When Michael Anastassiades made the pilgrimage to meet Bruno Danese and Jacqueline Vodoz in Milan in 1995, he was still at the beginning of his career as a designer, just two years out of the Royal College of Art in London. After four decades working with most of the people who made Italian design famous in the 1960s, they had recently sold their company, Danese Milano.
They manufactured a collection of apparently humble everyday objects – paper trays, candle holders, water pitchers and ashtrays, which when you looked closely, turned out to be anything but humble. There were ceramics by Angelo Mangiarotti, glasses by Achille Castiglioni, candle holders and lamps by Bruno Munari, desk calendars from Enzo Mari. Each piece had its own sense of purpose and character. Everything in the Danese Milano catalogue hinted that objects might carry a level of meaning beyond the most obvious.
Anastassiades showed Danese and Vodoz images of his own work. He explained the Message Cup that grew out of a graduation project, handmade from plywood and polystyrene, as the realisation of a Greek proverb: “Let me once drink from your glass, and I shall know all your secrets.” His idea was that every member of a household could have one to leave voice messages for each other.
Speaking into the cup starts recording, inverting it stores the message. Righting the cup plays the message back. He had other things to show too: a device for cultivating, straightening and displaying cucumbers, prototype stainless steel scissors, porcelain teacups, a drawer for collecting garden sounds, equipped with a cricket box. Danese and Vodoz were charmed by what they saw. They introduced him to Marco Romanelli, a designer and critic who wrote the first piece of press coverage on Anastassiades for Abitare. When Anastassiades was commissioned to make an installation for Colette, the exceptional Parisian concept store founded by Colette Roussaux, he invited Danese and Vodoz to the opening and was honoured when they came.
It was a simple but intense installation: a circular table with a slightly concave mirror set into its surface, two chairs, one with a mirror back, and a ceiling light. The mirror on the table reflects the downlight back into the room. The mirror in the chair allows solitary diners occupying the other to see their own reflection. It was an early example of Anastassiades’ use of light to define space.
After handing over their company, Danese and Vodoz – who had her own career as a photographer – set up their foundation in the Neoclassical Palazzo Alari Visconti, located on the Via Santa Maria Fulcorina and designed in the late 18th century by Carlo Felice Soave. It houses the Danese Milano archive and serves as an exhibition space. When Anastassiades was offered the chance to use that space to exhibit his own lighting designs during the Milan design week this year, it seemed like a great opportunity to pay his respects to the Danese ethos, which has been deeply significant to him over the years.
The installation has not been without its issues. The palazzo’s frescoed ceilings and elegant interiors are carefully protected architectural landmarks. Anastassiades’ display had to be designed in such a way that it could installed without touching the ceiling or the walls. Since most of his pieces take the form of hanging pendant lamps, it took some planning. He devised a bamboo framework to carry the lights. Bamboo is a material that Anastassiades has been working with for some time, and which he will be able to put to new use when the installation is dismantled.
Beyond the installation in the palazzo, Anastassiades’ work is also on show in three other significant places in Milan. His work is at the Flos stand at the Salone, and its showroom in the Corso Monforte. Alessi is also unveiling a new initiative, a partnership with Anastassiades to make an affordable and chargeable table lamp, a first for the company. It’s the latest step in Anastassiades’ relationship with Alessi that began when Alberto Alessi asked him to join the Il Tornitore Matto project, which translates in English as the ‘Crazy Lathe’.
The project was the result of Alessi’s personal fascination with the lathe, the machine on which his family had built their company. Because the lathe is dependent on the individual skills of the maker rather than elaborate tooling it allows for a degree of spontaneity that is particularly appealing in the digital world. Alessi invited a range of designers including Michele de Lucchi and Andrea Branzi to explore ways to celebrate the potential of the lathe. Anastassiades, with his interest in making and technique, was a natural addition to the group. His contribution was the Trumpet vase series, inspired by the high level of skill and strength required to shape brass – either through hammering or turning it on a lathe. He followed this with a more mainstream product, the Menhir, a very beautiful stainless steel espresso maker. “Alberto asked me what I would like to do for them next. I went for the most terrifying object that I could think of, given Alessi’s history, the Moka.”
In the 30 years since he opened his studio in 1994, Anastassiades’ career has oscillated back and forth, from installations, to manufacturing on his own account to mass production. His career is a close reflection of the history of contemporary design. He started working at home, supporting himself by taking a job with Tom Dixon, who taught him how to weld. He worked on some of Hussein Chalayan’s memorable fashion shows.
He designed conceptual projects, such as the Occasional Tables series in which each piece was configured to address the role that a side table might play in a different way. The Thermometer Table, for example, has a heat sensitive fabric covering that changes colour in response to temperature. The Bedside Table: Alarm Clock has a concealed compartment containing an alarm clock. It vibrates when the alarm goes off, rocking the whole table on its uneven legs.
His first museum show was in 2005, when his work with Fiona Raby and Tony Dunne was selected for Paola Antonelli’s exhibition, Design for Fragile Personalities in Anxious Times. Dunne and Raby attracted a lot of attention at the time for what came to be called critical design. Rather than solving problems and answering questions, Dunne and Raby developed a strategy of speculative inquiry, exploring intractable questions. The series looked at design as a kind of therapy. Huggable Atomic Mushroom, a miniature mushroom cloud-shaped stool, was a way to make people feel better by being exposed to a manageable dose of their fear.
He makes ingenious use of relatively simple manufacturing techniques to produce highly refined objects with commercial potential. In 1997, he produced a series of mirrored glasses, ice buckets, tumblers and shot glasses. Like a thermos flask, they are made from two layers of mouth-blown glass with a silver solution between them to create a partly mirrored surface, creating an ambiguity about content and colour. Around this time, he started to manufacture products in the modest quantities that were all he could afford.
He used his own home in London as a showroom one year, stripping out every trace of the personal to provide an abstract backdrop for his work. It attracted the attention of Murray Moss, the New York-based retailer who became famous for his store in Soho, curated with a care that outshone most design museums. Moss showed Anastassiades’ work in New York, and introduced him to Piero Gandini, then still leading the celebrated lighting company Flos, a meeting that was another turning point.
Anastassiades had already decided to focus his own brand on lighting, not because it was his only interest, but because “it seemed more doable”, as he puts it. He found makers capable of working with the precision needed to make his designs to order – couture as it might be called. And in 2011, he showed his range at the Milan Salone for the first time. He made an installation that stood out in the midst of a hall full of large-scale commercial stands. And it opened the way to a range of commissions from a wide selection of manufacturers. He is currently working with Cassina, B&B Italia and Molteni, and even for Herman Miller, as well as the Austrian glassmaker Lobmeyr. Anastassiades had established himself as a significant voice in the design landscape.
This article is taken from Anima Issue 3, to purchase a copy or subscribe head here