Event 2024

exhibition: il Magistretti inglese

Exhibition: conceived, curated and set up by young London based architects Viola Pelù and Louis Mayes, the exhibition explores and elaborates on the relationship between Vico Magistretti and the United Kingdom: the projects and trips, the correspondence and collaboration, the conferences and recognitions, and finally the work and memories of Vico’s students at London’s Royal College of Art (RCA).

Where

Fondazione studio museo Vico Magistretti — Via Bellini, 1, Milano
Map

When

16-21 April 2024

Program

Entry rules

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Designers

Vico Magistretti

Architecture Conferences, workshops Installations Product Design

The exhibition

explores and elaborates on the relationship between Vico Magistretti and the United Kingdom: the projects and trips, the correspondence and collaboration, the conferences and recognitions, and finally the work and memories of Vico’s students at London’s Royal College of Art (RCA).

The exhibition remembers and documents a planning and cultural “love story” which goes well beyond Vico’s known role as visiting professor in 1979 at the RCA: from the participation in 1952 in the Italian Contemporary Architecture show at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in London to many projects which have adopted English form and material (from the Caori table of 1969 to the Raffles sofa of 1988).

So it was in 1993 that Vico remembered the deep sentiment with Anglo-Saxon culture: “I am linked, for various reasons, to English traditions (...) The English culture is able to suggest reversals of meaning, surprise juxtapositions. In the British tradition the sense of necessity and love for reality is interwoven. Sometimes it is enough to alter a small element of reality to create an object of good formal quality”.

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