106 Rassegna
Invited to Hong Kong in
December, Francesco
Librizzi talked to the public
about his approach to
design at Business of
Design Week.
By Giulia Guzzini
How
to design
space
The theme of Business of Design Week
was Italy. Your contribution was entitled
“Archetype. Stereotype. Prototype”.
What issues did you address?
My contribution was based on the
assumption that the archetype
tends to coincide with the stereotype
while the prototype is the outcome
of experimentation. In this sense,
design, as well as providing consol-
idated solutions, moves forward
through experiments and is often
developed through prototypes.
What example did you start with?
In the exhibition Munari percorsi a
mezz'aria I did with Matilde Cassani,
we challenged the visitor to find
their own position in space, moving
their point of view via a series of
elements anchored to the ceiling
that asked to be explored: suspend-
ed structures counterbalanced by
lead sacks to discover the force of
gravity. There was also an acrobat,
hired on the day of the opening, who
moved between the structures and
I photographed him seated inside
a suspended tetrahedron.
In what way did the exhibition on Munari
lead on to thinking about the nature of
the archetype?
Three years after the exhibition, I
was preparing a lecture and I came
across the triptych Three Studies
of Lucian Freud by Francis Bacon.
For the first time I noticed the struc-
tures that surround the man seated
on a Thonet with his legs crossed.
Lucian Freud is depicted inside a
smaller space that contains him, in
a pose that resembles my acrobat
sitting inside the suspended tetra-
hedron. With this in mind I analysed
the play between archetype and
stereotype: different people can take
similar paths because they have
approached the theme with a sim-
ilar logic.
Where has this idea of spaces that con-
tain other spaces taken you?
Space has no defined characteristics
or dimensions, yet within this in-
determination one can trace an
outline, fix a distance or occupy
areas with presences that are ob-
jects, such as in the Still Life table
designed for Driade.
Is this influence of objects on space the
same one we find in the installation of
your room for the XXI Triennale?
My idea was the discovery of a do-mestic space. The exhibition at the
Triennale was based on of a line of
three concentric barriers: an initial
threshold, the red line, separates
the architecture from the landscape;
a second is where the architecture
begins to be an interior and a third
threshold, represented by the table,
is where the space of objects begins.
Do you think modularity is functional to
the definition of space?
The term ‘define’ means both de-
scribe and circumscribe. In this
tracing of the line there is the defi-
nition of space. For me modularity
is not intended in the sense of add-
ing but of successive partitions. In
dealing with space in its smallest
dimension, that goes from things
to interiors, I have always thought
that space is everything. Going up
a scale, beyond the threshold of ar-
chitecture, when it becomes land-
scape, and then it becomes sky. All
architecture is between these two
lines: the line of the landscape and
that of objects. In this sense for me
modularity is the design of these
two lines.Photo Andrea AstesianoPhoto Andrea Martiradonna