Counterbalance:
The design poetry of
Angelo Mangiarotti
AGAPE IS COMING HOME IN THE COMPANY OF ANGELO MANGIAROTTI
Agape has extended its range of action and widened its horizons of poetic awareness to encompass the entire home environment, offering its loyal and cultured customers a new brand, AgapeCasa, featuring a new range of products for every room in the house. At a time of great global complexity and sense of insecurity, Agape’s congenital optimism turns all these question marks into certainties and, with unwavering faith in its own DNA (whose distinctive codes are sobriety, elegance, experimentation and quality), now proudly presents the "Mangiarotti" collection, a selection of projects by this great architect, who has been a treasured friend and designer of objects, which are now evergreen classics of Italian design. Some of his thoughts on living are now being exclusively incorporated in AgapeCasa, a brand which, for this reason and thanks also to the work of other designers who will gradually be involved in the project, will soon become a fundamental benchmark for modern-day furnishing.
2010: Agape is coming Home in the company of Angelo Mangiarotti.
ANGELO MANGIAROTTI
Angelo Mangiarotti, one of the leading exponents of 20th-century Italian design, a committed, cultured and brilliant designer, who took on the ideals of the Modern Movement and actually exceeded them through his experimental and highly original work, a Mies with the mind of an engineer, a freer and more creative Prouvé, a more multifaceted and experimental Nervi, and even a Brancusi drawing on the technology of his own time: because Mangiarotti managed to apply his own ingenuity to both architecture and design, a razor-sharp exponent of rigorous functionalism, who, however, never lost sight of elegance and beauty, taking his own work to the very verge of sculpture through clever studies of form, always using cutting-edge production processes and materials backed up by proper know-how and, above all, thinking, constantly drawing on ethical principles and a deep awareness of moral values, unique traits of this master, who, by brilliantly bringing together the dual qualities of ethics and aesthetics, has achieved "happiness" through "correctness".k
THE MANGIAROTTI COLLECTION
The "Mangiarotti Collection": special objects to live and dwell with, a catalogue of precious jewels chosen from the repertoire of a designer who has handed down dozens of excellent projects to the history of design, along with some authentic masterpieces: beginning in the mid-1950s with his innovative "Cavalletto" and “Compensato” (plywood) furniture systems and then a number of projects developed in the late 1960s, such as the "M" marble table and elaborate "Multi-Use" system, followed by the theoretical and structural groundbreaking “Eros”, “Incas” and “Eccentrico” tables with gravity slots and joints from the 1970s, absolutely incomparable designs and hence never copied; not to mention his re-reading of wooden stools ("tre 3") and metallic tubular armchairs ("Lema"), right down to the 1990s with other carefully gauged sophisms, such as the marble “Clizia” chair and wooden "Quattrotto" table. All episodes from a career during which the designer played on a combination of expertise, balance and know-how, verging on perfection.
A collection of objects for everyday living, as heterogeneous as could possibly be imagined yet all designed by the same hand, incredibly cutting-edge despite the fact they were designed over a span of fifty years’ work, the product of a line of thinking capable of experimenting and setting new benchmarks in terms of style, form and construction, tackling the kind of objects we have always lived with in an anything but obvious way: chairs, tables, bookcases and containers, always functional but in an innovative and intelligent manner and created with elegant, unusual and erudite forms.
The “Mangiarotti Collection”: the first step in re-proposing the work of a maestro, who is now part of the history of design and who, as time passes, is increasingly being considered one of the greats of modernity, alongside Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Marcel Breuer and Franco Albini. All architects who have survived the test of time, just like Angelo Mangiarotti.
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