Fondazione Achille Castiglioni

Achille Castiglioni

Architect-Designer | Magenta | From the 1960s to the end of the millennium

Biography

Born in Milan on 16 February 1918, he took a degree in Architecture in 1944. Starting in 1940, he conducted experimentation on industrial products with his brothers Livio and Pier Giacomo. He was assigned a lecturing post in 1969, and was a full professor at the Department of Architecture in Turin until 1980, and then in Milan until 1993. In 1956 he was one of the founders of ADI. He received many prizes and honors, including nine Compasso d’Oro awards. From 1984 to 1995 two solo shows of his work were organized, which traveled to 14 cities around the world. The name of Castiglioni is associated with a very vast number of objects: lighting fixtures, radios, stereo systems, furniture and tableware. He was also very active in the field of exhibit and display design. He died in Milan on 2 December 2002.

In 1957, at Villa Olmo in Como, you and your brother designed the interiors of a modern house. A living room for “The Home of Today.” Your play had become a laboratory of experiences. You assembled common, banal objects to transmute them into new forms. Ready-mades that granted new life to refuse. Stools, armchairs, wall bookcases. All prototypes that later became standard products. Made with the hands, more than by means of drawings. The same thing happened at Palazzo Strozzi, in Florence, in 1965, with “The Inhabited House.” Tables, flatware, wall clocks. These treasure troves packed with ideas brought you international honors and prizes over the years, but for you what counted was to continue to have good hands, enthusiasm and visions.

In the meantime the studio was moved. In 1962 the decrepit building on Corso di Porta Nuova was demolished. Today nothing remains of the city of your father, your grandfather. Only memories. Only stories. With Pier Giacomo, you found a ground floor space on Foro Bonaparte. From the studio window you could see the reassuring bulk of Castello Sforzesco. For forty years that studio welcomed helpers, friends, colleagues, fans. You gathered anonymous objects there, models, rough drafts, in a sort of playful Wunderkammer.

It took the early death of your brother Pier Giacomo, in 1968, to make you understand the emptiness of loss. And the duty of inheritance. Together, you had designed the new facility of the Permanente, the church of San Gabriele on Via delle Termopili, that gem of interior design that was the Splügen Bräu bar – in a building by your friend Caccia Dominioni – dismantled years later by shortsighted new management. Pier Giacomo had already been teaching at the Polytechnic for about a decade. Now it was your turn to move forward with this transmission of knowledge. In 1969 you gained a lecturing post. You became a professor, even though you still had fun spangling the ceiling of your studio with playing thousand-lire bills attached with thumbtacks. First in Turin, starting in 1971, in “Artistic Design for Industry” (what a great way to define all your activity, much more apt and true than the banal, pretentious term used in English, “industrial design”). Than at “your” Polytechnic, in Milan, until 1993.

Your formal experiments, your cheeky youthful games (at a university exam, when you were still in your teens, you submitted a model for a Casa del Fascio made out of cheese), are now exhibited in prestigious museums all over the world. The more they imitated your works – feeble emulations that aped the forms without understanding the philosophy – the more amused you were. Go ahead, you thought, copy! It means I was on the right track when I was playing with the material. For you, the important thing was to know how to make fun of yourself, “like Jacques Tati, and also not to make too big a deal out of this ‘design,’ to take society for what it is…”

Actually, of all your projects, all your works – the Mezzadro chair, the Arco, Parentesi and Gibigiana lamps, the Dry flatware – your true favorite was a simple electrical switch. A light switch. Every day, even now, hundreds of thousands of units are still being produced. Who knows how many electricians have installed it, how many are still installing it, without knowing who designed it. A device in thermosetting plastic that simply performs its function. An anonymous piece by an anonymous author. It takes humilitas, as the Borromeos remind us. It takes Milan to explain who you were, Achille.

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