The Salone, for designers a must, for architects a nice change. And some even bring something: Stages for furniture.

For designers the Salone del Mobile is a must, for architects a welcome change. But the latter have also been here more and more professionally for a few years now - and those who don't present a chair or table bring a stage to Milan: the exhibition stand.

Rem Koolhaas was certainly not the first, but he established the task with a certain pride. And so it came about that his exhibition stands for the furniture manufacturer Knoll International were also always located in an experimental context, serving more as art and architecture exhibitions than for disdainful product presentation. Whereby serving is a good keyword. From the architect's point of view, furniture is often a necessary evil within the built architecture, but here at the trade fair architecture becomes its stage, the servant of the furniture. A paradox of trade fair architecture. Although the role of the architect certainly has an effect in the classical sense - which could be seen again on the stands of many manufacturers at this year's Salone del Mobile.

What they all seem to have in common is a special bond between client and architect, as well as cooperation at eye level - because even if the roles are clearly distributed, everyone involved benefits. At OMA and Knoll, the trade fair appearances bear witness to a grown continuity. Since 2013, Knoll's 75th anniversary, the two partners have cultivated their cooperation, which began with the OMA counter Tools for Life.

From furniture to trade fair stand: what could be more fitting than to see architecture and design as a unifying work of art? For this year's trade fair appearance This is Knoll, OMA surprises with a veritable fireworks display between Mies van der Rohe and postmodern material collage, between travertine and colored mirror wall. For the Rotterdam architects, the new stand, which replaces the previous Knoll stands with their famous curtains (a close collaboration with Rem Koolhaas' partner Petra Blaisse and her studio Inside Outside), is a "hypermodern version" of Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion.

With this obvious look into architectural history and the icon of modernism as a reference, OMA is naturally causing a stir at the furniture fair. The diagonal stand layout opens up the stand to the trade fair environment, but also creates individual spatial situations in which the furniture innovations are presented: a clever staging with a perfect stage, for which the architects immediately thought of the appropriate choreography. Rem Koolhaas and his team push the game to the extreme, so that the statue Morgen by Georg Kolbe could not be missing. And they go into detail: the fact that the temporary exhibition stand was in parts far better executed than the Fondazione Prada, which opened last year, is perhaps due to the budgets available.

The booth from Italian manufacturer Cassina also casts a wistful glance back to the modern era. Art director Patricia Urquiola also uses a temporary pavilion as an architectural history reference - in this case from 1955: the Sonsbeek Pavilion, designed by architect and designer Gerrit Rietveld for the sculpture exhibition in Arnhem's Sonsbeek Park. Similar to the Barcelona Pavilion, this icon was reconstructed and could be reopened in 1965 with the new name Rietveld Pavilion in the sculpture garden of the Kröller-Müller Museum on the initiative of some Dutch architects.

For Cassina, the Rietveld Pavilion perfectly reflects the character of its minimal and recognizable design. With its many rooms, it forms a stage staged as a home with a total area of 900 square meters. It stands to reason that the revived Rietveld building would provide a fitting setting for the furniture on display as an exhibition stand: not only did Cassina reissue Rietveld's Utrecht Armchair with new upholstery patterns in 2016, but the famous Red-Blue Chair from 1917 is also available in black, white and green, thanks to Cassina 100 years later. The Rietveld Pavilion has fortunately been built in the colors of the original, even if the bricks at the furniture fair in Milan were made of Styrofoam. Note: Already reconstructed, once temporary buildings of modernism can be reproduced at will in the best way.

David Chipperfield goes further back in history for his stand at this year's fair for the northern Italian furniture company Driade: namely, to antiquity. Inspired by a villa in Pompei, his stand is pure and minimal. You can only recognize David Chipperfield's signature if you know that the British architect, who has been art director at Driade since 2014, designed the structure. Or if you're familiar with the Driade showroom in Milan's Via Borgogna, which has a similar color scheme with its light gray surfaces.

Finnish brand Artek has a well-established collaboration with Berlin-based Kuehn Malvezzi when it comes to designing its trade show booths.

Since Kuehn Malvezzi both conceive and curate exhibitions and design furniture themselves, similar understandings of architecture, art and technology come together in this collaboration. Already in 2015, for Artek's 80th anniversary, Kuehn Malvezzi had designed a clear, reduced exhibition stand for the Finnish furniture manufacturer. In 2016, things are getting a bit more colorful at Artek: the team is impressing with a strong color combination of royal blue and white. Walls and floors form their own room corners, which look like a whole that has been cut and pushed apart. On display here are just a few novelties, such as the relaunched Kiki-collection by Ilmari Tapiovaara. At the center is an exhibition of Aalto's wood-shaping experiments.

Arper, along with Kartell, is one of the few companies to isolate itself from the fair with an introverted booth, creating a truly enclosed and thus quiet space. Founded in 1989, the Italian furniture company has now been working closely with the office Lievore Altherr Molina from Barcelona for 16 years. The result of this cooperation is not only the many successful pieces of furniture, but also Arper's trade fair appearances, which the Lievore Altherr Molina studio has been in charge of continuously since 2001. Here, everything is from a single source: architecture, furniture, corporate design. A perfect symbiosis.

"Initially, we designed the stand architecture ourselves for all the trade fairs," says designer Jeannette Altherr, "but then, with the increasing complexity and size of the stand, we looked for a partner for the architecture." So in 2009, Milan-based architects Migliore & Servetto were responsible for the design of the Arper stand, in 2011 the New York studio SO-IL, while in 2013, 2015 and this year the Madrid-based office 2x4 constructed the stand. A perfect division, because Lievore Altherr Molina could thus concentrate on creative direction, storytelling and the presentation of the furniture.

The fact that furniture is staged in an environment similar to its intended purpose seems a logical consequence. The question remains: What interests the star architects in these mini-architectures that are dismantled again after six days? The fact that the design of exhibition stands makes economic sense for them can only be one aspect. Perhaps it is more a sign of the regained realization that architecture and furniture belong together. The paradox of exhibition architecture is an invention of postmodernism. We can prove it.

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