Architect, designer, entrepreneur, talent scout: Giulio Cappellini, with his brilliance and his projects, holds a prominent place in the history of Italian and international design.
Architect Giulio Cappellini was recently named by the American magazine Time among the ten trendsitters – literally "trend-setters" – in the fields of fashion and design at an international level, and described as an ambassador of excellence for Italian creativity in the world. With his open and far-sighted vision, his sure instinct and his unconventional, experimental approach to design, Cappellini has helped push the boundaries of Italian production and turn domestic design into an acclaimed, avant-garde international phenomenon, in which culture and business always go hand in hand.
During the Milan Design Week 2018, held from 17 to 22 April, we interviewed Cappellini at Superstudio Più, the space he launched in 2000 together with Gisella Borioli and of which he has once again become artistic director.
Cappellini, born in Milan in 1954, is an emblematic figure on the international design scene and is universally acknowledged as a talent scout of emerging young creatives. Since the mid-1980s, with incredible flair and tireless curiosity, he has tracked down – and continues to track down – new talents from around the world, acting as a springboard for their debut on the global design stage, which has often led them to become among the most established designers of their generation. These include Jasper Morrison, James Irvine, Carlo Colombo, Christophe Pillet, Patrick Norguet, Marc Newson, Nendo, brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, and Marcel Wanders, all protagonists of the contemporary scene. Among the illustrious names is also Shiro Kuramata, the great Japanese architect who passed away in 1991 and whom Cappellini was the first to introduce to Italy in 1986, with a major exhibition at the Museo di Milano, subsequently producing several of his iconic furnishing objects.
Design and the world of objects have been Cappellini's passion and constant commitment for nearly forty years. Tireless, warm, full of charm and elegance, with a gaze always directed forward, he maintains that "what one has only just thought up already seems obsolete" and that it is necessary to continuously look at oneself in the mirror and question one's assumptions. He has been the architect of the uniqueness of the design and furnishings company that bears his family name – today part of Haworth Group – which has become for everyone a byword for creative avant-garde.
Cappellini's sought-out and chance encounters with various figures – including Queen Elizabeth II of England – are described in the book Metodo Cappellini. Il sogno declinato, edited by Francesca Serrazanetti and published by Electa. The book is a kaleidoscope of memories, encounters, objects, places and colours that illustrate his design vision, poised between rationality and imagination, and his eclectic, personal method of working. Drawing on the traditional values of made in Italy – creativity, quality, craftsmanship – and on his formidable instinct, Cappellini has been able to cross geographical and cultural boundaries to create innovation, with the conviction that design "must be able to make people dream." "This book is a synthesis of my experiences, dreams, projects and achievements in the world of design," says the architect and creative who is its protagonist. "A miscellany of personal memories, extraordinary encounters, the creation of objects and ideas. But it is not a point of arrival. The question mark on the cover opens onto new forthcoming answers about the frontiers of design in general, and of made in Italy design in particular."
The Cappellini products that have become part of the history of Italian design and have turned into true icons are countless: from the Thinking Man's Chair, the iron armchair by Jasper Morrison that has become a classic, to the Knotted Chair by Marcel Wanders made from rope, the S-Chair by Tom Dixon with its unmistakable S-shaped silhouette, the Wooden Chair by Marc Newson, a masterpiece of wood-strip bending technique, and the Rainbow Chair by Patrick Norguet, a surprising example of striped coloured methacrylate, to the black-and-white curved chest of drawers by Shiro Kuramata, a virtuoso exercise in craftsmanship. Research and experimentation have generated products with very different expressive and poetic languages that coexist magically and without contradiction within the company's catalogue.
In 1992 Cappellini created an unconventional installation at the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan, a then-derelict and abandoned industrial space, which marked a turning point in the way furniture was presented. And from 2000 onwards, the Superstudio space in Via Tortona in Milan became a major hub of the Fuorisalone – the Design Week events held throughout the city – after Cappellini used it as the exhibition venue for his company.
It was Gisella Borioli and her husband Flavio Lucchini, as the new owners of this old industrial space, who asked him to promote it. And he responded by organising memorable installations, showcasing astonishing objects and giving visibility to unknown young designers. The grand parties held from 2000 to 2004 on the evenings before the opening of the Salone del Mobile – the international furnishings fair held every year in Milan – also entered the history of the Fuorisalone, with thousands upon thousands of people launching the events of what became known as the Fuorisalone and what has gradually evolved into the Design Week, which today has taken on an enormous scale.
"These events represented a moment of tremendous rupture with the presentations of good Milanese design," comments Cappellini, "offering a lively alternative to the events held within certain city-centre showrooms that were incapable of opening up to the city and the wider public, or of fostering communication and participation."
Cappellini is fond of saying that "everything and its opposite can coexist." To this freedom of expression regarding the combination of objects, and to the idea that objects should be "free and happy, to be used and not merely contemplated" (a view shared with another great designer, Achille Castiglioni), the visionary creative adds another concept that lies at the heart of his philosophy: "One must resist everything that is superfluous – and therefore wasteful of materials, labour and technologies – but also everything that is unethical and immoral."
In 1992, together with designers Jasper Morrison and James Irvine, he brought to life almost playfully Progetto oggetto, an experimental collection of domestic accessories — small, reduced-scale objects, necessary and not, for everyday use in the home — characterised by poetic lightness, formal clarity and great rigour. It was a collective example of interdisciplinary design with a plurality of expressive languages that produced heterogeneous objects in a variety of materials, from glass to plastic, from metal to wood, some poised between the real and the unreal, conceived by the group of young designers who gravitated around the company, coordinated by Morrison and Irvine.
The domestic environment and the concept of a home free from stereotypes has always been the subject of the exhibitions and stagings created by Cappellini at trade fairs, events, showrooms and exhibitions. The three keywords of the domestic installations he has developed have not changed over the years: contamination, emotion, disorientation. To anticipate the evolution of the times and stay one step ahead of everyone else.
This year he represented his particular vision of living with two home installations told through a series of evocative scenarios: Superloft at Supersudio Più and Cappellini goes gipsy in collaboration with designer and set designer Valentina Folli. The latter "is the nomadic home of a traveller who loves to let themselves be touched by different cultures, often distant but all deeply moving," as Cappellini describes it. "It is a hymn to the freedom of the end consumer who loves to mix products of different atmospheres in their own home with great naturalness." A journey around the world in eight spaces rich in folk references, travel souvenirs between tradition and contemporaneity, where East and West and the most evocative cultures blend in absolute stylistic freedom. In true Giulio Cappellini style.