Pop Laminate

History

Pop Laminate names a Milanese design collective active from 1981 to 1988, founded by an Italian designer with a collaborator in 1980 and drawing members including several other architects and designers, with contributions from outside architects too. It debuted at the Milan furniture fair in 1981 and was, by design, a temporary project: its founder himself left in 1985, and the group wound down in 1988. In that short span it became one of the defining furniture movements of Italian postmodernism, reacting against the restraint of prior modernist design with deliberately loud, cheap-looking materials treated as luxury.

Elements

The group's signature move was to take plastic laminate, an ordinary kitchen-counter material, and clad simple board carcasses in loud colour and printed pattern, a squiggled pattern chief among them. Pieces are typically assemblies of elementary solids: boxes, cylinders, stepped blocks and flat planes, often set on an underlying triangular geometry and stacked into totemic forms that read as much as sculpture as furniture. Function is frequently secondary to form; the group's best-known room-divider piece is often described as barely functional as storage. Rather than legs, pieces tend to sit on blocks and plinths, sometimes a smaller cabinet supporting a larger one.

Each plane of a piece is typically a distinct colour or pattern, mixing laminate, terrazzo, lacquer and occasional figured veneer, with square edges finished in laminate or a contrasting strip. Underneath the surface spectacle, construction is ordinary cabinet-shop sheet-goods work: panels cut from MDF or board, laminated on both faces to stay flat, and assembled with dowels, screws and glue, with shelves often meeting uprights at 30 or 60 degree angles. The craft challenge was never the joinery itself but achieving clean, square, laminate-faced corners and precise angles.