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"View Slideshow\n\nIn Italy, which exports beauty the way some other countries export oil, bellezza is both a business and a way of life, and design exists in a continuum \"from the city to the spoon,\" to cite a phrase coined by the midcentury Italian architect Ernesto Rogers. The Italians have long resisted any official line of demarcation separating architecture from, say, tableware, and architects often cross disciplines to create small wonders of industrial design for the tabletop. This April, at The Triennale in Milan, the Italian housewares manufacturer Alessi will unveil a new limited-edition collection of tea and coffee services in Italy's latest interdisciplinary venture, in which 22 of the world's most promising and provocative architects pour spirited aesthetic tempests into teacups.\n\nWithin the Italian pantheon of design patrons, Alessi has for three generations commissioned the country's best and brightest to bring elegance to the table. The company has survived and thrived on successive fashion waves, from classic modernist bel disegno of the 1960s and '70s to unruly, sassy Memphis in the 1980s. Alessi has even generated waves of its own. In 1979 Alberto Alessi, the company's managing director and general manager for design, invited 11 emerging international talents to create the Tea Coffee Piazza, a collection of silver pots and servers arrayed on a tray.\n\nUntil then, the world of Italian design had tended to greet outsiders warily: Alberto Alessi opened up the club to international talent, changing the insular way that the Italian design establishment operated. \"Today is another time, and I wanted to explore the world of new architects who haven't had the chance to show how they would bring a fresh eye to the domestic landscape,\" he says. \"We want to find the next Michael Graves and Aldo Rossi, new talents not only for architecture but for product design.\"\n\nIn addition to offering a design of his own, Milanese architect Alessandro Mendini curated the first list of architects for Alessi, and he has returned with a new roster that includes participants from the United Kingdom, Asia, the United States and Australia. Two decades ago the Piazza collection was fabricated in silver, but this time the materials include titanium, porcelain, glass, plastic and wood.\n\nNo dominant theme has emerged, but it's clear that the 2003 Tea Coffee Towers collection has been influenced by postmodern tropisms\u2014toward irony, allusion and appropriation\u2014that have left their mark on the culture over the last 20 years. France's Dominique Perrault has produced a severe Euclidean design with geometric handles, and Wiel Arets Associates of Holland cast their teapots and coffeepots as dark silhouettes encased in transparent resin. Japanese architect Toyo Ito imagines a round lake on which float small porcelain cups with handles shaped like frogs.\n\nIf the 1979 group was inspired by the concept of the piazza, some of the architects this time have piled the parts into high-rise configurations. For easy handling, the Dutch group MVRDV has indented a tall canister made of stackable containers. Hong Kong's Gary Chang presents a skyline of abstract high-rises, and the Australian firm DCM has composed a leaning, tapering tower of fitted pots with handles akimbo.\n\nTwo decades ago most of the drawings were done by hand, but now almost all of them have been executed on computers. With their new digital powers, some architects\u2014including Greg Lynn, of Los Angeles, and UN Studio, of Amsterdam\u2014have produced rounded organic forms; others, like Thom Mayne, also of Los Angeles, have created hybrid shapes that mix the curved and the angular in complex, involuted contours. (The sets will be exhibited in the United States at New York's Max Protetch Gallery in May; later this year they will make their way to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.)\n\n\"We knew not to overdemand and overdiscipline the architects, saddling them with the constraints of the technology,\" notes Alessi. \"We wanted them to feel free to open the doors of their dreams. I strongly hope to find new talents who will be able to interpret the spirit of our times. We're trying to generate the unusual.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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