An Evening with Piero Lissoni
Last night I had the great pleasure of attending a brief talk given by the Italian architect, urbanist and designer Piero Lissoni. Latitude Nord, the high-end furniture store on St-Laurent just below Mont-Royal, played host as they were launching the Lissoni-designed Living Divani range of furniture, co-sponsored by the Italian Trade Commission who provided top quality snacketry and vino.
Lissoni himself seemed more like an academic - which he is, being a professor at the Italian Design Institute. He was charmingly disarming, self-deprecating and funny, speaking in a mix of Italian, French and English, and looking rather like a shorn Salman Rushdie.
He ran through a PowerPoint presentation (just images, no bullet points - Cliff Atkinson would approve) on the theme of human dimensions - how all of his work has involved the concept of scale, from the thousands of tiny parts required for his Alessi wristwatches to the planning of his Boffi kitchens to stunning glass buildings to designing an entire village. Not entirely unlike Niels Diffrient of Humanscale, except Lissoni tends to work on the macro level where Diffrient works at the individual scale, but by branching out into the designed-objects business, Lissoni shows that the same rules apply, no matter where.
May 22, 2003 9:03 PM
