Milan-based Michele de Lucchi (1951- ), architect and product designer, is known internationally for his chairs and lighting. Part of the Memphis group with Ettore Sottsass of early 1980s, de Lucchi has also had a successful career working with such international manufacturers as Artemide, Olivetti, and Vitra. This book provides a comprehensive overview of his career and documents all of his many projects to date. Also included are reprints of de Lucchi’s key critical writings.
Michele De Lucchi and AMDL Circle Connettome details the connections activated in the design work of Michele De Lucchi's studio, named AMDL CIRCLE since 2019.0Through a suggestive photographic sequence, the book traces the most significant creations of the studio, combined in order to make visible what the designer calls the "synapses of architecture", meaning the associations of emotions, memories and thoughts that stimulate new creativity. Covering over 20 years of activity, the images reveal a way of thinking about architecture and design in the light of a multidisciplinary, visionary, future-oriented - in a word, humanistic - approach. At the end of the book, which includes a text by De Lucchi, is a chronologically arranged selection of projects carried out in the new millennium, in the fields of architecture, interiors, installations, product design, graphics and research.
Ettore Sottsass Jr. - architect, designer, writer and artist - is a figure of international standing who needs no introduction. His career has been broadly documented and "Sottsass the man" was recounted in first person in the autobiography published in 2010. This photographic book sets out to talk about Sottsass by presenting a selection of photographs taken over almost 30 years by the designer's friend Giuseppe Varchetta, a psychologist with a passion for photography. Varchetta's portraits and the brief comments that accompany them connect the public figure and the private individual in a sort of emotional biography in images, a journey in stages from 1978 to the closing moments of Sottsass' life. The book also features a text by Marco Belpoliti that introduce the images and the figure, the long interview Ettore Sottsass gave to Hans-Ulrich Obrist in February 2001 (first published in 2003) and a farewell message by Sottsass' friend Michele De Lucchi. Text in English and Italian.
Founded in 1981, the international group of architects, Memphis, shook the design world to its foundations. Based in Italy and led by Ettore Sottsass, it overturned and re-shaped the pre-suppositions on which the production of so-called Modern Design is based. It became the almost mythical symbol of the New Design. Laughing out loud at our culture and at itself, Memphis pulled out all stops when it came to colour, pattern, decoration and ornamentation.
The Hot House is in part a manifesto and in part a noncanonical history of the most progressive and heretical experiments in the applied arts and design. Covering two centuries of avantgarde designs, but concentrating on the 1950s to the present, the book looks at architecture and urban design as well as graphic, interior, exhibit, industrial, and fashion design. It discusses the role that such magazines as Casabella, Domus, and Modo have played on this lively front, and provides an insider's view of such figures and groups as Alessandro Mendini, Gaetano Pesce, Alychmia, Global Tools, Michele De Lucchi, Ettore Sottsass, and-the design world's hot new movement-Memphis. It also elucidates such concepts as banal design, soft design, radical architecture, and color cultures, and relates these and other design developments to social and political issues. Protagonist of many of these experiments, Andrea Branzi calls for a theory and practice in which the old methods and instruments - pencil, square, and compass - are rendered obsolete, and the formal commandments of modernism - comfort, function, and style - are banished. If Branzi's vision of the new domestic landscape bears any relation to the future home, the places we live and objects around us are on the verge of being radically transformed. The Hot House dramatically expands the theoretical and operative limits of design. While precedents to Il Nuovo Design (The New Design) can be found in everything from Art Deco to De Stijl to Pop Art to California funk, Italy is the center of this new phenomenon and the "hot house" of its most intense activity. Beginning in the 1960s, there emerged a number of design studios that went by names like Archizoom, 9999, Superstudio, and UFO; their products redefined the basic architecture of furniture and clothing and polemicized an entire discipline. Andrea Branzi, architect and designer, has been a leading force in Italian design since the 1960s. As the founder of Archizoom Associates and member of the experimental design collective Global Tools, he is responsible for many of the experiments described in this book. He lives and works in Milan, where he is Educational Director of Domus Academy and Editorial Director of Modo.
The world and creativity of Elio Fiorucci seen from the inside and recounted by those who took part in his fashion adventure. The fashion and stores created by Elio Fiorucci in the late 1960s were a great creative hotbed for the following decades, anticipating many of the trends that emerged later and the ideas of the next generation of designers. Elio Fiorucci's innate curiosity led him to explore the unknown, to broaden his vision towards new currents of freedom of expression, beyond the borders of his country, in search of other energies. This book recalls his new, joyful, mocking, free realm, and the conception of unconventional clothing that upset the rules of the bourgeois, conformist world of the 1960s. It is a choral fresco, told through the letters of those who worked with him, including absolute beginners, professionals who knew him and shared his passions, family, and friends: architects such as Antonio Citterio and Michele De Lucchi, photographers, artists (Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, who decorated the entire Milan store in 1983), singers, and actors who attended his stores and parties. Direct testimonials come from the likes of Biba (Barbara Hulanicki), Oliviero Toscani, Donna Jordan, Terry Jones, Italo Lupi, Alessandro Mendini, Paul Caranicas and Joey Arias. The book also features a preface by Janie and Stephen Schaeffer, the current brand owners.
"The following pages comprise a sourcebook of over 1000 designs since the turn of the century. It is intended as a tool not only for the consumer, but also for those seeking inspiration in their own design work. Each object is presented with a caption providing full technical details, as well as the websites of the manufacturers, or designers where relevant. Commentaries throughout shed light on the work of personalities and on trends, making the book more than just a catalogue of desirable objects."--BOOK JACKET.
A new edition of the acclaimed monograph on the legendary designer, published to coincide with the centenary of his birth. The life and work of Ettore Sottsass is more relevant than ever, with exhibitions around the world and renewed collector interest in the Memphis movement. Now available in a new format, this book, packed with beautiful images taken from the extensive Sottsass archives and including drawings and sketches from the designer's countless sketchbooks, explores his entire career from the 1940s to the 2000s, covering everything from his architectural projects and product design to his jewellery, sculpture, and graphics.
