Alessi at Home and Afield
Alberto Alessi had a dream. He wanted to be a vintner, but not just any kind of vintner. “My ambition is to do the best wine ever in Italy,” says the sixty-seven-year-old head of Alessi, SpA, the $130 million family company he has headed since 1970. He has transformed it from a staid producer of stainless steel housewares into a dynamic powerhouse driven solely by design…
News
Design Miami/Basel 2013 Highlights
Basel Switzerland experienced an exciting five days of design with the eighth edition of Design Basel. From June 11-16, 2013 nearly fifty galleries from fourteen different countries presented museum quality work from the last five centuries of design. This year Basel was housed in the newly completed Herzog & de Meuron designed metal latticed building. [...]
New York’s June Design Auctions
Design sales at Phillips, Sotheby’s, and Christie’s combined earned a total of $19 million, while the addition of sales from Chicago’s Wright and New Jersey’s Rago Arts and Auction Center brought the tally up to $29.3 million. This auction season highlights came from Tiffany, François-Xavier Lalanne, and Harry Bertoia sales.
Departments
Pattern of Chaos
Albert Paley’s installation of monumental series of new sculptures on Park Avenue is his largest body of work shown in New York City in more than two decades. The Park Avenue project, on view from June 29 to November, will be documented by an exhibition of developmental drawings and sculpture maquettes at Gerald Peters Gallery, New York, opening in September, and in a book, written by Patterson Sims published at the same time.
A New Look at Modernist Michigan
An exhibition at the Cranbrook Art Museum (accompanied by a four-day symposium) will address the too long-overlooked subject of Michigan’s large and significant contribution to modern design in America. Both aim to establish the ways in which Michigan-based designers and architects defined modernism at mid-century—with work that ranged from the Eames Lounge chair to…
Features
Rooted Modernism
“We’ve hung onto a number of ideas over the years, chief of which is that place will always matter,” says architect Richard Fernau, one of two partners in the Berkeley-based firm of Fernau and Hartman Architects. “It’s been one of our touchstones.” Indeed, the work of Fernau and Laura Hartman draws on the deep-set traditions of the land and landscape…
The Dream Factory of Alessi
Today, the Hollywood Dream Factories are long gone, but Alessi is thriving, with one eye still focused on function and the other on art and invention. Some of the greatest designers and architects of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including EttoreSottsass, AchilleCastiglioni, Aldo Rossi, Michael Graves, Philippe Starck, Norman Foster, and Jasper Morrison have worked with the company. The president, Alberto Alessi, grandson of the founder, calls it “the dream factory.”
