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NY Times
September 22, 2006
V. Magistretti, 85, Furniture Designer, Dies
By MARGALIT FOX
Vico Magistretti, an architect and industrial designer celebrated as the dean of Italian modernism for his sculptural furniture and lamps of the 1960's and afterward, died on Tuesday in Milan. He was 85 and had lived and worked in Milan all his life.
John Ryan, the senior sales manager for the furniture maker Kartell U.S., confirmed the death, but could provide no details. Based in New York, Kartell U.S. is a subsidiary of the Italian company Kartell S.p.A., which manufactures many of Mr. Magistretti's designs.
Mr. Magistretti's death came four days after that of Ivan Luini, the founder and president of Kartell U.S., who died in a plane crash last Friday.
Information on Mr. Magistretti's survivors was not immediately available.
The recipient of many international design awards, Mr. Magistretti was at the vanguard of a group of postwar Italian designers who helped define the sleek, insouciant look of the Swinging Sixties. His pieces are characterized by bright colors, clean, unembellished lines, playful use of homely objects and often witty reinterpretations of familiar designs from the past.
Mr. Magistretti, whose works are in the collections of many major museums around the world, was among the first designers to create home furnishings out of plastic. This helped to make high style easily reproducible in quantity, bringing it within reach of the general public.
Among his most recognizable designs is the Carimate chair. With its simple, airy frame, rush seat and elegant concave arms, the chair became ubiquitous in cafes and living rooms worldwide. Mr. Magistretti's best-known lamps include the Eclisse (Eclipse) table lamp, which features an illuminated globe that can be rotated to give off varying amounts of light.
Vico Magistretti was born in Milan on Oct. 6, 1920. His father was an architect, and the younger Mr. Magistretti followed him into the profession, earning an architecture degree from the Milan Polytechnic Institute in 1945.
Beginning in the 1950's, Mr. Magistretti designed buildings in Milan and elsewhere, including offices, private homes and a church. By the early 60's, his attention turned increasingly to interior furnishings.
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One of his most enduring creations is the Atollo, a table lamp most commonly made of metal. The Atollo is all geometric silhouette: a wide cylinder, pointed at the top like a fat crayon, is capped by a hemisphere-shaped shade. The lamp is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Another lamp, the Chimera, is a floor lamp made of a sheet of twisted white plexiglass. Nearly six feet high, it resembles a tall curtain hanging in sinuous folds.
Mr. Magistretti sometimes liked to transform ordinary objects into household furniture. Visiting an equestrian shop in London, he was captivated by a display of woolen horse blankets. He bought the lot and, using Velcro to secure the blankets to wooden frames, created his famous Sinbad chair.
In other designs, Mr. Magistretti reworked - and often gently tweaked - enduring perennials. One of these, his Silver chair, is an homage to a classic design by Marcel Breuer from the 1920's. In Mr. Magistretti's rendition, Breuer's wooden frame has been replaced by aluminum; the seat and back of woven cane have become perforated plastic.
In an interview with The New York Times in 1989, Mr. Magistretti rejected the idea that works like the updated Breuer were paeans to the past.
'I like memories, but this is a contemporary chair,' he said. 'I feel there is a need for memory, and for not throwing out the past, especially in Europe, where we have such a historic one. To be truly contemporary, one must always have a hand in the past and a hand in the future.'
Another bad news...
we have read last week that Timo Sarpaneva, a major Finnish designer, has died.
http://www.designaddict.com/design_index/index.cfm/fuseaction/designer_s...
I can't say why, but..
I absolutely love Mr. Sarpaneva's coffee set. Could someone explain the aesthetics of what he has done with a simple coffee set to make it not only elegantly simple and unusual, but also so right?
http://www.designaddict.com/design_index/index.cfm/fuseaction/showjumbo/...
Even for a nice person...
eighty years of a productive and eventfull live is quite an accomplishement....
The nice thing about the "Suomi"("Finland" in the language of the majority of finish population) is first of all the basic "super-elliptical" shape. It is not as perfect as a Piet Hein super egg, but it has the same self-contained quality and by being "squared" it invites the eye to look around the corner, a good way of inviting the observer to a closer "tactile" experience. Secondly, the level of consistency plays an important role. It is reached by building the smaller components out of "borrowed" parts of the bigger ones. The handle is almost identical to a strip cut out of the top of the shape. The handle of the cup with an unusual large radius and width also looks like a part of the larger cup shape, cut out and used as a handle. The lids have no knobs that would distract the eye from the main shape of the body.
I think that with (prof.)Wolf Karnagel's "Tavola" for Hutschenreuther and recently for Dankotuwa (Sri Lanka) It is one of the best designs of the 20th century
Damn, Koen, I wish I could think like a designer...
Every time I ask you to describe what is happening with a piece, you point to 3-5 things and, pow! Suddenly, I get it. And it always seems so obvious after the fact. You designers just have a minds eye for surfaces and forms that I seem to lack. I have a pretty good antennae for the exceptional (i.e., I recognize it when I see it), but I just can't explain what makes it so until someone holds my hand. Frustrating. I'm working on developing some facility in this regard, but I seem to have a very long way to go...and straight up. 🙁 Regardless, of my bout of self-pity, thanks very much for revealing the magic behind the magic.
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