OntwerperItalian
Vico Magistretti
2 actieve items
The Atollo table lamp, designed by Vico Magistretti for Oluce in 1977, consists of three geometric primitives stacked with the confidence of a Renaissance dome: a cylinder, a truncated cone, and a hemisphere. It contains no visible switches, no exposed mechanisms, nothing extraneous. It is, in the purest sense, inevitable, and it won the Compasso d'Oro in 1979 alongside another Magistretti design, the Maralunga sofa for Cassina, in what amounted to an anointment of one of Italian design's most quietly authoritative figures.
Born Ludovico Magistretti in Milan on October 6, 1920, into a family of architects, he studied at the Politecnico di Milano under Ernesto Nathan Rogers, the rationalist architect whose intellectual rigour shaped a generation of Italian designers. Graduating in 1945, Magistretti initially worked in urban planning before turning his attention to furniture and industrial design in the 1950s, an era when Italian manufacturing was transforming itself from craft tradition into a global design powerhouse.
His partnership with Cassina produced the Carimate chair in the late 1950s, a design that married a rural straw seat with an urban lacquered frame in bright red, selling in the hundreds of thousands. The Maralunga sofa (1973) took a different approach entirely: a deep, deliberately slumped form with an adjustable-height backrest that could be raised for support or lowered for lounging. It remains one of the most imitated sofa designs in production.
For Artemide, Magistretti designed the Eclisse lamp, which won the Compasso d'Oro in 1967. For Oluce, beyond the Atollo, he created a body of lighting work that combined geometric simplicity with warm, diffused illumination. His designs for Fritz Hansen, De Padova, Flou, and Kartell extended his influence across the full spectrum of domestic furnishing.
Magistretti taught at the Royal College of Art in London for twenty years and was appointed Royal Designer for Industry. He won four Compasso d'Oro awards (1967, 1979 twice, 1987) plus a career achievement award in 1995. His work is held by MoMA, the Pompidou Centre, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago. He died in Milan on September 19, 2006.
On Auctionist, 135 Magistretti items are indexed, with chairs and armchairs (68) and sofas (26) making up the bulk, followed by lighting (11). Stockholms Auktionsverk handles the largest share across its European locations, including Koln (26 items). The Maralunga sofa holds the top results, with three-seaters reaching SEK 19,262, while Atollo lamps command up to EUR 14,000. For collectors of Italian design seeking pieces that balance intellectual clarity with physical comfort, Magistretti's secondary market is among the most rewarding.