In the coming months, our blog will be featuring products from Alessi’s list of their 100 best products. Stay tuned!

A couple prefix notes.  One from Alberto Alessi – “Decipher your own Modernity”:

Alberto Alessi - Alessi CEO

Since time immemorial, my family has been firmly established on Lake Orta.  In this poor, narrow valley in the Italian Alps, close to Switzerland, a long-standing tradition in wood and metal handicraft has survived up to this day.

Within the Alessi Company, design in the current sense of the term began to gain a foothold under my father Carlo, who drew on his training aas an industrial designer in order to develop virtually all of the products which appeared in our catalogues bewteen 1935 and 1945.  In the 1950s, my father replaced my grandfather (who fonded the factory in 1921) as corporate general manager, giving up altogether his activity as a designer and increasingly relying on the contributions of freelance designers, in accordance with the practice which was to become typical of all “Ittalian Design Factories”.  To this day, Alessi products are still considered as being handicraft items made with the aid of machines: by this I mean that, even though we rely on contemporary, industurial, technology and processing equipment, at depth of price – the one I beleive we ought to stick to – our inherent attitude is still rooted in handicraft culture.

When speaking about the “Italian Design Factories” I am referring to a historical group of companies for whom design is a mission, an activity which has become a sort of overall philosophy, a “Weltanschauung”, undelying all of these companies’ operational steps: we believe that our true nature comes closser to a “Research Lab in the Applied Arts” than to an industry in the traditional sense of the term: A Research Lab in the Applied Arts, the role of which is to mediate contrinually between the most advanced and stimulating expresions of international creative culture on the one hand, and the public’s requirements and dreams on the other.  A lab that should be as open and dedicated to the world of creation as possible.

The right type of contribution that an industry such as Alessi can make to the cilised devlopment of the consumer society is to be an artistic mediator, attemping to create new ojects, introducing a touch of transcendency, helping us decipher our own modernity.

Alberto Alessi

And one from Francesca Oldrini – “Design Classics”:

Some people have them in their homes and don’t even see them.  Some people find them in the attic, amongst old junk, and out of nostalgia, inpired by fond membories, clean them up and put them in the living room.  We are talking about household goods or to be precise tableware: objects which form an essential part of our daily lives…

Humble, unpretentious, so familiar they have become prosaic.  Yet the Alessi family, who have been producing them since 1921, have managed to transform these jugs and trays into design classics, and some are even beginning to hail them as works of art…

Francesca Oldrini

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