A century has passed since Giovanni Alessi founded the Alessi factory in Omegna, in 1921. But the celebration that has been going on over the last few months in one of the most emblematic “Italian Design Factories” does not take the form of a nostalgic new interpretation, but rather that of a constructive impulse towards the future.
Alessi celebrates its centenary with 12 cult objects
To celebrate the company’s centenary, twelve items, including prototypes and re-editions, come back to life from the Omegna archives. And they take the form of an optimistic passing of the baton to celebrate an identity and its timelessness for years to come.
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- Giulia Zappa
- 23 December 2021
The opportunity to bring the company’s legacy into the future is offered by a line of 12 objects that Alessi is introducing to the public every month, following extensive research in the museum’s archives. Prototypes that have never been launched onto the market or new versions of classics, the objects in the Alessi 100 Values Collection are an opportunity to rediscover some of the cult objects of Italian design and the great masters who created them, but also to question the relevance of the ideas they still convey, the shapes they can still take on and the meaning they can have many years after their creation.
“It’s not always the case that a project created in a certain historical context continues to speak to us, it usually isn’t,” says Alberto Alessi, now President of Alessi and the main initiator and creator of the many dialogues between company and designer - we remember Tea & Coffee Piazza as Form Follows Fiction - that inspired the creation of these objects. “I believe that a number of factors contribute to making an object ‘timeless’, to use a word that is very fashionable today... as far as I’m concerned, for example, a fundamental characteristic of a project is that it must be able to evoke the historical moment in which it was created in a strong, unequivocal and poetic way”.
Representing a corporate and cultural tradition, the Alessi 100 Values Collection thus seems to embody not only a corporate identity but also the mediation work carried out by design companies, holding the balance of power between an entrepreneurial vision, the presumed demand of the market and the multiple creative interpretations that designers can give to a need, a desire or a pretext. A characteristic that also becomes a hope for the future, not only for the development of Alessi but also for that of the entire Italian sector, which has become the bearer of this dialogue and translation method, of this triangulation between the main players in the supply chain. “I hope,” continues Alberto Alessi, “that we will be able to continue to play our role as mediators between the Immensity of the Creative Possible on the one hand (represented by the most interesting designers of the period) and the “needs” (or rather the dreams, the imagination) of the public. In short, I would like for this phenomenon to last for a few years (even less than 100): when someone is looking for the best examples of French, English or Brazilian design, they have to resort to the catalogues of the “Italian design factories”.
In this selection of images, the objects from the Alessi 100 Values Collection that have been released since last May and have been included in the company catalogue or distributed in limited editions.
The majestic and solemn character that has always led Ettore Sottsass to engage with the symbol of the totem is revived on a smaller scale in this series originally designed in 1989 and proposed again today as an embodiment of Alessi’s main value, industrial craftsmanship. All the objects in Twergy, whose name comes from the Omegna dialect and means “pixies”, are characterised by the superimposition of convex wooden volumes that are the expression of deep-rooted lathe working skills. Alongside the objects designed by Sottsass, the line also includes a small selection of objects designed by Andrea Branzi, Kuno Prey and Bertolani Becchelli Associati.
The Proust armchair, perhaps Alessandro Mendini’s best-known masterpiece, is a hymn to the ability of objects to transcend the ordinary. The use of pointillism as a way of distorting a simple armchair, enriching it with layers of meaning that recall an elsewhere made up of memories and suggestions, is also demonstrated by the 100% make-up Proust vase, originally made in two pieces for the exhibition “Italy - Germany 4:3 / 50 Years of Italian and German Design”, held in Bonn in 2000, and now reissued in a limited edition of 999 pieces. The name of the vase, which is not a coincidence, is a reference to a previous collection from 1992, for which 100 designers and artists had redecorated Mendini’s masterpiece creating 100 original versions.
Merdolino was the first project to ironically legitimize an everyday taboo object, the toilet brush. Presented in 1992 and an immediate success with the public, Stefano Giovannoni’s Merdolino uses a narrative form and an expressive use of plastic to make it look like a bean sprout growing out of a plant pot. The current re-edition, in 999 pieces, exasperates the paradox embodied by the short circuit between manure and preciousness with an unprecedented golden finish.
A challenge to go beyond the boundaries of the usual and the possible. This is what is embodied in this new version of the centrepiece designed by Susan Cohn in 1992 during a workshop at the Centro Studi Alessi. The use of two steel meshes is a reference to the old wire mesh cabinets in which food was once stored, and when the light passes through the two superimposed mesh surfaces, the effect is amazing.
These well-known corkscrews by Mendini, emblems of the personification of our tableware, change clothes to wear the Galla Placidia decoration, designed by Mendini in 1984. Anna G. and Alessandro M. thus embody a hymn to hybridisation that bridges the gap with both fashion and the references to the high culture of our art history.
According to Alberto Alessi, the company is “an industrial research laboratory that engages in a continuous mediation between the immensity of creative possibilities and the needs of the public, or as I prefer to say, the dreams of the public”. To exemplify the laborious work behind the scenes that has always accompanied the search for this complex balance, Alessi came up with the fine idea of presenting two versions of two legendary objects that have never gone into production, Richard Sapper’s 9090 and Aldo Rossi’s La Conica. In the first case, the coffeemaker is presented with a new perforated handle painted red - the only fetish colour used by Sapper in addition to black and white. For La Conica, this new long-handled version was the first that Aldo Rossi presented to the company.
Never actually put into production, this kettle designed by Achille Castiglioni in 1995 was inspired by the granite stone that curling players take turns sliding on a sheet of ice. Castiglioni’s ironic exercise, in this case, is double: on the one hand, he transposes the reference context from cold to hot, and on the other, he uses a dialect name - Bulbul, “it’s boiling, it’s boiling” in the dialect of Milan - to express astonishment.
The emblem of an iconic design that minimises the object’s function at the expense of its aura and prestige, Starck’s famous lemon squeezer - which is not a spider, but rather a squid at a restaurant on the island of Capraia - is brought back to life through a study that embodies the borderline between its potential appreciation by the public and its denial. This is a grey area that no one can know as well as an entrepreneur, and with this version of Juicy Salif, it seems to come alive in its darkest side.