CALL THEM BY THEIR NAME: ARTISTS
They have made the international design story grand with their avant-garde creations, and awarded with coveted prizes in addition to their design products being among the most recognized, sought-after and loved all over the world. They are the historians and the new top Italian designers: we present them to you.
His style is irreverent, provocative and sensual. His name is known all over the world for having completely rethought objects of everyday life. His biography reads: “Since 1966 I’ve responded to those who call me Fabio Novembre. Since 1992 I have also responded to those who call me “architect”. I cut out spaces in the vacuum by blowing air bubbles, and I make gifts of sharpened pins so as to insure I never put on airs.. (...) I want to breathe until I choke. I want to love until I die. “The protagonists of his projects are faces and bodies: just mention the Nemo chairs with Driade and Jolly Roger for Gufram, Him & Her for Casamania and the Muse lamp for Venini. Nemo is undoubtedly his most famous chair: recognizable and functional, it relates the aesthetics of Novembre and his ability to bring together metaphysics and creativity. The backrest represents a human face with classic perfection and creates a living space in which to sit: it is a chair that is experienced from the inside. Fabio Novembre’s vision - which has also given design extraordinary architectural projects - of objects that have an emotional dimension, so much so that shape and content coincide perfectly leaving no void. His slogan is: “Do less, do it better”, a motto that takes him away from the risk of designing the things that already exist. Shaping new needs: this is the future of design for Fabio Novembre.
“Gae”, diminutive of Gaetana, was the manifestation of a generation of pioneers who left a resolute mark on the contemporary architectural scene. “Architecture is a man’s job, but I’ve always ignored that”, she said, and for this cognizant and determined personality she always distinguished herself in an environment controlled by machismo. She lived through the war era and a destroyed Italy, a vision that led her to discover her passion for architecture: “It was a useful job”. She impacted architecture with her renovations of the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, the Gare d’orsay in Paris, the restoration of the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome and the Palavela for the Turin Olympics. In the same way design owes her for the creation of important pieces of furniture that have done nothing but confirm her talent and innate good taste. During the Neoliberty period, Aulenti designed her famous Pipistrello (bat) lamp for Olivetti’s show room in Paris. It was characterized by clear Art Nouveau lines and designed for Martinelli Luce. It is unmistakable. The shape of the diffuser is reminiscent of the wings of the nocturnal animal whose name it bears, additionally the lamp still holds an expressive force that makes it suitable for any environment and any decor. An undisputed intellectual, Gae Aulenti always carried with her a poetical form that characterized all her design work, from just thinking about an object, architecture, or nonetheless a project, always in relation to the city, the place representing human history.
To call him just a designer is not little, but it’s more than anything else inaccurate. Giò Ponti was an architect, industrial designer, craftsman, poet, journalist, painter and, above all, passionate endorser of excellent design. What characterized him was his casual passage from subject to subject, first designing a simple object for everyday use, then, creating ingenious solutions for a modern home, up to giving life to complex projects in an urban setting. The Pirelli skyscraper in Milan or the cathedral in Taranto are his most imposing architectural works in Italy. But he is also responsible for the most iconic home furnishing articles. An intellectual like few others, Giò Ponti has been able to read his time with lucidity and anticipate its needs, giving shape to his own vision of the future. “Not cement, not wood, not stone, not iron, not steel, not aluminum, not ceramics, not glass, are the most durable raw material, but art is”. Starting from this idea he managed to capture a front row seat in the history of design and architecture. As a designer, he revolutionized the spirit of the Florentine ceramics company Richard-ginori, and then changed its aesthetic concepts from time to time, propelling the company towards increasingly simple lines full of personality. Think of the voluptuous curves of La Cornuta, his coffee machine for La Pavoni in 1948, and then the industrial design of the Superleggera chair in 1957, created for Cassina as an innovative reworking of the old wavy wooden Chiavari chair, which soon entered the homes of many Italians. He called it a “chair without adjectives”, and precisely for this reason it became one of his most famous pieces. Thanks to the elimination of the “superfluous” material, Giò Ponti considerably lightened the weight of the chair, transforming it into an object with a minimal, modern design but with strong ties to the past. A way of saying: “Let’s go back to chair-chairs, househouses, works without labels, without adjectives, the right, true, natural, simple and spontaneous things”.
Brothers in life and work, they have marked the history of design with taste and intelligence. Although Achille was the most famous of the two, and also the most long-lived, the most famous products by Castiglioni are offsprings of their collaboration. Pier Giacomo and Achille emerged from their time thanks to a minimalism that is not snobbish and a simplicity that is not rhetorical. From their minds were born iconic pieces with clean lines and sophisticated gears that represent the movement of perfection. There is no ostentation of aesthetics, but rather a balance between beauty and mechanics, simplicity that creates a revolution. It’s easy to understand why together they have won 14 Compassi D’oro, the Nobel Prize in design. From the functional sophistication by the two brothers was born the product that even today expresses its iconic and modern value: the
Arco lamp created for the Flos brand in 1962. A perforated steel dome, suspended by an a steel arch supported by a block of Carrara marble.
