Mr Magistretti, could you tell me something about your family, about your origins?
I was born in a middle-class family, the ordinary middle class family. My grandfather was a high-school teacher, my father was an architect. My various aunts and uncles had big families, one had a big building company, working in reconstruction, another founded the Generale Immobiliare estate agency and then died in a road accident.
But my great-great-grandfather, on my mother's side, was the architect
Gaetano Besia, who designed the very fine Collegio Reale delle Fanciulle and Palazzo Archinto. Then he designed the Arch, I think, at Porta Nuova, and was involved in the construction of the building on the corner between San Pietro all’Orto and corso Vittorio Emanuele, quite a number of buildings, in short.
When foreigners come here it amuses me to show them that this building was designed by my father, and it's right next door to the one I designed, and that the building next to it was designed by my great-grandfather.
 
Can you tell me if and how the fact of coming from a family of architects has influenced your choice and your life?
Well, I feel I've been very lucky in this way, partly because my father belonged to a different generation, the one, lets say of the Italian Novecento, with whom I have nothing in common. So I started from scratch and I think this was a big help.
This meant I was able automatically to be part of the Italian Rationalist movement. I remember, for example, when I made my first impromptu drawing, a very formal one with braced cables supporting a metal canopy to the entrance of an exhibition. When my father saw it he was rightly horrified: he redid the drawing with arches and columns, all beautifully drawn, he was a wonderful draftsman, and he said: "You just can't take them this stuff."
 
Did you feel in any way compelled to choose the profession of architect?
I firmly believe that whoever succeeds in expressing himself in life has the greatest luck in the world, that of doing a job that he likes. As for me, I still do what I love, in fact I love it more than ever.
 
Could you tell me about your education, your schooling?
I matured relatively late. Just think, I was 20, even 22 years old, and I still didn't have the least idea who Hemingway was, who Kafka was. These were the cultural limitations that weighed on my life when I was young.

Can you tell me about your years at high-school, were they important?
Having had a classical education was, I feel, very very useful, firstly because it gave you glimpses of beauty,  take Sappho, for instance and some things by Ovid. Though I was immature I understood there was something interesting in it. And then, above all, Latin a lot more than Greek.

What did Latin teach you that you still remember?
Latin has been extremely important in my work, as in all work. In fact since I teach in London, I notice the lack of a classical education in the great majority of young English people, they lack any kind of classical culture with a classical background. They know a lot and well, but at times they hardly know Shakespeare; well, I may be exaggerating but it's pretty well like that.
Latin is actually an extraordinary language, it really changes your mentality, because it leads you to distinguish, as a basic concept, what is important, absolutely important, from what is less important, and from what is just so-so. For example, putting the verb at the end, that's not what counts, but it gives you the idea that in life there are extremely important things and things that fall into second place. If you get the important thing wrong, you can do the ones that come second right, but unfortunately it won't work.
This is what you learn from Latin.

What about the university?
My university was in a sense partial, because I took the course as far the third year in Milan, then there was the war.
After 8th September 1943 (the fall of Fascism - ed.) I had to go here and there. And then I had the good luck, after a while, with the help of Colonnetti, Professor of Construction Sciences at the Turin Polytechnic, to get the opportunity to be associated with the university campus in Lausanne. I did a few exams and then I came back and took my degree in August of '45.

Do you remember any teacher in particular, someone who taught you things that have been really important in your life?
I have to admit I have no great memory of my teachers. Or rather, I remember some teachers. For example, I recall a professor, a woman, who enabled me, to my great pleasure, to understand mathematics for a term. Then I forgot nearly everything. I must have done, I guess, some 25 science exams at the Polytechnic, with an average of A or A+, but now I can't remember anything about those subjects. So I mostlyremember people who taught me badly. While my maths teacher taught me really well, and I feel infinite gratitude for her, so that when I enrolled my children at the Parini, I went and asked her which section I should put them in.

