Finding life in an object

Italian design master Achille Castiglioni delighted in useful designs

For Italian design great Achille Castiglioni, form always followed function. In a career spanning almost 60 years, Castiglioni produced industrial design icons such as the Mezzadro chair (1957) and the Arco lamp (1962) which emphasized a utility, but still suggested a sense of creative wit. The Milanese designer helped to de-mystify modern design and, along with 1960s peers such as Joe Colombo and Marco Zanuso, he introduced Italian product design to a world audience. Thanks to the work of Castiglioni and his contemporaries, Italian design continues to enjoy an international reputation for the highest quality.
Castiglioni passed away three years ago at the age of 84, but he was working on new design projects until the end of his life. As always, his design process was concerned with an object's function, rather than its look, believing that if the functional challenge was met, good aesthetics would naturally follow. Castiglioni once said that a designer needs "a constant and consistent way of designing, not a style".
A freelance architect and designer since his graduation from the Politecnico di Milano in 1944, Castiglioni maintained career-long associations with a core group of manufacturer clients, including Alessi, Flos and Zanotta. He began his career by joining the Milan design studio of older brothers Livio and Pier Giacomo. The trio earned a solid reputation for their exhibition designs before Livio left the firm in 1952 to pursue solo work in lighting and sound design. Castiglioni exhibit designs continued, but product designs such as Mezzadro soon began earning a higher profile for the brothers. In this and other projects, they explored the use of found objects to challenge conventional ideas about product design.
The classic form of a city street lamp inspired Achille and Pier Giacomo to design their Arco lamp for Flos. The light source is a full eight feet removed from its marble base, effectively bringing an outdoor lighting effect indoors. Their iconic Sella seat - a quirky combination of leather bicycle seat, metal stem and rounded cast iron base - suggested a new genre of seating for the restless and pointed to the brothers' delight in using humour in their work.
Following Pier Giacomo's premature death in 1968, Achille Castiglioni augmented his design work by teaching at the major polytechnical schools in Turin and Milan until 1993. Paola Antonelli, the design curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art, was one of his students. "He typically came to class with a large Mary Poppins-like black bag," Antonelli remembers, "from which he would extract and line up on the table that day's chosen pieces from his stupendous collection of found objects: toys made from beer cans that he had bought in Teheran, galoshes from the USSR, wooden stools from Aspen, Colorado. Castiglioni chose to show objects that clearly had a life of their own, derived from material culture and independent of any designer's name. By emphasizing that the success of these objects resulted from their fulfilling a functional task with wit and common sense and within the available resources, he initiated his students' discovery of the design process for themselves".
The designer's widow, Irma Barni Castiglioni, is planning to turn her husband's Piazza Castello area studio into a design museum, where many more will be able to examine Castiglioni's diverse collection of objects and get some sense of the processes that drove his own legendary work. His designs are only part of his legacy - Castiglioni helped to raise the standard for Italian design in general and he also taught new generations of designers to value the utility of objects. If an object also brought a smile to a face, Achille Castiglioni believed, it was even more valuable.

Publication Date: 2005-08-21
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=5482