Prof. Achille Castiglioni
Milano, Italy

In Berlin's West, the architecture office Coordination has converted two attic flats into an elegant penthouse. Now the Wilhelminian architecture serves as a colourful backdrop for the art.

Robert Stadler, an Austrian whose adopted home is Paris, has enriched the tradition-steeped KWM Krefeld with a coffee house that thoroughly lives up to the famed Viennese model. As an “gesamtkunstwerk”, it carries the spirit of productively combining art, craft, and industry forward into the Modern Age and playfully melds design and life, tradition and innovation.

Industrial and product designer Marco Dessí was born in the Italian city of Merano in the South Tyrolean Alps and lives in Vienna. He tells us in an interview why design is an interactive process for him and it is worthwhile to reinterpret the work of the old masters.

After analyzing the portfolio of the luminaire manufacturer Studio Italia Design, multidisciplinary designer Luca Nichetto is now repositioning it as Lodes and adapting his own creations.

For the 50th anniversary of the classic "Parentesi" luminaire, FLOS presents a new edition in Turquoise and Orange Signal.

For the boutique hotel K5 Tokyo, the Swedish studio Claesson Koivisto Rune has merged city and nature in restructuring a former bank building in Nihonbashi-Kabutocho. The result is microcosm full of ambiguities.

Light + Building clearly showed that light is becoming ever more digital and offers tools for emotions of all kinds. Among the mass of novelties, you could notice that good light is getting ever more rare.

Be it rock or opera, the living-room revolution has a name: „RR126". In the 1960s, no one matched Brionvega’s consistent emphasis on design for radios, TVs and hi-fi equipment.

Let there be light! “Vitra Design Museum” is exploring different shades of lighting design with “Lightopia”, its major exhibition currently on show in Weil am Rhein.

For quite some time, manufacturers of decorative luminaires were hard hit by the innovation of LEDs. What to do with their traditional designs that were built around lamps and spots? They have since overcome the future shock and the industry is now fielding new products in all shapes and sizes.

Achille Castiglioni, Andrea Branzi, Alessandro Mendini, Ettore Sottsass and Richard Sapper talk in these short "Design Interviews", which are now out on DVD, about their paths to what was still, at that time, a new discipline, about their own development and careers, about their search for design solutions, which, for the most part, still owed greater allegiance to society than to industry.

What is the likely result if you have a lot of imagination, a strong feeling for shapes- and one day come across a bicycle saddle and some rusty handlebars among your old things? In this case, Picasso's Bull's Head and the story of Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglionis seat SELLA might have taken a similar course.

NASA-Experimente und andere Lichtspiele mit Achille Castiglioni