A theatrical performance and an installation at Teatro Lirico Giorgio Gaber celebrate 60 years of the Cassina LC collection designed by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand. ‘Staging Modernity’ is the project by the artistic duo Formafantasma staged during Milan Design Week 2025: a thougthful and provocative interpretation of the legacy of Modernism.

“This project aims to challenge the conventional narratives around modernity, domesticity and design while examining the deep cultural implications of these ideas today.”

Formafantasma ‘Staging Modernity’ takes the floor plan of the ‘Salon d’Automne’, a milestone in the history of modern architecture and design, as its starting point. This historical moment sought to redefine the domestic environment as an industrial and functional machine à habiter (machine for living) and liberate it from the weight of tradition.

 

By introducing their tubular metal furniture, Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand and Pierre Jeanneret distanced their new modern aesthetic from the traditional wood workmanship of the time. This radical break was intended not only as a design shift but as a symbol of modernity itself: a forward-thinking, industrial and rational world untethered from the past. Rather than simply revisiting or commemorating this historical moment, Formafantasma’s installation ‘Staging Modernity’ fragments it by scattering elements across the space as if they were sketches or drafts.These fragments, like pieces of a puzzle, evoke the idea of a vision once whole but now fractured, offering a lens through which to reconsider the idealized conception of modernity. Le Corbusier, Perriand and Jeanneret’s work, deeply embedded in the philosophy of rationality and progress, is re-imagined in Formafantasma’s intervention, not as a pristine vision of industrial perfection but as something more open and porous.

On stage the protagonists are the new limited in time editions, developed by Cassina in collaboration with the Le Corbusier Foundation and heirs of Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand, inviting the public to take a seat and assist the installation that contrarily takes place in the theatre below.

Here, in the theatre stalls, pieces from the Le Corbusier®, Pierre Jeanneret®, Charlotte Perriand® Collection have been placed alongside a selection of furniture elements from the Salon d’Automne produced by Cassina in the same colours and materials as 1929. Over the course of the week, theatrical performances directed by Fabio Cherstich featuring professional actors will be activated as an integral part of the installation.

Based on three commissioned texts by philosopher Emanuele Coccia, architect, writer and curator Andrés Jaque and architect and artist Feifei Zhou (terriStories), reflection on the ideological and material implications of modernity and nature are further explored, moving beyond the static and the visual to include the performative, the auditory and the embodied in a completely immersive experience for the public.