This text aims to revisit some of the most important stories from the vast scenario of authors and productive modalities of images in Italian furniture design. Italian products were synonymous of a style, of originality, of inventive elegance. It was a surprise. Yet for it to become a discourse and a narrative, it needed to be expressed. It was graphic designers who modeled and visualized a symbolic universe where consumers met products. And before owning the chair or the armchair, the sofa, or the house object with a modern design and innovative material, consumers met their images, names and qualities within the pages of advertisements, catalogues and magazines. Our goal is to identify, in certain figures and cases, the peculiarities of visual communication’s contribution to productive modalities that influenced a product segment that is still important today. Indeed, the powerful visual device introduced by certain authors and graphic studios contributed to the affirmation through time of the values of a cultural and entrepreneurial model that remains a reference point for a Italy’s national economy. Thus we list an incomplete yet useful series of cases that may help to delineate the evolution of a disciplinary and professional culture.
Enrico Ciuti: painting and design
Enrico Ciuti (1910–1991) may be considered an anticipator of the virtuous relationship between architects-designers and artists-graphic designers. He worked with Luciano Baldassari, Marcello Nizzoli, Gustavo Pulitzer and above all Gio Ponti, designing covers, posters, panels and decorative elements. Since the 1950’s, he developed a solid professional activity for Ideal Standard. This ceramic company innovated the sanitary services theme with the 1954 PontiZ series (designed by Gio Ponti) — the first example of industrial design in the sector. His pictorial approach, somewhat similar to Ponti’s style, modeled and illustrated the company’s cultural evolution. Ciuti designed advertising pages with delicate strokes and tones, offering a stylized physiognomy of products. Yet, he also used mature and coordinated tones, creating an articulate visual score capable of uniting abstract and geometrical compositions with a narrative use of photographic images; a testimony of the company’s reality. This multiple vision happily married the new spirit of the product with the productive and technological environment of the company. Ciuti’s gentle style went beyond the vision of the “painter-advertiser”, creating a planned and orchestrated communication, as in his works for Tecno (1956) and for Riello (1964), a heating devices company.
Provinciali’s style
Culture, history, artistic patrimony, genius loci, sense of origins, mystery: these are the instruments used by Michele Provinciali (1923–2009), an ”anomaly” within the time’s anomalous scenario, an unexpected alternative to functionalism. His humanistic approach was evident ever since his first works. In 1954 he designed image and layout for the Industrial Design section of the famous X Milan Triennale, a fundamental date for Italian design. This experience already fully evidenced the sensitivity and poetic spirit he instilled within his work. We could have expected a canon, a rigid visual order and cataloguing influenced by the Swiss approach: on the contrary Provinciali opted for an unpredictable use of daily objects, and created a vision capable of narrating stories, through which the author aimed to synthesize the destiny and limits of nascent industrial design. His tender, magical and eloquent approach is the most poignant element of his work; he observed the world of design through the keyhole. Some of his works also underlined unexpected or bizarre effects. This instinct to seek in shapes and materials the maximum degree objects’ truthfulness, to the point of codifying them into symbols, was his system for creating images such as for Kartell, characterized by an abysmal distance from systemic models. When looking at his advertisements and catalogues, when reading the house organ Qualità or when facing the Kartell packaging, we are sucked into a visual whirlwind that transfigures products and turns them into fables. Corporate design becomes an oral project, as new material is visualized as if it were people chattering within a marketplace. This approach appears light-hearted, yet hides a deep and refined procedure. His design is a enchanted place, a truly unique moment that represents in many ways the perfect parallel of Italian industrial design.
