Please take a seat – Vico Magistretti is here.

How does one conceive of a chair? And how is it designed and then put into production? Vico Magistretti, who was an urban planner and architect, is perhaps the finest example of the multifaceted design skills that characterised a brilliant generation: that of the Italian designers born in the 1920s. A blend of innovative vision, pragmatism and a sense of style. Vico Magistretti’s Chairs (LetteraVentidue) by Luca Poncellini is the evolution of the exhibition “Suppergiù 60 sedie in 60 anni”, hosted at the Fondazione Studio Museo Vico Magistretti. Not a catalogue, not a selection, but more specifically the essence of a design philosophy that embodied a sense of movement and presence in the world. For shaping the world is also about designing a chair. Fifteen models are featured as examples, accompanied by Magistretti’s notes, studies and sketches, design drawings and prototypes.

A chair is never just a chair: we begin in 1946 with Piccy, a folding chair reissued in 2011 by Campeggi. A beach chair, lightweight and made of canvas, comfortable to sit on and easy to carry around. We then move on to 2003 with the Magistretti 03 01, produced for Gebrüder Thonet Vienna. The idea here is that of a design which draws on high-quality craftsmanship and explicitly showcases the cultural and aesthetic value of its presence, thereby also influencing the setting in which it is placed: “The simpler a chair is, the more beautiful it is,” Magistretti observes.

The dialogue with manufacturers is close-knit; Magistretti’s work bears all the hallmarks of a Renaissance workshop: it begins with a sketch and an idea that captures the manufacturer’s requirements, yet immediately connects with the industrial history, the available materials and the practical needs without any discontinuity. This dialogue is both internal and external: the object and its characteristics, and the object and its ability to evoke a feeling; the whole constitutes the design. Almost sixty years have passed between the first and the last chair – a lifetime spent shaping thoughts and materials, an idea of comfort and functionality that spans the history of a country: “I see my task as suggesting, through objects, the possibility of giving rise to something that we all already have in our memory, but which we are unable to give form to and perhaps cannot even conceive of.”

For Magistretti, design is a catalyst for ideas, where the home is a self-portrait of those who live there: ‘Living is, first and foremost, an autobiographical matter’. It is uncertain what the Milanese designer would have thought of humanity had he witnessed, during the pandemic, the horror of the banality of homes devoid of any thought or taste. This absence of life serves as the backdrop to the absence of both healthy eclecticism and useful pragmatism. At a time when people prattle on about projects even whilst doing their weekly shop at the market, the lack of feeling that should characterise the most intimate spaces inhabited by humans remains striking: even sitting down requires good ideas and just as many reasons.