So how do you judge your training?
Out of honesty I must admit that when I left university I didn't know how to attach a beam to a pillar. I just rolled up my sleeves and little by little I learnt the job.

If you had to tale stock of your first years of work?
Of course it was a tough life, a life of sacrifices, because I began work in a country that had been destroyed. At that time, more than ever, even financial worries were important. 
I tried to find work, luckily some people trusted me and I built a lot. Then I began to divide my work between architecture and product design, as I still do.
 
Let's go back to the years after the war. What was Milan like when you returned? What had changed?
When I began to live in Milan again, after August '45, I found myself in a city that was very different from before. It was a city of hopes, a living city, where there was a lively professional communication, information really circulated, not like nowadays.

So a city full of promises and hope. Were they all kept?
Milan definitely developed. You have to think that Italy has become a model, an example of incredible development, despite all the terrible things that have been done, even greater than South-East Asia. 

The sixties were the start of the golden age of Italian design, at the same time as a lot of the objects that have made you famous were in production. Could you speak of this?
After the war there was the phenomenon of the Italian design, the direct offspring of the Rationalist movement, and it was a unique development worldwide, with the production coming from architects. The fact that it was an initiative motivated by industry, by manufacturing, developped a powerful contact with reality, something that explains why it has endured, from '55-'60 down to today, half a century.

There a combination of factors that favored it: the instinct of industrialists, the historical period, the urge to go in for mass production, or was there something else that influenced events?
In that period in Milan there was a very strong network of small craftsmen, who were very valuable.
Valuable because they enabled us to make our models, I won't say with our hands but with theirs, and to understand whether they could be made in a mold or not. A lot of things came to us only because of the presence of someone who had extraordinary skill in using his hands.

Are there specific reasons why this phenomenon was born and developed in Milan?
Why was it born in Milan? It was born in Milan because, as I was saying, Milan was a city surrounded by a dense network of highly skilled craftsmen, which was gradually being transformed into industrial production. This relationship was generated by the nature of the city itself, surrounded as it was by a belt of craftsmen who were so important and so skilled.

Do you think it was a special period, difficult to repeat?
I know the design world pretty well, but I have never come across anything comparable with happened in those year., even travelling round the world as I've done for my work.

How did your first projects come about and what sort of relations did you have with the big industrial groups?
It happened in the sixties when I had just finished the Milan Triennale, where I had been artistic director together with Ignazio Gardella.
I was commissioned to design some things, some products. I recall, for instance, Artemide. Artemide was just three people: Gismondi, his wife and another person, that was all. From then on, we gradually became friends. It was a continuous exchange of ideas. At that time there was the demonstration of the great merit of the industrialists, who understood that something was changing and they had to find someone to help them change. Up till then they used to make furniture in Cantù style.
 
And what was your relationship like in practice?
It wasn't work done only in the studio but above all outside it, and with a very special relationship. I recall, at the meetings, around the table there were 7 or 8 people, starting from the president and ranging all the way to the expert for the South-East Asian market, the woodworking expert, and the one who knew everything about metals. And it was a continuous discussion, which is ultimately the strength of design. When a technician tells me it's better to do something in a certain way, unless I'm a fool, I'll do it that way, then it's up to me to create something I like.
 
Do you believe design should always be addressed to a mass public?
I've always believed that the interesting point about design is what the Bauhaus taught us, namely the fascination of mass-production.
We are all part of an industrial culture. Why shouldn't we think of furniture for the home following the logic of industrial civilization? Mass production is what gives a meaning to design, an object produced for a large number of people who, in this way, can find in design what they are looking for to put in their homes.
 
Do you feel there is just one way of doing design? And if there are many, which is yours?
The interesting thing is you can do two kinds: there's STYLING DESIGN, like American cars in the seventies, where the addition of a decoration, let's say a piece of chrome, determined the model of the following year, but there was no substantive change to the model.
I've never been interested in that. Then there's CONCEPT DESIGN, which starts from a precise executive and functional concept, and is so simple that it endows the object with its distinctive character. So that it's what happened to me,and to a lot of other designers, to be able to have such a close relationship with industrials that I could explain over the phone why an object was designed in a certain way and how it ought to be made. And all this was posiible because the object in question was, in itself, conceptually very simple.

