In architecture, the history of the designed space is intertwined with that of the objects that space houses. The architect's craft involves activity related not only to the scale of the building but also to graphics and products. The endless production of furniture, often designed for a specific context and finished later in serial production, immediately comes to mind, but the discourse has expanded on many occasions to everyday objects, fashion and tech. And not only recently.
The need to have control over the design in the totality of its levels has been a constant throughout the centuries: in liberty buildings all elements contribute to a kind of total work of art (Van de Velde when designing his villa in Uccle even drew the clothes his wife was supposed to wear inside); later the goal of the Bauhaus was to define a method rather than a style, as valid for architecture as for all applied arts, and a few decades later "from the spoon to the city" is the slogan of Ernesto Nathan Rogers who urges to consider the project in its breadth and relationship to the complexity of human dynamics.
The endless production of furniture immediately comes to mind, but the discourse has expanded on many occasions to everyday objects, fashion and tech.
In fact, architects have designed spoons of them, and the space that separates them from the "city" is a huge container full of other products: chairs and lamps, of course, but also home appliances, medical devices, packaging, cars, toys, slippers, watering cans. All the more or less basic things that inhabit our everyday life.
The copious and fundamental contribution of architects to the product universe has given way to specialized designers only in recent times - the first design schools in Italy are not even a hundred years old - continuing to manifest themselves with some notable exceptions: their signature on objects reinforces the already solid relationship between the two universes and highlights a kind of architectural value of the products (in this sense the most explicit was Aldo Rossi).
Discussing the numerous marketing operations that have seen some brands engage great architects in collaborations of dubious design value, we have made a list of ten things (that fall outside the semantic realm of furniture) designed by architects.