Themes and variations.

The Milan Furniture Fair gives architects and designers the opportunity to test their imagination on the most intimate of scales and this year's event was no exception. Here we look at some of the more intriguing outcomes.

How many variations on a chair is it possible to sustain intellectually, functionally and economically? In Milan in April you might as well ask how long is a piece of string. For the furniture-obsessed, this year's Salone was characterized by a sense of consolidation rather than the whiff of heather being ignited, as architects and designers wrestled with the perennial problem of trying to reinvent the wheel.

For Cassina, Ron Arad presented a 'table that eats chairs', following Shaker-inspired principles of furniture that can be easily stowed away to create more space. Rather than stack chairs or hang them on the wall (a la Shaker), Arad's hinged seats fold up wafer thin and slot neatly into the underbelly of the table. Also for Cassina, Jorge Pensi's Raster storage system in gauzily translucent methacrylate embodied a strong geometric rigour animated by the play of light. For Kartell, the prolific Philippe Starck presented Ero/s, a range of Eames-inspired moulded plastic seats in different colours supported on slender metal stalks.

Starck is inescapable at Milan -- his Bubble Club chair was shown in its final version, an armchair and two seater divan in chunky, pastel-coloured polyethylene that can be used outdoors. Also for Kartell, Piero Lissoni and Patricia Urquiola's modular storage system, One, was unveiled. Based on a simple cubic container and aluminium structural frame that can be assembled accretionally to form various horizontal and vertical configurations, the system is both adaptable and elegant.

The sheer volume of designer products competing for attention tends to mean that eye-catching excess stands out. For Cappellini, Rive Gauche by Patrick Norguet (who has worked with major fashion houses) featured sofas and chairs covered in retina-searing Pucci prints. Another arresting confection was Humberto and Fernando Campana's Anemone armchair with plastic tubing woven around a steel frame. Tendrils dangling seductively, this was chair as marine lifeform. It was left to Fritz Hansen to provide a scourging blast of Scandinavian sobriety with Vico Magistretti's Vicolounge, an elegant sofa series for commercial and domestic use, and Runner, a flexible stacking chair by young Danish designer Kasper Salto. With a moulded laminated timber seat and back, the design is an object lesson in material and formal economy.

Other architects turning their hand to furniture at this time of year included Mario and Claudio Bellini for Heller, with a cheerful, stackable, multi-purpose chair in rainbow hues, and Claudio Silvestrin for Dema. Crafted in pearwood, and upholstered in hemp, linen and cotton, Silvestrin's exquisitely simple Le Foglie collection evoked a consoling spirit of solidity and agelessness, that stood loftily above the seemingly inexhaustible tide of ephemeral froth. C. S.