Geometric Forms #Vico Magistretti

The Carimate chair, designed for the golf club that he built in the Italian town of Carimate in 1959, was one of Ludovico Magistretti’s first products in a particularly fruitful career as an industrial designer. This chair, with its characteristic red color, became an unexpected success, especially in Great Britain, where it was distributed by Terence Conran. Starting in the 1960s, Magistretti began to collaborate assiduously with some of the great Italian design companies, such as Artemide or Cassina, so that his work as a designer would gradually eclipse his work as an architect.

Research with plastic materials occupied much of his work as a designer. Magistretti’s stackable chair Selene is together with Verner Panton’s Panton and Joe Colombo’s Universale the first chair made entirely of plastic. Magistretti used plastic technology also in the field of lighting. The Dalú lamp, produced by Artemide, made the base and the reflector with a single melamine piece thanks to its intelligent geometry. Plastic materials and geometric purity are also the main characteristics in other lamps produced by Artemide, such as Telegono or Chimera, although the small Eclisse table lamp particularly stands out among them. With its spherical pieces and its lid to regulate the emitted light, Eclisse obtained the Compasso d’Oro in 1967.

I love geometric forms. I love making essential things that seem nothing Vico Magistretti.

Magistretti was for many years Oluce’s art director. He designed for this Italian lighting firm such well known lamps as Atollo, an abstract revision of the archetype of table lamp that also obtained the Compasso d’Oro in 1979, or the pendant lamp Sonora, also characterized by its radical geometry.