[1995#03] italo lupi
A Global Approach: The Italian Way To Design
Yes, it is: there is, in my opinion, an Italian, own peculiar way to design, almost in the second half of XXth Century, when the Gutenberg era—more than five centuries of cultural production/transmission through paper and ink, which begon as a (r)evolution of handwriting, that anyway hasn’t disappeared—seems near to be replaced, or better, to be sided by a new communication model: the information bits. In our times, as a matter of fact, another (r)evolution in the cultural tools/media as the Gutenbergian one has occurred, the coming of digital environment over or, better to say, beside to the analogical one, but our mentality and cultural habits seem to be a hard border, a strong limit, a powerful but static defensive protective device which evolves slower than the technology itself. It appears clear that as a new medium is the screen (it is easy to predict that both it will increase in higher definitions and it will mix in something different what were the television, movie, radio, computer environments), so a new tool is the light, the electronic beam that excite the phosphorous dots coated on a glass screen, the image pixels. So, the present challenge in the field of visual/graphic design, the border soon to be properly crossed (otherwise someone with no specific training/tradition but more bravery will invade all the digital Far West) seems to be the integration/coordination of sound and movement, that gives a new dynamic/acoustic dimension to the “bit” page (may will call so, for the moment, the screen?), giving to the designer a new, unseen, unexplored dimension, an additional depth, in comparison to the relation between type/text and images/pictures on “atomic” paper we all know, test and try, and a greater (even if very dangerous) freedom on manipulating/using images and texts. History most probably never repeats itself, but it is allowed to say, in a metaphoric way, that we’re in a kind of new Renaissance, which started (the old one) with the (r)evolution of printing, and now we’re crossing the digital (r)evolution, already and again connected with the production, transmission, communication, conservation of events and ideas; but we don’t know yet what it really means, and perhaps we aren’t fully aware of all the implications of that—anyway we’re going, somewhere. Never as now the designers had such extraordinary tools and powers on their own hands, provided they still use the tool number one, a grey jelly kept safe in a mervelously designed packaging, our brain. The designers should not miss this chance, and surrender in a competition that is simply selective evolution, as cruel and unsafe as every evolutive process; otherwise, they will most probably disappear. They should be aware that their specialization and knowledge in a complex professional field, as visual design is, is a true social need, more and more hard to keep, as competition increases and technology furiously evolves; at the same time, the specialization in itself is a danger, as it risks to limit the look into a stare—culture is an open eye and acts like a bee: cross–fertilization is the guarantee of surviving, not only in the biological sphere.
Well, what’s have to do all this with Italy? It has to do, since the Italian way is an example, in many cases, of cultural hybridization and openness, a model of education not to be forgotten, not merely to be followed as it is, but at least to be understood in his own. Not by chance, probably, many of the Italian designers, and also many of the leading figures in fields other than graphic design, have been trained or, at least, have studied in architectural schools (the Milan Polytechnic being the most common): where humanistic, art and historical studies are faced to a scientific and technological instruction all together, to give a global approach to the “project” design. To quote someone, as art historians, movie directors, fashion designers, photographers, painters, illustrators, industrial designers, exhibition designers, let’s say that studied architecture: Tafuri, Antonioni, Lattuada, Ferré, Ballo, Basilico, Scolari, Cantàfora, Serafini, Baldessari, Mollino, Castiglioni, Stoppino, Colombo, Zanuso, Sottsass, Bellini, Mendini, Pesce, La Pietra, Branzi, Piva, De Lucchi, Di Puolo; and, in the field of our interest: Nizzoli, Carboni, Grignani, Muratore, Vignelli, Waibl, Sambonet, Bonfante, Fronzoni, Cerri, Origoni, Canale, Camuffo, Vetta—not to forget that Saul Steinberg studied architecture at the Polytechnic School of Milan, where he started his career. It means also that many of those people are not only graphic designers, but most of them work in an across, transversal field, from “the spoon to the city”. And a critical point of view related only to one side of their work is most often ineffective, giving a distorted perception of the multifaceted approach to design that qualify Italian designers: “progettisti”, that means something more and, at least, something different than “designers”—words, said the ancients, are “imago animi”, images of the mind.
