Alessi

www.alessi.com

The Alessi company was founded by Giovanni Alessi in 1921 at Omegna, a village on Lake Orta in the foothills of the Alps near Novara. Giovanni was a skilled lathe turner, the last of a long line of craftsmen from the nearby Valle Strona valley. During the nineteen-twenties and thirties, in his workshop copper, brass and nickel silver tableware and household objects were made with exquisite craft skill. Many of the different objects produced in this first period (like the nickel silver tea and coffee service from 1921, the nickel-coated brass flask holder from 1926 or the cheese tray in fine nickel silver and milk glass from 1929) have become part of the collective memory for generations of Italians. Design (in the modern sense of the word) first appeared at the end of the nineteen-thirties with Giovanni's eldest son, Carlo. Carlo had trained as an industrial designer in Novara. He was the author of most of the objects that appeared in the catalogue between the mid-thirties and 1945, the year when his last design project was presented: the 'Bombe' tea and coffee services. This was one of the archetypes of the first era of Italian design. In the fifties, he became Chief Executive of the company and together with his brother Ettore he began to call in free-lance designers, such as Carlo Mazzeri and Anselmo Vitale, the authors of some highly successful projects that are still in the catalogue (like the cocktail shaker No. 870 of 1957). One of Alessi's special features today is the ability to reconcile its typically industrial needs (in terms of operations and products) with its tendency (at intellectual and spiritual level) to consider itself more as a 'research laboratory in the field of the applied arts' than an industry in the conventional sense. This is what inspires Alessi's tireless research and experimentation, which has led it over the last few years to use new materials and new technologies: wood, porcelain and ceramics, plastic, glass and crystal, electricity and electronics. Over the years, Alessi has produced objects that have been created by over two hundred designers. Some of the historic designers of the company include: Ettore Sottsass, Richard Sapper, Achille Castiglioni, Aldo Rossi, Michael Graves, Massimo Morozzi, Philippe Starck, Stefano Giovannoni and Guido Venturini, Enzo Mari... Alessandro Mendini, who has also been design consultant since 1979.