Confalonieri+Negri: wide-ranging graphic design
The collaboration between Giulio Confalonieri (1926-2008) and Ilio Negri (1926-1974) began in 1956 and provided an infinite series of logos and images for furnishing companies. Their initials, often completed by the name Studio Industria, appear frequently within the architecture magazines of those years. Their exemplary projects include famous brands which marked the history of Made in Italy, as well as many others which disappeared through time. This designer duo was truly special, and united in magisterial fashion many aspects of visual language. Confalonieri had an enormous consciousness of signs’ arcane strength. A determination to find indelible signs. Negri was instead a refined arranger: apparently more secluded, in truth he represented the motor of the projects’ narrative capacity. This style can be observed in their advertising pages, yet also in the construction of coordinated images, such as for Boffi. Their work on the brand, on its declinations and hypertrophic visualization proceeded parallel to images that displayed products, as well as frugal and daily objects, in a somewhat disorderly fashion, as if upon a domestic notice board. Alongside pages in an exasperated black and white are others featuring tonal coatings and chromatic overprintings on photographs and furniture details. The duo’s sign is always brilliant and original.
Iliprandi: design, sofas and kitchens
At the end of the 1960’s, Giancarlo Iliprandi (1925) was the true multi-instrumentalist. He was a designer, an illustrator, a photographer, art director and a professional activist. This list of activities is already enlightening. While illustrating fair pavilions with well-known Milanese architects and taking photographs for new-born magazines, such as Abitare, he also led the crucial moments of two important companies of the sector: Arflex and RB Rossana. Sofas, armchairs and kitchens.
What was previously considered an intuition now became a communicative strategy. The main character of this process is the graphic designer, director of the company’s visual system: only he can manage the aforementioned parallel levels and make them collide. Graphic design is the research of a methodical process aiming to solve problems involving industrial themes. This is a precise method to establish rules not only for an anonymous serial production, but for the visual coordination.
Iliprandi allowed the experimental horizon of design, modeling and alternating languages. In particular with his visual and verbal contrasts: he associates easy and gratifying slogans with fluorescent images with unnatural colors. The 1977 poster Stiamo in casa (lit. Let’s stay in) is exemplary: a summary of all juvenile anti-cultures, printed in fluorescent colors like underground magazines and featuring a text which quotes beat epics and the reiterated enchantment of songs of protest.
FMR and Scic
In 1963 Renzo Fornari, a housing entrepreneur from Parma, founded SCIC, a company for the production of composable kitchens. It was 1966 and Franco Maria Ricci (1937) prepared a series of extremely coordinated pages, linked to each other by a narrative line capable of understanding and declining pop images. Kitchens and products were not shown, but the communicative tone was happy, joyous and suggestive.
The reference to the kitchen was evidenced by the use of images of typical tools as colored icons. Spoons, knives, graters and chopping knives were sketched and printed in brilliant colors. Within the layout, vaguely similar to the organization of cutlery in a draw, these icons were however associated to heterogeneous references: cars, shoes and clothes, travel tickets, fortune-telling symbols and many more. The use of verbal-visual rhetoric, of typographic models from the past, of emblems and medals worthy of a universal expo set the context for humorous texts somewhat close to non-sense. However any doubts about the seriousness of the enterprise could easily be dismissed by the sight of its plant, next to the Autostrada del Sole highway: a linear prefabricated building featuring a large brand sign.
Noorda, Vignelli, Gregorietti: the International Style
Unimark International represents the affirmation of project as a system. The idea was to create a canon for the positioning of a company and to provide it with a status. This could only be done through an excellent management of the complete image and through a high degree of efficacy in expressive synthesis.
The projects of Bob Noorda (1927-2010), Massimo Vignelli (1931-2014) and Salvatore Gregorietti (1941) defined certain visual corollaries that became an actual language for companies worldwide. They offered a new visual suit, elegant and tailor-made, for mature and consolidated companies. The images for Tecno, Cassina, Brionvega were born from a consciousness of positioning. Products were shown as visual absolutes in photographs by Aldo Ballo and Oliviero Toscani. The black and silver of the backgrounds was blinding. Advertisements for companies selling museum pieces, for products whose aesthetic value is above all a sign of distinction. Those were the years of the great success of the business of design.