Italo Lupi
The work of Italo Lupi has to be seen as emblematical of such a peculiar Italian creative landscape, where a more or less absolute lack of specialized schools of design has been (and still was, until latest years) replaced by the architectural faculties, with original results. For that reason, his work may be understood only as a kind of ‘plural’ tension to design, which is one as a field, many as objects: the art is an unity, of which the artifacts are the different expressions.
Born in Cagliari in 1934, after classic high school studies, Lupi graduated as a matter of fact in architecture at the Polytechnic School of Milan, where he studied, ia, with Franco Albini, a great master of Italian architecture and design. Here Lupi had, in his own recent words, “a vast and non–specialized preparation which sufficiently enlarged your horizons to enable you to consider your professional domain with a more desenchanted look: it prepares you not to take for granted any bigoted preconceptions about communication”. The architectural, three–dimensional training to actual complexity of a design process directly reflects in his approach to visual design: “Some graphic problems might have a three–dimensional solution. The consideration of a third dimension—he said—allows you to face complexity, to better understand the design, because you are used to taking in to account more data”: the covers of “Domus” with holes or cuts that offer glimpses on the ‘second’ cover are a clear demonstration of all that. And, adds Lupi, “I have found that the training of an architect often adds to my way of dealing with the work I do now—its three–dimensional vision contributes to not accepting the impositions and limits of the typographical cage. The attempt to translate a two–dimensional into a three–dimensional does not have to exclude the enrichment given from the infringement of rules; those rules serve to rationally channel the data of a project”. From 1966, he was assistant for some years at the Polytechnic School of Milan of Piergiacomo Castiglioni—one of the famous three Castiglioni brothers, masters of Italian design, and sons of a famous monumental sculptor of the Twenties and Thirties in Italy—, and then he opened his own office in 1972. In a interview, Lupi has revealed—remembering, from his youthness, in the years immediately after the WW 2, to the beginnings of his career as designer—some actual sources of his interest in graphic design, ie four magazines: the British “Il Mese” (The Month), a monthly international news magazine published in England, which arrived in Italy with the allied troops, where he saw for the first time works by Ardizzone, Bawden, Kempster–Evans and Thurber, of whom he was specially fond; two Italian comics magazines of the atferwar times, the “Asso di Picche” (Ace of Spades), which was publishing strips mainly by Italian—better to say, Venetian—comics designers, as the internationally known ‘master of Malamocco’ Hugo Pratt (the father of Corto Maltese stories)—who recently has disappeared—and others as Bellavitis or Ongaro, and “Robinson”, which was publishing mainly American strips, such those by Chester Gould or Milton Caniff (interesting to note that Umberto Eco, the Italian semiologist, author of the fiction bestseller The Name of the Rose , wrote in the Sixties some exciting pages on Steve Canyon in his book Apocalittici e integrati); and, last but not least, the “Ark” magazine, designed by students of the London Royal College of Art such as Alan Fletcher and the soon–to–be named Pentagram, in the Sixties. At that times, the interest of Lupi for design begon with a collaboration with ‘la Rinascente’ (‘the reborning’, a headline written after the WW 1 by the decadentist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio), then the main Italian department store and a kind of seminal place for design, where the internal R&Design Office was headed by the architect Carlo Pagani, helped by Max Huber for graphic design (the famous company logo is from the Huber’s hands). For ‘la Rinascente’, Lupi worked on furniture and packaging with the internationally known architect/designer Mario Bellini and on interior design with Augusto Morello, who is now editor of the new series (1994) of the “Stile Industria” historical Italian magazine on design, and president of Adi. Shortly after, at the beginning of the Seventies, Lupi started to design his first magazine, “Shop”. During his career, Lupi has then designed many periodicals, including “Pubblicità Domani”, “Progex” and “Contretemps” (a French literary magazine), and he has been art director of magazines such as “Giornale della Lombardia” “If Rivista della Fondazione Ibm”, “Zodiac”, “Domus” (from the second half of the Eighties, when Mario Bellini was appointed editor, to the beginning of the Nineties). From 1992, he is both art director and editor of “Abitare”, the Italian magazine on architecture, home, town and environment living, with a printing run of nearly 100,000 copies, of whom he was already art director, from 1974 to 1985, when he left for “Domus”. With Alberto Marangoni, Lupi designed in 1979 a famous (and really three–dimensional) XVI Triennale corporate image, that he has redesigned later, followed from then on by a very long list of—both public and privately commissioned—sign and information designs (such as those for Milan light railway, Lombardia regional parks, Tokyo design center), corporate designs (such as those for International Design Conference of Aspen, the Chiba municipality, the Poldi Pezzoli museum of Milan), book and poster designs—a paradigmatic sample of his careful, complex and original approach to the book is Printed in Italy, designed in 1988, where he also directed the work of 9 illustrators, 9 graphic designers and 19 photographers, with total freedom of paper, typesetting equipments and printing. Member of Agi (the Alliance graphique internationale) and Adi (the Italian chartered designers society), Lupi has been teacher at the Isia in Urbino, the main (of a really few) school for graphic design in Italy, and at the Summer Courses of the Institute for the Human Environment in San Francisco. It seems that, of all the Italian graphic designers, Lupi is the one most attentive and curious to what happens on the other side of the Ocean, to what may be called an American graphic flavour, and of the Channel, as he shows the greatest appreciation for British visual design, from the XIXth Century tradition of children’s books onwards (he confesses that he has often missed a train in the London Underground with the wealth of graphic material on tube stations). So, it is easy to recognize the influences of, let’s say, Milton Glaser or Seymour Chwast or, going backwards, of Leo Lionni (the great italo–dutch–american master, one of Lupi’s heroes) on some of his graphic works; and this is perhaps one of the reasons why he has recently engaged Steven Guarnaccia in a regular collaboration for “Abitare”: “everything I do, I do mostly for fun”. “Not taking for granted any preconceptions about communication”, fertilized with this way of visual thinking, the Anglo–Saxon Bildhaftes Denken, is at the root the Lupi approach to the type/text as image, and to image as text, breaking the (habit) rules with a three–dimensional attitude at the base: “the rigour of Max Huber and Swiss–style graphics blended with Italian invention and Anglo–Saxon wit” is the Lupi solution, in its own words. His interest in type is clearly “one of the basic aspects of my work—Lupi says—, together with the efforts I make not to use type in a conventional way. I love to mix different styles”
But it has not to be forgotten that Lupi is also a very gifted interior and exhibition designer. During the Sixties, he was assistant to Achille—another one of the brothers—Castiglioni in Montecatini and Rai (the Italian broadcasting corporation) exhibition designs; and the Lupi talent is showed by the exhibitions about XVIIIth Century art at the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Parma of I980 in collaboration with Guido Canali, and in the same year for the Compasso d’oro Design Award exhibition in Milan, the Ferruccio Parri exhibition at the Besana in Milan of 1985, the XVII Milan Triennale exhibition of 1988 in collaboration with Achille Castiglioni and Paolo Ferrari, the automobile museum Ferrari at Maranello (Modena) of 1989, the Supermarket of Style exhibition for Pitti Image in Florence of 1994, and in the same year the Renaissance architectural exhibition at Palazzo Grassi in Venice with Mario Bellini, but also in the interior sign and decoration design for a cruise ship of the Costa navigation company, the Costa Marina. And these are not another, different stories. Lupi is a designer in Italy, a place where Renaissance and digital world, past and present, arts and technologies should try to live, side by side: “to make memories live in every new work without them becoming an obstruction—confirms Lupi—, but to recognise them as the substantial base for new linguistics, is true graphic vitality”.
