Should See Design Masters through the Milan Design Week
As we eagerly anticipate the beginning of the world’s most famous design occasion, reflecting on the period previous the Salone del Cell is intriguing. Designers of that point devoted their lives to observing the world and striving to reinforce particular person experiences. They refined every day gestures creating objects, welcoming areas, and envisioning cities with a profound love for neighborhood and artistic interplay.
These six figures (Achille Castiglioni, Aldo Rossi, Franco Albini, Gio Ponti, Gae Aulenti and Vico Magistretti) at the moment are virtually legendary. They had been all passionate people who infused their lives with magnificence and revolutionary concepts, from which we proceed to attract inspiration.
Under are a few of the most vital addresses that narrate the tales of those nice visionaries.
These personalities proceed to dwell via their buildings, objects, and publications, serving to us admire the previous with a progressive spirit.
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Legacy of Design Masters | Achille Castiglioni Basis
The Ironic and Ingenious Legacy of Italian Design Grasp
“Design is just not about aesthetics. It’s about ethics.”
This quote encapsulates the designer’s ethical dedication to creating practical, clever, and accountable objects.
Achille Castiglioni was one of the sensible Italian designers of the Twentieth century, identified for his ironic genius and love for practical simplicity. Castiglioni had the power to view on a regular basis objects via contemporary, playful eyes, leaving anmnenduring mark on the world of design. His most well-known quotes reveal a curious, deeply human spirit and joyful creativity.
Proper within the coronary heart of Milan, simply throughout from the Castello Sforzesco, lies an area that tells the story of this design grasp: the Studio Museum of Achille Castiglioni.
In 2011, the architect’s household signed an settlement with the Triennale di Milano to open his historic studio to the general public, remodeling it right into a fascinating museum. Since then, it has welcomed over 89,000 guests worldwide (as of 2024).
Pushed by a want to guard and rejoice Castiglioni’s extraordinary inventive legacy, the Achille Castiglioni Basis opened in 2014. Its mission is evident: to catalog, digitize, and share the huge archive accrued over greater than sixty years of labor—first in collaboration along with his brother Pier Giacomo, and later independently. The archive consists of drawings, images, fashions, movies, lectures, design objects, and publications.
Discover Castiglioni’s studio, a workshop the place the strange turned extraordinary. Guided excursions showcase iconic designs and his inventive course of, making him a design legend
Yearly, the Basis continues to honor his legacy with momentary exhibitions and cultural initiatives, conserving his imaginative and prescient alive: a design for folks—easy, practical, and stuffed with wit.
📍 The place: Achille Castiglioni Basis, Piazza Castello 27, Milan, Italy
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Legacy of Design Masters | Aldo Rossi Basis
Reminiscence, Type, and the Considered a Poetic Architect
“To construct is to recollect.”
Aldo Rossi was one of the influential architects and theorists of Twentieth-century Italy. He was identified for his profound and poetic reflections on structure, reminiscence, and town. His phrases usually rework the constructed surroundings right into a vessel for collective reminiscence.
In Milan, the Aldo Rossi Basis preserves the mental and artistic universe of this grasp of Italian structure. Constructed and curated over time by Rossi himself, the archive is a chronological journey via his initiatives, containing a wealth of fabric: competitors briefs, sketches, technical drawings, fashions, images, and paperwork. Every aspect reveals his theoretical meditations on the essence of kind and the soul of cities.
Established in 2005 by his heirs, the Basis’s mission is to preserve, catalog, and improve this extraordinary legacy. Along with architectural works, it homes writings, notes, images, and uncommon editorial supplies, lots of which stay unpublished. Visiting or researching the archive means getting into a laboratory of thought the place structure meets philosophy, artwork, and literature. It’s a place the place rigor meets poetry, and kind turns into storytelling.
📍 Location: Aldo Rossi Basis, Viale Ungheria 24 – Milan, Italy
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Legacy of Design Masters | Franco Albini Basis
The place Rigor Turns into a Type of Poetry
“One should strategy Design with honesty, readability, and respect for folks.”
Within the coronary heart of Milan, the Franco Albini Basis is a vibrant house the place the visionary considering of one of many founding figures of Italian design continues to unfold.
Established to protect, examine, and share the legacy of architect and designer Franco Albini, the Basis holds a exceptional assortment of drawings, initiatives, images, furnishings, objects, and archival supplies born from many years of labor throughout structure, city planning, and design.
A pioneer of Italian Rationalism, Albini mixed technical rigor with a refined lyrical contact. From his floating bookshelves to the Milan Metro trains, his creations mix precision, goal, and timeless magnificence. The Basis conserves this legacy and promotes Albini’s methodology and ethics via exhibitions, guided excursions, workshops, publications, and academic actions.
Positioned in his unique studio, the Basis welcomes guests, researchers, and design lovers, providing direct entry to the every day processes of Albini and his collaborators. It’s a place the place design is just not merely kind however thought—and accountability.
📍 Location: Franco Albini Basis, Through Telesio 13 – Milan, Italy
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Legacy of Design Masters | Gio Ponti Archives
The place Artwork Turns into the Most Enduring Materials
“Love structure, be completely happy, make others completely happy.”
