DESIGN in ITALIA. THE MAKING OF AN INDUSTRI

DESIGNinITALIA

The first great homage to the three generations of entrepreneurs who, together with projects designers, craftsmen and specialists built the image of Italian design in the world.

What is the true face of design in Italy? The already famous and well-known one of the great designers? That of the many products that created the image of Made in Italy in the world? Or is it not rather the physical presence of hundreds of entrepreneurs who starting in the fifties believed and invested in first person in the values of creativity and project design? This book published by 5 Continents Editions proposes a radical hypothesis: without these entrepreneurs Italian design would have been drastically different, or would have not even existed.

The historical and critical analysis of Stefano Casciani and the portraits of the Norwegian photographer Tom Sandberg describe the figures of the industrialists many of whom started out from small craft shops with a burning desire for success after the difficult years of the war, almost all starting at a young age. Profoundly convinced that the values of artisan handcraft quality could be part and parcel even of serial production of objects, they believed in a new form of elegance and made the birth of truly iconic objects possible - furniture, lamps, and many others that created the unmistakable physiognomy of the “new domestic landscape “ of Made in Italy.

In the essay by Casciani, using a simple and direct language, sometimes pitiless but always passionate, all of the phenomenon of the industry of lifestyle is re-seen in its intimate essence - social, economic, and existential - and in its relationships with art and style, revealing the “behind the scenes” of a phenomenon that many believe that they know, but that still hides many other truths. From the structural difficulties to the inconveniences of the star-system, from the gruelling research for innovation to the new role of high finances. The faces of mythical industrialists- from Alberto Alessi to Ernesto Gismondi, from Bruno Danese to Riccardo Sarfatti, from Roberto Poggi to Giulio Cappellini but also the younger generations, like the three children of Aurelio Zanotta to Patrizia Moroso- these are portraits with an affectionate and lucid glance by the Norwegian photographer Tom Sandberg, which throw a new light on the physiognomy of contemporary Italian production.

As Massimiliano Fuksas, one of the greatest Italian contemporary architects and designers, writes in his introduction: ”Stefano Casciani …overturns the conventional critical praxis, and without being intimidated by the worlds of economy or politics, tells of the Italian production, and the men and women of design, with great precision. From the pioneering beginnings to the reorganizations of the present day. Tom Sandberg shows us the faces of a few of them, sometimes without pity. For Casciani (as with the image for Sandberg) writing is a weapon - his style cuts like a razor.”

text by Stefano Casciani
photographs by Tom Sandberg
introduction by Massimiliano Fuksas
edited by Gunda Dworschak