Compasso d’oro Carrier Award

The visual and expressive research of Pino Tovaglia, who died prematurely in 1977 at the age of 54, was among those dominant – yet discreetly and almost timidly, like its author – in the cultural landscape of the post-war development years and leaving indelible marks on graphic design culture, not only in Italy.

 Overcoming the distinctions between formal genres based solely on technical differences – as in the now famous Finmeccanica series in the years of Leonardo Sinisgalli in which, for the first time, line and “burnt” photography were integrated into the graphic context – Pino Tovaglia has greatly contributed in practice to the affirmation of the thesis against those “literary genres” which hindered expressive authenticity at that time.

Author of memorable brands from those of Nebiolo and “Ottagono” to that of the new Alfa Romeo and co-author of the brand for the Lombardy Region, Pino Tovaglia developed famous advertising campaigns such as those for Pirelli in the years of Arturo Castellani,  Splugen during the reign of Aldo Bassetti and for Total and Lanerossi; activities that earned him the Palme d’Or for advertising. Founder and president of the Art Director’s Club of Milan and the art director of magazines such as “Pirelli” and “RAI”, consultant at la Rinascente in the years of Giovanni Bordoli, and of Italia Nostra, Mondadori, Flos and Einaudi, he taught at the Scuola Superiore d’Arte del Castello, Umanitaria and at Urbino, then starting up the coordinated image course at the Nino Di Salvatore Polytechnic School of Design in Milan, helping to train an entire generation of graphic designers with a new globalized direction.

An advocate of team work, but self-taught and a researcher by instinct and reasoning; free and independent, logical and subtle, Pino Tovaglia has been able to translate the great themes into the experience of the “everyday” in an approach from which we all still have a lot to learn.

It is primarily for this reason that the Compasso d’Oro is intended to act in memoriam.

A pioneer of Italian graphics, in 1939 he opened a studio in Milan with his wife Lica, creating the “Politecnico Biblioteca” series for Einaudi in 1945. From 1946 to 1948  he was in Mexico and returned to Milan where from 1950 to 1958 he was art director of La Rinascente, for which he designed the Compasso d ‘Oro brand. A founding member of ADI, he collaborated with cultural institutions and companies, dedicating himself in particular to editorial graphics for Feltrinelli (1955-1965) and Zanichelli. Until 1958 he taught at the Collegio Rinascita and from 1959 at the Scuola del Libro della Società Umanitaria.
 

JUSTIFICATION
Albe Steiner, born in 1913 and died prematurely in 1974, has characterized since 1933 an entire season of Italian graphics, intertwined  in the most radical and advanced Rodcenko expressive tradition- with political and civil commitment.

A man of vast cultural and social interests and convinced that “freedom is culture”, Albe Steiner set up Elio Vittorini’s legendary magazine “Il Politecnico” immediately after the war, created the Liberazione della Ricostruzione Exhibition with Gabriele Mucchi, collaborated with Hannes Meyer former director of the Bauhaus, and worked intensely in the Milan Umanitaria, also as director of his pet project, the Scuola del Libro.

Animator at the Triennale Study Centre and  founder of the Artists Union, of the Graphic Studies Centre, the AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale), ADI, ANEDI and ICTA  as well as curating countless public, private and political publishing productions, he published the historical “distance” didactic lecture notes on the history and technique of the manifesto for the Accademia di Roma. He also edited Zanichelli’s ‘experimental scientific book’ and set up series and magazines for Feltrinelli. His contribution to la Rinascente, especially during the establishment of the Compasso d ‘Oro, gave an unmistakable character to the image of the award, while the other cultural and commercial achievements of the department store are also remembered for his always illuminating interventions, not only strictly graphic, which contributed in particular to distinguish it, also on the international scene.

Collaborator of various Venice Biennials and with Coop, RAI, Pirelli, Olivetti, Bemberg, Linoleum, Heller, Bertelli, Geigy, Cedit, Necchi, Lark  and Aurora, he conceived Pierrel’s corporate identity which remains a milestone in history not only in the context of pharmaceutical graphics and packaging. Enthusiastic, tireless, courageous, Albe Steiner was one of the great masters of life and knowledge, who knew how to accompany the profession and politics with the didactic commitment and generous care of young people. The vast book and newspaper library and the graphic collection that he left are, especially today, a precious reference point for the documentation of the successful years that saw him as a leading figure.

