Joe Colombo - Inventing the Future

Avuncular in his casual suits, pipe fixed in his mouth, Joe Colombo’s jovial form seems strangely at odds with his iconic sci-fi designs. But then he sits down, relaxing into his furnishings, and somehow the opposition is reconciled and he begins to look more clearly like the eccentric inventor of a utopian techno-future. His designs spring to life and suddenly seem comfortable, livable, present, as he presides over them with a calm sense of proprietary. Even the knowledge of his untimely death in 1971, on his 41st birthday, barely dampens the sense of a lively, lived-in future that emanates from these photos.

Colombo is an icon of the 1960s design world. Futurist, painter, architect and designer, his works epitomise the optimism of the post-war era, with its faith in technology and its sense of limitless economic expansion. The aesthetic is identifiably ‘60s – strong colours, bold shapes and rounded corners – but his functional, integrated solutions to problems of everyday living still seem ahead of our time.

We look back on his style as a retro-futurism, another era’s future. But regarding Colombo’s tomorrow with a contemporary nostalgia, it’s perhaps too easy to lose sight of his influence on current design practices. His Universale stacking chair, the first to be moulded from a single material, looks hauntingly familiar, the precursor of innumerable mass-produced items of garden furniture. His storage devices, compact and flexible, still set the standard in their class. Even his most radically experimental interior designs – the furnishings of a whole house integrated into a single unit – have their echoes in the effective use of small spaces and built-in furnishings that characterise much of the most successful contemporary residential architecture.

Given Colombo’s importance to twentieth-century design, it’s perhaps surprising that the first international retrospective of his work was not mounted until almost 35 years after his death. But mounted it was, in a joint venture between the Vitra Design Museum and La Triennale di Milano, spending most of 2005 at the latter and most of 2006 at the former. It has since travelled to Weil am Rhein, Paris and Manchester, and is currently showing at the Kunsthaus Graz until the end of August.

Entitled “Joe Colombo – Inventing the Future”, the exhibition is divided chronologically and thematically into four sections, marking four distinct phases of the Italian designer’s career. The first covers his youthful work as a painter, art student and practitioner of the Arte Nucleare. Characterised by post-nuclear themes and an informal style, this period culminated in his design of the utopia of a subterranean nuclear city, a precursor to the futuristic utopianism of his later design work.

The second part presents his early work as a designer. Turning to design in 1962, this period saw the production of iconic products for major Italian design companies of his day. This period was followed by an increasing experimentalism, illustrated by the ever more modular, flexible objects of the exhibition’s third section, from the Tube Chair to his range of compact, flexible storage solutions.

The final phase of his career pushed this experimentalism back towards art, producing fully integrated “machines for living” that combined his early design innovations into complex, multifunctional units. The exhibition features four such projects, all produced in the final three years of Colombo’s life and representing the culmination of his utopian project. +


2 Elda Lounge Chair, Design Sketch, 1963. Ignazia Favata, Studio Joe Colombo, Milan. 3 Elda Lounge Chair, 1963. Vitra Design Musem Collection. Photo: Vitra Design Musem/Andreas Sütterlin. 4 Experimental Visiona I at the Cologne Fair for Bayer, Leverkusen, 1969. Ignazia Favata, Studio Joe Colombo, Milan. 5 Interior, Zancope Apartment, via Sismondi, Milan, Ground floor, basement, 1964. Ignazia Favata, Studio Joe Colombo, Milan. 6 Interior design of Colombo Apartment IV via Argelati 30b, Milan, 1970. Ignazia Favata, Studio Joe Colombo, Milan. 7 Total Furnishing Unit, 1971-72. Ignazia Favata, Studio Joe Colombo, Milan.