Vico Magistretti (* 1920 in Milan; † 2006 in Milan), studied architecture and urban planning at the Champ Universitaire Italien de Lausanne in Switzerland and at the Polytechkinica in Milan. He started his career creating low cost furniture for those displaced in World War II before moving onto the design of mass produced furniture and lighting. For all in plastic. Vico Magistretti always attached great importance to high quality workmanship. For a design solution to be long-lived and of high quality, Vico Magistretti felt it had to be both beautiful and useful. A testament to this ethos is the fact of that an estimated 80% of Magistretti's designed products are still in production, including such classics as his Maui Chair range for Kartell. A dozen or so of his pieces are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
...Divided into ten sections Sixties Design starts in the 1950s before moving over "space age design" and pop art and on to anti-design and features works from the likes of Vico Magistretti, Joe Colombo, Verner Panton and Eero Saarinen...
Last summer we spent our annual holiday weekend in a small museum in the north of England discussing the life of a man who had hung himself 30 years previous. And folk say we don't know how to relax. The town was Macclesfield and the subject was Joy Division...
...In the 19070s, and with the security achieve dthrough the CASSINA I MAESTRI range, Cassina did the "Italian thing" of embracing new materials and new technologies and via the works of designers such as Mario Bellini or Vico Magistretti established themselves as an important and truly forward-thinking player in the international designer furniture scene...
