From the spoon to town: the design of Gianfranco Frattini

Gianfranco Frattini. Design 1955/2003 is a brand new e book celebrating the life and work of the Italian architect and designer. The e book was introduced at Milan’s ADI Design Museum, the place Frattini was a founding member, and follows a retrospective held in 2023 at Palazzo Arese Borromeo in Cesano Maderno (close to Milan).

‘Gianfranco Frattini. Design 1955/2003’

Gianfranco Frattini (1926 – 2004) was an architect and designer whose pursuits and design sensibilities ranged from textile analysis to home interiors, craftsmanship, and industrial design. The e book helps to rediscover his manufacturing in addition to his private method to design. ‘It’s an inclination in the direction of discretion, to not exhibit and to be part of up to date life with savoir-faire. Frattini’s work exemplifies this perspective,’ says Luciano Galimberti, president of ADI.

The amount is enriched by product sheets that describe furnishings and initiatives in nice element, and the iconographic equipment reveals unique sketches and drawings of architectural initiatives, pictures of archive items, and pictures from the exhibition. 

Amongst them is the helmet designed for industrial large Montecatini in 1963, one of many first office health-and-safety merchandise produced in Italy: yellow to be seen in giant manufacturing websites, it was made from plastic reasonably than metallic, a fabric used till then however troublesome to put on for lengthy durations of time. The e book can also be stuffed along with his most admired items: the refined play of resistant joints of the ‘Kyoto’ desk, created with the grasp of wooden craftsmanship Pierluigi Ghianda and produced by Poltrona Frau in 1974. 

He was identified for practising the idea of designing ‘from the spoon to town’, transferring between initiatives with fluidity and dedication, as defined by the e book’s editor Emanuela Frattini Magnusson, who’s Frattini’s daughter and an architect and designer herself. ‘What we needed to specific by way of the exhibition and the e book is my father’s potential to use design as a psychological course of on all scales.’ 

It’s a part of his biography: as a scholar, he labored in Gio Ponti’s studio for just a few years earlier than establishing his personal. There, he met Cesare Cassina, with whom he labored, in addition to the famend material designer and weaver Jole Gandolini, with whom he started a lifelong collaboration. However throughout his profession, he designed additionally for Acerbis, ArteLuce, Artemide, Bernini, Fantoni, Knoll, Lema, Luci, and lots of extra. 

The e book options designs which can be now not in manufacturing, these which can be nonetheless in manufacturing, and varied re-editions. Highlights embody the playful ‘Boalum Lampada’, designed along with Frattini’s good friend Livio Castiglioni and produced by Artemide in 1970: the 2 had the concept whereas working at a lodge in Anacapri, and observed the attendants cleansing the swimming pool with a protracted vacuum hose.