Silver chair for De Padova, in aluminum and polypropylene, 1989 Photo: De Padova
Vico Magistretti would have turned 100 on October 6: Reason enough for the global design community to celebrate. Yet one hundred years now represents a critical age. Just a few years ago, the magic number still stood for the threshold to a special form of perpetuity. A designer or architect who passed this point without being forgotten almost automatically entered a virtual Design Mount Olympus of sorts. Things have, however, changed since. Sometimes all that lies between the status of design star and oblivion is a single season. This never applied to Magistretti. Nevertheless, it is getting increasingly crowded in the place where the gods and goddesses of design live. Since the 1920s the number of important active players who have left behind a relevant oeuvre in the field of design – including new and rediscovered bodies of work – has increased dramatically.
Vico Magistretti’s work continues to be rediscovered by each new generation. During his lifetime, he taught in Venice, Milan, Vienna and London, training designers who included the likes of Patricia Urquiola, Jasper Morrison and Konstantin Grcic studied under him at the Royal College of Art in London. And right now he is drawing you designers under his spell once again. For example, with his chairs: “I made about 50 chairs in my life,” Vico Magistretti said in retrospect, “of which maybe ten will stick around. But if I hadn’t made all 50, those ten wouldn’t exist either.”
Design theorist Anniina Koivu, who teaches at ECAL University of Art and Design in Lausanne, recently published an analysis of the 300 most important furniture items designed by Vico Magistretti. After all, 70 of them are still on the market – or back on the market. Students of the university also turned a contemporary gaze on some of the furniture items and lamps by staging them for photographs. Most notably however, they traced the fate of 12 iconic designs and researched what led to production of them being discontinued. Sometimes this was due to a large number of imitations flooding the market, other times it was down to the production having become too expensive over time. And in yet other cases, the products had received a great response in the media but were not commercially successful. The analysis drew on sources including the archive of the Fondazione Vico Magistretti in Milan, magazine articles and interviews with companies and their earlier decision makers. While this approach may be exemplary and interesting in terms of design history, it nevertheless doesn’t explain the continuing success of many Magistretti products, which have remained in focus both for manufacturers and buyers. Magistretti’s work is not a matter for obsessive collectors. Rather, his stance is reflected in the practical use value of his objects, and it is this which has allowed them to weather many trends.