Tax Credit Furniture
Fake Authentic - Mistakes, Fuorisalone Milano
Built interventions in Italy mostly consist in improving the energy efficiency of the existing building stock through a tax incentive scheme called “Superbonus 110%”. Since its launch in July 2020 as part of the country’s post-pandemic recovery strategy, more than 150,000 applications have been approved, and €30bn have been spent under the scheme, offering tax credit of up to 110% on construction costs. Tax Credit Furniture invites a critical refection on the contemporary practice of construction in relation to the new performance standards of buildings. On the one hand this operation is necessary to achieve the objectives imposed by the climate crisis, on the other hand it generates a new way and new materials through which to we relate to the built environment. Expanded polystyrene with graphite additive is a thermal insulation material which has become one of these tools. Its overproduction and reckless increase in price are testimony to this. In a city with many expanded polystyrene facades, what remains are often scraps and waste of such material, which are nevertheless part of the tax credit scheme and thus paid by the state. The installation is built with 0.4 cubic meters of this unused material, laying bare the sensitive qualities that are hidden beneath a few layers of plaster. The furniture becomes a well reasoned assemblage of these materials, orphans of what might be thought to be destination. The result is a figure that finds its function and location in its ambiguity of being “furniture”. Functions are only suggested through volumetric articulations that make it resemble, in some formal aspects, architecture or rather, an architectural maquette. The same way that, volumes are the vehicle through which a building relates with the urban environment, here the volume become the mean that convey the dialogue with the environment and those who inhabit it.
