Design Conversations

This time a prize goes not to one of our products, but to a project we hold dear: The Appartamento Lago. Last Friday, Diego Paccagnella, the creator and Art Director of the project, collected the Adecco Prize at the Festival delle Città Impresa in Asolo, awarded to Lago S.p.A. “for having developed an innovative use of Design”.

The first Appartamento was opened two years ago on via Tortona, 21 in Milan. It was exclusively furnished with Lago products and the staff – 13 people – lived there throughout the entire duration of the Salone. The days were lived out with the doors wide open and the first visitors began to climb the stairs and enter (sometimes asking “may I?”, confused by the unusual combination of public and private). From there the flow has continued without interruption…Tortona, Brera followed. Then Venice, Riccione, Bologna, Turin, Bergamo…in short, thousands of visitors, events of every kind, countless words and numerous photos, videos and articles even though few, at the beginning, really understood the complexity of the project.

It was for this reason that the decision was made to publish, with Corraini Editore, the book, “Lago Appartamento”. To explain in 180 pages the ideas and reasoning behind the concept, to create a text that could also be a manifesto for a project with the ambition of activating a change in the meaning of creativity and design. In this matured the strong desire to bet on a vision: to create a network of apartments in which people can meet, get to know and converse with one another. A network of homes where one breathes culture, where one creates energies capable of giving life to creative social change.

Commentary of Diego Paccagnella, Creative Director of Lago S.p.A.: “The awarding of a prize like the Adecco becomes a truly important occasion for reflection on what has already been achieved and what can still be explored with the Appartamento. It is my hope that this prize can offer a moment of satisfaction to all those who contributed and continue to contribute to its fulfillment (and there are many, among Lago staff, professionals, creatives and tenants). Above all I hope that this can be an occasion for reinforcing the conviction that we are all taking part in a project that does not die out but that continues to flourish though the creativity of every single participant. I believe that the Appartamento is a choral project, that it manifests its uniqueness through the plurality of voices involved each and every day!“.

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Il Adecco prize 2011

Adecco Prize 2011 – The prize for 2011 is dedicated to Education. The dynamism of ideas is by now a state of necessity and not a fancy dress for openings that count. Education is its motor force, since this orients man, leaving him versatile, leading him to seek the perfect move while accepting limits and balances he might not have wanted. Education is the flexible receptor in each one of us. The forbidden fruit that it represents is therefore a fluid body, ready to to redefine itself in service of the stimuli it receives.

Only one day to go until the Mario Brunello concert. Have you made your reservation? Act soon because seating is limited. All you need to do is register on the website Festival delle Città Impresa and sign up for the event.

If are feeling lost by the wayside, let me explain what I am talking about…

As you know, LAGO has contamination with other realities in its DNA. This times we are contaminating ourselves with music and we are doing it in an unusual way: we are hosting “I thought it was Bach”, a musical event for which Mario Brunello will perform a selection of Bach suites for violoncello in a suggestive and unexpected location: the LagoFabbrica. Which is to say in a business space that is normally dedicated to production and that will become an Auditorium for the evening.

It will be stupendous to see the factory emptied of machinery and filled with musical notes. From the production of products to the production of music, of culture.
Betting on the capacity of a business to produce culture is a choice we made some years ago, moved by the desire to have a positive impact on our territory. And we are reaping the good fruits of this decision.

The event tomorrow evening (starting at 8pm) will start off with the technical manager of Ferrari, Roberto Fedeli, who will demonstrate how a motor attains perfection through a highly refined process that begins from its most “human” characteristic, which is to say the sound it produces.

This will be followed with the performance by Mario Brunello, who will be accompanied by the “metropolitan” video commentary of another great of the world of Italian music, Vinicio Capossela.

But for those who have time, the evening will begin before 8pm. At 6pm we will take a tour led by Anna Scalfi Eghenter, who will show us the project she designed for the industrial zone of Villa del Conte and that she created in our Art Waiting Room, where we are scheduled to arrive at 7pm. Here is the invitation…

A day of intriguing contaminations, not to be missed!

