DE ARCHITECTS
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S-151
year 1959
material metal
source title Achille Castiglioni
info In December 1959 the American manufacturers Reed & Barton announced a “Design Competition for Italy,” with ten Italian architects invited to design a silver cutlery set for the US market. The competition was part of a fruitful collaboration between the Americans and Gio Point, who was on the jury together with Isamo Noguchi, James S. Plaut, James C. Raleigh and William T. Hurley Jr. In conversation with Giampiero Bosoni in 1988 Achille Castiglioni explained, “For the competition we did a lot of research, examining old cutlery and studying its history and literature. This shaped our designs of two sets of cutlery. One was called Secco and started with the idea of using the elementary ergonomic principle of a draughtsman’s pencil (a wooden shaft with a hexagonal cross section), which prompted the shape of the handles.” “These new designs for cutlery,” noted the brothers, “were inspired by the line dictated by the traditional function of Italian cutlery rather than the stylistic formalism of their rational function. The new forms adopted by designers in recent decades tend to take functionalism to an extreme. This leads them to overrate the utilitarian operations of cutting and collecting solid or liquid food and create cutlery with an emphatically formal expression that now appears mannered.” The two sets of cutlery (Secco and Dolce, the latter taking first prize) were displayed in the exhibition La casa agitate, held in Florence in 1965. The Alessi company marketed the Dolce range under the name Grand Prix, while Secco furnished the idea for a steel cutlery set called Dry, produced in 1982.
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year 1959
material metal
source title Achille Castiglioni
info In December 1959 the American manufacturers Reed & Barton announced a “Design Competition for Italy,” with ten Italian architects invited to design a silver cutlery set for the US market. The competition was part of a fruitful collaboration between the Americans and Gio Point, who was on the jury together with Isamo Noguchi, James S. Plaut, James C. Raleigh and William T. Hurley Jr. In conversation with Giampiero Bosoni in 1988 Achille Castiglioni explained, “For the competition we did a lot of research, examining old cutlery and studying its history and literature. This shaped our designs of two sets of cutlery. One was called Secco and started with the idea of using the elementary ergonomic principle of a draughtsman’s pencil (a wooden shaft with a hexagonal cross section), which prompted the shape of the handles.” “These new designs for cutlery,” noted the brothers, “were inspired by the line dictated by the traditional function of Italian cutlery rather than the stylistic formalism of their rational function. The new forms adopted by designers in recent decades tend to take functionalism to an extreme. This leads them to overrate the utilitarian operations of cutting and collecting solid or liquid food and create cutlery with an emphatically formal expression that now appears mannered.” The two sets of cutlery (Secco and Dolce, the latter taking first prize) were displayed in the exhibition La casa agitate, held in Florence in 1965. The Alessi company marketed the Dolce range under the name Grand Prix, while Secco furnished the idea for a steel cutlery set called Dry, produced in 1982.
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