Joe Colombo
Italy
Telling about Joe Colombo means telling the brief but intense parable of one of the greatest Italian designers, who died in 1971 at the young age of 41. It means telling about a life, as quick as lightning, of a man who strongly believed in the future and who gave us a very particular prefiguration of those fundamental 60s, when the future suddenly started to appear closer. Joe Colombo’s future was an anti-nostalgic future (he would not have recognised as 'future' the ’90s in which we live today), in which intelligent technology would have helped every human activity, laying the foundations for completely new living models. At the time, Joe Colombo designed entire living cells. The first one was for Bayer, Visiona ’69, an integrated cell divided into 'functional stations': the 'Night-Cell' block (bed+cupboards+bathroom), the 'Kitchen-Box' (kitchen+dining room), the 'Central-Living' (living room). These functional stations are articulated mapwise as well as section-wise, just like the homes designed by Joe Colombo, where floors and ceilings go up and down, continuously accelerating and slowing down within the interior dynamism, where shelves hang from above and lights are deep-set in the floor. This is probably the best-known vision of Joe Colombo’s future, which makes us smile today and talk about a science fiction utopia, but another one exists, one that has been subject to less analysis and which, unlike the former, proposes independent single elements, which condense functions and which are finished and ready to use.
The first one which comes to my mind is the Mini-Kitchen, presented in 1963 at the XIII Triennale: a mysterious plastic-coated ashwood parallelepiped on wheels, measuring 75x75x90 cm, and containing ”cooking stoves, an oven, a spit, a grill, a refrigerator, a locker for 6 plates, cutlery and glasses (all placed in special lofts to avoid breaking during transport), a locker for pots and pans, a series of small drawers to contain all the various tools, a locker for the cookery books, a knife rack (at the side), a tin-opener (hanging), the lid of the refrigerator which also acts as a chopping-board and the wooden lid of the stove which can also be used as a tray.” (from Domus 418, September 1964). It is evident that the underlying idea here, is that of a future constructed in indifferenciated spaces (could this be a prefiguration of lofts?) where resolver objects constantly surround us and are capable of characterising and serving every single area.
Telling about Joe Colombo means telling the brief but intense parable of one of the greatest Italian designers, who died in 1971 at the young age of 41. It means telling about a life, as quick as lightning, of a man who strongly believed in the future and who gave us a very particular prefiguration of those fundamental 60s, when the future suddenly started to appear closer. Joe Colombo’s future was an anti-nostalgic future (he would not have recognised as 'future' the ’90s in which we live today), in which intelligent technology would have helped every human activity, laying the foundations for completely new living models. At the time, Joe Colombo designed entire living cells. The first one was for Bayer, Visiona ’69, an integrated cell divided into 'functional stations': the 'Night-Cell' block (bed+cupboards+bathroom), the 'Kitchen-Box' (kitchen+dining room), the 'Central-Living' (living room). These functional stations are articulated mapwise as well as section-wise, just like the homes designed by Joe Colombo, where floors and ceilings go up and down, continuously accelerating and slowing down within the interior dynamism, where shelves hang from above and lights are deep-set in the floor. This is probably the best-known vision of Joe Colombo’s future, which makes us smile today and talk about a science fiction utopia, but another one exists, one that has been subject to less analysis and which, unlike the former, proposes independent single elements, which condense functions and which are finished and ready to use.
The first one which comes to my mind is the Mini-Kitchen, presented in 1963 at the XIII Triennale: a mysterious plastic-coated ashwood parallelepiped on wheels, measuring 75x75x90 cm, and containing ”cooking stoves, an oven, a spit, a grill, a refrigerator, a locker for 6 plates, cutlery and glasses (all placed in special lofts to avoid breaking during transport), a locker for pots and pans, a series of small drawers to contain all the various tools, a locker for the cookery books, a knife rack (at the side), a tin-opener (hanging), the lid of the refrigerator which also acts as a chopping-board and the wooden lid of the stove which can also be used as a tray.” (from Domus 418, September 1964). It is evident that the underlying idea here, is that of a future constructed in indifferenciated spaces (could this be a prefiguration of lofts?) where resolver objects constantly surround us and are capable of characterising and serving every single area.
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