Gio Ponti was one of the versatile and influential figures in Twentieth-century Italian design and structure. Architect, designer, artist, and founding father of Domus journal, he left behind a legacy wealthy in imaginative and prescient, innovation, and important thought. Very like his creations, his phrases are wealthy in magnificence, irony, and intelligence.
Within the inventive coronary heart of Milan, Ponti’s lightness, magnificence, and imaginative and prescient proceed to shine like pencil strokes on paper within the Gio Ponti Archives, positioned in his unique studio on Through Dezzo.
The archive is just not an strange one: it’s a dwelling laboratory of reminiscence—a constellation of concepts, pictures, and objects that illuminate the multifaceted universe of this design maestro. It started as a labor of affection by his daughter, Lisa Ponti, who meticulously collected and arranged photographic supplies. It has since grown because of the continuing efforts of Salvatore Licitra, who has curated and expanded the gathering since 1996.
Immediately, the archive serves as a dynamic and evolving database, housing architectural initiatives, design objects, writings, magazines, images, and uncommon unpublished supplies—spanning over fifty years of creativity from the Twenties to the Nineteen Seventies.
However past preservation, the Gio Ponti Archives interpret, join, and reignite. They doc Ponti’s genius throughout structure, industrial design, graphics, communication, and artwork, forming a fluid, ever-changing path via one of the fertile eras in Italian tradition.
Casa Gio Ponti – Through Dezza, Milano
📍 Location: Through Dezzo 49 – Milan, Italy
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Legacy of Design Masters | Gae Aulenti Archive
The place Structure Provides Voice to Our Time
“There isn’t any such factor as structure for ladies or males. There’s simply structure.”
Gae Aulenti was one of the charismatic and influential voices in Italian structure and design of the Twentieth century. She introduced a crucial, cultured, and deeply human strategy to each challenge. Gae Aulenti is rnowned for her visionary work in museums, public areas, furnishings, and concrete design.
Within the quiet, timeless streets of Brera, Milan, her former dwelling studio now homes the Gae Aulenti Archive—a treasured repository of ideas, kinds, and artistic gestures from a lady who left a luminous and indelible mark on the historical past of structure.
Established in 2012 by her household, the archive holds greater than 700 initiatives, forming a sweeping journey via buildings, museums, piazzas, lamps, stage units, furnishings, and visionary city plans. It’s an unlimited, compelling physique of labor that displays Aulenti’s interdisciplinary spirit, seamlessly transitioning from artwork to engineering, from home element to monumental scale.
The drawings, images, movies, and paperwork preserved right here live traces of a stressed, cultured, radically trendy thoughts. Born in 1927 in Palazzolo dello Stella and raised between Florence and Turin through the conflict, Aulenti graduated from the Politecnico di Milano in 1953. Her path advanced into a synthesis of artwork, structure, and narrative, sharpened throughout her youth at Casabella-Continuità below Ernesto Nathan Rogers.
Amongst her most celebrated works are the transformation of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Nationwide Museum of Catalan Artwork in Barcelona, and the restoration of Palazzo Grassi in Venice—together with iconic design items such because the Pipistrello lamp for Martinelli Luce and the Desk with Wheels for FontanaArte.
Immediately, the Archive isn’t just a spot of preservation however a bridge between previous and future, between the silence of drawing and the vitality of design. It invitations us to rediscover the gaze of a lady who knew learn how to filter the sunshine of her time and present it to future generations.
📍 Location: Gae Aulenti Archive, Through Fiori Oscuri 3 – Milan, Italy
Gae Aulenti’s former front room in Milan
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Legacy of Design Masters | Vico Magistretti
The Class of Thought, the Simplicity of the Line
“Drawing is a mind-set.”
Within the coronary heart of Milan, in a studio the place concepts took form below smooth mild and the rhythm of pencil on paper, Vico Magistretti’s imaginative and prescient nonetheless lives on.
Based in 2010, the Vico Magistretti Studio Museum Basis is greater than a spot of conservation—it’s a inventive reminiscence house, an invite to rediscover the ironic intelligence, formal readability, and poetic performance of one of many nice masters of Italian design.
Housed within the unique studio the place Magistretti labored all through his life, the Basis preserves an archive that tells the story of over sixty years of design from 1946 to 2006. By freehand sketches, technical drawings, images, and private correspondence, we glimpse a fluid, sensible design course of—able to remodeling a single thought into an object, at all times with folks on the middle.
The archive exhibits Magistretti’s work with main Italian design companies, many nonetheless supporting the Basis.
Between reminiscence and imaginative and prescient, the studio is now open to researchers, college students, professionals, and curious guests, bodily at Through Vincenzo Bellini 1 and digitally via an evolving and richly detailed on-line archive.
📍 Location: Vico Magistretti Studio Museum Basis, Through Vincenzo Bellini 1 – Milan, Italy
Don’t Miss :::: Superrgiù Exhibition on the Fondazione Vico Magistretti – From April third, 2025 to February twenty sixth, 2026
