100 years of Vico Magistretti - 1920/2020

The new year started with an important event for the Fondazione Studio Museo Vico Magistretti: on January 7, the website of Studio Magistretti’s digital archive went online. The database contains more than 30,000 accessible documents and over 450 projects designed by the Milanese architect, a geo-localised map of his architectures and 10 research roadmaps across the entire archive’s contents.
The launch of the digital archive is only the first of the diverse events included in the program which, through different methods and themes, aim to promote the work of the prominent Italian architect and designer on the centenary of his birth.

The Studio Magistretti archive is the starting point for the events planned to celebrate the centenary. Inventorying, digitising and cataloguing the architect’s work required a major effort that began in 2007, one year after his death. The website that has been created represents the first actual monograph entirely dedicated to the work of the Italian architect, now available for free to a varied and vast audience: from students to design and architecture enthusiasts, from everyday people intrigued by Magistretti’s work to expert researchers.
The Touring Exhibition curated by Rosanna Pavoni and Margherita Pellino together with Maria Vittoria Capitanucci, will also open its doors in January, hosted by the Network of Italian Cultural Institutes around the world. The projects, architectures and design products created by Magistretti, will be presented thanks to the help provided by local designers and architects in creating the exhibition setup.
The opening event will be held in Cologne during the furniture fair. In February, the exhibition will move to Stockholm at the headquarters of the Italian Cultural Institute designed by Giò Ponti. Set to be presented during the Stockholm Design Week, the exhibition will involve various Scandinavian designers who were inspired by Magistretti’s works. On the occasion, a number of the objects owned by the Möbeldesignmuseum in Stockholm and designed by Magistretti during the 60s and the 70s will also be exhibited. The exhibition will also include stops in New York, Strasbourg, Berlin, Prague, Valletta, Budapest and Washington.

Three different events are scheduled in April. The headquarters of the Fondazione Studio Museo Vico Magistretti will host the 1 10 100 Vico Magistretti exhibition, curated by Rosanna Pavoni and Margherita Pellino, with the setup design curated by Luca Poncellini, Valentina Cerra and Chiara Corbani. The exhibition focuses on the sixty years of the architect’s activity in his studio in Milan, located in Via Conservatorio. The public will be welcomed in the architect’s historical studio, which will come back to life thanks to some original furnishings. The studio’s drawers and cabinets will open up to tell the stories enclosed in the archive’s materials.
The second event, curated by Gabriele Neri in collaboration with Rosanna Pavoni, consists of an important and substantial exhibition to be held at the Triennale di Milano, which will trace back Vico Magistretti’s entire artistic career. The exhibition will present works from the architect's archive, together with those from the archives of various companies, collections and museums, providing a broad look at Vico Magistretti’s work, which goes well beyond his most famous products and architectures.
The title of the third event to be held during the month at the Galleria Viasaterna in Milan is Vico Magistretti – Storie di oggetti(Stories of objects), curated by Anniina Koivu and Francesco Zanot. The exhibition will present 12 objects designed by Vico Magistretti, reinterpreted by young photographers from the ECAL/Ecole cantonale d'art de Lausanne. Finally, in autumn 2020 an international conference will look at the vast heritage of architecture and design works contained in archives and the need to digitise such archives to make them accessible and “useful” to a broader public, starting precisely with Studio Magistretti’s digital archive.

(Agnese Bifulco)

Images courtesy of Fondazione studio museo Vico Magistretti www.vicomagistretti.it
archivio.vicomagistretti.it

---

GALLERY