A master of contemporary design, Piero Lissoni has helped to write the field’s history over the last 30 years. With grace, delicacy and balance, as reflected in his style. Almost a full three decades of career, expanding, evolving, conceptually ranging from product to project, artistic direction to exhibit design, Milan to New York – the locations of his studios – though he works all over the world on concrete architectural works. It is hard to sum up the immense legacy in a single narrative. So he has chosen one precise aspect that can describe the evolution of his work, a segment of his production through which to talk about himself and his approach to design.
Quello che sono diventato. Sul libro, sulle librerie is the book just published by Edizioni Henry Beyle, with 88 pages and six drawings applied by hand, in which the architect talks about himself through his relationship with books and bookcases. Of which he has designed many.
In the first part of the book Lissoni looks back on his childhood through readings, and the “occasional” bookcases, such as the ones in his grandparents’ and parents’ homes, seen as “chambers of wonders with animals and games, where the books were contaminated by other presences,” resting places for comic books, which in time would coexist with other things, with books, “parked, lingering, resting… as in a hotel, or an age-old posthouse.”
The second part covers the birth of some of the bookcases he has designed – physical supports for books – and his approach to industrial design, where what continues to prevail is the geometry of the reader, the passion for books, and the relationship with clients.i.
The results are domestic micro-architectures, in dialogue with the space, the user and the contents to be stored: the Antibes system for Boffi, flexible and modular; the Boutique Mast by Porro, light and graphic in character; the Quantum by Glas Italia, a composition in glass; the Colonnata by Salvatori, elegant with its marble inserts.
These are the destinations of those paper devices the architect loves so well, which like his profession are in a constant state of becoming: “For me, books are entities that travel. If I think about the books of my grandparents, my father, my mother, my siblings, the books I have bought over time, I see them as nomadic things, and I am certain that in the future they will make other journeys, ending up in other places, enjoying a new life. From time to time they can have a rest in a house, or find a stopping point, but it is not necessary and we cannot be certain they will stay there forever.”
