Legend Continues Design Dialogue

Italian designer Vico Magistretti emphasizes manufacturer relationship in own works

Prima donnas need not apply. That's one message design legend Vico Magistretti seems to have for aspiring designers in a recent interview for Milan-based design magazine Domus.
"I have never had occasion to deliver a perfect master drawing to a company, saying, 'This is what you have to do, I'll be back in 10 days' time'," Magistretti told interviewer Hans Ulrich Obrist last fall. "This is the opposite of 'doing design,' which instead means setting up a dialogue with the makers and asking them if exactly what you propose at that moment is going in the right direction - not only as a product, but also as technology," the veteran architect and designer says. "Design is always a dialogue between two people, two spheres: production and design".
Magistretti, now in his early 80s and still working, experienced first hand the Italian design boom of the 1960s. He helped organize the 1960 Milan Triennale, where manufacturer Cesare Cassina spotted one of Magistretti's chair designs and put it into production. "Firms that had been accustomed to make craft imitations of, for example, Louis XV period furniture, realized that things had to change," Magistretti recalls. "This new awareness was a major event and one that contributed to the duration of Italian design".
He reiterates his belief that effective design is that which endures. "Fashion, it seems to me, has done a lot of harm to Italian design," he says. "A good design product must last 50, 100 years. Let me insist, the most odious word in design today is 'style'."
Magistretti's world of perfectly realized objects includes the umbrella, because "it doesn't refer to any style at all, but rather to a use". Simplicity is the key to an enduring design, he says, acknowledging that attaining this is easier said than done. The legendary design figure's new work includes an extension to the Cusano Milanino town hall (he designed the original in 1968), as well as a Biella factory renovation for Nino Cerrutti.
The most famous design by Magistretti is likely his Eclisse lamp (1967) for Italian manufacturer Artemide. Its spherical shape is emblematic of 1960s Utopianism, but its inspiration was in fact a traditional lantern. Eclisse is still in production. He calls the practices of architecture and design "like mountains and the sea. Two opposite but important aspects of the same panorama". The architect and designer's Chimera lamp, also still produced by Artemide, was designed from Magistretti's description to the manufacturer over the phone, perhaps driving home his point that design is indeed a dialogue.

Publication Date: 2004-02-22
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=3661