Yes, it is: there is, in my opinion, an Italian, own peculiar way to design, almost in the second half of XXth Century, when the Gutenberg era—more than five centuries of cultural production/transmission through paper and ink, which begon as a (r)evolution of handwriting, that anyway hasn’t disappeared—seems near to be replaced, or better, to be sided by a new communication model: the information bits. In our times, as a matter of fact, another (r)evolution in the cultural tools/media as the Gutenbergian one has occurred, the coming of digital environment over or, better to say, beside to the analogical one, but our mentality and cultural habits seem to be a hard border, a strong limit, a powerful but static defensive protective device which evolves slower than the technology itself. It appears clear that as a new medium is the screen (it is easy to predict that both it will increase in higher definitions and it will mix in something different what were the television, movie, radio, computer environments), so a new tool is the light, the electronic beam that excite the phosphorous dots coated on a glass screen, the image pixels. So, the present challenge in the field of visual/graphic design, the border soon to be properly crossed (otherwise someone with no specific training/tradition but more bravery will invade all the digital Far West) seems to be the integration/coordination of sound and movement, that gives a new dynamic/acoustic dimension to the “bit” page (may will call so, for the moment, the screen?), giving to the designer a new, unseen, unexplored dimension, an additional depth, in comparison to the relation between type/text and images/pictures on “atomic” paper we all know, test and try, and a greater (even if very dangerous) freedom on manipulating/using images and texts. History most probably never repeats itself, but it is allowed to say, in a metaphoric way, that we’re in a kind of new Renaissance, which started (the old one) with the (r)evolution of printing, and now we’re crossing the digital (r)evolution, already and again connected with the production, transmission, communication, conservation of events and ideas; but we don’t know yet what it really means, and perhaps we aren’t fully aware of all the implications of that—anyway we’re going, somewhere. Never as now the designers had such extraordinary tools and powers on their own hands, provided they still use the tool number one, a grey jelly kept safe in a mervelously designed packaging, our brain. The designers should not miss this chance, and surrender in a competition that is simply selective evolution, as cruel and unsafe as every evolutive process; otherwise, they will most probably disappear. They should be aware that their specialization and knowledge in a complex professional field, as visual design is, is a true social need, more and more hard to keep, as competition increases and technology furiously evolves; at the same time, the specialization in itself is a danger, as it risks to limit the look into a stare—culture is an open eye and acts like a bee: cross–fertilization is the guarantee of surviving, not only in the biological sphere.
Well, what’s have to do all this with Italy? It has to do, since the Italian way is an example, in many cases, of cultural hybridization and openness, a model of education not to be forgotten, not merely to be followed as it is, but at least to be understood in his own. Not by chance, probably, many of the Italian designers, and also many of the leading figures in fields other than graphic design, have been trained or, at least, have studied in architectural schools (the Milan Polytechnic being the most common): where humanistic, art and historical studies are faced to a scientific and technological instruction all together, to give a global approach to the “project” design. To quote someone, as art historians, movie directors, fashion designers, photographers, painters, illustrators, industrial designers, exhibition designers, let’s say that studied architecture: Tafuri, Antonioni, Lattuada, Ferré, Ballo, Basilico, Scolari, Cantàfora, Serafini, Baldessari, Mollino, Castiglioni, Stoppino, Colombo, Zanuso, Sottsass, Bellini, Mendini, Pesce, La Pietra, Branzi, Piva, De Lucchi, Di Puolo; and, in the field of our interest: Nizzoli, Carboni, Grignani, Muratore, Vignelli, Waibl, Sambonet, Bonfante, Fronzoni, Cerri, Origoni, Canale, Camuffo, Vetta—not to forget that Saul Steinberg studied architecture at the Polytechnic School of Milan, where he started his career. It means also that many of those people are not only graphic designers, but most of them work in an across, transversal field, from “the spoon to the city”. And a critical point of view related only to one side of their work is most often ineffective, giving a distorted perception of the multifaceted approach to design that qualify Italian designers: “progettisti”, that means something more and, at least, something different than “designers”—words, said the ancients, are “imago animi”, images of the mind.
