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More Than An Act Of MagisRule number one for successful Italian furniture companies seems to be this: have a charismatic president. It worked for Cappellini for more than a decade (until company president Giulio Cappellini was forced to sell to competitor Poltrona Frau two months ago) and it continues to work for Magis, a plastics specialist led by founder Eugenio Perazza.
When it comes to having top designers work for Magis, Perazza, it seems, doesn't take no for an answer. His persistence has been rewarded. Recent Magis products have been designed by a who's who of the world's most sought-after designers, including (take a deep breath, this is a long list) Werner Aisslinger, Ron Arad, the Bouroullec brothers, the Campana brothers, Stefano Giovannoni, Konstantin Grcic, James Irvine, Jasper Morrison, Karim Rashid and Marcel Wanders. It's enough to make a competitor jealous, but Magis has some formidable challengers in the marketplace, including like-minded design-driven companies such as Alias, Edra, Kartell and Zanotta.
Magis distinguishes itself mostly because of its (relatively) cheap and cheerful plastic designs, but like any good Italian design innovator worth its salt, the company is not afraid to take a risk here and there. Such was the case with German designer Konstantin Grcic's Chair One design, which was as much loathed as loved when it debuted at the Milan furniture fair two years ago. The seat is a skeletal-like die cast aluminum and in one version it sits on a concrete base. To paraphrase an old Monty Python sketch, Chair One is not a chair for sitting, it is a chair to avoid sitting on for any serious length of time. Grcic had this in mind - the chair was designed for transitional public spaces.
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11/6/2004 | Viewed 6,177 time(s)
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