Atelier Dalisi
ATELIER DALISI
Richard Dalisi, 1931-2022, he held the chair of Design at the Faculty of Architecture in Naples. At the same faculty he was director of the School of Specialization in Industrial Design.
In the seventies, together with Ettore Sottsass, Alessandro Mendini, Andrea Branzi and others, was one of the founders of Global Tools, counter-school of architecture and design that brought together all the groups and people who in Italy covered the most advanced area of the so-called "radical architecture". Always involved in social work (the experience of neighborhood work with the children of the Traiano district remains fundamental, with the elderly of the Casa del Popolo of Ponticelli and in recent years the commitment with the young people of the Sanità district of Naples), he combined research and teaching in the fields of architecture and design, increasingly approaching artistic expression as the royal road of his life.
In the 1981 won the Compasso d'Oro award for research on the Neapolitan coffee maker and in 2014 the Compasso d'Oro for Lifetime Achievement.
In the last thirty years he has devoted himself intensely to the creation of an increasingly articulated and fruitful relationship between university research, architecture and design, sculpture and painting, art and crafts, keeping at the center the purpose of human development through dialogue and the potential for creativity that it releases. In the 2010, after a long preparatory search, presented, in collaboration with the Milan Triennale and the New Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, the first edition of the “Tin Compass Award”, initiative for new research in the field of design in the name of human support, of eco-compatibility and degrowth.
L'Atelier Dalisi Srl, born by the will of the Dalisi family, alongside the Riccardo Dalisi Archive, recognized as of historical and cultural interest by the Ministry of Culture, in the production of the unpublished design of the master.
The production of a handcrafted design for Dalisi started over the years 70 and involved the main producers in the history of Italian design such as Alessi, Zanotta, Memorandum, Cleto Munari and Slamp to name a few and has seen the establishment of a permanent collection in various museums such as the Center Pompidou, FRAC D’Orleans, Milan Triennale, MOTHER museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Gent Museum e Collection Thierry Barbier-Mueller.
When we talk about biodesign, not very beautiful objects come to mind, in which a poor aesthetic prevails, a bit austere, where the sense of bio is expressed with natural materials and with solutions that are often too simple, interlock, identify, which can also annoy. Let's go further. Beyond means identifying a new aesthetic, not poor but rich, how is nature, making those values explicit and making them vibrate, making them alive.
The new production of Atelier Dalisi offers unpublished works, unique, on measures and in limited series.