We cannot conclude this motivation for Albe, so pleonastic for those who know the history of design, without mentioning Lica, the apparently fragile companion who always supported him with great, even professional intelligence, with reciprocated affection and even with stubbornness in the difficult and painful phases. Lica Steiner, to whom the Prize is awarded so that she herself has it among the things she experienced with him and never lost.

Mechanical model maker attracted by industrial design, in 1951he moved from making foundry models to industrial models, collaborating with Nizzoli, Albini, the Castiglioni brothers, Sottsass, Zanuso, Giò Ponti and Munari for companies such as Olivetti (Lettera 22, 1950), Necchi (Mirella sewing machine, 1956), Brionvega (TV Doney, 1962), Siemens (Grillo telephone, 1965) and Alessi (Cupola coffee maker, 1988). At the end of his activity he had created 8,000 models and 25,000 design models.
 

JUSTIFICATION
For decades Giovanni Sacchi has represented the best in terms of designed product models. The first, exactly fifty years ago for Marcello Nizzoli at Olivetti was the Lexicon. The last is still to be done.

From the outset his models were created from a partnership of work, sensitivity and thought: Sacchi is often the hand that thinks in wood together with the heads of others; which makes Denis de Rougemont’s penser avec les mains true by becoming the interlocutor of research without ever betraying it. Even when he made working models of Leonardo’s machines and guessed the solutions unexpressed in the drawings, it could be said that for Sacchi the Codex Atlanticus had fewer mysteries than for critics and scholars.

For the designer, his chisel becomes a pencil, and this becomes, through his hand, a tool; because – capable of simulating the final materials in wood – he knows how to overcome the abstract limits of design; he always knows how to become a collaborator; and what’s more, always available, dedicated and tireless. Without intentionally doing so Sacchi ended up choosing, due to his expertise, the high points of Italian design while many companies have decided to produce precisely on the basis of the perception and judgment induced by his model which therefore acts as an interface between the idea and the designer, and between this and the client. In this sense, the responsibility – and the merit – of many achievements are also due to him.

To this extraordinary and unique career which spread throughout collections, design studios and company archives, an ideal museum of final, provisional, transitory models and yet unrepeatable witnesses of the process that led to the final outcome – the Compasso d’Oro was obligatory in 1998, fifty years after his first success; and two-thirds of a century after his first work.

Founded by Gio Ponti in 1932 as the “artistic” division of Luigi Fontana, Fontana Arte was a company that developed as a research centre into the particular characteristics of glass, with results that made it one of the leading figures of pre-war Italian design. The Compasso d’Oro for Lifetime Achievement at Fontana Arte – together with the memory of the now classic designs by Ponti and Pietro Chiesa – is intended above all to indicate, for example, the rigorous twenty-year-long intervention that, led by Carlo Guglielmi and his team of managers, was able to redeem the company and its name from past entrepreneurial and cultural mistakes through a radical change of orientation, the recovery of the culture of the company and a courageous thematic diversification that underwent continuous evolution. It also is intended to recognize how the predisposition of an intelligent creative climate has been able to adequately involve designers who, not only in the products, but in the graphics, the installations and in every communication gesture – in a word, in the overall image – have contributed to redevelop the top level one of the historical names of Italian production and prestige, and not just onf terms of furnishing.

Fantoni, awarded the Compasso d’Oro Career Award is a company that knows how to translate the activity of producing a material – Medium Density – into a piece of  constant proactive, metaproject and design research, together with its appropriate translation into final products; evolving the all-Italian tradition of “primary design”.In terms of the evolution of a vast range of diverse types and rheological structures attributed to the specific destinations of the variants of the material and its finishes, Fantoni has explored and continues to explore not only the most convenient possibilities for their application, but also those for reducing environmental impact – from the forest, to production processes and to the final use of the materials themselves.Resulting from research into materials, the products that Fantoni presents directly to the end user also constitute paradigmatic proposals in accordance with the most advanced practices of “competitive collaboration”, as examples of possibilities elsewhere and which can be further developed.The Osoppo factory itself – conceived and designed by Gino Valle to grow over time, constitutes one of the main cases of an intelligent, sensitive and well developed integration into the landscape, to the point of positively demonstrating the well-known thesis in which the landscape it is primarily the result of the presence of man.The image of the company – resulting from the coherent expressive trait of all the creations – thus becomes an example of total design towards which all truly excellent companies are heading.