In your interviews you often speak of simplicity as an essential quality of good design…
Simplicity means the total absence, not so much of decoration, as of decoration superimposed, redundant and serving no purpose. I avoid all these things. Now, if you look at a book describing the objects designed by the people who created the Italian design, the first thing you'll notice is that they are quite different from each other and then that most of them could have been described without a drawing, because they started from a simple concept. It's always the conceptual detail that attracts people's attention. "Look, this is something that could be useful for one thing, and this for another". This is the design I like, CONCEPT DESIGN.
If you were asked to tell which object embodies your creed in design, what would like to have designed?
I'd answer "The umbrella". I think whoever invented the umbrella was quite remarkable. And just think, at the time the Church prohibited covering your head because this prevented the Almighty from sending down the rain and wetting people.

Why the umbrella?
Because of the simplicity of the umbrella, the nothingness of the umbrella, the tension of the umbrella, which make it the object I'd have liked to design most of all. Instead, I ended up designing this silly lamp, Eclisse, which still keeps going, because it has left its mark on a few generations, in some cases by burning their fingers. This is a real satisfaction, it gives you the sense of the object produced, because evidently it responded to some need that had nothing stylistic about it.
 
For years you've divided your work between architecture and design. What do you like in each? Do they give you a different sense of fulfillment?
I've designed a lot of homes in Milan. When people decide to live in one of the homes I've designed, they do it because it's got 2 rooms, 3 rooms, 2 bathrooms, it's close to the office or far from it. Whenever they go out, half the time they don't even remember what color the outside is. If they go into a shop and buy one of my lamps, then their reasoning will be: "Gosh, look at this trifle, it's so simple, could have done it myself".  Which is the finest compliment you can give me. They go in, buy it and take it home, it will have some influence on their lives, if they like it that'll be because they've sensed there's something in it, which is its simplicity, the most complicated thing in the world.
 
Can we talk about your travels? Do you feel they've been important for your creativity?
I had to travel and I wanted to travel, I can say I've traveled round the world pretty well. It was enormously useful to me, but the trip that meant most of all was one I did when I was still young, when I must have been about 34-35 years old.
 
Which trip was that?
The first time I saw New York, I was 34 years old and I was stunned by that incredible metropolis, it amazed me to see women smoking in the street and silly little things like that.

Why was it so special for you?
That trip gave me a lot, gave it early, and that was a great stroke of good luck, to see a world I had only read about, and then to see it in the course of my work: so it was pretty important. But above all travel is something that opens up your mind, a bit like Latin, it helps you to learn that there are very important things, things that others do a lot better, things that could be done better. In short, traveling gives you an experience like doing classics at school.

Would you mind telling me about the sentimental side of your life, the emotional aspect?
I think you can't live without emotions. When someone gives you an emotion, you're grateful for the rest of your life. Then the emotions are the same in Greek poetry, in the cinema, they're Mozart's Mas in G. They're things you're grateful to live for.
 
Our culture is traveling inevitably towards the vulgarization of things; massification, television levels down everything. What do you think?
I think that now the true source of information is television, and the book has disappeared. At the same time, in Italy an immense number of books are published, but they don't sell. Then people don't read, they don't read because they're tired, so they watch TV, which I fear is an immense danger, above all for children. I hope my grandchildren don't watch much TV.
 
After vulgarity, lets talk about refinement. Is it important to you, a question of style?
Refinement, if it's bound up with anything, is bound up with simplicity, not style.

Have you got a quote that could help us to understand the way you think and work?
 “L’architecture c’est des ruines”.

Could you explain that?
It's a saying of Perret's. August Perret, who was the first to use reinforced concrete in buildings. I think he wanted to say that even there simplicity and the concept are the basis of design and architecture.