I have a friend who’s aim is to build a wooden car. This is trully inspiring.
Archives for category: Italian designers
La sedia per visite corte, the chair for brief visits 1945
If her guests are unstimulating, if life seems to be rushing by, if time is pressing, if the need to hurry steals the minutes and the hours… then the seat is slippery, she is shorter than usual, her back higher… This is a chair for briefs visits. Bruno Munari
From Cicci Coco, an Arnone and Munari book
The greatest obstacle to understand a work of art is trying too hard. Bruno Munari
L’albero, di Bruno Munari
You are the average of the 5 persons you spend most time with.
A Roger Arquer design
Dans la société actuelle 1+1 ne fait pas toujours 2, mais peut aussi rester 1+1. Ceci est un aspect très intéressant, car l’absence de synthèse peut permettre d’utiliser différemment l’espace ouvert entre thèse et antithèse. On interrompt un cycle fonctionnel, en laissant les choses comme elles sont, mais en abattant le sens, pour en trouver un autre. Andrea Branzi
Biscotti, by Matteo Maggiolo
I didn’t like cookies so much when I first came to Italy. This country and its substances have a way to change my appetite in radical ways.
Every night we get together with Matteo there will be a tantrum of my part asking for biscotti.
This is one of the most beautiful gifts I ever received; a beautiful planet and the best illustrator I know gave it to me last night.
I was very excited with my new object so I took it all around the city to do some errands, I think people really got the fact that I like cookies.
I ended up forgetting the picture on the last bus I took when I came back home. Not a surprise. Patiently, I had to ride the same bus again and again, till I got it back.
Biscotti is a traveller and she’s part of my suitcase crew from now on.
Cover of the book for kids Cicci Cocco, Bruno Munari and Enzo Arnone
Most of the mistakes in thinking are inadequacies of perception rather than mistakes of logic. Edward de Bono
So many projects stayed in my mind from the architecture of the world Triennale exhibit. I saw these original drawings and an introduction to Ettore Sottssas utopian concept of the contemporary city, Planet as a festival. It was an instant attraction, beautiful composition, crazy drawings, colors and Sottsass.
For me, it was a different and interesting approach of the Non-stop city. Here are some interesting parts of this wonderful intro:
Production problems no longer exist. A few movements alone are sufficient, and the machines make everything by themselves in eternally repeating cycles.
‘Consumer goods’ automatically pile up in distributing points spread over the planet with a super abundance of basic goods and foodstuffs scattered at random.
The explosive decentralization of consumer good has pulverized our cities, has eliminated them from the face of the earth. They have been consumed by the jungle, by the silk cotton trees, by the desert. There are no longer men going to work because men are not needed in factories, and neither are there any temples of productivity and income any longer, since there is no directive to work. I mean no kind of directive, since one works only when one feels like it, since there is the super-possibility of communication.
In this way we have all become artisans-artists, furnished with super-instruments for doing what we feel like by ourselves. We are also nomad artists, we are free from the factory, the bureau, the supermarket, the ban, to find out everything and allows us to let everyone know everything about us without any static centralized power, We are our own representatives.
We are at appoint in which there are no more powers, but wandering fluxes of will and public passions, which are generated in some way, like the molecular movements and settlements of gases and liquids, like the sky settling with clouds coming and going…
I thought there was nothing let for me to design or architecture to draw, solitary, not group artist that I am, child of an era worried about the future (…). Maybe one day others will design temporary or permanent buildings to scatter like popcorn over the planet along the ancient migratory routes… conserving memories provoking smiles, boredom, and eroticism…
I design these projects as if they have designed by someone else, someone far removed from the trajectory of thought concerned with the city, since I considered that thought concerned with the city has, up to now, only projected, up to now, wherever it comes from and wherever it goes to, the insane, the sick, dangerous and aggressive idea that men must live only to work and must work to produce and the consume. (…)
I know from Nanda, when she came to understand with compassion that freedom can only com from the possible knowledge that each of us is living and that very slowly dying too.
More about this project here http://socks-studio.com/2011/09/08/ettore-sottsass-jr-the-planet-as-a-festival/
The bed-book, six cushions 70x70cm, in various materials
This is a book for children
a bed if one feels like it
a book one can live in
You can take a nap between its pages
There are little dreams right there
A soft dream about cats
a dream as rough as…
Lots of little dreams
Just lie down on the page of your choice
The diverse materials will prompt you
As when you snooze on the grass, or on
the beach, on a towel, spread on the sand
or on a velvet sofa or on a sheep-skin
The pages can be removed
and laid out as one wishes
The short sentences
can be mixed and matched
into stories
that are different every time
Each book is read (a bed)
but not every bed is a book
with its pages laid out at will on the floor
it creates a story you can touch
and change the way you want it.
Every book is read (a bed)
but this bed is experienced in
a different way every time.
Sweet dreams.
Bruno Munari 1993
Progettare architettura vuole anche dire disegnare un posto dove, due amici seduti per terra si raccontano, adagio, le storie de la loro vita.
India 1993, Ettore Sottsass, Foto dal Finestrino.
