Beltá Frajumar: How did you know you wanted to be a designer?
OF. Gagliardini: I certainly didn’t start by planning my professional life, everything was step by step. Before becoming an architect, I graduated as a quantity surveyor and then entered the Polytechnic University of Milan.
I graduated as an architect in 1974 and after the corresponding qualifying exam in 1975 I joined the Milan College of Architects. All this led me to an almost obligatory path, which is why I partnered with a fellow student to form an engineering office.
Among the various jobs, we carried out an expansion of a rattan outdoor furniture manufacturing industry.
The owner asked us to design some products.
Meanwhile, we met a technical engineer, who, in addition to collaborating with our client’s industry, also collaborated with other industries, including a Spanish company that produced wicker outdoor furniture, and knowing my time in Madrid, he offered me the trip. to Gerona to introduce myself to them with the intention of starting a possible collaboration.
The year was 1982 and it marked the beginning of my collaborations with various Spanish companies that operated in different fields and that is why my debut as a designer was marked.
My passion for Spain was too strong not to dedicate myself to the trips that gave me the opportunity to live my passion.
So I left architecture, which at that time was contaminated by “tangentopoli” to dedicate myself to design.
D.E. Gagliardini, premios INTERCIDEC, ’16
BF: What can you tell us about his experience collaborating for architecture and design magazines such as Ottagono, ddn, Riabita, edited by Rima Editrice, and Style and Places magazines, edited by Fiera Milano Editore?
D.E.Gagliardini: It would take too long to respond in detail for each of these magazines, but the question leads me to reflections that unite them: the concept of “flashback” to explain the narrative seemed abstract to me.
I didn’t realize that flashback can also be inflected on subjective, as well as objective, reality.
IN OTHER WORDS, TO DESCRIBE MY PATH, IT SEEMS TO ME REALLY ESSENTIAL TO “INTERRUPT THE CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER OF EVENTS.”
I am first a journalist or first an architect. I deal with projects and for some time now I have been using language and the “social” amplifier to make “our” content travel.
I say “our” because if there were no projects and designers I would lack plots and protagonists for my narrative. In these years of work I have gone from the typewriter to the beginnings of the internet and social media platforms. I orient myself in these changes in a completely instinctive way. Improvisation suits me well, it has accompanied me in my various collaborations with the so-called “small magazines”, those produced outside the large publishing circuits, the so-called sector magazines.
These models of magazines in which architects discussed the theory and criticism of architecture and design, a typically European phenomenon in contrast to the world of magazines supported by advertising. They changed the way we thought about architecture, refocusing on research rather than profession.
Its privileged audience was that of the university and design world, from which its editors came, almost all of them professors. A narrative reading that I try to recover through my articles published by Diseño Interior, trying to recreate a corner of what were once magazines of “listen”, giving voice to memory, to delve into the past what they now call modernity.
Designer D.E. Gagliardini,
BF: Your pieces tend to be classicist and quite timeless. Is it an aesthetic or pragmatic choice?
D.E.Gagliardini: I think it is neither one nor the other, it is just my way of being to provide answers in accordance with the needs of companies. I consider it important that the designer creates objects that maintain a function, that respond to a need and that are not just the contemplation of beauty. Therefore, the beauty of an object must be a function of its purpose, it must not be detached from its function.
In modern design, however, there are some exceptions, in fact in some cases the function fades into the background and the communicative part is more important, as in Philippe Starck’s Juicy Salif juicer (1990), uncomfortable and unusable for its function (the juice drips everywhere because there is no container and the seeds are not separated), but of a particular beauty and with a great communicative side.
On the other hand, at every moment in history, man needs not only content but also “forms.”
We are living in a moment of rethinking design culture, perhaps that is why there are many reissues. My interest is directed towards sedimented models and typologies, reinterpreted and reduced to the essence and with greater formal rigor: an index of design culture. The recovery of tradition is configured as a nostalgic artistic expression rather than rhetoric.
MY DESIGN WANTS TO BE AN INDIVIDUAL CHARACTERIZATION THAT IDENTIFIES A REFERENCE MODEL OF GOOD DESIGN WHERE HARMONY, SIMPLICITY, USEFULNESS AND BEAUTY ARE EXPRESSIONS OF A LIFE ETHIC.
Typologies that have their roots in the past, that are eternal due to their aesthetics built with so much balance and so much harmony.
I never felt the weight of responsibility, I have never had anxiety, I never sought a confrontation. It was clear to me immediately, when, still a student, I looked for references in the things I projected. This was my way of designing: first have an idea, a concept, then look for an emotion. A stylistically unitary game of relationships, which involves everything, volume, surfaces, details. Precisely in this design practice lies the “modernity” of my designs, timeless? Classic?
ALAN sofa, design by D.E. Gagliardini for Beltá Frajumar
BF: What is the best thing for you about working with Beltá Frajumar?
D.E.Gagliardini: I think I started collaborating with Beltá Frajumar certainly without planning.
Once again chance marked my path: a friend, knowing my professional career, suggested introducing me to a sofa manufacturer, who had plans to expand the market range with new models, etc.
We agreed that on my first business trip to Barcelona he would accompany me to Yecla to make the first contacts. So it was. She introduced me to what was then Frajumar and they asked me my opinion on calling the new line “Beltá”, I liked it right away; Furthermore, in Italian it means “beauty.”
Who can oppose so much beauty?
I presented models, some accepted them and others did not understand them. Then little by little the collaboration became more and more established, they considered my experience useful that unites the project-production-communication chain, but the most important thing was that the professional relationship generated the human relationship, I found respect and friendship.
This is what I find positive about working with Beltá Frajumar: the relationship that involves you as a person, feeling responsible, not only professionally, but as a person deserving of friendship.
ALAN sofa, design by D.E. Gagliardini for Beltá Frajumar
DO YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE DESIGNS AND THEIR DESIGNERS? CLICK HERE.
FINALLY, WE INVITE YOU TO SHARE OUR CONTENT SO THAT MORE PEOPLE CAN LEARN ABOUT THE DESIGNER BEHIND SOME OF THE SUCCESSFUL PRODUCTS.
