Contemporary design has come up with its own response to each of these exercises of taming of nature. Starting with the projects of the Radical groups, between nature and artifice, the idea has been to demonstrate an open dilemma, a contradiction in terms. The use of artificial materials that reprise the motifs and themes of nature like animal skins (see the Safari sofa by Archizoom) and botanical references (the big piece of sod of the Pratone by Gruppo Strum) can be seen as a way of asserting that nothing more real and spontaneous can exist than the human need to import pieces of nature into the domestic setting through a selective, artificial act.
We find a lot less ideology and more of a magical, poetic dimension in the natural reaction objects of Tord Boontje. His furnishings often suggest botanical forms, but the mediation of rational appropriation becomes an obligatory passage: his blossoms become viral, invading the forms of classic typologies, disrupting them, transforming seats and lamps into clusters of leaves and flowers that are the shadow of their natural counterparts, often colorless, white, aseptic silhouettes, with the perfection of laser cutting. In substance, a pale natural souvenir imported into the domestic environment.
Today Cristina Celestino is also playing with a personal interpretation of this anthropological desire to tame nature, with seats that seem to spring from giant leaves, or surfaces that suggest the geometric arrangements of Italian gardens. Simone Crestani creates tributes to tamed nature that are apparently fragile in their glassy essence, but are strong in terms of the selected subjects: busts of stags and bonsai are, by definition, trophies of man’s actions on animals and plants, conserving the power of a sense of conflict.