Alessandro Mendini, 2006
The New York Times Magazine

Here are five important figures, five women protagonists of Italian design. In alphabetical order, they are Astori, Aulenti, Boeri, De Padova and Vigo. Or better: Antonia, Gae, Cini, Maddalena and Nanda. Their personalities lie far apart. Actually, they are opposites. But they have a common denominator that may not be neglected: they have been the leading women of Milan’s cultural stage for many years, the actresses of its legendary Bel Design. They testify to a refined female presence in Italian design. Preceded and followed by very few other interesting women protagonists in this mundane, snobbish, tension-filled environment. They are five individuals who have designed some of the most fascinating objects and interiors of current times. Are they five little lambs grazing on the same grass as our great masters, the “sacred monsters”? I really don’t think so. They are strong, aggressive masters in their own right.
Take Antonia Astori. With a sunny disposition, shy, reserved and precise, she proved that it was possible to take the implicit hardness of modular furniture systems and infuse it with poetry. Her Oikos system is an unambiguous example of this. As Driade’s inspiring force and muse, Antonia invented a kind of passe-partout with Oikos, an answer to the multifarious needs of home interiors. She disregards the functional image that holds many in its death grip. All her attention is focused on refinement in the composition of volumes, where textures, transparency, color, material, shadow and shine generate an image of calm emotion. This is the type of image that has distinguished throughout the years the fresh, skillful and admirable style of the Driade company – its factory, its exhibitions and ever new stores.
Then there is Gae Aulenti, a world-famous architect, full of medals and honorific titles. And she’s popular, too. She started out magisterially designing the layout for Casabella under editorship of Ernesto Rogers, went on to become a “Neo-Liberty” exponent, making many brilliant sculptural objects, and then became artistic director of Fiat and Fontana Arte. Her large, official commissions for museums and buildings everywhere - Italy, France, Spain and Japan, from the Champs Elysées to the Quirinal – have made her a figure of high institutional prestige. Her design culture has been interwoven with political culture, and as a result Gae is an authoritative public figure. She also has a deep, inborn vocation for the métier of set designer, creating wonderful plays for prominent theaters and directors, which are, in my opinion, her most beautiful things. Luckily, the official character of her commissions has not yet been able to diminish her curiosity, her acute intelligence, the originality of her approach and her continuous modernization in all her different activities.
Then there is Cini Boeri. As an architecture graduate from the Milan Polytechnic, Cini’s debut working with Marco Zanuso for ten years during Italy’s post-war reconstruction allowed her to understand discipline, perfectionism and technique: the most useful type of beauty. When she opened her own office and started working alone, she began mixing this method with her vibrant talent and her innate sensitivity toward the public. Soon she became a fashionable, sought-after young designer, a reference point in an Italian design world that in the ‘60s and ‘70s was solely and strictly Milanese. Every living room had to have one of her armchairs or couches. With the Arflex company, Cini was the first to use the technique of foam expansion without the use of structures. All intelligentsia sat on her big snake-like seating elements “Seduta Infinita”. Her serious approach to her profession remains intact today, in her collaboration with the American company Knoll and in her teaching at the Milan Polytechnic. Most unforgettable remain the austere little house she built for herself in Sardinia, and her all-glass chair for Fiam, one of the most excellent examples of classic Italian design.
Contrary to the others, Maddalena De Padova is not a designer, but someone who sells “good taste”. For half a century now, her taste has been expressed in its entirety inside the legendary De Padova store. Throughout the years, it has accompanied, for better and for worse, the radical-chic spirit and mundane soul of both Milanese and foreign bourgeoisie alike, furnishing their elegant homes and their villas on the sea and in the mountains. A bourgeoisie that once was strong, but now is on its decline. Hers is a very Italian taste, but transformed in its clean sobriety by her youthful fascination with George Nelson, Charles Eames, Dieter Rams and Nordic design. A later brilliant touch was her partnership with the great Vico Magistretti, undisputed talent, to whom Maddalena gave free rein to create that fantastic collection of chairs and furniture that has become a cornerstone in the history of design. Still today, that work remains an amazing concentration of inspiration. And so Maddalena holds the Milanese under her spell, and not only them, with the visual messages she sends out from her showroom, her “temple” on Corso Venezia.
And there is Nanda Vigo, an artist/designer of anti-rhetoric stance, an outsider. Working contemporaneously on architecture, installations, decoration and object systems, Nanda is the foremost example of how design can be approached artistically. Her subtle and uninterrupted course of visual events pursues and perfect her utopia of a world based on sentimental rituality. In her progressively developing vocation, in her visionary humanitarianism, Nanda lovingly combines her expressive inventions infused with a need for silence and the desert, with the languages of conceptual art and pop art, with the exploration of different primitive cultures, with neo movements and Italian post-design. This eclectic methodology, tenaciously applied in the hard asphalt jungle amid the rhetoric of contemporary design, makes her creative research admirable and always fresh. Neon, tulle and mirrors are some of her favorite materials, and the way she expertly combines them with her long experience results in environments that are infused with magical feeling.
Then there are her space-time designs, her space stimulators (pyramids, glass), and her recent, highly sensitive, mystical and political ethnic involvement. There are the apartments that she strictly decorates in a single color (white, black or yellow) that shake up the highly bourgeois structure of the pretty apartments of Milanese art collectors, turning them into an aesthetic species: “Art Apartments”.
Milan has many defects, but when it comes to design (and jet-set fashion creators and La Scala opera house) it is the center of the world. I am convinced that this stable and exceptional condition is due to our extraordinary roots and Renaissance energy. The five grandes dames of design, proud warriors as they are, these five monuments of Italian design, enjoy these fortunate origins, this privilege. Just like their male counterparts do.
A difficult question remains: Have these women really led to a feminine way in design? To what extent has their strong commitment brought about a divergence with respect to prevailing masculine design? From this point of view, Nanda is the most experimental, possibly because of her close affiliation with art and the lesser degree of complexity in her work. It is less violated by the heaviness of institutions, which force every move to be a move towards homogeneity, or towards defending a masculine move. As for the female Italian architects and designers of the following generations, they are few, yet interesting. The globalization-driven, complex and critical conditions under which they have to work seem to have marked a drastic cut with the history of the five famous designers that we spoke about. The quaking of economic and cultural epicenters has changed the scenery.

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