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By Decio G.R. Carugati
The city recites the daily involvement of people and things, where, alas, the times are only those of mere action, but here of inventory, of memory, of reflection. The Studio Castiglioni, at 27 Piazza Castello in Milan, is a welcoming threshold for sharing an unexpected magic.
In a curious parallel, and certainly at the same time unconscious, the hut frees man from the condition of being wild in the wilderness, pursued pursuer, and for the first time induces him not to disperse gestures and words, to be a collector of emotions, to make choices, to plan the quality of life.
An ancestral feeling permeates the entire space where a simulated chaos reigns, though actually everything has its own justification. The impression you get is of a chamber of wonders, where all the items might rebel if they were unhappily arranged differently. But unlike what happens in Maurice Ravel's opera L'enfant et les Sortilèges, the items here suffer no damage because they are already arranged in apparent disorder, like the notes waiting on a musical stave. Objects arranged in a desire to reinterpret their use or fashion something new.
One of the earliest examples of the correct redefinition of the form is a 1940 Phonola. Livio and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, with Luigi Caccia Dominioni, reconfigured the radio receiver, improperly called a "radio set," restoring the unit to the representation of its function. The Phonola was to be the archetype of all the models produced in Italy after the war.
Livio left the firm in 1952 and so Pier Giacomo began his long partnership with his younger brother Achille.
Milan in that period was at the start of its great season: it was an international design center with the Triennale and the ongoing art-design-industry debate. Virgilio Vercelloni writes: "The series of masterly designs by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni in the period were largely the result of an artistic and human partnership even before it produced its first technical and professional results ... The Toio lamp of 1962 for Flos is a clear example of a slightly tweaked readymade. It skillfully combined a car headlight, a standard transformer and a few sections of fishing rod."
This brings to mind earlier projects by the Castiglioni brothers: Mezzadro and Sella (1957). Again in 1962, continues Vercelloni, they designed the Arco lamp for Flos. It grew out of "the idea of lighting a work table from the corner of a room. The formal model for this design was surreal. It was one of the first models of rustic lamps reinterpreted here. Before Arco there had never been a lamp capable of constructing new spaces."
By the range of their work in those years, Achille and Pier Giacomo were the creators of undisputed design icons. An example is the Pitagora espresso machine for La Cimbali, which won the Compasso d'Oro award in 1962. It corresponds closely to Giulio Carlo Argan's definition of the industrial product: "Everything that the industry produces is designed from multiple standpoints: economic, technical, aesthetic. For each kind of product, however, there are different values that are not dependent on the cost of the materials or production times, but the method of design ... A product is well designed when the practical and aesthetic factors are not added together or superimposed but integrated, because they were designed together."
With the death of Pier Giacomo in 1968 and Livio in 1979, for more than twenty years Achille (who died in 2002) remained the only witness and continuer of the Castiglioni brothers' conceptual and practical excellence.
In an interview with Ottagono in 1970, Achille explained the design of the Arco lamp. "We were thinking of a lamp that would shed its light on a table. Some already existed, but you had to go all the way around them. To leave the space around the table uncluttered, the base would have to be at least two meters away. This gave rise to the idea of the arch. We wanted to make it out of products already on the market, and found a curved steel section that was just right. Then there was the problem of a counterweight, we needed a heavy mass to support it. We thought of concrete at first, but then chose marble because for the same weight it gave us a smaller volume and then a better finish at lower cost. In Arco nothing is decorative. Even the beveled sides of the base have a function, they ensure you don't bark your shins. Even the hole isn't fanciful. It's so you can lift the base more easily."
The use of marble was not confined to Arco. It was carefully studied over the years that followed. In the timeline of the firm's products the earlier ones were still designed by both brothers, the rest by Achille alone. Examples of the continuity of an intention, the rigor of an exclusive design ethic, they are part of the inventory, memory, narrative. The Studio Castiglioni, at 27 Piazza Castello in Milan, is a welcoming threshold for sharing an unexpected magic.
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