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LagoFabbrica – “LagoFabbrica” derived from a project by Italo Chiucchini, a non-factory that produces insofar as conceived according to the criteria of organic domestic architecture. Here, noble materials not commonly used for industries meet: architectural systems made to the measure of man create harmonious sequences of inclined pitches, wooden beams, bricks and glass, terracotta, steel and aluminum.

Mario Brunello – Born in Castelfranco Veneto (Treviso), studied at the Venice Conservatory with Adriano Vendramelli and Antonio Janigro. In 1986 he won first prize at the International Competition Čajkovskij of Moscow in the category dedicated to the violoncello.

Founder and director of the Italian String Orchestra, he has performed in the most important concert halls worldwide, conducted by the biggest names, including Claudio Abbado, Myung-Whun Chung, Valery Gergiev, Carlo Maria Giulini, Eliahu Inbal, Marek Janowski, Riccardo Muti, Zubin Mehta and Seiji Ozawa.

He plays a Maggini violoncello made in 1600 that belonged to Benedetto Mazzacurati and then later to Franco Rossi, violoncellist of the Quartetto Italiano.

In Castelfranco Veneto, he hometown, he gives concerts, courses and master classes at Capannone Antiruggine, a historical factory where one once worked with iron and has now been transformed into a concert hall.

Our Art Waiting Room is currently in the able hands of Anna Scalfi Eghenter, an artist from Trent who, through her art, seeks to trigger participatory dynamics beyond the strictly artistic sphere and in relation to such themes as the economy, the environment, daily life and living.

Her new project, “Time is the place”, for fondazione march, invites reflection on the critical points of mobility in the industrial zone of Villa del Conte (PD), offering creative strategies to users that can become new habits and that stimulate relations between businesses.

Through research on transportation (train and bus routes and schedules, parking, metropolitan surface projects) and on the ways, habits, schedules and motivations of those who work, live or arrive in Villa del Conte, Anna in generating a series of targeted artistic interventions such as Workstation (the artist’s studio), Time Ticket (a ticket which has a time as its destination, not a place), Usucapio (train station seating dedicated to commuters), Born to Be Stolen (fluorescent bicycles with instructions for how they can be stolen), Fairway (industrial golf course with the course holes located at participating businesses) and Mapcase (bookstore-archive in the shape of a map of Villa del Conte).

The goal is to transform the industrial zone of Villa del Conte into an evolved industrial district – not in the literal meaning of the term that signifies a socio-economic entity constituted by a group of businesses of a productive sector located in a circumscribed area, among which there is collaboration but also competition, but rather in the sense of a place constituted by a group of businesses from diverse productive sectors that share services, visions and points of aggregation.

We are getting the ball rolling on Thursday, 28 April with a tour through the industrial zone that departs at 6pm from the Villa del Conte train station.
The industrial zone will be transformed into an enormous gold course in which the businesses constitute the eleven holes. Cement and soil, a few pieces of turf near the gates. Soft, environmentally-friendly balls. Outside of each business, its respective logo is made into a flag signaling a point to be scored. Derived from Urban Golf, Industrial Golf is a new way of relating to public space in the city.

At 7pm we will shift to the LAGO waiting room for the exhibition opening. Later, at 8pm, we will host a concert by Mario Brunello in the LagoFabbrica, which we will tell you about soon.

For information on rounds of Industrial Golf in the Industrial Zone of Villa del Conte contact fondazione march – info@fondazionemarch.org

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Anna Scalfi Eghenter, born in Trent in 1965, conceives art as a subversive frame that alters the boundaries of action. The entire organizational process of her projects takes an analytic perspective of mechanisms of negotiation between art and civil society. An independent artist, she intervenes with site-specific projects that trigger participatory dynamics that extend beyond the strictly artistic sphere on themes such as the economy, the environment, daily life and living.
She currently works in London where she is advancing her project “From inside (I like the system)”, through a PhD program at the Essex Business School. Her work reflects an interdisciplinary background, having studied at the School of Fine Arts, Brera (Milan), the Academy of Theatrical Arts S. D’Amico (Rome) and in the Sociology department at Trent. The artworks of Scalfi Eghenter have been displayed
at the Pistoletto Foundation in Biella (2010), the Foundation of the Civic Gallery of Trent (2009), the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation in Turin (2008), the MART-Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rovereto (2007), and at  Manifesta7-Parallel Events (2008).

