Product Description: Plastic culture: The story of a company that made plastic an enduring attraction   The Italian company Kartell is famous around the world for having invented the culture of plastic furniture and interior fittings. Kartell was founded in 1949 by Giulio Castelli, a chemical engineer with a vision to create something good from plastics, a material whose applications were still relatively unexplored...read more

Product Description: The Milan Triennale is an Italian State institution which, together with the Municipality of Milan and the Lombardy Region, is charged with preserving and promoting Italian Design as well as carrying out research in framework programs focusing on town planning, architecture, handicrafts, industrial production, fashion, new media, etc...read more

Product Description: This book is the catalog of the exhibition in Milan (Triennale Design Museum, September 25-October 26 2008). The exhibition pays tribute to Ettore Sottsass from a new point of view: the historical journal "Terrace" which he designed and built with Barbara Radice, Christoph Radl, Anna Wagner and Santi Caleca...read more

Product Description: This excellent collection of twentieth and twenty-first century design features key examples of the last century's best industrial objects from the Art Nouveau period to the present, with pieces by Gustave Serrurier-Bovy, Shiro Kuramata, Ettore Sottsass, Maarten Van Severen, Richard Hutten, Jasper Morrison, Ingo Maurer, Matali Crasset, Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec, Eero Aarnio and Charles Eames among many others...read more

Product Description: Among distinguished contemporary designers, Alessandro Mendini is perhaps most deserving of the overused title of Renaissance man. Painter, writer, architect, theorist, designer: his work in all these fields has influenced generations of other artists and craftsmen and delighted even those who don't know his name but have entered his spaces (like his stores for Alessi and Swatch), sipped from his espresso cups and rested in his chairs...read more

Product Description: As if mimicking Gaetano Pesce's emancipation of objects through design and thought, this monograph features a cover made of pig bristle, coconut fiber, and silicone (cut to mimic Pesce's profile--nose and all); perforated pages that the reader can tear to create a unique object; and a wide selection of the designs that have arisen from Pesce's outside-the-box thinking of the past five decades...read more

Product Description: What is it that makes Italian design so attractive? Maybe the answer is to be found in Custom Built, a critically reflective look at unique and handcrafted objects by succeeding generations of Italian designers. Beginning in the 1930s and moving towards the present, this volume peers into the archeology of twentieth-century Italian design, uncovering unique pieces created before the spread of industrial furniture culture and the mass-produced object, as well as prototypes who stand in ironic defiance of the factory-made objects they may have spawned...read more

Product Description: Sofas with the names of cities. Chairs with the names of countries. Lamps with the names of islands. Tables that recall architectural styles. Household appliances that allude to morphological land elements. The Italian design objects gathered together in this book give new shape to the places and forms of the Earth, representing them within the walls of the home, bringing the four corners of the earth into the confines of the domestic living room and kitchen...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: A zoologist might classify Italian design objects in various ways, distinguishing between species that are capable of flight (the Vespa "Wasp" scooter, the Heron lamp), of living aqueous lives (the Dolphin armchair, the jellyfish-like Medusa lamp), and of existing on terra firma (the Grillo "Cricket" telephone, the mouse-sized Topolino automobile)...read more

Product Description: Meet Donna, Miss Sissi, Mami, Genni, Luisa, Fiorenza, Auretta, Mirella, Graziella, Charlotta, Celestina, Lucretia and Anna G. They are a lamp, pots and pans, a chaise longue, a hair dryer, a sewing machine, a bicycle, a corkscrew and many, many chairs...read more