Michele De Lucchi Gets Personal

Italo designer and co-founder of Memphis movement balances artistic, commercial pursuits

It's said that design is a marriage of art and commerce, and no one may be more keenly aware of this than architect and designer Michele De Lucchi, whose career has been marked by significant achievements at both ends of this wide spectrum.
De Lucchi first came to prominence more than 20 years ago when he helped to found the Memphis design movement along with the legendary Ettore Sottsass. The post-modern Memphis movement was characterized by a colourful and playful approach which nonetheless had as its core a serious repudiation of the functionalist designs which dominated much of mid-20th century architecture and product design. Memphis whimsy - with a tip of the hat to 1950s kitsch - became design's flavour of the month but it stuck around for much of the 1980s. De Lucchi's contribution was the First chair, which seemed to straddle a fine line between something brave and new and a design linked to history. The chair's back and armrest were made of a steel tube shaped to form a circle, and First's backrest was a flexible round wood disk attached with rubber bearings. The armrests were two wood spheres and the entire finished product suggested both a familiar minimalism as well as a shaking off of a dull conformity. First was the chair as a design manifesto.
De Lucchi's contributions to the Memphis movement raised his career profile and industry soon came calling. As the movement began to wane at the end of the 1980s, the Milan-based De Lucchi teamed with fellow designer Giancarlo Fassina to produce the Tolomeo task lamp for Artemide. The lamp's cantilevered structure, fully rotational diffuser and spring balancing system would earn the designers the coveted Compasso d'Oro award in 1989. Domus magazine calls Tolomeo "one of the great success stories of contemporary lighting design".
In 1990, however, a restless De Lucchi took a break from the demands of industrial production and formed a small studio, Produzione Privata, which focused on unique, largely hand-made designs. The designer's studio continues today, with work in bent and blown glass, as well as metals, woods and pottery. De Lucchi says this studio work is about "entirely individual intuitions. For me, this is the quest for a style, for a personal way of designing, clearly recognizable handwriting." The designer re-worked his classic Tolomeo as part of his studio work and came up with the Macchina Minima. It resembles the Artemide product, but a greater complexity precludes the design from ever being mass produced. Another studio product, the Meteora wall lamp, juxtaposes delicate opaque glass with a smooth river rock as its centrepiece. Although strictly limited runs, the Produzione Privata designs are sold world-wide.
De Lucchi hasn't completely turned his back on industrial production. A collaboration with Huub Ubbens yielded the recent Castore lighting series for Artemide. The Castore floor lamp features an opaque glass globe perched on a thin plastic and metal column. The light from the globe travels and dissipates in the upper plastic portion of the column, creating a poetic effect. Design writer Deyan Sudjic says De Lucchi's work exhibits a "sure touch with materials and a confident, unfussy approach to form."
Having proven himself as a designer capable of commercial successes such as Tolomeo, De Lucchi continues to explore the artistic dimension of design through hand-made objects "charged with reflections, feelings, questions and searchings".

Publication Date: 2004-11-28
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=4655