Last Wednesday, heedless of the fiery situation, Francesco and Eleonora hopped a flight to Beirut for the inauguration of the first Lago Store in Lebanon. They returned safe and sound…certainly not aboard the mini-car here below, but on a passenger plane….

A perfect opening, a truly beautiful store. In addition to the friends of the Lago Store Beirut there were many journalists and designers present.

Representatives of the Italian Embassy in Lebanon also showed up for the occasion…

To see the store, page through the photos here below…

This morning, a rumor spread throughout the office that the new AIR Sofa catalogs had arrived…and so I dashed to the warehouse in search of the catalogs, but the truck was still unloading them. I had to go back upstairs and wait for the boxes to be brought inside…sigh. After about an hour, I went back to the warehouse, glanced around and there they were! There was already someone there, taking a peek….

I started to leaf through the pages, too. After having worked so hard, written, photographed, commented, organized, re-read (etc., etc.), it was a wonderful thing to hold in my very hands the new LAGO Sofa catalogs. Yes, I had already seen all of the photos and read and corrected the texts, but to see them in real life is a whole other story! And then to feel the paper and smell the perfume…yummm! Tactile experiences always take some time…it is necessary to wait and wait…and the waiting always pays off, in the end.

The product, however, as I was saying, we have already known for some time…we presented it at the 2009 Furniture Salon, but above all we began, for the first time, to publicize it in a different way. For the LAGO sofas, in fact, we created an ad hoc site that served as a content aggregator. A sort of box where we could put everything that was being said in the Internet galaxy about our sofas. Probably also this post, when I have finished writing and publishing it.

Other than the aggregator, we also set up a “sofa blog” where you can read, among other things, everything about the genesis of the new catalog. Here below it tells you that the AIR Sofas won the Good Design Award.

It was a big challenge to start talking about the efforts involved in order to communicate a product before the catalog arrived in shops, before the photos came out in the papers and before the .pdf files were available for the visitors to our website. But the Internet offers this particular advantage: it makes our Clients and Retailers participants…first. And we couldn’t not make the most out of the opportunity!

In a market in which communication is ever more savvy, it is necessary to find new ways of involving the public…and at times this is not easy, above all when the giants in the furniture sector have enormous liquidity at their disposal, mega agencies and a PR flock. We, instead, wanted to demonstrate that it is possible to do a lot with a little…it is enough to find the right soil.

In sum, there I am in the warehouse turning pages and looking, turning pages and looking, and the guys tell me that there are five different covers!!! Thanks to WOW (alias Giacomo Covacich and Morris Granzotto, who designed the catalog). What a great idea! Obviously we fished them out by color…I chose the one with the yellow cover. Until next time!

And with Turin there are five. Five LAGO hot spots in five cornerstone cities and all open beginning with the first in April 2010: Milan-Brera, Venice, Bologna, Riccione and…now Turin! The opening of the fifth LAGO Appartamento – on via Massena 25 in Turin – was a huge success and the event was followed closely by the press even before Saturday, 15 January, the day of the opening. Just think that, yesterday (and so the morning after the opening), the tenant, Marco, was already invited to give a talk about the project and his experience as a tenant.

But how did the evening go? Let’s say it was characterized by lots of cheer, serious and not-so-serious talk and the fusion cooking of Nori Muramatsu (a Japanese chef from Piedmont), in collaboration with Nao, the tenant’s girlfriend…here they are at work, preparing sushi and tea for the guests.

Excellent sushi, I must say. And it was devoured without restraint by the guests who came and went and exited and entered the Appartamento throughout the whole evening. I tasted only two pieces of maki (sob, sob), but they were truly exquisite! Just to give you an idea of the attack on the sushi…

The Appartamento stayed open until 10pm. The last guests made their exit around 1am! A busy evening, but very fun…you can take a look at what happened in the slide show below…

There was even a conjurer, Gian Vito Svito, who left everyone amazed! I admit I tried to cheat, to trip him up, but I did not succeed! He always guessed the card I had fished out without seeing it…

In sum, a grand evening! Marco has already put the photos online, those of the professional photographer naturally…Take a look!

Until next time.