A manifesto of their design, in which nothing is exclusively decorative, but everything is functional. The perforated dome, in fact, serves not to prevent overheating the lamp, the travertine cuts serve not to create edges that would make the material more subject to wear and the hole in the same block is used to move the lamp more easily. With Arco, the Castiglioni brothers have rewritten the poetry of space for the first time, moving away from the classicism of the chandelier hanging from the ceiling, but creating a luminous experience within the home environment, capable of generating a sense of continuity with the rest of the space. The momentum of the lamp towards its place in the history of design was obvious, so much so that it was defined as a work of art and as such protected from plagiarism and imitation. Other pieces are Splüghen Brau, Snoopy, Viscontea, Taccia lamps, the Sanluca armchair, the Lierna and Tric chairs and the Sella and Mezzadro seats, to name just a few, avant-garde symbols that has inevitably changed the relationship with the everyday space and with the way of understanding true creativity.
“Creativity works in the brain through imagination and invention: the more things you know, the more connections you can make.” This is why Bruno Munari has been many things in his life: artist, designer, illustrator, architect, graphic designer, poet. In each discipline he has managed to excel and all his creations are the expression of his philosophy and the stylistic research that inspired him, according to which design must rediscover the essence of form. Too many frills and too much rigor leave room for a balance that manages to give logic to the shape of the object. With Danese Munari, he began to continuously design industrial objects, such as the famous Cubo ashtray, an icon of Italian design and ingenious design in its simplicity. A melamine cube inside which a thin aluminum sheet folds on to itself is inserted to hide ash and butts from view and smell. His approach has always been aimed at finding simple solutions without too many frills that use technical innovations and innovative materials. A concrete and symptomatic example of this design genius is the Falkland lamp, also for Danese. The “stocking lamp” has been defined for the material with which it is produced, the filanca, that of women’s panty hose, able to diffuse the light in a very particular way. Munari’s signature is clearly visible: the Falkland lamp is the apotheosis of the linearity of its objects, enhanced also by the logical structural essentiality, the one that made him say: “to complicate is easy, to simplify is difficult”.
For seventy years of his long life, Ettore Sottsass had been an architect and designer, and many other things too. Bon vivant and friend to legends such as Hemingway, Picasso and Allen Ginsberg, his name equated the expression of pop culture with a whimsical touch. His aesthetic language was full of energy and his design look of a vitality made even more vibrant by the ever-present touch of color, distinctly in contrast with any form of intellectualism and inflexibility. Sottsass used common objects and played with form and space to give materials a deeper meaning. He delegated the value of the word to colors, because then they were able to express emotions. And it is in this spirit that Ettore created and designed the Valentine portable typewriter for Adriano Olivetti, as well as the Praxis 48 typewriter, the Logos 27 calculator, the Memphis television for Brionvega, the Elea 9003 computer, numerous tables, bookcases, chairs, and mirrors. The principle behind his furniture, monumental and sometimes absurd, is emotion before function. A concept clearly expressed by Carlton, a bookshop that stands halfway between a totem and a video game; a «playful response to the need to have solid and enjoyable forms: a way to connect, and not without irony, the sacred and the profane, history and current affairs, the archetype and its expressions».
Enclosing Gaetano Pesce within a professional label is being simplistic because his art is exploratory and not made to be limited to an abstract. Gaetano Pesce is a transcendent artist, sculptor, designer, architect, precursor of ideas and innovator in the continuous search for materials. For over forty years he has been working his imagination on objects and structures of all types: glasses, vases, sofas, chairs, jewelry, sculptures, tables, plates, lamps, shelves, but also houses and buildings. Each object, small or large, expresses a theme and connotations that go beyond simple form. Its final goal is to generate art, yes, but also views that leave room for reflection that go beyond all limits. Gaetano Pesce’s art goes further than conventional and industrial production, to the point of rejecting the repetitiveness of the work itself, it’s different every time it is created. When he presented his Up 5 chair at the Salone del Mobile in Milan in 1969, he clearly manifested his philosophy: to challenge the longestablished and give art the social role it deserves: an armchair in the form and shape of a female body, with a ball tied to the armchair itself that acts as a footrest. It was a design object and a condemnation of women kept in submission and segregation in many parts of the world. “Less is more” is not his credo, on the contrary, for him minimalism is a dying expression used by those who have no ideas.
Antonio Citterio is accustomed to approaching objects with kindness and elegance and not by chance do many characterize him as the gentleman of design. Son of a craftsman, he learned his craft by observing, reflecting and meeting masters who changed his life, first of many was Sottsass. The relationship opened up horizons and multiplied his opportunities, indeed his collaboration in 1986 with the B&B Italia brand launched him towards success and public recognition. For the Sity sofa - designed not only to be a place for conversation, but to be a place on which to enjoy the daily acts of eating, sleeping, reading or watching TV - he is in fact awarded the Compasso d’oro: a project that fittingly explains his vision as a designer, moving away from the mere aesthetic extrapolated from the living environment. Concealed in his designs are references and tributes to the masters he was inspired by and in each of them he adds his own personal touch that makes them unique. An example is the Charles sofa, a tribute to the design of the fifties and sixties and also to Charles Eames, the American designer, architect and director who always claimed “details are not details, they make the design”. The B&B Italia best sellers design strength can be seen in the details: first of all, the inverted L-shaped foot to the thin raised base, which gives the sofa lightness and comfort. Antonio Citterio looks at the past with admiration, but learns a lot from modernism. His belief is to design something only if there is a real motivation, which also comes from the use of new technology, and only if the value of the project is convenience. Visavis Softback by Vitra is an example: a timeless office chair, with simple geometric lines and expertly used materials, creating balance and elegance without ostentation. In full Citterio style.