Collection: Marco Zanuso
Marco Zanuso was born in 1906 in Milan, where he obtained his degree in architecture in 1939. After WWII, he worked in the fields of industrial product design, architecture, and even territorial and urban planning. His positions in organisations like CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne), INU (Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica /National Institute of Urban Planning), MSA (Movimento di Studi per l’Architettura /Movement for Architectural Studies), ADI (Associazione per il Disegno Industriale /Industrial Design Association) and with magazines like Domus and Casabella made him a key figure on the Italian architectural scene in the second half of the 20th century. Zanuso can be considered a founding father of industrial design, one of the first to tackle the problem of industrialisation along with the question of new technologies and materials applied to design.
In 1956, he contributed to the establishment of ADI, acting as its president from 1966 to 1969. In collaboration with Alberto Rosselli, he created the Compasso d'Oro award based on a design by graphic artist Albe Steiner. Between the 1950s and the '70s, he built several factories, including the Cedis factory in Palermo, the Necchi workshops in Pavia, Olivetti factories in Buenos Aires, San Paolo, Scarmagno, Crema and Marcianise, the Brionvega factories in Casella d'Asolo and the IBM complex in Santa Palomba. During that same period, Zanuso was lead designer of a vast number of objects, mostly working with Richard Sapper, with whom he established a fruitful partnership from 1956 to 1971. Many of these products won him the Compasso d'Oro award: in 1956 with the superautomatic sewing machine Mod. 1102 produced by Fratelli Borletti; in 1962 with the Brionvega Doney television; in 1964 with the children's K1340 chair by Kartell; in 1967 with Grillo, a telephone produced for Siemens; and finally in 1979 with the Ariante fan designed for Vortice Elettrosociali and a dropped ceiling for open spaces created with Karl Steiner.
Other legendary projects include the Lady foam armchair produced in 1951 by Arflex (a company founded by Pirelli in 1948); the Algol television in 1964 and the TS 502 radio receivers in 1965 (designed with Sapper for Brionvega); the Martingala armchair produced by Arflex in 1975; the Lambda chairs by Gavina; and 4999 by Kartell now at MoMA in New York. He made a significant contribution to the historic 1972 MoMA exhibition, th eNew Domestic Landscape. Alongside his work as an architect and designer, he also taught Artistic Design for Industry, Scenography, Architectural Technology and Industrial Design at the Milan Polytechnic. Marco Zanuso received numerous awards throughout his career, from the Gold Medal at the VIII Triennale di Milano in 1947 (the first of five in succession) to the Compasso d'Oro Career Prize in 1985. Important monographs by such authoritative critics and historians as François Burkhardt and Gillo Dorfles were dedicated to Zanuso, consecrating him as a seminal figure in the history of industrial design.
