By Sebastiano Tonelli. Eccentric, visionary, multifaceted, Philippe Starck was born in Paris on January 18, 1949, and is considered by many as the enfant terrible of design. Son of an aeronautical engineer, he studied at the École Nissim de Camondo in Paris and at only 19 years old, he founded…
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Bruno Mathsson was born on January 13, 1907, in a small town in Sweden and is considered one of the pioneers of modern Swedish furniture design. As the son of a cabinetmaker and a descendant of a generation of carpenters, he gained a profound knowledge of wood and its processing…
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by Evi Mibelli. “Everything is a sum of details, but every detail is usable if it is thought out, designed and finally created”. At the end of the 19th century, the Austrian newspaper Neue Wiener Tagblatt wrote that never before in all of Europe had such a new building as…
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Paolo Rizzatto was born in Milan on 25 December 1941 where he still deals with architecture, interiors, products and lighting. After graduating in architecture from the Polytechnic of Milan in 1966, he opened his first studio together with Antonio Monestiroli di Leo with whom he mainly dealt with architecture and…
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by Evi Mibelli. Observing the vast and multifaceted production of Oki Sato – founder of the Nendo design studio – one instinctively thinks of Osvaldo Cavandoli, Bruno Munari and a quote from Hagakure. Osvaldo Cavandoli was the genius from whose pencil the cartoon La Linea was born, the little man…
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by Evi Mibelli. “I like the beautiful and the useful, and even more the beautiful in the useful.” Andrée Putman was neither a true designer nor a true architect, but an exceptional “ensemblière“. This is how Sylvie Santini, biographer of the grand dame of French design, defines her. A perfect…
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On 15 December 1870, Josef Hoffmann was born, a famous architect who was among the founders of the Viennese Secession (1897) and a few years later of the Wiener Werkstätte, an association of artists who proposed unity between the various types of arts and who had great fame for thirty…
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Gae Aulenti: the lady of architecture and design. In the panorama of Italian design of the 1950s, women, due to a question of possibilities or female emancipation that characterized that historical period, did not have much space. One of the few personalities who managed to leave an indelible mark on…
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Some remember him for the Pirelli skyscraper in Milan, others for the iconic Superleggera chair, rightfully entering the ranks of 20th-century design icons. Yet others recognize him as the founder (and director for a remarkable fifty years) of Domus, a magazine still at the forefront of contemporary architectural discourse. The…
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What inspires me? Light. Light is decisive for shapes, for objects, for a total environment. Light goes and has no dimension, and it can travel very far. (Nanda Vigo) Nanda Vigo was born in Milan on 14 November 1936. After graduating from the Institut Polytechnique of Lausanne and an important…
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