Joe Colombo

Joe Colombo (1930-1971) went down in history as the "designer of the future". His creations are permeated by an optimistic vision of progress and aim at creating a radically new way of understanding the home environment. The result was a pioneering interest in innovative materials such as plastic, at the time used in the field of furniture only for experimental projects, and a very modern attention to the theme of modularity, often taken to the extreme as in the Visiona 1 installation designed for Bayer. in which every room of the house is rethought in science fiction as a "functional station". Born in Milan, he dedicated his youth to art and painting, joining the Nuclear Art movement. He only became interested in design when he was thirty and had only one decade to devote to the discipline, before his sudden and premature death from cardiac arrest. But that decade was the 1960s, a period of swirling changes, and his creations set the tone for an era: armchairs like the Elda (now re-proposed by Longhi) or the Tube Chair (designed for Flexform and re-edited by Cappellini) in the collections of all the most important design museums around the world, as well as the Minikitchen designed for Boffi, the vast collection of lamps produced by Oluce, and the fruits of its collaborations with brands such as Kartell and Zanotta. Among the products that today re-edit his creations there are also B-Line, Amini, Karakter and many others.