Lella and Massimo Vignelli: Two Lives, One Vision

Foreword

1 Foreword Rather than make an argument for the importance of Lella and Massimo Vignelli’s work, in this book, Jan Conradi has written an intimate and affectionate portrait of two gifted and remarkable people. The likely audience will have no need of any words of mine to convince them of the significance of the Vignellis and their role in the evolution of design over the last half century. They, like me, will have been depressed by the willful vandalism perpetrated by American Airlines when it obliterated the simple authority of its own Vignelli-designed livery. They, like me, remember the clarity and authority of the shortlived New York City subway diagram, a victim of the literalism of those who insisted on interpreting it as a map. With its glorious citrus fruit salad of colour and its supremely confident typography, it seemed to define modern New York with a thread of lucidity that ran throughout the decrepit system of the 1970s as a sign of better times to come. In my study, I keep one personally resonant Vignelli-designed artifact. It’s a copy of Skyline, the magazine published in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s that mixed a tabloid format with a strong graphic language and high-culture content that inspired a group of us in London to set up Blueprint. Of course it set rather a worrying precedent by suspending publication shortly before we launched. Conradi addresses the Vignellis’ lives both in Europe, and in the US. The transatlantic connection is important to understanding them. Unlike the German refugees of the 1930s that Tom Wolfe mocked as the silver princes whom superstitious Americans got down on their knees to worship on their arrival from the Bauhaus, the Vignellis represented a different kind of Europe. And they had a different relationship with America. Mies and Gropius took Europe to America in their suitcases. Massimo and Lella Vignelli were from another generation. They were Italian. And they went to America because they wanted to, not because they had to. They liked what they found there, in spite of themselves. In the 1960s, leftist Italians— 2 among whose number Massimo certainly counted himself—were not meant to be impressed by the vulgar materialism of the beating heart of American capitalism. But then modern Italy has a way of accommodating such contradictions. Aldo Rossi, Massimo Vignelli’s friend from their student days in Venice, was both a Marxist and prepared to work for Disney. The billionaire publisher Giacomo Feltrinelli—a client of Unimark’s during Vignelli’s time—was a revolutionary socialist who owned a yacht equipped with an elegantly uniformed crew. The Vignellis brought this ambiguity to America with them. Helvetica, it sometimes seemed, was almost enough to bring moral salvation to the most black-hearted and anonymous corporate clients. Massimo and Lella came to maturity as designers in postwar Italy, a society that between 1945 and 1965 went through a transformation that was the closest Europe has come to China’s explosive growth of the last twenty years. What had been a largely pre-industrial economy—for all that Fiat and Olivetti achieved—tore through a phase as a producer of low-cost generic manufacturing, and then Italy embarked on reinventing itself as the world’s center for contemporary design-led production. And unlike the German modernists of the 1930s, the Italian version of the 1950s and ’60s came with a certain sensuous elegance that for all Massimo Vignelli’s puritanicalsounding pronouncements, certainly infuses the Vignellis’ work. They emerged from the small and intense world of northern Italy, between Milan and Venice, full of talented architects and designers whose careers were interwoven. Both Massimo and Lella set out to be architects. It was a training that was the starting point for almost all of Italy’s designers in the post-war years: Bellini, Magistretti, and Sottsass all went to architecture school, even if they did not become best known for their architecture. In Milan, Massimo worked in the Castiglioni brothers’ studio. He moved to Venice after graduating from the Brera Art Academy and a year of study in the architecture program at Politecnico di Milano. Lella studied in Venice too. She was a Valle, the sister and daughter of distinguished architects. She was taught among others by Franco Albini, who with his partner Franca Helg, was the architect of the first stations on the Milan metro, for which Bob Noorda, Massimo’s partner at Unimark, created the...