Italo Lupi
The work of Italo Lupi has to be seen as emblematical of such a peculiar Italian creative landscape, where a more or less absolute lack of specialized schools of design has been (and still was, until latest years) replaced by the architectural faculties, with original results. For that reason, his work may be understood only as a kind of ‘plural’ tension to design, which is one as a field, many as objects: the art is an unity, of which the artifacts are the different expressions.
Born in Cagliari in 1934, after classic high school studies, Lupi graduated as a matter of fact in architecture at the Polytechnic School of Milan, where he studied, ia, with Franco Albini, a great master of Italian architecture and design. Here Lupi had, in his own recent words, “a vast and non–specialized preparation which sufficiently enlarged your horizons to enable you to consider your professional domain with a more desenchanted look: it prepares you not to take for granted any bigoted preconceptions about communication”. The architectural, three–dimensional training to actual complexity of a design process directly reflects in his approach to visual design: “Some graphic problems might have a three–dimensional solution. The consideration of a third dimension—he said—allows you to face complexity, to better understand the design, because you are used to taking in to account more data”: the covers of “Domus” with holes or cuts that offer glimpses on the ‘second’ cover are a clear demonstration of all that. And, adds Lupi, “I have found that the training of an architect often adds to my way of dealing with the work I do now—its three–dimensional vision contributes to not accepting the impositions and limits of the typographical cage. The attempt to translate a two–dimensional into a three–dimensional does not have to exclude the enrichment given from the infringement of rules; those rules serve to rationally channel the data of a project”. From 1966, he was assistant for some years at the Polytechnic School of Milan of Piergiacomo Castiglioni—one of the famous three Castiglioni brothers, masters of Italian design, and sons of a famous monumental sculptor of the Twenties and Thirties in Italy—, and then he opened his own office in 1972. In a interview, Lupi has revealed—remembering, from his youthness, in the years immediately after the WW 2, to the beginnings of his career as designer—some actual sources of his interest in graphic design, ie four magazines: the British “Il Mese” (The Month), a monthly international news magazine published in England, which arrived in Italy with the allied troops, where he saw for the first time works by Ardizzone, Bawden, Kempster–Evans and Thurber, of whom he was specially fond; two Italian comics magazines of the atferwar times, the “Asso di Picche” (Ace of Spades), which was publishing strips mainly by Italian—better to say, Venetian—comics designers, as the internationally known ‘master of Malamocco’ Hugo Pratt (the father of Corto Maltese stories)—who recently has disappeared—and others as Bellavitis or Ongaro, and “Robinson”, which was publishing mainly American strips, such those by Chester Gould or Milton Caniff (interesting to note that Umberto Eco, the Italian semiologist, author of the fiction bestseller The Name of the Rose , wrote in the Sixties some exciting pages on Steve Canyon in his book Apocalittici e integrati); and, last but not least, the “Ark” magazine, designed by students of the London Royal College of Art such as Alan Fletcher and the soon–to–be named Pentagram, in the Sixties. At that times, the interest of Lupi for design begon with a collaboration with ‘la Rinascente’ (‘the reborning’, a headline written after the WW 1 by the decadentist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio), then the main Italian department store and a kind of seminal place for design, where the internal R&Design Office was headed by the architect Carlo Pagani, helped by Max Huber for graphic design (the famous company logo is from the Huber’s hands). For ‘la Rinascente’, Lupi worked on furniture and packaging with the internationally known architect/designer Mario Bellini and on interior design with Augusto Morello, who is now editor of the new series (1994) of the “Stile Industria” historical Italian magazine on design, and president of Adi. Shortly after, at the beginning of the Seventies, Lupi started to design his first magazine, “Shop”. During his career, Lupi has then designed many periodicals, including “Pubblicità Domani”, “Progex” and “Contretemps” (a French