Paolo Deganello

Paolo Deganello (1940-) was one of the great protagonists of the Radical Design adventure in Italy. Born in Veneto, he studied architecture in the 1960s at the University of Florence and it was there that he obtained one of his first assignments as a designer, in 1963 restoring some rooms of the church of Orsanmichele. Shortly after graduating he became one of the founding members of the Archizoom Associati group, together with Andrea Branzi, Massimo Morozzi and Gilberto Corretti. Through Archizoom he was among the first to advocate in Italy an overcoming of the rationalist style in vogue at the time, riding the atmosphere of renewal and contestation that characterized those years and giving life to great creative ferments. In 1974, after the exhaustion of the Archizoom experience, he founded another design group together with Corretti, Franco Gatti and Lorenzo Querci, the Collettivo Tecnici Designisti, carrying out an intense intellectual work through writing for magazines such as Domus, Casabella and Modo and university teaching in London, Rome and Milan. In 1981 he opened his own design studio with which he worked for brands such as Cassina and Driade. In recent years he has oriented his reflections and practices above all towards the theme of eco-sustainability.