Hasta La Ideas

In this series, Matthew Sullivan (AQQ Design) highlights some designers that you should know, but might not. Previously, he looked at the work of Martino Gamper.

Ugo La Pietra: Born in Bussi sul Tirino, Italy, 1938

“Art furniture” is a fairly detestable moniker. It carries with it a sense that said pieces are not quite art and not really furniture—either art is slumming or furniture is longing. Clearly, and it may seem overly reductive (but I can’t see much actual distortion), for all human endeavors, some creations are simply good and some not so much. All things have value but not all are superlative, whether art or decorative art, sculpture or industrial design, painting or graphics, drawing or illustration, essay writing or whatever. To separate the functional arts from the fine arts is like trying to differentiate between the acceleration rate of a falling pound of goose feathers and a falling pound of duck feathers. Art and design are not dualistic—and our subject, Ugo La Pietra, is really the most instructive on these matters. He considers his life’s output (50-plus years, spanning a wide range of disciplines) to be, plainly, research.

La Pietra came of creative age during the ambitious days of radical 1960s culture. Working with and alongside such provocateurs as Hans Hollein, the Haus-Rucker-Co, Ettore Sottsass, the Situationist International, Coop Himmelblau, Archizoom and Superstudio, he developed his own critical method of making. In his own words, he pushed for the “decoding and rereading of what has been forgotten, or ill used, or is somehow, for more or less legitimate historical reasons, petrified” (Ugo La Pietra, “1960-1990: Thirty Years of Experimental Research”).

Above: the 1966 Globo Tissurato lamp (left) and a ceramic piece from 1991. Top: the Libreria shelving unit (left) and La Pietra with his Globo Tissurato.

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