly, whose expertise and experience proved essential to realise the pieces made for the exhibition. 

Heritage textile brand Gancedo partnered with nearly 20 designers who have studios in the Tetuán neighbourhood of Madrid. Using materials from the brand’s fabrics and textiles archive, each proposition, whether collage, sculpture or weaving, was completely unique yet tied to the distinctive characteristics of the neighbourhood such as its use of brick, low rise housing, or the tradition of bringing chairs onto the street after work to socialise with neighbours.

Soul & Matter presented a selection of Spanish craft, including works by Idiola Cuesta, Adriana Meunie, Maria Oriza, Canoa Lab and Marc Monzo, among many others. Having been a guest at the 2023 Chengdu Biennial in Korea, this exhibition brings together the work for the first time in Spain.

Institución Libre De Enseñanza
P.º del Gral. Martínez Campos, 14
Chamberí, 28010

Miguel Milá at the Fernán Gómez Cultural Centre

One of the festival’s most engaging exhibitions is the retrospective of Miguel Milá, one of Spain’s most influential mid-century designers. Curated by the designer’s son, Gonzalo Milá, and Claudia Oliva, ‘Miguel Milá, (Pre)industrial Designer’, includes more than 200 pieces, prototypes, plans and original drawings. 

Born in Barcelona in 1931, a time of austerity and scarcity, from an early age Milá was guided by the motto of 'be useful and you will be used'. This search for practicality and simplicity guided him throughout his life, with many of his best designs inspired by everyday domestic needs. 

A lamp that helped launch his career, ‘T.N.’, (1956), was designed for his tia (aunt) Nuria, (T.N), who requested a better reading lamp. His brother wanted a table that would not hide his rug, leading to the design of the rectangular glass table, and the now iconic ‘Cesta’ lamp, produced by Santa and Cole, remains as contemporary today as ever.

But while Milá was centred on practicality, this didn’t distract from his ability to experiment and be innovative. Using materials such as rattan and coloured glass, Milá was not afraid of pushing convention and developing new ideas throughout his career. For Milá, who continues to work today, craftsmanship and aesthetics are as essential as practicality, the combination of which has allowed his work to become timeless.

Fernán Gómez Cultural Centre
Pl. de Colón, 4
Salamanca, 28001

Chairs: Icons of Modern Design. The Alexander von Vegesack Collection 

Featuring over 80 pieces and 100 catalogues and publications, ‘Chairs: Icons of Modern Design. The Alexander von Vegesack Collection’, opens up the archive of one of the most important design collectors of the 20th century. The exhibition reveals not only the tastes of a visionary collector, but of the cultural and historical moments in which the pieces were made. As Pablo Sevilla, co-curator of the exhibition, notes, 'the exhibition is about the evolution of industrial design through the lens of the chair', an object that has always 'reflected the cultural, social and technological changes of the time.' 

It begins with the 1883 Thonet chaise lounge, and puts a focus on Thonet as a designer whose advanced ideas about style, comfort and production helped open the way for early 20th century designs. From here, thematic sections or ‘chapels’, as Sevilla describes them, present objects and ephemera on key design moments such as ‘Pop’, ‘PoMo’, ‘Space Odyssey’, and ‘After the Party’.

Insightful ‘dialogues’ can be made across the exhibition, such as with the installation of Alvar and Aino Aalto’s designs for the Paimo Sanatorium in which curves and wood are central themes, placed in contrast to Marcel Breuer’s ‘Tubes’ installation where metal and the machine of living are emphasised. As an avid traveller, von Vegesack refers to his collection as “Adventures in Objects”, having bought objects throughout his life as a way to document his travels. He continues this adventure today with Domaine de Boisbuchet, which serves as a laboratory for the designs of today and tomorrow, keeping alive his passion for design and as a documentarian of our times. 

‘Chairs: Icons of Modern Design. The Alexander von Vegesack Collection’ is curated by Guillermo Gil Fernández and Pablo Sevilla, until 31 March 2024

Centro Cultural de la Villa
Pl. de Colón, 4, Salamanca
28001 Madrid

Showrooms in Madrid

In addition to the festival’s main exhibitions and events, showrooms across the city opened their doors with specially commissioned pieces or installations. Among them, Andreu World highlighted its ambitious ‘Circular Design Challenge,’ Natuzzi featured an installation by Valencian designer JM Ferrero about soft spaces and sensations, Gandiablasco held a competition for design students to prepare a project using AI and their archives, and Mil Studios opened the doors to their beautifully renovated 2-floor showroom housed in a former textile factory, located on a quiet, residential street in the Tetuán neighbourhood of Madrid.