Mario Bellini is an Italian architect and designer. After graduating from the Polytechnic University of Milan in 1959, Bellini pursued a career as an architect, exhibition designer, product designer, and furniture designer during the Italian economic boom of the late 20th century. Bellini has received several accolades in a variety of design fields, including eight Compasso d'Oro awards and the Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Triennale di Milano. In 2019, the Italian President of the Chamber of Deputies, Roberto Fico, awarded Bellini a career medal in recognition of his contributions to Italian architecture and design.
Cesare Colombo, known as Joe Colombo, was an Italian industrial designer.
The Sacco chair, also known as a bean bag chair,beanbag chair, or simply a beanbag, is a large fabric bag, filled with polystyrene beans, designed by Piero Gatti, Cesare Paolini and Franco Teodoro in 1968. The product is an example of an anatomic chair, as the shape of the object is set by the user. “[The Sacco] became one of the icons of the Italian anti-design movement. Its complete flexibility and formlessness made it the perfect antidote to the static formalism of mainstream Italian furniture of the period,” as Penny Spark wrote in Italian Design – 1870 to the Present.
Gaetano Pesce was an Italian architect and a design pioneer of the 20th century. Pesce was born in La Spezia in 1939, and he grew up in Padua and Florence. During his 50-year career, Pesce worked as an architect, urban planner, and industrial designer. His outlook is considered broad and humanistic, and his work is characterized by an inventive use of color and materials, asserting connections between the individual and society, through art, architecture, and design to reappraise mid-twentieth-century modern life.
Shiro Kuramata is one of Japan's most important designers of the 20th century.
Vico Magistretti was an Italian architect who was also active as an industrial designer, furniture designer, and academic. As a collaborator of humanist architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers, one of Magistretti's first projects was the "poetic" round church in the experimental Milan neighbourhood of QT8. He later designed mass-produced appliances, lighting, and furniture for companies such as Cassina S.p.A., Artemide, and Oluce. These designs won several awards, including the Compasso d'Oro and the Gold Medal of the Chartered Society of Industrial Artists & Designers in 1986.
Marco Zanuso was an Italian Modernist architect and designer.
In Italian design, the Radical period took place in the late 1960s, with a shift in style among the avant-garde. Probably the most notable result of this avant-garde period is the installation called "Superarchitettura", made in Pistoia in 1966. Another important exhibition dedicated to radical design in Italy was held at MoMA in 1972.
A design museum is a museum with a focus on product, industrial, graphic, fashion and architectural design. Many design museums were founded as museums for applied arts or decorative arts and started only in the late 20th century to collect design.
Fornasetti is a luxury artistic design company founded in 1940 in Milan by Piero Fornasetti, now run by the founder's son, Barnaba Fornasetti, which is known internationally for the creation of porcelain and handmade decorative objects for the home.
Alberto Meda is an Italian engineer and designer. His work is held in museums around the world. He works and lives in Milan.
Fabio Novembre is an Italian architect and designer.
David Lincoln Rowland was an American industrial designer noted for inventing the 40/4 Chair. The chair was the first compactly stackable chair invented, and is able to stack 40 chairs 4 feet (120 cm) high.
Piero Gilardi was a visual artist. Born in Italy from a Swiss family, he studied at the Liceo Artistico in Turin. In an interview with LeGrace G. Benson, Gilardi stated that his personal encounter with artist Michelangelo Pistoletto and others helped him in the development of his own artwork. While trying to comprehend the cybernetic idea of feedback and the scientific rationale behind man's mental synthesis, his perspective on reality changed; he then focused on the fluxus and relationship of things around him.
The Eames Molded Plastic & Fiberglass Armchair is a fiberglass chair, designed by Charles and Ray Eames, that appeared on the market in 1950. The chair was intentionally designed for the International Competition for Low-Cost Furniture Design. This competition, sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art, was motivated by the urgent need in the post-war period for low-cost housing and furnishing designs adaptable to small housing units.
The 40/4 chair is the compactly stackable chair designed by David Rowland in 1964. Forty chairs can be stacked within a height of 4 feet (120 cm), giving the chair its name. Over time it has received a number of design awards and is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as other museums internationally.
Zanotta is an Italian furniture company particularly known for the iconic pieces of Italian design it produced in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. These include the "Sacco" bean bag chair and "Blow", the first mass-produced inflatable chair. The company was founded in 1954 and has its main plant in Nova Milanese. In 1984 Zanotta established its experimental division, Zabro, headed by Alessandro Guerriero, with Alessandro Mendini and Stefano Casciani. Since the death of its founder, Aurelio Zanotta, in 1991, it has been run by members of his family. Zanotta's products were awarded the Compasso d'Oro in 1967, 1979, 1987 and 2020.
Charles William Stendig was an American businessman and philanthropist who was the founder of Stendig, Inc. The company was active between 1955 and 1976 and imported a unique selection of modern European furniture to the United States, focusing on contract-grade pieces suitable for commercial use. Stendig was among the pioneers of the movement that would later become known as mid-century modern.
Studio 65 (Studiosessanta5) is an Italian architecture studio. It was founded in 1965 in Turin as an avant-garde experimental collective of architects, designers, poets and artists. Its founders were Franco Audrito, Roberta Garosci, Enzo Bertone, Paolo Morello, and Paolo Rondelli.
Margaret Scolari Barr (1901–1987) was an art historian, art critic, educator, translator, and curator.
