The geographies of Vico Magistretti return to the stage. After the conference Vico Magistretti. Between Milan and the world and the exhibition Il Magistretti inglese, this time it is the turn of a more distant destination: Japan. And this time there is also a travel companion: ECAL/Ecole cantonale d'art de Lausanne.
Vico Magistretti e il Giappone recounts encounters, collaborations, journeys and projects: from the Cerruti 1881 shops in Tokyo (1974) and Osaka (1986), to the houses in Tokyo (1984-86) and Aburatsubo (1987-91) for the Tanimoto family, up to the products designed for Japanese companies. Above all, it tells a story of formal and conceptual correspondences between the work of the Milanese architect and designer and Japanese aesthetics: more than twenty projects are reread through three aesthetic concepts of Japanese culture – wa, harmonic beauty and balance; iro, the sense of colour; and iki, the elegance of renunciation – which resonate in Vico's work: the simplicity of forms, the use of natural materials, a design approach that interweaves craft techniques, aesthetics and everyday life into a coherent and measured whole; the ability to combine grace and spontaneity.