literary magazine), and he has been art director of magazines such as “Giornale della Lombardia” “If Rivista della Fondazione Ibm”, “Zodiac”, “Domus” (from the second half of the Eighties, when Mario Bellini was appointed editor, to the beginning of the Nineties). From 1992, he is both art director and editor of “Abitare”, the Italian magazine on architecture, home, town and environment living, with a printing run of nearly 100,000 copies, of whom he was already art director, from 1974 to 1985, when he left for “Domus”. With Alberto Marangoni, Lupi designed in 1979 a famous (and really three–dimensional) XVI Triennale corporate image, that he has redesigned later, followed from then on by a very long list of—both public and privately commissioned—sign and information designs (such as those for Milan light railway, Lombardia regional parks, Tokyo design center), corporate designs (such as those for International Design Conference of Aspen, the Chiba municipality, the Poldi Pezzoli museum of Milan), book and poster designs—a paradigmatic sample of his careful, complex and original approach to the book is Printed in Italy, designed in 1988, where he also directed the work of 9 illustrators, 9 graphic designers and 19 photographers, with total freedom of paper, typesetting equipments and printing. Member of Agi (the Alliance graphique internationale) and Adi (the Italian chartered designers society), Lupi has been teacher at the Isia in Urbino, the main (of a really few) school for graphic design in Italy, and at the Summer Courses of the Institute for the Human Environment in San Francisco. It seems that, of all the Italian graphic designers, Lupi is the one most attentive and curious to what happens on the other side of the Ocean, to what may be called an American graphic flavour, and of the Channel, as he shows the greatest appreciation for British visual design, from the XIXth Century tradition of children’s books onwards (he confesses that he has often missed a train in the London Underground with the wealth of graphic material on tube stations). So, it is easy to recognize the influences of, let’s say, Milton Glaser or Seymour Chwast or, going backwards, of Leo Lionni (the great italo–dutch–american master, one of Lupi’s heroes) on some of his graphic works; and this is perhaps one of the reasons why he has recently engaged Steven Guarnaccia in a regular collaboration for “Abitare”: “everything I do, I do mostly for fun”. “Not taking for granted any preconceptions about communication”, fertilized with this way of visual thinking, the Anglo–Saxon Bildhaftes Denken, is at the root the Lupi approach to the type/text as image, and to image as text, breaking the (habit) rules with a three–dimensional attitude at the base: “the rigour of Max Huber and Swiss–style graphics blended with Italian invention and Anglo–Saxon wit” is the Lupi solution, in its own words. His interest in type is clearly “one of the basic aspects of my work—Lupi says—, together with the efforts I make not to use type in a conventional way. I love to mix different styles”
But it has not to be forgotten that Lupi is also a very gifted interior and exhibition designer. During the Sixties, he was assistant to Achille—another one of the brothers—Castiglioni in Montecatini and Rai (the Italian broadcasting corporation) exhibition designs; and the Lupi talent is showed by the exhibitions about XVIIIth Century art at the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Parma of I980 in collaboration with Guido Canali, and in the same year for the Compasso d’oro Design Award exhibition in Milan, the Ferruccio Parri exhibition at the Besana in Milan of 1985, the XVII Milan Triennale exhibition of 1988 in collaboration with Achille Castiglioni and Paolo Ferrari, the automobile museum Ferrari at Maranello (Modena) of 1989, the Supermarket of Style exhibition for Pitti Image in Florence of 1994, and in the same year the Renaissance architectural exhibition at Palazzo Grassi in Venice with Mario Bellini, but also in the interior sign and decoration design for a cruise ship of the Costa navigation company, the Costa Marina. And these are not another, different stories. Lupi is a designer in Italy, a place where Renaissance and digital world, past and present, arts and technologies should try to live, side by side: “to make memories live in every new work without them becoming an obstruction—confirms Lupi—, but to recognise them as the substantial base for new linguistics, is true graphic vitality”.
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