Tobia Scarpa
Career Manifesto

ADI Design Museum
_

–

A TRIBUTE BY ITALIAN GRAPHIC DESIGNERS TO THE MASTERS OF THE COMPASSO D’ORO.
_

AS PART OF THE PERMANENT COLLECTION, ADI DESIGN MUSEUM PRESENTS THE EXHIBITION “CAREER MANIFESTO. A TRIBUTE BY ITALIAN GRAPHIC DESIGNERS TO THE MASTERS OF THE COMPASSO D’ORO”.

It’s the occasion for ADI - the Italian Association for Industrial Design - to celebrate the story of Italian genius in the fields of design, graphics and architecture. Since 1956 ADI has established the Compasso d’Oro Career Awards with the aim to pay homage to the finest names in 20th Century Italian design and highlight their theoretical, visionary and social action.

–––– Luca Molinari, curator of the exhibition, has invited some of the finest Italian graphic designers, along with a careful selection from the new generation, to design a poster dedicated to one of the 139 Compasso d’Oro Career Awards. Each invited designer has developed, interpreted and translated the assigned Compasso d’Oro Career Award enjoying complete freedom of expression, thereby giving rise to a multifaceted and heterogeneous collection of posters. The exhibition is either a tribute to the history of well-informed and cultured Italian professionalism as the opportunity to present a state-of-the-art snapshot of contemporary Italian graphic production.
–––– pc-|< paolo cesaretti Arch- has been invited to design a poster dedicated to Tobia Scarpa, Compasso d'Oro Career Award in 2008. Tobia Scarpa's work reveals a continuous mediation between innovation and bourgeois style, not without a touch of irony. This master of Italian design was used to affirm that intelligence arises from the ability to manipulate. Following his idea we sampled from his work a repertoire of signs which we reworked by subtraction to form an abstract but meaningful alphabet. So, we chose the sheer symmetry of Foglio - Scarpa’s iconic wall lamp stripped of any formalisms to become pure form - and we transform it into a kind of beautiful abstract writing as our homage to the master's work.

Concept/
Paolo Cesaretti, Claudia Astarita

Visual design/
Claudia Astarita

Place/
ADI Design Museum, Milano