Vico Magistretti Foundation Museum Studio

Sketches, drawings, floor plans, project reports, patents, photographs, magazine articles, catalogs, little correspondence: these are the documents collected in the Vico Magistretti archive that tell us about the entire professional life of the Milanese architect and designer, from 1946, when the young graduate took over his father’s studio on Via Conservatorio, to 2006, the year of his death.

The online archive

Today, this heritage is open to everyone through the website archivio.vicomagistretti.it, a project that the Fondazione Vico Magistretti has worked on in recent years with the support of its founding members (Triennale Milano, Artemide, Cassina, De Padova, Flou, Oluce, and Schiffini), also thanks to the contribution of the Fondazione CARIPLO.

With this site, the archive becomes a (digital) place where the relationships between Vico’s architectural activity and design projects are highlighted; between the designed products and the manufacturing companies; between Magistretti and the colleagues and friends with whom he shared a piece of the history of design culture. Thanks to the paths proposed by design and architecture historians, the digitized archive becomes a useful tool for navigating the documents in search of stories that – starting from Magistretti’s two professional skills – intertwine with themes of history, art, economics, and technology.

The archive also becomes a place of meeting and sharing among those who work to find the best strategies for enhancing these digitized heritages and their use: on the site, it is now possible to revisit the international online forum that the Fondazione Magistretti organized in collaboration with MEET Digital Cultural Center on November 19, 2020, titled Narrating with the Archive – Magistretti living.

The Fondazione Vico Magistretti is currently not open to the public, like many other cultural places that have to deal with the regulations imposed by the pandemic; or rather, the physical place, Vico’s studio, rich in history and stories, is not open. But the digital space is open, certainly lacking the narrative power of the space experienced by the great architect, yet so rich in materials that would otherwise remain inaccessible, open to multiple search keys, thus capable of both among professionals and those encountering Magistretti for the first time.