It’s a balmy October afternoon in Bologna, Italy. Massimo Iosa Ghini’s office is in the old city center, on the second floor of a Renaissance palazzo that now houses grand high-ceilinged offices around a central courtyard. Iosa Ghini, born in 1959, was a formative member of Italy’s Bolidism and Memphis movements. Today he practices both architecture and design for clients including—but not limited to—Ferrari, Snaidero, Listone Giordano, Moroso, Poltrona Frau, Zumtobel Staff, Dornbracht, and Duravit.
In a mostly white room spotted with models of racecars, buildings, and other things bearing a streamlined, frozen movement, Iosa Ghini seats himself on one of his office chairs. Several books of his drawings and designs are on the table. After an espresso-fueled greeting, I fumble with my tape recorder. “I’ve never met a journalist who’s comfortable operating one of those things,” Iosa Ghini says. “Not even the tech-savvy ones I met in Japan.”
That idea—the speed of technology—has long been an issue for me. Is it too quick? We’ve been in a period where we consider it progress.
In Italian, a bolide is a fast-moving object, like a projectile, a racecar, or a comet. Back in the ’70s, we felt that speed was a theme of the times. But not like Italian futurism of the early 20th century—not just glorifying the power and velocity of machines. We were thinking about speed in a less material sense: computers, and the increasing speed of communication. Of course, as designers, our first inclination was to wonder what the shape of speed is. Then we began to imagine a society of speed, the fluid city—a fantasy town controlled by a constant electronic flux. In a way, it was before its time, since it was before the Internet became mainstream.
That was because when we started thinking about Bolidism, we started designing things for their shape, their gesture—disregarding whether and how they might be manufactured. In that period design was very close to art. All our teachers had preached the mantra “form follows function,” but now I know that wasn’t quite right. Function isn’t the main point. Like that tape recorder: Why are there thousands of different tape recorders in the world, if they all share the same function? Because there are millions of different social groups, with varying aesthetic preferences. Design communicates an object’s place in human culture.
Memphis brought this idea to a further extreme, designing things deliberately devoid of function—from production to final use. After that, designers thought about materiality in a different way. The syllogism “I’m designing a cup, cups are glass, so my cup will be glass” became obsolete.
Design is a more social phenomenon—it’s moved further and further in that direction. Philippe Starck’s designs, for instance, probably wouldn’t have happened if not for Memphis. His work is distinctly communicative, and it also addresses material possibilities. A Starck chair has the same structural function chairs have always had, but it’s made of translucent plastic.
Different cultures express different priorities when it comes to materiality. For example, with houses—in Europe, they’re usually made of stone, intended to last several generations. In the United States they’re usually wood. It’s durability versus disposability. When we renovate a house, we modify the existing structure—in America you’d gut it and start over.
I think the American society and government are focused mainly on money. Europeans, we also like money. But we are obsessed with quality of life. Here in Italy it’s a prevalent notion that you must not sacrifice all your time, all your life, for money. People sometimes say I have a communist vision, but it’s really not. If a company asks me to design with a priority of fast production and fast sale, I don’t work with them. It goes back to the idea of speed. If we’re going to embrace speed, it shouldn’t be like the train that races time to get from point A to point B. It should be like a computer—elastic, flexible, taking into account situations and details. I think the role of European design is to focus on quality of life.
